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Alex Steffen gave an interesting TED talk summarising the ways that greater urban density can reduce energy use while increasing our quality of life [1].
Geoffrey West gave an interesting TED talk about the way animals, corporations, and cities scale [2]. The main factor is the way that various variables scale in proportion to size. On a logarithmic graph the growth of a city shows a steady increase in both positive factors such as wages and inventions and in negative factors such as crime as it grows larger. So it seems that we need to decrease the crime rate significantly to permit the growth of larger cities and therefore gain more efficiency.
The Mankind Project (MKP) has a mission of “redefining mature masculinity for the 21st Century” [3]. They have some interesting ideas.
Phillip Zimbardo gave a provocative TED talk about the demise of men [4]. He provided little evidence to support his claims though.
In May I gave a talk for LUV about the basics of creating video on Linux. As part of the research for that I investigated which cameras were good for such use. I determined that 720p was a good enough resolution, as nothing that does 1080p was affordable and 1080i is lower quality. One thing to note is that 854*480 and 850*480 are both common resolutions for mobile phones and either of those resolutions can be scaled up to full screen on a 1920*1080 monitor without looking too blocky. So it seems that anything that’s at least 850*480 will be adequate by today’s standards. Of course as Dell is selling a 27 inch monitor that can do 2560*1440 resolution for a mere $899 in the near future 720p will be the minimum that’s usable.
Cheap Digital Video Cameras
The cameras I suggested at the time of my talk (based on what was on offer in Melbourne stores) were the Panasonic Lumix DMC-S3 which has 4*optical zoom for $148 from Dick Smith [1] and the Olympus MJU 5010 which has 5*optical zoom camera for $168 (which is now $128) from Dick Smith [2]. Both of them are compact cameras that do 720p video. They are fairly cheap cameras but at the time I couldn’t find anything on offer that had significantly better specs for video without being unreasonably expensive (more than $600).
Update: In the comments Chris Samuel pointed out that Kogan has a FullHD digital video camera for $289 [13]. That’s a very tempting offer.
More Expensive Digital Video Cameras
Teds Cameras has a good range of Digital Video Cameras (including wearable cameras, and cameras that are designed to be attached to a helmet, surfboard, or car) [3]. These are specifically designed as video cameras rather than having the video function be an afterthought.
Ted sells the Sony Handycam HDR-CX110 which does 1080p video, 3MP photos, and 25* optical zoom for $450 [4].
They also sell the pistol-style Panasonic HX-WA10 which is waterproof to 3M, does 1080p video, 11MP pictures, and 5* optical zoom for $500 [5].
For my use I can’t justify the extra expense of the digital video cameras (as opposed to digital cameras that can take video), I don’t think that they offer enough. So a cheap $128 Olympus MJU 5010 is what I will probably get if I buy a device for making video. I can afford to replace a $128 camera in a year or two but a device that costs $500 or more needs to last a bit longer. I expect that in a year or two I will be able to buy something that does 1080p for $200.
Features to look for in Great Digital Cameras
The other option when buying a camera is to buy something that is designed to be a great camera. It seems that RAW file capture [6] is a requirement for good photography. RAW files don’t just contain uncompressed data (which is what I previously thought) but they have raw sensor data which may not even be in a cartesian grid. There is some processing of the data that can be best done with raw sensor data (which may be in a hexagonal array) and which can’t be done properly once it’s been converted to a cartesian array of pixels. Image Magick can convert RAW files to JPEG or TIFF. I haven’t yet investigated the options on Linux for processing a RAW file in any way other than just generating a JPEG. A client has several TB of RAW files and has found Image Magick to be suitable for converting them so it should do.
The next issue is the F number [7]. A brief summary of the F number is that it determines the inverse-square of the amount of light that gets to the CCD which determines the possible shutter speed. For example a camera set to F1 would have a 4* faster shutter speed than a camera set to F2. The F rating of a camera (or lens for interchangeable lens cameras) is a range on many good cameras (or lenses for detachable lens cameras), if you want to take long exposure shots then you increase the F number proportionally. A casual scan of some web sites indicates that anything less than F3 is good, approaching F1 is excellent, and less than F1 is rare. But you don’t want to only use low F numbers, having a higher F number gives a larger Depth of Field, that means that the distance between the nearest and furthest objects that appear to be in focus is greater. So increasing the F number and using a flash can result in more things being in focus than using a low F number without a flash.
Another important issue is the focal length, cheap cameras are advertised as having a certain “optical zoom” which apparently isn’t quite how things work. The magnification apparently varies depending on the distance to the object. Expensive cameras/lenses are specified with the range of focal lengths which can be used to calculate the possible magnification. According to DPReview.com Optical zoom = maximum focal length / minimum focal length, so a 28mm-280mm lens would be “10* optical zoom” [8]. Finally it seems to be that the specified focal length of cameras is usually in “35mm” equivalent. So a lens described as “280mm” won’t be 28cm long, it will be some fraction of that based on the size of the CCD as a proportion of the 35mm film standard (which is 36*24mm for the image/CCD size).
Update: In the comments Aigars Mahinovs said: Don’t bother too much with the zoom. The view of a normal person is equivalent to 50mm lens (in 35mm film equivalent). Anything under 24mm is for landscapes and buildings – it is for sights where you would actually have to move your head to take in the view. Zooms are rarely useful. Something in 85-100mm range is perfectly fine to capture a bird or a person some distance away or some interesting piece of landscape, but anything more and you are in the range of silly stuff for capturing portraits of football players from the stands or for paparazzi photos. And the more zoom is in the lens the crappier the lens optics will be (or more expensive, or both) that is why the best optics are prime lenses with no zoom at all and just one specific optical length each. For example almost all my Debconf photos of the last two years are taken with one lens – Canon 35mm f/2.0 (a 50mm equivalent on my camera) and only the group shots are taken with a lens that is equivalent to 85mm.
So I guess if I was going to get an interchangeable lens camera then I could get fixed focus lenses for things that are close and far away and one with a small zoom range for random other stuff. Of course that would get me way outside my budget unless I got some good deals on the second hand market. Also having a camera that can fit into a pocket is a real benefit, and the ability to rapidly get a camera out and take a picture is important!
A final item is the so-called ISO Number which specifies how fast the film is. A higher number means that a photograph can be taken with less light but that the quality will generally be lower. It seems that you have a trade-off between a low F number (and therefore low Depth of Field), good lighting (maybe a flash), a long exposure time (blurry if the subject or camera isn’t still) and a grainy picture from a high ISO number.
Comparing Almost-Affordable Great Digital Cameras
I visited Michaels camera store in Melbourne [9] and asked for advice about affordable cameras that support RAW capture (every DSLR does but I don’t want to pay for a DSLR). The first option they suggested was the Samsung EX1 that does 10MP, F1.8-F2.4 with a 24-72mm equivalent focal range (3* optical zoom), and 640*480 video [10] for $399.
The next was a Nikon P7000 that does 10MP, F2.8-5.6 with 7* optical zoom (28-200mm equivalent), and 720p video [11] for $599.
The final option they had was the Canon G12 that does 10MP, F2.8-4.5 with 5* optical zoom (28-140mm equivalent), and 720p video [12] for $599.
3* optical zoom isn’t really enough, and $599 is a bit too much for me, so it seems that RAW format might not be an option at this time.
Conclusion
I can’t get what I want for great photography at this time, there seems to be nothing that meets my minimum desired feature set and costs less than $550. A client who’s a professional photographer is going to lend me an old DSLR that he has hanging around for some photography I want to do on the weekend.
I am also considering buying a Olympus MJU 5010 for making videos and general photography, it’s better than anything else I own at this time and $128 is no big deal.
Please let me know if I made any errors (as opposed to gross simplifications) in the above summary of the technical issues, also let me know if there are other things to consider. I will eventually buy a camera that can capture RAW images.
About 24 hours ago I rebooted the system that runs the secondary DNS for my zone and a few other zones. I’d upgraded a few things and the system had been running for almost 200 days without a reboot so it was time for it. Unfortunately it didn’t come back up.
Even more unfortunately the other DNS server for my zone is ns.sws.net.au which is also the only other server for the sws.net.au zone. Normally this will work because the servers for the net.au zone have a glue record containing the server IP address. So when asked for the NS records for the sws.net.au domain the reply will include the IP address of ns.sws.net.au. The unfortunate part was that the IP address was the old IP address from before the sws.net.au servers changed to a new IP address range, I wonder whether this was due to the recovery process after the Distribute IT hack [1], as forgetting to change a glue record is not something that I or the other guy who runs that network would forget. But it is possible that we both stuffed up.
The DNS secondary was an IBM P3-1GHz desktop system with two IDE disks in a RAID-1 array. It’s been quite reliable, it’s been running in the same hardware configuration for about four years now with only one disk replacement. It turned out that the cooling fan in the front of the case had seized up due to a lot of dirt and the BIOS wouldn’t let the system boot in that state. Also one of the disks was reporting serious SMART problems and needed to be replaced – poor cooling tends to cause disk errors.
It seems that Compaq systems are good at informing the user of SMART problems, two different Compaq desktop systems (one from before the HP buyout and one from after) made very forceful recommendations that I replace the disk, it’s a pity that the BIOS doesn’t allow a normal boot process after the warning as following the recommendation to backup the data is difficult when the system won’t boot.
I have a temporary server running now, but my plan is to install a P3-866 system and use a 5400rpm disk to replace the 7200rpm that’s currently in the second position in the RAID array. I’ve done some tests on power use and an old P3 system uses a lot less than most new systems [2]. Power use directly maps to heat dissipation and a full size desktop system with big fans that dissipates less than 50W is more likely to survive a poorly cooled room in summer. Laptops dissipate less heat but as their vents are smaller (thus less effective at the best of times and more likely to get blocked) this doesn’t provide a great benefit. Also my past experience of laptops as servers is that they don’t want to boot up when the lid is closed and getting RAID-1 and multiple ethernet ports on a laptop is difficult.
Finally I am going to create a third DNS server for the sws.net.au domain. While it is more pain to run extra servers, for some zones it’s just worth it.
In my previous post I expressed a desire to use regular expressions for files that may appear in multiple places in the tree due to bind mounts for /run and /var/run etc [1]. However there is a problem with this idea.
The SE Linux file labeling program restorecon reads the file /etc/selinux/$SELINUXTYPE/contexts/files/file_contexts which contains a set of regular expressions to assign labels to files. That file is ordered and the last entry which matches is the one that counts. When the file_contexts file is created the order is based on how many characters at the start of the file specification aren’t regular expression meta-characters. For example the entry “/.*” is at the top of the file (and therefore has the lowest precedence), which makes it the catch-all entry for files that have no other match. So an entry for “/var/run/REGEX” will have a higher precedence than one for “/var/REGEX”, this means however that when I replaced the “/var/run” part with a regular expression then it had a lower precedence and it didn’t work properly.
I should have remembered this as I did a lot of work on setfiles (which became restorecon) in the early days. I have now developed a new way of solving this and this time I’m testing it before blogging about it.
I have written the following PERL program to fix the file contexts, this adds multiple lines and uses a distro_debian conditional on them so that they don’t slip into upstream use – and so that if I lose track of where each patch came from I’ll know that I can delete them in future because it only matters to Debian.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
open(LIST, "find . -name \"*.fc\"|xargs egrep \"^/(var.*run)|(var/lock)|(dev/shm)\"|cut -f1 -d:|uniq|") or die "Can't get file list\n";
while(<LIST>)
{
my $filename = $_;
chomp $filename;
open(my $infile, "<", $filename) or die "Can't open file $filename";
open(my $outfile, ">", $filename . ".new") or die "Can't open file ". $filename . ".new";
while(<$infile>)
{
print $outfile $_;
my $newline;
if($_ =~ /^\/var\/run/)
{
print $outfile "ifdef(`distro_debian', `\n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/var//;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";
}
if($_ =~ /^\/var\/lock/)
{
print $outfile "ifdef(`distro_debian', `\n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/var/\/var\/run/;
print $outfile $newline;
$newline =~ s/^\/var//;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";
}
if($_ =~ /^\/dev\/shm/)
{
print $outfile "ifdef(`distro_debian', `\n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/dev/\/run/;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "/var" . $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";
}
}
close($infile);
close($outfile);
rename $filename . ".new", $filename or die "Can't rename " . $filename . ".new to " . $filename;
}
The next policy thing that I have to work on is systemd. From a quick test it seems that systemd policy changes will be more invasive than is suitable for Squeeze. This means that someone who wants to upgrade from Squeeze to Wheezy+systemd will have to upgrade to Wheeze policy before installing systemd. I think that I will make 0.2.20100524-10 the last version in Unstable based on the 2010 release, I will now start work on packaging the latest upstream policy for Unstable.
PS I’m not much of a PERL programmer, so if anyone has suggestions for how to improve the above PERL code then please let me know. Please note however that I’m not interested in making my code look like line-noise.
Currently Debian/Unstable is going through a transition to using /run instead of /var/run. Naturally any significant change to the filesystem layout requires matching changes to SE Linux policy. We currently have Debian bug #626720 open about this. Currently the initscripts package breaks selinux-policy-default in Debian/Unstable so that you can’t have initscripts using /run if the SE Linux policy doesn’t support it.
A patch has been suggested to the policy which uses a subst file, basically that causes the SE Linux labeling programs to treat one directory tree the same way as another. The problem with this is that it depends on a libselinux patch that is not in any yet released version of libselinux (and certainly won’t be in a Squeeze update). The upside of such a fix is that it would work for policy that I package as well as custom policy, so if someone wrote custom policy referring to /var/run it would automatically work with /run without any extra effort.
I think that the only way to do this is to just have regular expressions that deal with this in the file contexts. It’s a bit ugly and slows the relabel process down a little (probably no more than about 10%) but it will work – and work on Squeeze as well. One thing I really like to do is to have the SE Linux policy for version X of Debian work with version X+1. This makes upgrades a lot easier for the users. Ideally upgrading a server could be a process that involves separate upgrades of the kernel, the SE Linux policy, and user-space in any particular order – because upgrading everything at once almost guarantees that something will break and it may be difficult to determine the cause.
At this time I’m not sure whether I’ll add a new policy using the subs file before the release of Wheezy (the next stable release of Debian) or just keep using regular expressions. I can have the Wheezy policy depend on a new enough libselinux so it won’t be a problem in that regard (a new upstream version of libselinux with the subst feature should be released soon). In any case I need a back-port to Squeeze to use regular expressions to make an upgrade to Wheezy easier.
for n in $(find . -name "*.fc"|xargs grep var/run|cut -f1 -d:|uniq) ; do
sed -e "s/\/var\/run/\/(var\/)?run/" < $n > $n.new
mv $n.new $n
done
for n in $(find . -name "*.fc"|xargs grep var/lock|cut -f1 -d:|uniq) ; do
sed -e "s/\/var\/lock/\/((var\/run)|(run)|(var))\/lock/" < $n > $n.new
mv $n.new $n
done
for n in $(find . -name "*.fc"|xargs grep dev/shm|cut -f1 -d:|uniq) ; do
sed -e "s/\/dev\/shm/\/((var\/run)|(run)|(dev))\/shm/" < $n > $n.new
mv $n.new $n
done
I used the above fragment of shell code to change “/var/run” to “/(var/)?run”, “/var/lock” to “/((var/run)|(run)|(var))/lock”, and change “/dev/shm” to “/(var/run)|(run)|(dev))/shm”. It involves a reasonable number of changes to policy (mostly for /var/run), but hopefully this will be acceptable to the release team for inclusion in the next Squeeze update as the changes are relatively simple and obvious and the size of the patch is due to it being generated code.
There is one final complication, Squeeze currently has selinux-policy-default version 2:0.2.20100524-7+squeeze1, but initscripts in Unstable breaks versions <= 2:0.2.20100524-9. So I guess I could submit a proposed version 2:0.2.20100524-9+squeeze1 to the release team to fix this. I would really like to have the Squeeze policy work with initscripts from Unstable or Wheezy.
Any suggestions for how to deal with this?
Update:
I wrote the above before testing the code, and it turned out to not work. I’ve written another post describing a better solution that I have now uploaded to Unstable. I still have to sort something out with an update for Squeeze.
There is always been an ongoing debate about how to assign disk space into multiple partitions. I think that nowadays the best thing to do is to assign about 10G for the root filesystem for every desktop and server system because 10G is a small fraction of the disk space available (even the smallest laptops seem to all have disks larger than 100G nowadays). Even if 10G turns out not to be enough using separate filesystems for /var or /usr provides little benefit now that it’s easy to resize the root filesystem with LVM – and a separate /usr is known to be broken [1].
In a discussion on a private mailing list there was a suggestion that multiple filesystems should be used for security.
DoS Attacks
There are some minor security benefits in having multiple filesystems. If a critical program will fail when there is no free disk space then allowing an unprivileged process to use up all the space on that filesystem is a minor security issue, so having unprivileged processes not being permitted to write to important filesystems is a benefit. But most failures of this type are merely DoS attacks which usually aren’t a big deal – if you can control a local process there are usually lots of other ways of DoSing a system.
Links
Links have been the cause of many security issues in Unix over the years. Using different filesystems for different tasks can prevent the use of hard links in attacks aimed at exploiting race conditions. But even if you prevent hard links there are similar issues with symbolic links. SE Linux is one of many security improvements for Linux which allow restrictions on the creation of hard links. SE Linux also allows restricting the ability of processes to follow symbolic links, so a privileged process can be denied access to follow a sym-link that was created by an unprivileged process.
NFS
The subtree_check option in /etc/exports causes the NFS server to verify that file access is in the correct subtree. So if you export only one subdirectory of a filesystem to a given server then hostile code on that server (or on a network device which impersonates that server) can’t access other subdirectories. This option is documented as having performance implications and working best for filesystems that are mostly read-only, for this reason it’s turned off by default in recent versions of the NFS utilities.
So if you want to NFS export /home then it’s probably a good idea to have /home be on a separate filesystem to prevent attacks on the root filesystem. But of the systems with significant use of /home (IE anything other than accounts used solely for “su –“) most of them have a separate filesystem for /home anyway so this shouldn’t be an issue.
SE Linux
When mounting filesystems with SE Linux there is a “context=” mount option that allows specifying the context for all files on the filesystem. This can save a small amount of storage space for XATTRs and theoretically improve performance (although the difference is unlikely to show up on benchmarks for anything other than fsck). Generally the context mount option is only used for a filesystem that has a huge number of files with the same context, such as a mail spool that uses Maildir, Cyrus, or any of the other formats that involve one file per message. But again such data is generally stored on a separate filesystem for other reasons anyway.
I found one interesting corner case in regard to SE Linux systems mounting files from an NFS server. When an NFS server exports multiple subdirectories of a filesystem mounted on /foo then if one NFS client running SE Linux is to mount two subdirectories of /foo with different contexts then the second mount attempt will give the error “an incorrect mount option was specified”. This is because as of kernel 2.6.18 by default it’s not permitted to mount parts of the same filesystem with different mount options. The option “nosharecache” allows you to use different mount options, but does apparently permit some undesirable behavior in the case of hard links that cross between the subtrees. Thanks to Eric Paris for the tip about nosharecache.
The best example I can think of for which you might want context mount options that differ among files that are used for the same purpose on an NFS mount is a web server which has data files and CGI-BIN scripts. So it seems that a SE Linux web server that mounts it’s data over NFS and is at risk of having hard links between the CGI-BIN directory and the data directory is a corner case in which multiple filesystems is required for security. This seems to be a very unlikely case.
Conclusion
Servers that are deployed in the real world are complex enough that there are always systems with some unusual corner cases demanding configuration choices that aren’t expected. There are some real corner cases for SE Linux where multiple filesystems are compelled for security or for a combination of security and best performance.
But I wouldn’t make a generic recommendation of using lots of filesystems for security. I think that the people who encounter the strange corner cases can usually work out that they need to do something different. So a small number of filesystems seems like a good general aim that doesn’t conflict with security.
Anne Rettenberg wrote an article for Psychology Today that is critical of the idea of online dating [1], she cites one example of a man who visited a prostitute due to being depressed at his lack of success in online dating to support her claim.
The first big problem with her article is that she doesn’t mention the different experiences that male and female customers presumably have on online dating sites. I don’t know what it’s like for women on the dating sites so I can’t comment on that. But I’m sure that someone who works as a counselor could provide some useful insight into this matter. Also she didn’t even give a mention to the issue of gay/lesbian dating sites.
The next issue is that she didn’t offer any good advice for who should use online dating sites and what their aims should be.
Rejection
In dating in real life (IRL) it’s expected that the man make the first move, and therefore women end up rejecting lots of guys for various reasons. Anne seems to think that rejection online is somehow worse than rejection IRL, it probably is for some people but that certainly isn’t the case for everyone. The way that lots of dating sites seem to work is that women place adverts, men respond to them, and then the women reply to a small subset of the email that they receive. “Rejection” in this case isn’t a matter of telling someone that you aren’t interested, but of merely not replying to their mail.
From my discussions with a few men who’ve used online dating sites the strategy seems to be to send out initial messages to a few dozen women every day and then maybe get a few responses a day. For the messages that get no response you will never know whether the other person found someone else first, wasn’t interested in you for some reason, or just didn’t bother checking their email. The only comparison to IRL rejection is that which happens after phone numbers have been exchanged, which isn’t going to be that common (and has the same issues regardless of how the people met).
Guys, relax about the women who don’t respond to your first message. They probably get 100+ responses to their advert and don’t have time to even read half of them. If you get rejected later in the process then you can look through your email archive at a later date to try and discover what went wrong.
The Aim of Online Dating
The fact that Anne’s client visited a prostitute suggests that maybe he wasn’t really after a relationship. In which case using one of the many online services for finding sex partners might have been a better option.
Generally it seems that a good strategy is to try and have fun. I don’t know any men who have married someone from a dating site, but the general opinion seems to be that they are still worth using. If you meet someone in a bar then you might end up having a drunken conversation that is drowned out by loud music. If you meet someone over the Internet then you can have a quiet conversation over the phone – which seems to be a better way to get to know someone (and generally more pleasant for anyone who’s not an alcoholic). I think that men who have no immediate aim other than finding someone nice to talk to will do better than those who aim to score quickly.
Of the men I know who married women they met over the Internet (but not through online dating sites) I wonder how many of them would have ended up married if they hadn’t used the online dating sites first. It seems that men who regularly communicate with women outside formal situations (work etc) will have a better chance of impressing someone that they like than those who lack such experience.
Introverts
There are a lot of people who really can’t function in a bar. With the way our society works it seems that anyone who can’t handle the bar scene really should consider online dating.
How Counselors can Help
It seems to me that someone who is seeing a counselor and who is considering a new way of finding a SO should ask their counselor for advice first. It also seems to me that a good option might be to ask their counselor for advice in online dating. Instead of being unsuccessful and depressed a man who was seeing a female counselor could do well to ask her advice for how to impress women on the Internet. This is probably a business opportunity for female counselors who can advise men on such things, among other things it seems that seeing an “online relationship coach” would be perceived in a more positive manner than seeing a counselor or psychologist for the more traditional reasons.
TED has published a list of resources for suicide prevention and to help survivors and their families [1].
Psychology Today has an interesting article by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D about the recent US Supreme Court decision denying female employees of Walmart the ability to file a class action lawsuit about their poor pay and working conditions [2]. She describes the problem as a focus on rights of the ruling class vs fairness to the workers, it could also be described as prioritising perceived rights of the rich over the rights of workers to fair treatment. It seems to me that her article has relevance to some of the discussions related to the treatment of women in the Free Software community.
New Scientist has an interesting article by Ferris Jabr about the use of MRI to discover brain-wave patterns correlated with Autism in sleeping toddlers [3]. This doesn’t seem likely to be useful for scanning the entire population as it currently has a false-positive rate of 7/43 (which would make false-positives outnumber true-positives by about 15:1). But it does seem likely to do some good in identifying young children who might be on the Autism Spectrum.
Shea Hembry gave an amusing TED talk about how he created art works for 100 fictional artists for his own exhibition [4]. He created a biography for each “artist” and every one had a unique style of art.
Steve Keil gave a passionate TED talk about the benefits of play – for children and for adults [5]. He focussed on the benefits for Bulgaria (where his talk was given) but it all applies to all humans.
Frederic Bastiat’s 1850 essays on economics are interesting, informatice, and well written [6]. Some of the themes such as the supposed economic benefits of maintaining a large army are the subject of political debate today.
Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today about the recent US supreme court decision in regard to the Wal-mart case [7]. Her article seems to have some obvious parallels to the situation in the FOSS community. The idea of rights vs fairness, beliefs that are unconscious or unexamined, and the comparison of attitudes towards racial vs sexual discrimination (in terms of not treating sexual discrimination and harassment seriously) seem to all apply clearly.
Al Jazeera reports that the Fukushima disaster is worse than is reported in the mainstream “western” press [8]. Generally I wouldn’t be inclined to trust al Jazeera if other news sources were reliable. But unfortunately reliable news related to contentious issues such as nuclear power is quite rare. It will probably be quite a long time before we can be confident that we know much about Fukushima, everyone who knows seems to be lying.
Periodically Free Software people from other countries visit Melbourne on business trips. Usually when someone is sent any distance on a business trip (IE to Australia from anywhere other than NZ) they will stay in a good hotel (4 star or better), this generally means that they have a pool in their hotel. 5 star hotels and the newer serviced apartment hotels tend to have really good pools (1/4 olympic size isn’t uncommon). Hotel pools are very under-utilised, their main purpose AFAIK is to boost the hotel star rating – my experience is that it’s not common to meet other people in a hotel pool.
While food and drinks are often banned in the pool area my observation is that the only rule which matters is “no glass”. So hotel pools are almost ideal for pool parties, you just need to drink from cans or from drinks in plastic bottles that are poured into plastic cups.
If any Free Software person finds themself staying in a hotel in Melbourne Australia with not much to do in the evenings or weekends then one option is to call for a pool party. I’ve asked on a local mailing list and it seems that there is enough interest for a small party, the local mailing lists can be used to arrange a party.
Also one thing to note is that some hotels have outdoor pools, while Australia is generally a warm place the southern parts of Australia (such as Melbourne) get quite cold in winter, an outdoor pool is not going to be fun for the colder half of the year. So getting a hotel with an indoor pool is very important during the April-September period.
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