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TED is offering an audition for future TED.com talks in New York on the 24th of May [1]. It would be good if we could have someone advocate Free Software there. The audition is a 1 minute talk, the speakers who pass the audition may be offered full ~17 minute lecture slots at the next TED conference, and some of the minute long talks will be published on TED.com (which has many viewers).
Larry Lessig has previously given a TED talk about laws that strange creativity [2], while this is fairly typical of the type of talk that TED promotes (in terms of politics and presentation quality), a talk doesn’t have to be so well produced to make the grade. Firstly some TED talks seem to be accepted with a lower presentation quality due to the speaker having some special knowledge – a TED presentation doesn’t have to be so slick if the speaker is sufficiently famous or the talk is particularly interesting. Also there are TEDx events which are organised independently, have less international attention, and therefore less competition for speaking slots. Larry gave a more recent talk at the TEDxNYED event about re-examining the remix and lessons that people on the political left can learn from conservatives about remix legislation [3], this talk is much more informal and also unfortunately has a much lower recording quality. But as it’s published on TED.com it will still get a large audience.
Promoting Free Software to the TED audience (which includes many senior politicians and other VIPs) would be a major achievement. Even a TEDx talk that gets published on TED.com would get seen by a huge and important audience.
Who is capable of giving such a talk? Larry got a standing ovation for his TED talk so it seems most likely that he can give another TED talk without going through the public audition process, but it seems that he has other priorities at this time. Probably most people who have more than 10 years experience doing Free Software development and who have a reasonable amount of experience giving lectures at Free Software conferences could at least manage the TEDx quality and a good portion of the speakers from any of the major Linux conferences could potentially give a talk of TED quality if they spent enough time preparing it.
What methods of funding are available? There are probably very few people who would travel far to give a 1 minute talk, Mark Shuttleworth is one person who can afford to travel for such things and who could potentially give a great TED talk (his story is the sort of thing that seems popular with the TED audience). Would any of the Free Software organisations sponsor someone to give such an audition? I would support having Debian funds spent on travel for one of the better Debian advocates to travel to NY for the audition – I’m sure that there are many other Free Software things that can be done in NY to help justify the expense. Maybe this would be something that is suitable for corporate sponsorship.
Finally it seems like a good idea to create some very short talks anyway. It would probably be useful to have leaders of the Free Software community publish minute-long video talks about their favorite projects anyway. In some ways a short talk is a higher form of art than a long lecture, I think that the best talk I ever gave was my 5 minute lightning talk about installing SE Linux.
Update
TED now has a blog post with a FAQ about the talks [4]. Larry Lessig is the first example they cite of how to give a great TED talk!
Also you can submit a video without attending New York and there is no restriction on publishing the video elsehere. So if you want to make a great 1 minute video about something important you can just send it to TED and see what happens and then publish it on Youtube or one of the other video services too.
Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for The Guardian about Harper-Collins attempts to make self-destructing books [1]. They claim that a traditional book falls apart after being read 26 times (a claim that Cory disputes based on personal experience working at libraries) and want ebooks to be deleted after being borrowed so often. Really the copy-right fascists are jumping the shark here.
Socialogical Images has an interesting archive of adverts for supposed treatments for autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, asperger syndrome, and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder [2]. The New York University Child Study Center conducted the campaign of fake ransom notes to describe a psychological difference as something that kidnaps a child. The possibility that parents should to some extent learn to adapt to their child’s nature rather than fixing them with medication is something that most people can’t seem to understand.
William Cronon has written an interesting analysis of the way “Conservative”, lobby groups work [3]. They are more organised than I expected.
The Reid Report has a good summary of some of the corporat issues related to the Japanese nuclear melt-down [4], apparently the company that runs the reactors decided to delay using sea-water in the hope that their investment could be salvaged and thus put everyone at increased risk. I think that this proves that reactors shouldn’t be privately owned.
Ian Lowe wrote a good summary of the reasons why Australia should not be using nuclear power when we believed that the Fukushima disaster was over [5]. But it turns out that the Fukushima problems were worse than we thought and the melt-down is getting worse.
Christopher Smart wrote a good analysis of Microsoft’s latest attempt to extort money from Linux users where they assert patent claims over Android [6]. He points out that .NET/Mono is a risk to Linux.
Major Keary wrote a positive review of “Snip Burn Solder Shred” which is a book about “Seriously geeky stuff to make with your kids” [7]. Sounds like a fun book.
The internal network of RSA has been cracked in some way that apparently weakens the security of SecureID, Bruce Schneier’s blog comments section has an interesting discussion of the possibilities [8]. I expect that it’s a fairly bad attack, if the attack was minor then surely the RSA people would have told us all the details.
Hans Rosling gave an interesting TED talk about The Magic Washing Machine [9]. He describes how his family benefited when his mother first got a washing machine and how this resulted in better education as his mother had more time to get library books for her children. It seems that deploying more electric washing machines should be a priority for improving education and food supplies in third-world countries.
Paul Root Wolpe gave an interesting and disturbing TED talk about bio-engineering [10]. He catalogues the various engineered animals and talks about the potential for future developments.
Ron Rosenbaum wrote an interesting and insightful article for Slate about Maj. Harold Hering who’s military career ended after he asked how to determine whether a nuclear launch order is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president [11]. The question never received a good answer, this is a good reason for moving towards nuclear disarmament – and for Americans to vote for the sanest and most intelligent candidate in the presidential elections.
Eythor Bender gave an inspiring TED talk about human exoskeletons [12]. He had live demonstrations on stage of a soldier using an exo-skeleton to carry a heavy backpack and a woman who suffered a severe spinal-cord injury walking after being in a wheel-chair for 19 years.
A meme that keeps going around is that Asperger Syndrome (AS) is somehow universally good. The DSM doesn’t list things that are beneficial, so any diagnostic criteria has to be for something that has some serious down-sides – even if there are positive aspects to it. Of course on the Internet the debate won’t just end there.
Positive Aspects of AS
The main positive aspect of AS is intense concentration on topics of Special Interest, if a Special Interest is something that is related to a high paying job (such as computer programming) then that’s a really good thing. Of course a Special Interest that isn’t related to well paid employment or for which most people get paid little and only a lucky few get paid really well (such as music) isn’t going to be a good thing by objective criteria.
It seems that most people on the Autism Spectrum have sensory advantages over Neuro-Typical people (NTs). Better vision and hearing are quite common. It’s good to be able to notice small and quiet things that most people miss, but that’s not a benefit that most people seem to particularly desire. The down-side is that loud sounds and bright lights are more unpleasant and it’s easy to be distracted by things that other people won’t notice.
The desire to give lectures has obvious benefits for any profession where giving lectures is a large part of the work, this is one reason why so many Aspies end up in academic careers. The down-side is that this is usually combined with a lack of ability to recognise when people aren’t interested in receiving a lecture.
Things can work out quite well for people on the Autism Spectrum who have a special interest that relates to a well paying career, who don’t have any problems that prevent them from getting and keeping a job.
Neutral Aspects of AS
On forums some Aspies report that they don’t want to have friends, presumably their needs for friendship are met by the interaction with other forum members. As far as I can determine they are happy like that. I’m sure that such people are a lot happier than people who want friends and don’t have any.
The incidence of asexuality among Aspies is apparently a lot higher than among the general population (something like 30% vs 1%). This isn’t a bad thing for those people (I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that asexuals are less happy than people with average sexual desire), but it is evidence to suggest that Aspies are not the next stage in human evolution.
Negative Aspects of AS
The DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for AS has as section C “The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning“, in the proposed changes for DSM-V it’s merged into “Autistic Disorder” with section D being “Symptoms together limit and impair everyday functioning” [1]. These seem like clear disadvantages, it doesn’t seem possible to be diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum without having some real disadvantage.
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) seem to usually be correlated with Sensory Processing Disorder. Symptoms of SPD can include a lack of tolerance for noise, lights, certain types of clothing, dirt, and lots of other things as well as being physically clumsy. SPD is not in the diagnostic criteria for any ASD but it seems that most people on the Spectrum experience it to some degree and many regard it as the worst down-side of Autism.
Spiritual Aspects of AS
I’ve seen a claim that AS gives them some advantage over NTs in terms of spiritual development. When someone manages to prove that their God exists or whatever other supernatural belief they have is based on fact then I’ll consider this possibility.
I think it’s worth noting however that most religions seem to place some emphasis on humility, that seems to go against claiming that one’s neuro-type is genetically predisposed to being successful at religion.
Conclusion
There are many positive, neutral, and negative aspects of AS that I didn’t list, I only mentioned some of the more common ones. How the positive and negative aspects compare differs on an individual basis, some people seem to be better off by objective criteria. But it seems that the best outcome is to have a different life experience that isn’t objectively worse, which usually seems to involve a career in computers, science, engineering, or academia.
Really if we were better then the Neuro-Typical people (NTs) would envy us, and I haven’t seen much evidence of that. The NTs who do think that AS is a good thing seem to have little knowledge of AS.
I’ve just written some small scripts to help me manage spam emergencies on a mail server. I’ve been doing this thing with a bit of manual effort for a while, but after having done it once from a phone I want to optimise it a bit to reduce painful typing.
My observation is that when a system I run is used as an outbound mail relay for spamming I will notice this reasonably quickly by the queues getting big. Some portion of mail that is queued is delayed due to general network issues and anti-spam measures that neither accept nor reject mail cause a typical spam message to be more likely to be queued than a typical non-spam message. So I look for accounts that send large amounts of mail.
The biggest mail server I run (and the only one to have an outbound spam problem) is configured to not allow users to fake their sender address (IE use an address from gmail.com or another server) unless they pay extra. So the spam I deal with tends to have a valid origin email address that I can use.
Queue Counting
The following command provides a sorted list of the accounts that have the most mail in the queue. This usually means a maximum of 2 or 3 spammers at the end of the list:
mailq|grep ^[A-F0-9]|cut -c 42-80|sort |uniq -c|sort -n|tail
The following function declaration makes the command get-top-sender find the sender with the largest number of queue entries (which has been a spammer every time I’ve checked such things) and assign their email address to the environment variable $TOP_SENDER. It has to be a shell function so that the environment variable will be set in the context of the shell and available to child processes.
function get-top-sender() { TOP_SENDER_LINE=$(mailq|grep ^[A-F0-9]|cut -c 42-80|sort |uniq -c|sort -n|tail -1) ; export TOP_SENDER=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE|cut -f2 -d\ ) ; TOP_COUNT=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE|cut -f1 -d\ ); echo "Top Sender is $TOP_SENDER with $TOP_COUNT messages" ; }
Viewing the Queue
The following script uses the first parameter or the environment variable $TOP_SENDER to specify the user who’s mail should be read. In the normal course of events user email won’t be read by the sysadmin, but if we are to determine whether a slew of email is spam or not there’s no other way. So far I haven’t seen a large number of queued messages not be spam, but I expect it’ll happen eventually and the user will be happy that I checked it instead of locking their account and deleting all the queued mail. For readers who don’t do sysadmin work, this is why we always have entries in the Terms of Service about the possibility of your email being read to fix technical problems or to investigate possible breaches of the ToS from your end.
#!/bin/bash
set -e
mkdir -p ~/tmp/$$
cd ~/tmp/$$
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
TOP_SENDER="$1"
fi
if [ "$TOP_SENDER" = "" ]; then
echo "Specify the sender on the command-line or in \$TOP_SENDER"
exit 1
fi
for n in $(mailq|grep ^[A-F0-9].*$TOP_SENDER| cut -c 1-10) ; do
FILE=$(echo $n|sed -e "s/^\(.\)/\/var\/spool\/postfix\/deferred\/\1\/\1/" -e "s/ .*$//")
if [ -f "$FILE" ]; then
postcat "$FILE" > $n
else
echo "File $FILE missing, probably active"
fi
done
less *
rm -rf ~/tmp/$$
Note that this needs to be done with a single less command so that I can terminate it by pressing q and easily go to the next file with “:n“. It does waste some server resources by running postcat on all queue files relating to the user in question, but that doesn’t matter, servers are supposed to be powerful enough to cope with some inefficiency in processing uncommon operations.
The Final Command
After that I have a script that connects by ssh to all outbound mail relays and deletes bad messages from the queues and then connects to the database server to lock the account that was used for sending the mail. I’m not publishing it because it’s specific to the servers I run.
So when NAGIOS reports that the queue is too large I have one script to find the most likely culprit, one script to view the queued email from that account, and a final script to lock the account and purge the spam.
I’ve also added a reminder of the command names to /etc/motd as I don’t want to be running ls and set on a phone to discover command names that I’ve forgotten.
Any suggestions for improvements to this will be welcome.
Sam Varghese has written an article that is very skeptical of the educational value of the OLPC project [1].
Are Laptops Any Good for Schools?
Sam cites an article in the New York Times by Winnie Hu about schools removing laptop programs due to a lack of success [2]. Winnie’s article gives an example of a school shutting a program because of getting new teachers who lacked computer skills and some examples of schools which had issues with the repair cost. The solution to that would be computers that are more robust and easier to use – by all accounts the OLPC systems are solidly constructed and easy to use!
It is claimed that using laptops doesn’t increase test scores. Using only test scores to compare educational methods is a way to lose, probably any school which does nothing other than try to increase test scores is worth avoiding. One example from Winnie’s article is a report by Mr. Warschauer of “students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online“. What value can you place on having students develop books for poor children in other countries and debate Supreme Court cases? If this sort of program became popular then it would lead to the countries which do it becoming better places to live in future decades!
Mr. Warschauer also claims that “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful“. I would go further than that, I think that providing the educational environment that involves international charity work and analysis of important court cases would lead to students having the skills to become good engineers, designers, and artists who work for people like George Lucas and Steve Jobs. No matter what you might do the vast majority of children will not grow up to be like George Lucas and Steve Jobs, there is a very limited number of positions for such people. But those people employ a huge number of creative people who do interesting and enjoyable work for good pay.
I don’t think that Winnie’s article supports criticism of the OLPC project. I don’t think that Winnie’s article even contains sufficient evidence to match the headline.
Playing Games
Sam also cites an article about the misuse of school computers for playing games [3]. Of course there are ways of limiting access to games based on time etc. For a Linux system you could have a root cron job that runs chmod on /usr/games at various times, and preventing users from easily running programs that they install isn’t difficult.
Not that games are all bad, the flash-based games on www.physicsgames.net do teach kids some things about physics – although I admit that much of that could be learned by playing with balls, skate-boards, etc.
The Problem with the OLPC Project
I think that the policy change to make OLPC systems only available to disadvantaged children was a mistake. The “give one get one” program was a great idea, maybe not the most effective way of getting funding but good for getting developers. While the new Sugar on a Stick project to put the OLPC GUI on a bootable USB device [4] it doesn’t compare well to having dedicated hardware IMHO.
Minimal Use of Computers
I have previously written about the weight of school bags and how laptops can alleviate the risk of health problems related to carrying heavy text books [5]. Since that time ebook readers and tablets have become incredibly cheap. Ebook readers are really light and the recent tablets are also very light (particularly the smaller ones). It seems to me that every school should at least be moving towards every student having an ebook reader and to use ebooks for all books that are part of the curriculum.
At the moment there are a bunch of tablets on sale for about $150, that includes tablets that can access the Internet via Wifi or via 3G – and a cheap 3G plan costs less than $150 per annum. If tablets were used for some of the computer tasks related to schools then a lot of the difficulty of repairing hardware would be removed. Tablets don’t offer as many options for messing up the software configuration and if the hardware breaks it’s easy to transfer the data onto a new tablet from the cloud – with a maximum cost of $150 to replace the hardware.
Also a cloud-based computing model could permit students to access all the same data from school and home while using desktop computers at both locations.
Current Success
Natalie Craig wrote an interesting article for The Age about “The Lab” – a drop-in computer center for kids on the Autism Spectrum run by Dale Linegar and Stefan Schutt [6]. The fact that kids who have communication difficulties can find it easier to communicate electronically should be fairly obvious to everyone in the free software community, but the creation of an organisation to support such kids is noteworthy – I think that such centers should be funded by the government and run in every city.
Salman Khan gave an interesting TED talk about his project the Khan Academy [7] which is an online video-based teaching system that evolved from some Youtube videos he produced to tutor his cousins. Salman pointed out that his cousins said that they would rather watch his videos than have him teach them in person, it seems that they liked being able to pause and rewind the talk as well as avoiding the pressure of human interaction. The Khan Academy has videos in Adobe flash format, but conveniently they have download links so those of us who don’t have the Flash plugin can still view the content [8].
One of the interesting things about the Khan Academy is that in school use the videos are being assigned to kids as homework and the class time is used for teaching children to do worked examples – what has traditionally been homework.
So it seems that there are real examples of special-needs kids and average kids benefiting from different types of electronic learning.
Conclusion
I think that almost everything about the education system is broken. I also think that in many ways the education system has reached a local maximum, so there is no small way of improving things, and adding computers without making any of the significant changes needed to fix the big problems probably can’t do a lot of good. In spite of this computers can provide some real benefits and I expect that those benefits can be better than the benefits of other potential ways of spending the money (IE it’s worth the opportunity cost). I also have no doubt that almost anything can give a negative result if done badly enough, so I don’t interpret examples of computer use failing in a school as anything other than evidence of a failing school.
While the Khan Academy has some results that seem very positive I think that’s only the first step of what needs to be done. It also seems to be based around users who have good Internet access which often isn’t the case in places where the OLPC is being deployed. This implies that we need to get systems like the Khan Academy designed to operate in a disconnected manner, maybe with a remote server that’s not connected to the Internet. This should be possible if funding is available.
Sam suggested that there needs to be a scientific study of the effectiveness of the OLPC. I think that every project which involves significant amounts of public funding should be researched to ensure that it’s an effective use of resources. 400,000 laptops is going to cost something more than $40,000,000 so it seems reasonable to devote a few person-years of research to determine how effective they are and which of the possible ways of using an OLPC will give the best results.
I am confident that a good study of the effectiveness of the OLPC would demonstrate that it provides real educational benefits when correctly incorporated into an educational program. I also expect that such a study would show some significant differences in the effectiveness of various ways of using them. But we shouldn’t be relying on confidence, we need some test results.
There have been ongoing news reports about the nuclear power plant problems in Japan following the earth-quake and tidal-wave. The Wikipedia page about the Fukushima I nuclear accidents seems to have the best current summary of the situation [1].
I think it’s worth noting that Potassium Iodide can be ingested to reduce the incidence of thyroid damage in the event of radiation leaks (which apparently usually contain radioactive iodine). KI can be ingested immediately after exposure and there’s apparently little harm in taking it before a time of risk (it can be good to take it for a couple of days before exposure). So getting some KI right now might be a good idea for people who live in the vicinity. Apparently the Japanese government have issued iodine tablets to the people closest to the disaster, but it’s probably worth spreading the word to people who are further away.
Leigh Krietsch Boerner gave a good explanation of how Iodine significantly reduces the risk of thyroid cancer [2].
The Nuclear War Survival Skills site has a good description of how to make your own KI solution [3]. This probably isn’t a viable option for anyone in Japan unless they can raid a chemistry lab as mail-order of chemicals will surely be too slow. This is probably something that’s best considered for future plans for anyone who lives near a nuclear reactor.
It would be good if airport pharmacies sold packs of KI tablets for the benefit of travelers who don’t live near a reactor but who are visiting a country that has them. It’s something I’d like to buy before my next trip to Japan.
This morning I attended the Climate Action Now rally to support a pollution tax [1]. The event was well attended, my personal estimate of the number of people there was there there was definitely more than 3,000 people, and maybe as many as 8,000 or more.
I spoke to an employee of the APS who was on guard duty, he described the event as “big” and said that they don’t usually have events that are so well attended. He gave a personal estimate of 5,000 people. While he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the APS he was presumably more skillful at making such estimations than most people. I expect that he also gave a conservative estimate, so it could have been a lot more than that.
There were some people using comedy to make political points. Below is a picture of the carbon monster, what you can’t see is the man who was handing out coal BBQ fuel for people to feed the monster, children appeared to enjoy that! Also there were three people dressed as Gollum representing the Liberal party (the Australian conservative party), I was unable to get all three in one picture.
 
Some vegans had a banner supporting the VeganEasy.org site [2]. Being vegetarian can make a significant impact on human environmental impact including on the amount of electricity used (from coal or other sources).
Here are pictures taken looking East over the main part of the rally, looking North towards the building at 3 Treasury place from the other side of the road, looking South over the lawns where people who didn’t like being crowded gathered, and looking West over part of the main crowd. The picture looking South shows another view of the Carbon Monster and his accomplice with a sign “haven’t you had enough dear?“.
   
When I first arrived there were two main sections to the rally. They weren’t discrete (there was no empty space between them) but they acted separately because there was no PA system that could make enough noise to be heard in both sections. At one stage the West section was chanting while there were speeches in the East section. Below is a picture looking out over the West section as people had just turned to go home. This area was entirely packed when I first arrived.
The rally was really a family event. There were some grey-haired people wearing t-shirts explaining that they wanted to create a better world for their grand-children and there were also some young children. At the end of the event some children used cardboard signs as toboggans to slide down a steep grassy bank near the main rally area – recycling!!! I deliberately chose my photos to try and avoid including children, but even so you can see a few in the background of some of them.
Why is that Mercedes blocking so much of the road through the station car park?
It’s because it’s the second car in a 1 car parking spot!
Here’s a front view.
These were taken in the Coburg Station car park on Wednesday. The car park was about half empty, so the alternative to blocking part of the road and blocking in someone who was legally parked was to just park about 10 meters further away from the station.
Some people just shouldn’t be driving.
Australia’s Department of Finance has mandated that the MS-Office document format should be the standard document format for all agencies [1]. Paul Wayper notes the fact that MS doesn’t plan to support it’s own standards and suggests ODF, also known as ISO/IEC standard 26300:2006. [2].
Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Marnia Robinson about scientific reasons for avoiding porn addiction [3]. Her post links to a number of other posts on the topic on Psychology Today.
Psychology Today has an interesting post by Noam Shpancer titled “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker” [4]. It seems to me that the belief to the contrary is due to people rationalising bad things that happened to them, “it’s not all bad as it made me stronger”.
Psychology Today has an interesting article by Noam Shpancer about the soldier as hero myth [5]. He argues that soldiers are really just employees, the risk to American soldiers in war zones really isn’t that great and that they are just pawns to the military-industrial complex.
Anders Ynnerman gave an interesting TED talk about visualising medical data which includes many startling 3D pictures of humans and animals that are being scanned [6]. He describes how this is useful in forensic analysis by the police and in better understanding biological processes.
Margarita Manterola gave an interesting Debconf talk titled “Making Debian Rule, again”, she has some interesting ideas for improving Debian [7]. She is most focussed on social problems and the questions and comments had some interesting ideas. The Center for Non-Violent Communication [8] was mentioned in the questions, apparently their success includes teaching better communication skills to violent criminals, so it seems that they can help with some big problems.
Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting article about the ratio of writers to readers on Wikipedia [9]. While he makes some good points I’m wondering about the measure of an “editor”, there have been few months where I have made 5 edits, so I guess I’m just a reader. I probably should take more care in logging in when I make changes though, I’ve made more than a few small changes from random systems (client sites, Internet cafes, etc) without bothering to login. This would mess up the stats a bit.
The Reid Report has an interesting article about Bush being limited in his international travel due to the fact that he has admitted being a war criminal [10].
Understanding Prejudice is an interesting article that summarises a lot of psychological research [11]. It gives many ideas for anyone who wants to reduce prejudice.
Robin Harris wrote an interesting ZD Net article about vibrations and the impact on disk performance [12]. Apparently it’s very common to be able to get more performance from drive arrays if you dampen vibration, previously I believed that unless you had extreme vibration to cause catastrophic problems then nothing would go wrong. But it seems that even smaller amounts of vibration can cause a 30% performance loss or worse! There is work in progress on vibration-damping racks.
In a story published in The Australian about the NSW ambulance service being shut down due to a virus, Professor Caelli cites SE Linux as an example of a technology to make computers more virus resistant [13]. Professor Caelli also states that there should be a legal requirement to have backup systems for computers that have such grave consequences if they crash.
Sinclair Community College is offering a new class “Fundamentals of Linux Security”, it includes SE Linux [14].
Slate has an interesting article about Pickpockets [15]. Apparently they are becoming extinct in the US as law enforcement has prevented the “Fagins” from training younger people, and it’s only in Eastern Europe that the skills base remains.
I’ve recently got a new Xperia X10 Android phone for my with with Virgin mobile, it’s generally been working OK although I am having some issues [1], I’ll write another blog post soon about other problems I’ve discovered with the phone and how I’ve solved some of the previous ones.
I upgraded my wife’s phone first because I can’t be without Nagios SMS messages if things don’t work. So now that things are generally working I want to get myself an Xperia through Virgin (and have my wife’s phone get the Nagios SMS in the mean-time). But since last Friday the entire Virgin sales infrastructure has apparently been down. It started with just declining my attempts to purchase a new phone on a separate account, but when I decided to add a second phone to my wife’s account the web site told me that they are upgrading their CRM system and it should be fixed on the 22nd of Feb (yesterday). The web site is now saying that I should “check back in 2 hours for an update“, it’s been saying that for a couple of days now.
So for most of a week potential Virgin customers have been turned away. It could be that Virgin stores are processing sales on paper, but they offer some significant discounts for web sales – the plan I want is a $39 per month plan and I’ll get 3 months free for buying on the web. I’m not about to visit a store and lose $117! I’m sure that many people are losing confidence in Virgin and taking their business elsewhere. I have only just installed the “3G Watchdog” free Android app that monitors bandwidth use and automatically turns off 3G when the quota is reached. For the first few days of using the phone which were more data intensive than usual I had no monitoring and no way of using the Virgin web site to discover how much was used. If Virgin bill me extra for data use I’ll complain and demand that they alter the bill.
This is even worse for pre-paid customers who can’t add credit to their account while this happens!
Virgin state that they are “upgrading the hardware, operating system and database our platform uses to ensure that we can service our Members even better for years to come” [2]. I wonder how people get themselves into such a mess. I guess they didn’t have a decent test environment to allow testing the upgrade process before doing it on the live data, I can understand a routine small upgrade going wrong and corrupting data in a way that takes some time to resolve. But when everything is upgraded then everything should be tested, and tested before going live! One thing that Virgin could do to regain some credibility is to publish what went wrong and what they learned from it. I would be much more happy to trust my personal data and my business critical phone to a company that learns from it’s mistakes and publishes plans on how they do better than one that just does PR.
According to Whirlpool they did the same thing on the 25th of January, so they have had two outages of their billing/CRM system in two months! [3]. The Whirlpool thread has discussion about last month’s down-time and this month’s down-time.
On the up-side, Whirlpool user Kevin JD is a Virgin representative who advised customers to send email to telesales@virginmobile.com.au with a contact phone number if they have any issues. It’s good to see a company engaging with it’s customers.
Update: An hour after emailing the URL to this post to Virgin I got a call from a service representative. It wasn’t a very productive call as I already knew that their servers are down and they can’t do anything. But it’s good to know that they are very enthusiastic about making things better. One useful thing that I learned is that my wife’s service is probably on a pro-rated bandwidth quota. As she got the phone in the middle of the month we can only do 100M of data transfer not 200M before the end of the month, by my rough calculations I’ve downloaded well over 50M of data (maybe as much as 100M) from the Android marketplace. So it might be necessary to negotiate about the bill as soon as their CRM system works.
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