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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. 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. 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. Nokia is in the news for it’s CEO announcing that they have a “Burning Platform”, Jeff Waugh gives an interesting analysis of the situation [1]. What is a Platform for Phones?This whole scenario makes me wonder about what a platform should mean in terms of mobile devices. Wikipedia says “A computing platform is some sort of hardware architecture and software framework (including application frameworks) that allows software to run. Typical platforms include a computer’s architecture, operating system, programming languages and related user interface (run-time system libraries or graphical user interface). [2] I think that Nokia’s problem was that it didn’t leverage it’s strength in making great phone hardware. Nokia used to have a commanding share of the market due to simply making better phones. They had phones that were upwardly compatible (the same UI and used the same chargers), their phones were always very solidly constructed, and they had some good design features such as having the battery comprise part of the case – which allowed a replacement battery to be physically larger for longer battery life. Even now they have hardware features which are better than the rest – such as the N8 which is widely regarded as having the best camera of any phone. Nokia also did some smart things like releasing their N800 series of phones with more open software than most companies used, they supported running arbitrary Linux applications. While they kept the platform as the API interface on a phone OS and maintained several different OSs (with multiple versions in production at any time) they made a less desirable platform for developers and a lot more development work for themselves. Nokia fragmented their own market. There is no technical reason why they couldn’t manufacture a phone that is capable of running a choice of their own OS as well as Android (or alternatively their own OS or the Windows Phone OS). There may be technical issues that prevent designing a phone to run either Android or Windows phone, but they could have got two out of three options available. On top of a hardware phone platform we could have multiple software platforms, Android, Windows, Meego, etc. The users could then decide which one to use. A Hardware Platform for PhonesI think that it would be ideal if a phone company offered phones with a choice of OS and allowed the user to change the OS. The N8 is a great phone and the hardware is really appealing, I would have definitely bought one for my wife if it ran Android. Also the resale value of phones can be improved if they can be re-purposed. If someone knew that people on ebay were paying good rates for an old phone because it could be re-programmed then they would be more likely to buy it. As phones are essentially free for most people due to telco deals, a phone that has a resale value of $200 is a lot more desirable than one with a resale value of $100 if all other things are equal. I would like to see the mobile phone as a platform just as the IBM PC compatible was a platform. Imagine if IBM had sued Compaq into oblivion when they first cloned the PC, if that had happened I don’t think that I would be using an IBM PC (Thinkpad) right now. The early IBM PCs really weren’t great systems for home use, for pretty much anything you might want to do the early PCs didn’t compete well with CP/M systems and systems from Commodore and Apple. It was only when cheap clones flooded the market that the “PC” platform took off. Modern PCs can boot from disks that were created 20 years ago. At every time during the PC’s history there has been a choice of OSs available that work with the standard BIOS boot loader and expect certain essential hardware (such as a BIOS interface for video, keyboard, and storage). This choice increased the market allowing economies of scale in production. It also allowed competition between vendors which forced the margins to be low and resulted in PCs becoming cheap – over the last 20 years every aspect of a PC apart from Intel CPUs and Microsoft Software has steadily dropped in price. I would like to see phones designed with a common boot loader, a common core set of CPU functions (I believe that with ARM CPUs a lot is optional), and common interfaces to the touch-screen and the GSM system. The boot loader would ideally have support for booting multiple OSs, in a typical end-user case the store would provide the phone configured to quietly only boot one of the available OSs – but it would be trivial to offer the user a choice of OS at boot time for advanced users. The process of installing a custom ROM image in a phone is regarded as dangerous at the moment and most people who would like to do such things are hesitant due to the risk of “bricking” their phone. If booting the last good OS was an option then more people would try new OSs. With the current situation I am a little hesitant to re-program my new phones (and I’m braver about such things than most people). One of the many problems with the current situation is that the phone vendor has to officially support every phone OS. One example of the problems with this is the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 which is a fine piece of hardware that has been saddled with an older version of Android for it’s entire life, Sony has stated that they won’t produce any more updates and thus the demand for this phone is a lot lower than it might be. I believe that this is why the Xperia X10 is significantly cheaper than any other phone with similar features. Sony is losing money because they have a closed hardware platform and don’t support the recent versions of Android! Ways of Booting the OSIt shouldn’t be a technical challenge to have support for basic touch-screen IO and 3G Internet access in the boot loader of the phone. Then an OS such as Android could be loaded from the network before being booted without needing an older version of Android running. 80386 systems with a few megs of RAM used to be able to boot from a LAN, a modern phone has much more powerful hardware and a network connection that’s at least as good as 10base2 networking so it should be able to do the same. Modern phones have micro-SD cards for local storage. There’s no reason why the OS couldn’t be loaded on micro-SD card. Fixing the OS on a phone that was “bricked” could be achieved by putting the micro-SD card in a PC and then copying the files across – just as I often fix PC OS problems by installing the hard drive in a working system. Changing the OS of a phone should be easier than changing a PC between Ubuntu and Fedora (the Linux distributions that seem to have the most usage by less technical users). ConclusionIf Sony had made their platform the hardware then they could have spent their effort on what they do well (making great phone hardware) and delegated almost all of the work related to creating the OS to other companies (Google, MS, telcos, etc). If the entire industry moved to a hardware platform for phones then the result would be lower prices and some thin margins for manufacturers. This would be good for users and OK for manufacturers. The current situation however is quite bad for users who can never get phones to do exactly what they want and not so good for phone manufacturers such as Nokia (and everyone else who does business with Microsoft) who find themselves on the wrong side of market forces. The phone as a hardware platform shouldn’t be too bad for Microsoft either, they did OK on the PC hardware platform. I have just got a new Xperia X10i for my wife. It’s with Virgin who use the Optus network. Optus apparently have better coverage than Three (who we have been using for 6.5 years) and Virgin offers the best deals – they have good phones on low monthly rates and do nice things like selling most phones unlocked (the Xperia is one that comes unlocked). I chose the phone for use in system administration work. A large screen should be good for reading email and running a ssh client. Hopefully I will be able to use the phone’s Wifi to provide mobile net access to a laptop for any problem that can’t be solved on a tiny screen. My wife doesn’t do much sysadmin work nowadays, but it’ll save some effort if we can both use the same model of phone. Also according to Amobil.no the Xperia X10 is the second best phone for camera-phone functionality [1], and my wife would really like to take some good pictures with her phone (she loves the LG U990 Viewty that she has right now). ScreenOne major reason for choosing this phone is that it has the biggest and highest resolution of any phone that doesn’t cost a huge amount of money. It does well in this regard, the screen is very good to look at. However it is apparently not particularly sensitive and we still have the protective cover on the screen which makes the swipe to unlock operation quite difficult. My wife generally likes to keep the protective plastic on such screens for a while to prevent damage, but she may take this off sooner than on other devices. Sony FoolishnessOne reason that this phone is cheaper than any other phone with similar specs is that it’s made by Sony. Sony won’t provide updates to Android 2.2 or better and they have their own stupid applications installed in an intrusive manner. The main screen of the phone has a large icon for the Sony Timescape program. If you choose a background image of a person’s face then the Timescape logo is in the ideal location to obscure the person’s eyes. Generally it’s not desired to have the person in your phone background look like Zorro. Fortunately you can delete icons from the home screen, you just have to press and hold the icon until a trash-can appears at the bottom of the screen and then drag it to the trash. Phone BookThe core phone functionality is fairly important for a mobile phone. But it seems that every modern phone has some serious failings in this regard. The Xperia comes with a phone book that is reasonably good for managing contacts and partially coalesces multiple entries with the same name – which is convenient as I somehow managed to import 3 copies of each entry in my wife’s phone book. The down-side is that the multiple entries are still stored, so when it comes time to update someone’s phone number my wife will have to separate the entries and then delete all but one of them, adding probably a minute of effort for each one. With 60 phone book entries that’s probably an hour of wasted time during the course of her phone use. They really should do a time based analysis of phone use and optimise the UI for efficiently performing common tasks. I think that an ideal design would start off by asking the user to rate the importance of phone functionality, camera, facebook, twitter, etc and then give a UI that matches the important tasks. A device that has 384M of RAM, 1G of built-in Flash storage, and an 8G micro-SD card (which Virgin provided with the phone) should be able to offer a selection of UIs. CameraThe configuration for the camera allows some settings to be changed easily and others have to be changed through the “advanced” settings which requires one more button press and a few extra taps on the screen. One real stupidity is to have the phone light be in the advanced settings, so if the room happens to be a little darker than expected you suddenly need to go to a lot of extra effort to turn on the light. Finally it would be really good to be able to take a quick picture. I would like to be able to be able to press a combination of buttons and have it immediately take a picture regardless of what had been running before. Not press the main menu button, the camera icon (which I made a link from the home screen), wait a second for it to load, and then press the shutter button. Ideally I would like to press a combination of hardware buttons to have it immediately take a picture even when the screen is locked. I don’t want to wait for the screen unlock process, sometimes the perfect shot is only available for a second. WifiIt doesn’t support ad-hoc networks. This is really annoying for me as I don’t own an access point – and I don’t plan to buy one just for a phone. My laptop (Thinkpad T61 with Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan]) doesn’t seem to support running as an access point, and my EeePC 701 with an Atheros AR5001 has the same problem, here is the error message: # iwconfig wlan0 mode master essid x I have a cheap Realtec USB Wifi device that claims to support being an access point but just fails when I try it. So presumably it doesn’t really support it but the driver is buggy. It seems that I may need to put a custom Android installation on it to get ad-hoc working. Also it’s apparently necessary to root the Xperia to get Wifi tethering to work for providing net access to a laptop. So I guess I’ll hacking it soon. Internet AccessThe Virgin web site couldn’t help me set up the Internet access because I ported a phone number from another Telco. I had to use the phone number supplied by Virgin to login to their web site and the site then wanted to “sent” (probably SMS) the settings to my phone, but of course it couldn’t SMS to that number as I’ve got the Three number active. Presumably they were expecting that customers would setup Internet access before porting their old number. I phoned the Virgin tech support and used the settings they suggested, but it didn’t work. Then I took the phone to a Virgin store and it started working after they rebooted it with no changes to settings. Just like Windows used to be. :( Email Access – Default AppThe email setup defaults to port 143 IMAP access, so even when a mail server provides access on port 993 for IMAPS and on port 995 for POP3S probably most users will not use any encryption because their phone doesn’t default to it. Also one annoying feature is that when I gave it the email address “test@coker.com.au” it decided to use “test” as the user-name for IMAP by default. It seems that a very large portion of the active email accounts nowadays are on systems that handle multiple domains and thus require the domain name in authentication, and a large portion of the remainder accept domain names even when they aren’t required. Besides it’s a lot easier to delete a domain name when it’s not needed than to type it in when it is. The default hostname for sending and receiving mail is the domain name, if the MUA configuration program had checked the MX record it would have known that smtp.sws.net.au is a better default choice for the mail server. I’ve now started the practice of creating a CNAME entry named “m” in every domain I run, so when someone is setting up a mobile phone they just have to add “m.” to the start of the default hostname to use for sending and receiving mail. By doing this I can probably save an average user at least 30 seconds of typing, which is particularly important if I happen to be talking them through the process! The MUA uses IMAP commands to load the text of the message without attachments and then loads attachments on demand, this will be handy for when people attach unreasonably large files. With IMAP caching and partial loads the core functionality seems OK, and some quick tests of standard but not commonly used IMAP functions such as noticing that mail has been deleted by another client seemed to work well. The performance of loading a new mailbox with 369 message was quite poor, I’m not sure how much of this is due to the network connection and how much is due to the client implementation. This is a real concern for me as I typically have about 7,000 messages in my IMAP account and 3,000 unread messages most of which are in two folders. Another problem is the fact that there seems to be no way of searching in the list of messages, sorting/grouping by subject or sender, or showing unread messages. This makes the Xperia unsuitable for the task of reading mailing lists when on public transport. I would really like to be able to sort through a folder of mailing-list mail, delete messages that I don’t need to keep and flag ones that need attention when I have the resources of a desktop system when I’m on a tram or in other situations where a laptop can be inconvenient. One undeniable bug I discovered (as opposed to the missing features I listed) is that when a message has a line with a URL followed by many spaces it won’t load correctly in the web browser, the spaces will be treated as part of the URL. I’ve changed the default signature in my email to have a description followed by a URL to avoid triggering this bug. Presumably other Android phones are bug for bug compatible. :( Moxier MailThere is a complete set of email and calendaring applications preloaded from Moxier.com. The Moxier mail client uses company.com as an example domain name (they should use example.com – does no-one read the RFCs?). It’s nice that they verify the SSL certificate and display the details when it’s not signed. Unfortunately Moxier doesn’t support anything other than Exchange, and I can’t delete it either as it’s part of the base set of applications from Sony. SMSThe SMS application is supposedly “conversation” based. This doesn’t seem like a benefit to me, it’s a pity that there is no option to make it act more like every other SMS implementation I’ve used over the last 12 years. BatteryThe battery is described as having a capacity of 1500mAh, for comparison a AA rechargeable batteries have capacities ranging from 1800mAh to 2800mAh. My first mobile phone had a rechargeable battery that took the same space as 4*AA batteries and the phone was designed to run on AA batteries if the main battery wasn’t charged. I would like to have an Android phone that had a battery pack of similar size to at least 2*AA batteries, and 4*AA would be OK too. The Xperia battery was reported as being half discharged after playing with the phone for less than an hour. Basically when doing anything with the phone that is remotely intensive I need to have it plugged in. Unless of course I’m using one of the star-chart applications… LightsThere are two white leds in the gaps between the keys for Settings, Main-Menu, and Back on the front. They are quite bright and annoying to look into at night. SSHSSH was one of the reasons for getting an Android phone, but it was one of the last things I worked on because everything else was so much fun. I’m currently using ConnectBot, it supports storing ssh host keys, generating a key-pair from random screen touches, locking and unlocking the key-pair (with a pass-phrase) and pasting the public key to an open window. All the basic functions just work although it’s rather inconvenient to enter the CTRL keys. The next thing to investigate is a small and light Bluetooth keyboard. Using an external hardware keyboard will save me from the pain of entering CTRL keys (which is even worse than the pain of entering passwords that contain digits and mixed case). It will also allow me to type a lot faster and use the entire screen for the ssh session. Current Bug SummaryWifi doesn’t do ad-hoc mode or tethering. MUA doesn’t correctly handle URLs in messages if many spaces follow the URL and is also unsuitable for mailing list mail. Sometimes requires a reboot to make Internet access settings take affect. Camera light can’t be easily turned on and off. This isn’t too bad. ConclusionMost things do what I want. Once I get a MUA working with all my email, Wifi doing what I want, and a Bluetooth keyboard it’ll be a fairly ideal mobile sysadmin terminal. I’ll probably order one for myself this weekend. I’ve just updated my SE Linux repository for Squeeze to better support running mplayer on the i386 architecture, below is the APT sources.list line: deb http://www.coker.com.au squeeze selinux The first issue is a bug in the compilation of the SDL libraries which makes them request an executable stack (bug #613535). Recompiling the libraries on my system caused this bug to go away, so it must be some issue with the compilation process. I have previously summarised the execstack issue, but we haven’t solved this yet [1]. The next issue is the fact that the ffmpeg libraries require execmod access (see my previous post for the details of the execmod issue [2]. The execmod issue with ffmpeg is pretty much the same as it was when I first wrote about the issue in 2008 [3] Finally the allow_execmem boolean needs to be set on i386 with the command “setsebool -P allow_execmem 1” to allow libGL the access it needs. This is an issue I haven’t been able to solve, I don’t know why libGL needs write and execute access to memory, I posted to the SE Linux list about this some time ago but didn’t get any good answers [4]. Any suggestions would be appreciated. The conference LCA 2011 had an anti-harassment policy [1] which was violated by a keynote speech. The speaker and the conference organisers apologised, but of course the matter didn’t end there. Discussion continued on the lca-chat list (for conference delegates) [2], on the Linux-aus list (for members of Linux Australia – the parent body of the LCA conference) [3], and in some blog posts. There is also some discussion on an LWN article that is linked from an ITWire article [4]. I think that the policy was reasonable and from all the descriptions it seems to have worked reasonably well. With such things there are always possibilities to tweak things, so probably there will be future policies which are better in some ways, but it seemed to do the job. The way that the LCA organisers handled the situation was appropriate. In the discussion there were some comments with logical failures that I think need further analysis, I’ll summarise them one per paragraph with the heading being a para-phrase of the claim. Is it Offensive?A particularly relevant blog post is Skud’s post about avoiding the use of the word “offense” [5]. In the various discussions about the speech in question most of the people who disapprove of the erotic images don’t use the word “offense“, this is presumably due in part to the influence of Skud’s post. This hasn’t stopped people claiming that the debate is about whether the images are offensive, I’m not sure if this is a deliberate straw-man attack or just cluelessness. The anti-harassment policy does use the word “offensive” in two places, I think that this was a mistake but it doesn’t detract from the overall meaning of the document. Is it Harassment?There was some discussion about whether the actions in question were harassment. Wordnet’s definition of harassment includes “the act of tormenting by continued persistent attacks and criticism“. It seems unlikely that any of the people in the audience who objected to the erotic content in the lecture slides had never seen unwanted erotic material before. So I think that it’s worth considering this incident as just another entry in a list of similar incidents that some of the delegates have experienced, and thus as a continuation of persistent attacks – IE harassment. Melissa McEwan’s post about the variety of harassment that she has received from men is worth reading in this regard [6]. I think that a reasonable analogy here is the school bullying campaigns that were experienced by many members of the Linux community when they were younger. School bullying in most cases is not about a small number of extreme incidents, but about a large number of small incidents each of which when considered independently can be rationalised as something that isn’t significant (excusing such incidents independently is what allows bullying to be rife in most schools). In many cases of high school bullying the victim is blamed for supposedly over-reacting after a reaction is compared to some small incident at the end of a long harassment campaign, some of the criticism of the Geek Feminists seems to echo this pattern. It seems to me that some of the more dismissive comments which demonstrated a lack of regard for the experiences of other people can reasonably be considered as harassment too (which is also something that Melissa McEwan mentions). Note that I am specifically not advocating that the discussion be shut down, merely that the people who claim that it’s only the (supposed) opinion of the majority that matters are part of the problem. However the fact that the apology for the talk received applause from the majority of the audience seems to indicate that the majority is in fact in favor of the anti-harassment policy. Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D. and David P. Rivera (a doctoral candidate in counseling psychology) have written a couple of interesting short articles about this for Psychology Today. “Bullying and Microaggressions” describes bullying as more than physical violence and also discusses adult bullies [7]. “The Power to Define Reality” describes the way that the experiences of people who lack power can have the reality of their experiences denied [8] – this one really relates to some of the discussions about harassment. But it’s Legal!It has been claimed that the legal system works well in Australia and that Australian law should be the only necessary guide to content. A trivial counter-case that was noted in the discussion is the fact that pure sales presentations are not accepted at LCA – and such presentations are certainly legal! There is a good precedent for prohibiting things that are legal as part of the conference speaker agreement. More generally the legal system changes slowly and still infringes on what many people in our community regard as basic human rights. There is no reason why an Australian conference should have as it’s standards the bare minimum that is required by Australian law. It was pointed out that workplace social norms translate well between cultures, they are usually more stringent than Australian law requires – and Australian workplace law is a lot more stringent than the laws relating to conferences and other public events. It seems to me that a presentation which would result in a visit from HR if given at the office shouldn’t be regarded as suitable for a conference such as LCA. But there is a Balance of Men and Women in Erotic Pictures!The complaints are not about a lack of balance in the erotic material, but it’s presence there at all. Defending the slides on the basis that there was a supposed balance of male and female misses the point that most people just want no erotic material in presentations at conferences. Also it seems to me that if there are pictures which aren’t offensive then the way to demonstrate this would be to publish them and say “look, they aren’t offensive”. If it takes 600 words in a blog post to justify the use of some images then that alone seems to be evidence that the images were poorly chosen. But the talk was EffectiveSome of the people who have commented on this issue mentioned that they couldn’t remember what was said when the images in question were displayed. When images from the talk are remembered and the main content of the talk isn’t that seems to be a failure of the talk. When a major sponsor of the conference complains and requests that the talk video never be published that also seems like a major failure of the talk. I think that the effective talks are ones that educate people and inspire them to do something positive and useful. A talk that inspires a discussion about whether the speaker deserves censure doesn’t seem effective. There are claims that there is no way the talk could have made the point as well if it wasn’t for the images in question. But I can’t believe that someone who is capable enough to get awarded a keynote speaking position at a conference such as LCA is incapable of finding other images to make the same point. But Similar Images are on MTVWhen people want MTV content they can watch MTV. Why Can’t we just try Educating Men?It was claimed that education works in dealing with such issues in corporate environments and sporting clubs. My observation of the corporate environment is that such training must be extremely rare in Australia, the Netherlands, and probably the UK due to the fact that none of my employers have done it. I have heard first-hand reports of “diversity training” from people who work in the US. I expect that the fact that people who fail diversity training in a corporate environment get a meeting with HR is a major factor in it’s effectiveness. The long email discussions and blog comment threads when these incidents happen could theoretically be used as training. But when you have some men using multiple mailing lists and dozens of posts arguing without appearing to learn it seems clear that they are not about to learn anything no matter what education is offered. It seems to me that you could broadly divide the free software community into two groups, those who want to learn how to do things better (but who are unlikely to make gross errors anyway), and those who won’t learn. Besides, having a keynote speaker at a major conference apologise should be educational. But Clueless Nerds Hit on GirlsI don’t know why every discussion about the treatment of women ends up getting a mention of this supposed issue. But Women Could make False AccusationsIn any classification system you have to make some sort of balance between false-positives and false-negatives. If the aim is to get zero false-positives then the incidence of false-negatives will increase. So if the aim was to never ever have a false accusation brought against a man for sexual harassment then the vast majority of real harassment cases would result in no action at all. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that most women who are mistreated should suffer in silence just to reduce the possibility that men might be falsely accused. The Rape Statistics cited in the discussion may be InaccurateThere is no possible way of interpreting rape statistics to make it not be a serious problem, now matter how you analyse the available information it happens far too often and has a significant impact on the victim. Also the suggested reinterpretation of the statistics didn’t contradict the claim that it is likely that there are multiple rape victims attending LCA. So interpreting the statistics in a different way to get different numbers doesn’t change anything. Trying to diminish the significance of rape generally doesn’t support any other arguments that you might make. There are things that you can just discuss for the heck of it and things which should be discussed with care (if at all) to avoid needlessly hurting people. In these sorts of discussions the right thing to do is to avoid debating the numbers as much as possible. I think that the numbers produced by RAINN [9] are as good as we can get. But I am very supportive of women in our communityIf you spend all your time arguing with women and don’t listen to what they have to say then you really aren’t supporting them. ConclusionAfter publishing this post I’ll email the URL to a few of the men who helped inspire it, I will explain how disappointed I am and how I expect better from them. I encourage others to do the same. Also when such discussions happen I encourage men to vote in favor of the positions advocated by women. Writing a message that addresses points in the debate can be difficult and if the debate is rapid then you may find that every point that you might make has been made by someone else. But in that case just posting to agree with the women can really mean a lot.
Rachel Botsman gave an interesting TED talk about Collaborative Consumption, various ways of sharing and redistributing objects to save money and reduce their environmental impact [1]. It’s a pity that there isn’t something like swap.com in Australia. P2P Car RentalAmong other things she mentioned P2P car rentals. The first company she listed is Drive My Car (link to the Australian site) [2] which has a good range of vehicles. They charge 16.5% as an admin fee, the rest is paid to the owner. Strangely they have a web page to estimate what you can get for your vehicle, but the rates that are returned by that page seem to be a lot lower than what cars are actually advertised for (I guess that the owner can ignore the recommendation and charge whatever they want). They deal in daily rentals and the owner may specify a minimum period – 4 days seems common. There are no changes needed to the car and the car owner only has to pay $25 per annum to be listed. Relay Rides operates in Boston and San Francisco [3], they operate on a per-hour basis and require some sort of RFID unlocking device to be added to each car. The normal setup fee for a car owner is $250 but they currently have a promotion that waives that fee. Get Around is a beta service that presumably operates only in the US (they seem US centric and don’t specify locations) [4]. They appear to offer per-hour rentals and require hardware to unlock the car. It seems that to get most of the useful information (prices etc) you need to sign up which is a mistake on their part. Whip Car advertises their service on a supposed relationship between the car owner and the renter [5], I’ve met the people who live in about 10 houses of the 50 in my street, so if a random person in my street offered a car for rent then there would be a 80% chance that I don’t know them – but I guess if one of my neighbors had a car to rent at a low price I might be more inclined to get to know them. The information page says that drivers must have a UK driving licence which implies that they only operate in the UK. Why don’t these people state clearly on their web site the country that they service? Their business model seems interesting, I can imagine a few people who live near each other pooling funds to buy a vehicle and then using Whip Car to control reservations and manage sharing the costs. P2P Rental of Other ThingsA logical extension of the Whip Car concept is to have a service which only mediates sharing between trusted parties. It would have a web site that manages bookings including issues such as the minimum time between bookings, charges a flat fee per item that is managed, and then gives a summary to all parties of what the use was. Ideally it would allow for bidding for peak times. This could work for cars, computers, cameras, holiday homes, or anything else which can usefully be transferred between different users. Gunnar included a copy of Mohammed Sameer’s blog post on the topic [2], which is a good idea as we can’t rely on Mohammed’s post remaining online. The Reid Report has an interesting summary of various news sources [3]. I hope that the end result of this is a democratically elected government that respects human rights and offers fair trials to people accused of crimes and humane punishments those found guilty. It would be ideal if the transition could happen in a way that involves little violence and no interruptions to the food supply etc. Update: Chris Samuel provided some information on free PPP access in other countries for people in Egypt [4]. This will probably be of short-term use as the Egypten regime will probably cut International phone access too.
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