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I have just discovered an innovative Melbourne company that has apparently been running for five years. ReWine is a wine seller that sells bottles of wine and then refills the same bottles for a lower price [1] (a saving of $2 per bottle). There have been many schemes for selling various liquids in reusable bottles, but a major failing of the business models has been the health issues related to cleaning the bottles. If I am going to drink wine from a bottle that some unknown person has used then I want it to be cleaned really well. But when I take back my own bottle for refilling the hygiene requirements are much smaller as I know where it’s been!
ReWine suggest that people rinse each bottle twice with warm water, a fairly simple cleaning process.
The wine that ReWine sells is described in terms of which region of Australia that it comes from and by the variety of grape. They make no claims about the wine being from a single vineyard or that the wine will come from the same vineyards next season. This is fairly common among the less expensive wines.
The prices for the wine are very low. A refill of a 750ml bottle of Chardonnay costs $5.50 and 750ml of Shiraz costs $9.80. 750ml of what is called “Port” in Australia (but is considered to be just a fortified wine in Europe as “Port” is a trademark for the Oporto region of Portugal) costs $5.80 and 750ml of Muscat costs $16.
I have bought bottles of “Port” and Muscat. The port is quite nice, not the greatest – but when considering the fact that any bottle of similar fortified wine costs more than $20 from a liquor store it’s very good value for money. It’s good for a quick night-cap. The Muscat is great! I would pay twice as much for it and still be satisfied that I had got my money’s worth!
I didn’t try the white wines because still white wine is not my thing. I tried the Shiraz, it was quite nice.
The technical aspects of the ReWine operation seem quite sound. The wine is stored in sealed barrels and pressurised nitrogen is used to force the wine out, this keeps out oxygen to avoid spoiling the wine while also allowing the bottles to be rapidly filled.
The business model of ReWine makes a lot of sense, it offers cheaper wine to customers while avoiding all the waste from the production of single-use glass bottles.
One final thing to note is the high quality of the bottles. The screw-top lids are very solidly constructed. A solid glass bottle with a quality lid can be used for many things, so even if you decide not to refill it from ReWine it will probably be handy – and worth $2.
The latest news is that the CEO of the new NBN (National Broadband Network) will receive a $2 million salary [1]. This has been defended as “the price required to secure the best person for the job“. The problem with this idea is that it’s not the first time that a multi-million dollar salary has been paid from tax money for a CEO of a communications company. Sol Trujillo did an absolutely awful job of running Telstra and was paid a package of $11 million (including bonuses) for doing so [2]. After finally quitting Telstra Sol then had a whinge about Australians supposedly being racist – he apparently didn’t realise that we would have loved him if Telstra’s monopoly services had operated well and if he had returned value for the stock-holders. Sol should have been sacked long ago, the government’s voting power (through owning half of Telstra) was enough to force him out.
Now the CEO of the NBN is going to be employed entirely at taxpayer expense (the NBN will initially be entirely government owned). So it seems reasonable to compare the pay of the NBN CEO to the pay of the Prime Minister of Australia [3] – which is currently $330,300. If we consider the perks of the job (free travel etc) to be worth an additional $200,000 (just a wild guess) then the Prime Minister gets paid 25% the proposed salary of the CEO of the NBN. Every day the PM makes decisions that are much more important than any that will be faced by the CEO of a communications company. So it appears that we can get someone suitably skilled for less than $2 million (I know some people believe that every PM has done a bad job – but I have not seen any evidence to suggest that the typical political leader is any less skilled than the typical CEO).
There has been a reasonable amount of research which can be applied when determining how to get people to do good work. One good analysis of some of the issues is Bruce Schneier’s blog post about Risk Intuition [4]. He points out that if there are penalties for employees who obey security procedures (in terms of unpaid overtime or bad reviews for not getting work done) and no penalties for breaking them then most employees will ignore the security procedures. It seems to me that CEOs have no real penalty for running a company into the ground (having a whinge after leaving the country with more than $40 million hardly counts as a penalty). So anyone who believes that paying more money gets more skilled people would have to believe that paying more for a CEO will tend to get a CEO who is more skilled at bilking the company (which appears to be the core skill).
It seems to me that most CEOs have little confidence in their own ability. Someone who believed that they could really do a good job as a CEO wouldn’t want a high salary, they would aim to have the company stock price improve in value at a rate that exceeds the average of the top 100 companies (or some similar index) and ask for a bonus in proportion to that!
For a government owned company (such as the NBN) a CEO who was confident in their ability would want a bonus paid after they had achieved their goals. The payment for the NBN CEO was incorrectly described as 0.3% of the project budget, according to my calculations $2M salary over 8 years is about 0.03% of the $43 billion budget. If a candidate for the CEO position believes that they can get the project completed on time and under budget while achieving all the goals then they should ask for 0.06% of the budget as their bonus payment if they succeed and a very low salary in the mean-time. If they believe that the project can’t be completed according to the plan then they should be saying so before the work starts. If however they are not confident in their ability then of course the smart thing to do would be to demand a high salary…
Now I think it’s worth considering someone who is known to be good at running a company. There are lots of bad things you can say about Bill Gates, but his skills at running a corporation tend not to be criticised. In 2004 Bill Gates (then the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft) and Steve Ballmer (MS CEO) each received $901,667 in salary and bonuses [5]. If we were to try and find a CEO who could be claimed to have a better record of running a corporation than Bill Gates then possible candidates include Michael Dell (of Dell computers) and Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, or Larry Page of Google. Given that it’s not going to be possible to hire such people it seems like a bad idea to offer someone with significantly less apparent skill than Bill Gates a significantly higher salary.
While on the topic of CEO pay, it would be good if the employment agreement would specify that no special golden-handshake would be awarded to the CEO when the NBN is privatised (we don’t want the CEO to be tempted to down-play the value of the company to encourage the buyer to give him a good payout). It would also be good if government ministers could be prohibited from being employed by the company that does the buyout – we don’t want another Bob Carr [6].
For a long time the use of HTTP cookies [1] for tracking the web browsing habits of users has been well known. But I am not aware of any good solution to the problem. A large part of the problem is the needless use of cookies, it seems that many blog servers use cookies even though they provide no benefit to the user. A major culprit in this regard is the Google Analytics service which sets a cookie with a two year expiry time when you first visit a web site. The CustomizeGoogle.com Firefox plugin allows you to block the Google Analytics cookies [2] and much more.
It’s unfortunate that Firefox/Iceweasel seems to lack the cookie management functions of Konqueror. Konqueror (the KDE web browser) can be configured to prompt the user for the appropriate action when a cookie is offered, the options include once-only accept or reject and permanent accept or reject status for the site in question. Of course even this has some issues, when a web site is on the “permanently block cookies” list it is one that has obviously been viewed intensively on at least one occasion (IE many page views) or viewed on multiple occasions, in some situations this may be a fact that the user does not want revealed. An option to store a list of the hashes of the names of web sites which should be blocked would be useful. It’s also unfortunate that Konqueror (like most browsers) is unable to use Firefox plugins, so given a choice between Konqueror and Firefox I’m always going to lose some features.
Update: Andrew Pollock points out that Firefox does allow you to control when cookies are accepted [5]. It’s listed as “Keep Until” with the value of “ask me every time“.
The next issue relates to the storage of cookies. It is a good security feature to have certain types of cookie expire after some period of time. Unfortunately the expiry process requires that the user run the web browser in question. So if for example my browser preferences were to change then I would probably end up with the cookies from the old browser remaining in my home directory for years after their planned expiry date. My home directory has the untouched configuration and data files of many programs that I have not used for four years or more. I’m not sure whether any of them include cookies from web browsers (I have used many web browsers over the years).
I think that the best solution to this problem would be to have a common directory such as ~/.session-state which has files with an MTIME indicating when they should expire. A program that wants to store such session data could create a subdirectory such as ~/.session-state/Firefox and then use one file per cookie under that directory. Then the user could have a cron job which deletes all session state files that are older than the current date. Such a cron job would not need to know anything about the actual data in the files, it would just delete the files that are out of date. The exact format of the files would be determined by the application, so if there were thousands of cookies (which would lead to a performance problem on some systems if one file was used for each) then there could be one file for each week (if deleting the old cookies as much as 6 days too late is a serious problem then you are probably going to suffer anyway). Such a state directory could be used for any data which has a fixed expiry time, it would not need to be limited to cookies.
This would be a minor misuse of the mtime field, but it’s the most reliable way of implementing this and making it difficult to mess it up (in terms of exposing private data). Note that the MTIME would not have to be the sole source of such data, an application such as Firefox could reset the MTIMEs on the files to values it considers appropriate (based on file name, file contents, or some metadata stored elsewhere). It is expected that certain backup/restore operations among other things can result in the timestamp data on files being lost.
Now cookies are not the extent of the problem. It seems that Macromedia/Adobe have some similar functionality in the Flash player [3], but the insidious thing is that Flash cookies are used to respawn HTTP cookies if the user deletes them! After reading about that I discovered some Flash cookies that were stored on my laptop since 2005 (which was probably the last time I ran Flash). It seems that if you desire security you need to first avoid software from companies that are at best disinterested and sometimes seem overtly hostile towards the privacy needs of users – this is why I haven’t used Flash on machines that matter to me for many years. If I had a lot of spare time I would help out with the GNASH project.
One thing I have been considering is to change my browsing habits to use a different account for untrusted content. The switch user functionality that has been in most Linux distributions for a few years seems to have the potential to alleviate this. I am considering setting up a system to allow me to ssh to a guest account to open a web browser window. Then I can switch to the X desktop that has untrusted web sites open and read them. It would be nice if I could extend a web browser to add an extra entry to the menu that is displayed when the secondary mouse button is pressed on a link, then I could make that run a script to launch the URL in a new window. I could also use that when I’m at home to launch the URL on a different system.
One thing that I have to do is to get XGuest (the SE Linux Kiosk Mode) [4] running in Debian. It’s been in Fedora since version 8. With the XGuest used for untrusted browsing nothing gets stored.
This is not the extent of security issues related to web browsing. It’s just a small set of issues that need to be fixed, we have to start somewhere.
I’ve never understood the point of school reunions. The past students association of a secondary school can potentially be of some use when you are looking for your first job, but once your career gets started it seems to be of minimal benefit. But apart from that there is no direct benefit.
I didn’t enjoy school and I feel sorry for anyone who regards high-school as one of the best parts of their life – the rest of their life must be sucking quite badly.
Of the people I knew from school, I am still in contact with the ones I want to know, there are a bunch of others that I feel fairly indifferent about, and many who I would only want to see in an obituary.
For the ones I feel indifferent about, if I was to meet them then I would probably find that I have even less in common with them than I did 19 years ago (for high school) or 25 years ago (for primary school). I could easily attend a Meetup.com meeting that is related to something which interests me and be in a room full of people with whom I have something in common. I have been much easier to find via Google (and previously Alta-Vista or Yahoo) than most people I went to school with, so I presume that everyone who I have not been in contact with has not been interested in finding me for 19 or 25 years.
But I’m not trying to discourage anyone from making contact with me. Anyone who I used to know (from school, university, work, or elsewhere) who reads my blog and thinks that they have significant things in common with me is welcome to send me an email and suggest a meeting. I occasionally receive email from random people who read my blog or my posts to various mailing lists and want to meet me, I sometimes meet such people at LUG meetings etc.
Below is a message from the thanks file on my SE Linux play machine [1]:
Hello from San Juan, Puerto Rico!
I just found out about this server by reading the SELinux book from O’Reilly. The book is pretty old (2004) and I’m glad to know the URL provided on the book still works!
All the best,
I had forgotten that the URL was included in the book.
In Australia we are currently in the middle of a long drawn out saga about Internet censorship [1]. In summary we have fundamentalist Christians wanting to prevent anyone from accessing X rated material, many clueless people wanting to “protect the children“, and most members of parliament totally ignoring the advice that is offered by everyone who knows anything about the Internet.
There is an ongoing trend world-wide to create new laws related to the Internet which are entirely disconnected from any rational idea of how to enforce them. Such laws also tend to be radically different from laws related to older forms of communication (telephone, the postal service, etc).
I think that anyone who wants to advocate a new law related to the Internet should first consider similar laws related to other methods of communication, the laws for old and new forms of communication should be roughly synchronised. For example any material that can be sent by the government postal service should be permitted to be sent via email. So if something is to be banned from transmission via email then it should be banned from the government postal service, if email is to be searched then the postal service should be searched too.
Now if we are going to have new laws compelling the censorship of all web browsing in the name of preventing child abuse then we should also consider censoring older forms of broadcast media and determine which achieves the greatest good with the minimal expense. It has been claimed that the Australian Federal Police Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team has had their budget cut at the same time as budget was being allocated towards censoring the Internet – this leads me to believe that spending money on censorship involves taking money away from the police work of investigating and prosecuting people who abuse children.
A current ongoing drama in Australian politics involves the abuse of a child on a live radio show [2]. A 14 year old girl was strapped to a faux lie detector and asked questions about sex. Here is a relevant quote from an article in The Age:
She revealed she had been raped when aged 12. When her mother asked in the broadcast whether she was sexually active, the girl replied: ‘‘I’ve already told you the story about this … and don’t look at me and smile, because it’s not funny.’’
When the girl said she had been raped, Sandilands responded by saying: ‘‘Right, is that the only experience you’ve had?’’
Here is a second quote from the same article:
A group of 15 high-profile psychologists, academics and child advocates wrote to The Age calling for the show to be axed, suggesting it had been the venue for child abuse and a gross violation of human rights.
Currently most of the discussion about this incident is focussed on the actions of Kyle Sandilands [3] and Jackie O [4]. But it seems to me that the majority of the blame should fall on the management of 2Day FM [5] for creating an environment where child abuse is going to happen. Radio stations have the technology to quickly switch from any content which fails to meet their guidelines, all it would take is a push of a button to switch to music or advertising. Any decent people in the management would realise that a segment which is based around coercing an underage girl to talk about sex is destined to get a bad result and therefore shouldn’t be approved.
It is very difficult (almost impossible) to implement censorship of the Internet. But it is very easy to control radio broadcasts. If the government is serious about blocking broadcast of material related to child abuse then the best thing that they could do implement a new law specifying that the radio frequency allocation will be removed from any TV or radio station that abuses children. That would be a major incentive for broadcasters to do the right thing, it would be simple to implement and cheap to enforce – and not require taking any more budget from the AFP!
As a final note, in Australia we do have a justice system. So while it would be fun to just pull the plug on 2Day FM without any advance notice the right thing to do is to have a trial first. Unlike the proposed laws for filtering the Internet which don’t even allow anyone to know which sites are to be filtered.
I recently decided to copy some of my FLV (Flash Video) collection to my LGU990 Viewty mobile phone [1]. I was inspired by the ffmpeg cheat sheet [2].
deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny selinux-mm
Firstly I installed the version of ffmpeg that comes from the Debian-Multimedia repository [3]. Then I spent about an hour getting it to build with some patches to not require text relocations. The change involves putting --disable-mmx in the CONFIG_OPT setting for i386 and patching rgb2rgb.c to not compile MMX code. I’ve put the packages in the above APT repository.
My first attempt was to produce AVI files similar to the ones that my Viewty makes when it saves a video. ffmpeg -i file.avi displays the file details, which includes mpeg4 video and mp3 audio. By default ffmpeg creates AVI files that use mp2 audio and my phone doesn’t like them. I tried using “-acodec libmp3lame” which gave a file that (according to ffmpeg) had the same encoding as files produced by my phone, but my phone didn’t accept them. I eventually gave up and used mpeg4 which worked without any problem. I never had a reason to desire AVI files, it just seemed likely that the easiest format would be the one that the phone uses to encode the videos it creates – obviously a bad assumption.
Just use MPEG4 for a Viewty phone!
One of the videos I tried causes various parts of the phone to crash. It would crash the preview screen (which shows icons of the videos), and crash the player after playing for a couple of seconds. Crashing the player caused a soft-boot of the phone (it restarted and asked for my PIN code). I expect that anyone who was suitably motivated could create a hostile mpeg4 file that can exploit a Viewty.
The next problem I had was that most videos had a blank icon for the preview. It seems that the Viewty uses the first frame as the icon which doesn’t work well for videos that fade in, as such videos comprise a large portion of my collection that is a problem. The solution to this problem is to take 100ms of video from later on in the flv file and prepend it to the start. The ffmpeg FAQ has some information on how to do this [4], it involves converting the data to a format that can be concatenated and then converting it back. It’s rather ugly, it would be good if someone added a feature to ffmpeg to support multiple -i options.
I used the below Makefile to convert all the flvs in my collection to mp4 format in a subdirectory named “mp4“. I used a Makefile for this so that I can just run “make” whenever I add more flvs to my collection, and “make -j2” to use both cores of my Opteron CPU. It takes 0.1 seconds of data from 20 seconds in the video and appends the entire video to that. It creates two pipes for the temporary data which tends to be about 30* larger than the source flv file.
MP4S:=$(shell for n in *.flv ; do echo $$n | sed -e s/^/mp4\\// -e s/flv$$/mp4/ ; done)
all: $(MP4S)
mp4/%.mp4: %.flv
mkfifo $@.aud $@.vid
sh -c "(ffmpeg -ss 20 -t 0.1 -i $< -vn -f u16le -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ar 22050 – ; ffmpeg -i $< -vn -f u16le -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ar 22050 – ) > $@.aud &"
sh -c "(ffmpeg -ss 20 -t 0.1 -i $< -an -f yuv4mpegpipe – ; ffmpeg -i $< -an -f yuv4mpegpipe – ) > $@.vid &"
ffmpeg -f u16le -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ar 22050 -i $@.aud -f yuv4mpegpipe -i $@.vid -y $@
rm $@.aud $@.vid
IQ as a Social Multiplier – Michael of Accellerating Future summarises some research into the effect of increasing IQ [1]. It seems to me that increasing the health of children and giving them adequate education is the best thing that can be done for developing countries. When smart children become smart adults they can fix all the other problems.
Richard Dawkins gave an interesting TED talk about militant atheism [2]. I’m not convinced by his central point, I’m happy to get along with anyone who doesn’t want to compromise a legal or educational system regardless of the myths that they believe.
Freeman Dyson gave an insightful TED talk about the search for life in our solar system [3]. He suggests looking for the reflections of lenses that could be used to keep life forms warm. He also suggests that if there are no such life forms there already then we should create them, that sounds like a good idea to me.
Arthur Benjamin gave a brief but insightful talk advocating statistics as a better candidate for the peak of high school mathematics than calculus [4].
Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuro-scientist who had a stroke, she describes the experience of having the left half of her brain shut down in a passionate TED talk [5]. It’s one of the most unusual lectures I’ve watched.
Alain de Botton gave an insightful TED talk “A kinder, gentler philosophy of success” [6]. One of his most striking points concerns the concept of a “meritocracy”. If everyone who deserves to be at the top gets to the top then by implication everyone who is at the bottom is there because they deserve it. He quotes St Augustine as saying “it’s a sin to judge any man by his post“. It seems to me that perhaps we shouldn’t push the meritocracy angle so much in the free software community…
Eve Ensler (who is most famous for the “Vagina Monologues” gave an insightful TED talk about security [7]. Her main point is that people who concentrate too much on trying to achieve security will end up not enjoying life – and not being particularly secure either. I believe that her work with women in Africa and the Middle-East who have been mistreated makes her better qualified to comment about security than most people. Bruce Schneier recommended her lecture.
Willard Wigan gave an interesting TED talk about his micro-sculptures, he typically creates a sculpture on the head of a pin [8]. It is interesting to note how his interest in art developed from being forced to wag school due to being treated awfully by the teachers.
Elene Gabre Madhin gave an interesting TED talk about economics in Ethiopia [9]. She describes how when people were starving in the north of Ethiopia there was a food surplus in the south and the problem was a lack of a functional market. She left her position at the world bank to create a functional commodities market in Ethiopia to solve this problem and increase the GDP of the country at the same time.
Michael Pritchard gave an interesting TED talk about the Lifesaver filter [10]. The primary product is a bottle that appears to have a volume of about 1.5L which contains a 15nm micro-pore filter. The smallest viruses are apparently 25nm in diameter so the filter will stop all viruses, as opposed to current filters which have a 200nm pore size which allows the smallest bacteria to get through. He gives a live demonstration of using a tank of water that came from rivers, a pond, and with some sewage thrown in and drinking the water that comes out of the filter! The filter in the bottle can produce 6,000 litres of clean water and can then be replaced. The other product that he is developing is a jerry-can size device that can filter 25,000 litres – enough for three years use by a family of four!
Here’s an amusing anecdote about airport security [11]. An interesting link from the comments section of that page is the Bill of Rights Security Edition – the US Bill of Rights printed on solid sheets of metal [12]. I guess that carrying that through airport security makes some political point.
In a previous post I referenced Elaine Morgan’s Aquatic Ape theory [1].
Simon Waters pointed out that the AquaticApe.org site which exists to analyse all the evidence about such issues [2]. Based on that I am convinced that the Aquatic Ape theory has little merit.
My mistake was to put too much faith in the organisers of the TED conference. They have a good history of inviting speakers who know their stuff. I recently analysed the facts behind one dubious claim made in a TED talk, but that case was a single claim which was not required to support the essential points of the lecture [3]. I expect other mistaken claims such as that one from any lecture anywhere, in a TED lecture I expect the central point to be well supported but it seems that my expectation was incorrect.
I will be more skeptical about TED talks in future.
Thanks Simon for correcting me on this issue! One of the advantages of blogging is that when (not if) you get something wrong there is likely to be someone out there with a good reference to evidence to the contrary.
Update: I am now convinced that the Aquatic Ape theory is wrong [0]. So much of this post is irrelevant. But I still believe that we should be uplifting animals.
Elaine Morgan gave an interesting TED talk about human evolution and the theory that our ancestors lived in the water [1]. The aquatic ape theory explains why humans are the only primates that have almost no body hair and why we can consciously control our breathing (which is essential for speech and which is apparently rare among land mammals).
So it seems that when (not if) we start a program of uplifting animals to the same status as humans a good starting point would be animals with an aquatic history. So we want animals that are friendly towards humans, reasonably intelligent, and which can be trained. Animals that can work well on dry land would be most convenient as are animals that can be owned domestically, so dolphins are not good candidates.
There are a number of dog breeds that have been specifically bred for operation in water [2]. This includes dogs bred for assisting fishermen (such as the Spanish Water Dog) [3] and for hunting in marshes (the majority of Water Dogs [2]). Even dogs that have not been bred for aquatic work can be very expressive in their barks (as I’m sure every dog owner has observed), so an aquatic dog should have the potential for greater speech.
So it seems to me that the Norwegian Puffin Dog offers great benefits for dexterity [4] which combined with slightly more speech potential from some water dogs should give a good start to the breeding program.
CNN has an interesting article on the intelligence of dog breeds [5]. It seems that the top 5 are:
- Border collies
- Poodles
- German shepherds
- Golden retrievers
- Doberman pinchers
The Poodle being a water dog and the second most intelligent breed of dog seems to have some good characteristics for uplift, so a Poodle/Puffin-dog cross should do well.
Recently I have been reading Michael Anissimov’s blog at AcceleratingFuture.com which concerns Transhumanism, AI, nanotechnology, and extinction risk [6]. A large part of Michael’s blogging concerns the development of Friendly Artificial Intelligence (FAI) [7], this is a type of AI that would not destroy us by accident or malice if it gains the ability to self-improve at a rapid rate (and therefore vastly exceed human capabilities in a small amount of time). It seems to me that if we can uplift dogs to a level equivalent to humans and have them still like us then we will have achieved a significant step towards developing general non-human intelligences that are sympathetic to us.
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