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Here is the Australian Electoral Commission documentation on how to register a political party [1]. It includes the requirement for “A Microsoft compatible electronic membership list (and paper copy) providing the following information“.
So a prerequisite for registering a political party appears to be the ownership of a PC running Windows. While it may be the case that I could create a plain text file on a Linux machine and append some CR characters to each line, or create a CSV format spread-sheet/database file the most common interpretation of this is likely to be that MS-Office is required.
Such blatant promotion of a software vendor in a government document is unacceptable. Anyone who wishes to use other software for their political activities should be permitted to do so without restriction.
Richard Glover has written a polemic about fads on the net [1]. His points are essentially good, but he does over-reach them a bit (which is part of the polemic style) and he also seems a little unimaginative about the future of technology. He starts by suggesting that Twitter [2] is a fad. Twitter has grown in popularity very rapidly, and I believe that the company is not guaranteed to last forever (the business model could fail or a better implementation of the concept could take the users). But the basic premise of Twitter (SMS length messages being published on the net in a similar manner to blog posts) is something that has been proven to work well. So even though I have not felt inclined to use Twitter (either as a reader or a writer) I don’t think that the class of service will ever go away.
He also cites an example of watching TV news on a mobile phone. While I believe he is right about that not being a viable business, it’s because TV news itself isn’t a great thing. Before the Internet was commonly used the only ways of getting news of something that happened in the last few hours was via TV or radio, if you want pictures with that then TV was the only option. If you wanted quality news (in-depth coverage, insightful analysis, and a depth of detail) then you were probably out of luck, but the best option available to you was the the newspaper. Watching a TV news segment on a mobile phone (or on a PC connected to the net) is not effective. What I want is a newspaper that is updated as soon as events happen and which contains full color pictures and video. There are a number of web sites which provide this service, The Sydney Morning Herald (which employs Richard Glover) [3] is one example.
I think that the current fad for mobile phone TV is like the fad for WAP [4]. Many years ago I worked for an ISP that installed a WAP server, one of my duties was to keep the WAP server running. Everyone who knew anything about technology knew that the project was going to fail, WAP phones were horribly expensive (you could expect to spend an extra 200 guilders or more to buy such a phone) and the features of WAP were not particularly exciting. Also requiring that everything be re-written for WAP was just insanity. The problem with the WAP fad was managers who knew nothing about technology making technical decisions. I’m sure that the TV on mobile phone fad is driven by managers in TV companies that are greedy for more revenue opportunities and don’t stop to think about the implications. I might watch a news show on free TV, but I’m certainly not going to pay by the minute to watch it on my mobile phone. Instead I can just go to a web site such as the SMH and read news items, see pictures, and even watch the occasional video (most TV news doesn’t really require any video – they just re-enact scenes or use stock footage to have something on screen).
Finally he makes a sarcastic reference to chocolate fondue. That reminds me, someone gave me a fondue set years ago that I haven’t used yet. I’ll have to make a chocolate fondue! For those of you who live in Melbourne, the restaurant of the Melbourne Swiss Club [5] offers cheese fondue for the main course and chocolate fondue for dessert. Fondue is still with us!
The car safety tests that are required for every new mass-market passenger vehicle are flawed in many ways. Here is a list of the most obvious flaws (please point out any that I’ve missed):
- There has been no research to make accurate crash-test dummies to represent women and children, and I believe that there has been no research to make crash-test dummies to accurately represent people of racial groups that are not common in the US. Basically the medical research used to make crash test dummies was performed on male cadavers that were readily available in the US.
- The standard tests involve a direct collision with a centrally targeted stationary object, a direct collision with an offset stationary object, and solid objects (representing cars) hitting the vehicle from the read and the side. These simulate crashes where there is little or no attempt made to avoid the collision, they are probably really good for protecting drunk drivers. But any sane and sober driver is probably going to make some effort to avoid the collision and the resulting impact will not be at a multiple of 90 degrees. Note that when a car directly hits the side of a moving car it is quite different to hitting the side of a stationary car (which is what is tested).
- There are no standard tests for the probability of a vehicle rolling in the event of a crash or of what would happen to the occupants if it was to roll. Rollover crashes are among the most dangerous…
- The tests do not take into account the ability of the driver to avoid a crash or minimise the damage. The ability to avoid crashes is a major advantage for cars with a low center of gravity, AWD, and traction control. It’s a major problem for vehicles with a high center of gravity and with tires that are not designed for road use (IE 4WD/SUV vehicles).
But generally the crash-test results are of some use provided that you start by looking at the results from vehicles that have good safety features such as the Audi Quattro, the AWD version of the VW Passat, a Mercedes with 4MOTION, or any other vehicle with constant four wheel drive, road tires, four wheel traction control, and a low center of gravity.
The RACV (the main car owners advocacy organisation in Victoria and also a major car insurance company) [1] has published the used car safety ratings report [2]. This was produced by the Monash University Accident Research Centre and is based on the analysis of 3,000,000 crashes reported to police in Australia and New Zealand. Results are only available for cars which have been in common use on Australian and New Zealand roads for some time (so there aren’t many entries for vehicles that are less than 5 years old or for particularly expensive vehicles).
The report also includes estimates on the purchase prices of some of the safest vehicles. A vehicle that is significantly better than average can be purchased for as little as $5000!
Now if you want to buy a new vehicle then choosing the latest version of a model that has rated well on the used-car tests should be safe if the new car crash tests also report good results. It seems likely that the latest Mazda 6 or VW Passat will also rate well on the used-car tests in a few years time. It’s a pity that the report didn’t note which of the vehicles that rated well have models that have good features to avoid collisions such as EBA, ABS, AWD, and traction-control.
A friend who is active in the free software community recently had a very lucky escape from a significant crash. From his description I doubt that car safety features had much to do with him escaping without injury, I think that it was mostly luck. While his car did have a good range of safety features (and was rated well on the used-car tests), a high-speed collision that involves a truck can easily result in a car being squashed flat. I have already sent him the RACV link which he is using as part of the process to decide what new car to purchase. But I think that this information needs to be spread more widely.
I have not searched for information on such analysis of crashes being performed in other countries, please leave a comment if you know of any good research that will be useful for other people. One thing to note however is that given the global scope of car manufacturing, results from one country will have some validity in others. I expect that a VW Passat that is sold in Germany or the US will be almost identical to the Australian version.
It’s common to hear a complaint of the form “I get paid to keep computers running not hack an OS” coming from someone who uses an Open Source OS such as Linux, BSD, or Open Solaris.
It seems to me that part of the job of keeping computers running when using Open Source software IS to hack the source and fix bugs. This takes the place of praying, begging, and having your employer pay arbitrary extra amounts of money to the vendor when you have problems with proprietary software.
It’s well understood that a good system-administrator will anticipate problems and implement solutions to them in advance. You don’t wait for a system to run out of disk space and then fix it – you install cron jobs to compress and remove old log files and have a monitoring system to tell you if disk space really runs low.
It seems to me that the approach that many companies take towards fixing software bugs goes against this ideal. They wait for software to fail in production and then file a bug report and hope that someone else will fix it.
When allocating time for various tasks it’s not uncommon to have various amounts of staff time devoted to different servers, departments, or projects. I believe that having a fixed amount of time devoted to finding and fixing bugs in Open Source software (both current versions and pre-release versions) would save money for a company in the long term. If 10% of the time of the most skilled programmers was assigned to finding and fixing bugs in the OS then the overall quality would improve. If a company depends on Debian then it would make sense to have this 10% time include testing out the production programs on Debian/Unstable, it if depends on Red Hat Enterprise Linux then it would make sense to test them out on Rawhide. This would increase the ability of the future releases of Debian or RHEL to support the applications in question, and might also discover some application bugs.
Also it’s very important to submit patches with bug reports. It’s not uncommon for a bug report to be critically important to a user but not overly important to the rest of the world. Such bugs can stay in a bug tracking system for a long time without getting fixed. But if there is a patch submitted that includes necessary documentation patches and a description of the tests that it has passed then it will probably be easier to include it than to debate whether it’s really needed.
If a project is only running for a matter of weeks or months (EG a consulting company that comes in, deploys a “solution” and then leaves) then there is probably no benefit for doing this. But if a company is going to be running servers for many years which will periodically be upgraded then it would be a real benefit to have bugs fixed in future versions.
Cnet has an article on the design of the Google servers [1]. It seems that their main servers are 2RU systems with a custom Gigabyte motherboard that takes only 12V DC input. The PSUs provide 12V DC and each system has a 12V battery backup to keep things running before a generator starts in the event of a power failure. They claim that they get better efficiency with small batteries local to the servers than with a single large battery array.
From inspecting the pictures it seems that the parts most likely to fail are attached by velcro. The battery is at one end, the PSU is at the other, and the hard disks are at one side. It appears that it might be possible to replace the PSU or the battery while the server is operational and in the rack.
The hard disks are separated from the motherboard by what appears to be a small sheet of aluminium which appears to give two paths for air to flow through the system. The thermal characteristics of the motherboard (CPUs) and the hard drives are quite different to having separate air flows seems likely to allow warmer air to be used in cooling the system (thus saving power).
Google boast that their energy efficiency now matches what the rest of the industry aims to do by 2011!
The servers are described as taking up 2RU, which gives a density of one CPU per RU. This surprised me as some companies such as Servers Direct [2] sell 1RU servers that have four CPUs (16 cores). Rackable systems [3] (which just bought the remains of SGI) sells 2RU half-depth systems (which can allow two systems in 2RU of rack space) that have four CPUs and 16 cores (again 4 CPUs per RU). Rackable systems also has a hardware offering designed for Cloud Computing servers, those CloudRack [4] systems have a number of 1RU trays. Each CloudRack tray can have as many as two server boards that has two CPUs (4 CPUs in 1RU) and 8 disks.
While I wouldn’t necessarily expect that Google would have the highest density of CPUs per rack, it did surprise me to see that they have 1/4 the CPU density of some commercial offerings and 1/8 the disk density! I wonder if this was a deliberate decision to use more server room space to allow slower movement of cooling air and thus save energy.
It’s interesting to note that Google have been awarded patents on some of their technology related to the batteries. Are there no journalists reading the new patents? Surely anyone who saw such patents awarded to Google could have published most of this news before Cnet got it.
Now, I wonder how long it will take for IBM, HP, and Dell to start copying some of these design features. Not that I expect them to start selling their systems by the shipping crate.
Flame has written a satirical post about the different methods used to try and prevent unauthorised use of copyright movies and the distribution of illegal porn [1]. He has also written an amusing rant about how offended he was by the false advertising of an erotic movie [2].
I think that both these issues need to be addressed at the same time. We need to have an erotic movie about a senator and some movie executives who go on a cruise. It could start with the senator wearing fishnet stockings under his suit while giving a speech about the need to prevent the distribution of pornography and “protect the children“. Then when on the the cruise he meets a young looking woman who likes wearing school uniforms and spends some of his spare time photographing her in artistic poses.
Most of the film would have gratuitous shots of people wearing less clothing than usual and spanking each other (including the senator giving a good impression of Dr Frank n Furter [3]). An element of mystery would also be good – who did the senator sleep with while blindfolded? The finale would have the senator in bed with the movie executives in an analogy of what senators do in real life (except that real life has a lot less spanking).
This plot wouldn’t necessarily imply a movie of Ed Wood [4] caliber. Let’s face it, most Hollywood movies don’t have a plot (the exceptions being those that are copied from successful movies from other times or places).
Disclaimer: This plot idea is strictly a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to any real people (I wouldn’t want my blog to end up in a secretive government blacklist). That said, if you want to imagine that any male politician who gives a speech about “protecting the children” is wearing lingerie while doing so, then go for it (you might even be right).
Tonight at 6PM the channel 7 news will have a special report about the dangers of inhaling fumes while filling cars with petrol. I’m blogging now because based on past experience I expect almost no technical content in the report and that the advert for the news show contains everything that is useful.
The advert showed that they had used some film technique to show the fumes leaving the petrol tank while fuel is pumped in. It was obvious that the fumes were rising past the face of the man who was filling the tank. Not that this is really news, if you observe closely when fuel is pumped into a car you can see where the vapor escapes as the slight difference in density causes whatever is behind it to shimmer slightly.
For a long time the Prius has had a bladder inside the fuel tank which expands and contracts to match the fuel volume [1]. This greatly reduces the evaporative loss of fuel when the car is parked and the ambient temperature changes and also when fuel is pumped in. So it seems that in regard to the issue of fuel vapor poisoning the driver, the Prius has been better than other cars for about 10 years. Apparently Toyota have developed a new system that they have implemented in the Hybrid Lexus and the new Hybrid Camry which involves “vapor recovery”, this is supposed to give similar benefits in terms of not releasing petrol fumes into the environment but without limiting the capacity of the fuel tank in cold weather (a common complaint about the Prius). I have not been able to find any technical information on how this works (please let me know if you know a good web page about it).
The next issue is that any car which gives good fuel efficiency and has a reasonable size petrol tank will be better in regard to vapor releases. The less frequently you need to refuel your car the less fuel vapor you will inhale. I predict that channel 7 will not suggest that people drive fuel efficient cars, they are probably more likely to go for hand-wringing about the “inevitable” health problems, or make vague claims that the government should do something about it. The fact that the news show in question is immediately followed by “Today Tonight” (one of the tabloid TV shows) is an indication of the likely quality.
A final issue is the puddles of fuel that you commonly see at petrol stations. People regularly spill reasonable quantities of petrol and Diesel fuel and it just accumulates on the concrete. It’s not uncommon that I will have to drive with my car windows open after buying petrol due to the petrol that I stood in evaporating from my shoes. Apart from training people to not be stupid when refueling their vehicles I can’t think of any way of solving this problem. A petrol station employee once told me that it’s not uncommon for people to refuel cars with their young children standing within splash range of the fuel nozzle. If people can’t manage to avoid splashing their children with fuel then it seems that it will be impossible to get them to do anything reasonable or intelligent regarding the refueling process.
Cory Doctorow has written a column for The Guardian titled “You shouldn’t have to sell your soul just to download some music” [1]. One really interesting point he made was “The same companies that spent decades telling lawmakers that they were explicitly not the guardians of the morality of the young that they couldn’t be held accountable for sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, for gangsta rap, for drug-fuelled dance-parties did a complete reversal and began to beat their chests about the corrupting influence of downloading on the poor kiddies“.
The pt4me2 organisation advocates that the Victorian government spend more money on public transport infrastructure [2]. Recently the congestion on Melbourne roads has been getting worse, the costs of private car parks in the central city area have been increasing, and during peak hours all public transport is over-crowded. Some significant improvements are needed, and more trains, trams, and buses are the only possible way of coping with the number of people working in the city. Also there’s the issue of suburbs that lack any public transport, I wouldn’t want to live near one of those areas when petrol hits $8/L (as the CSIRO predicts for 2018).
Michael Tiemann writes about Microsoft’s latest patent attack against Linux [3]. He doesn’t pull any punches which is a very noteworthy thing. It’s pretty rare to see someone in a senior position in a company blog in a way that makes any significant comment about another company.
Dan Ariely gave an interesting Ted.com talk about “Our Buggy Moral Code” [4]. One of the points was that people who declare themselves to be atheists are less likely to cheat when asked to swear on a bible first, another was that if someone who is identified as a member of the same group cheats then others will follow, but if an outsider cheats then they won’t. It seems that if you want to minimise cheating then you want to have only outsiders be seen to do it, and you want everyone to swear to follow some sort of moral code.
Flame has written a good rant titled “Anarchy is Dead” about the lack of popular outrage against the Australian government’s censorship plans [5].
Rolling Stone magazine has a good article about the US banking crisis [6]. A moderate amount of bad language, but no more than is deserved.
Amazing video of rounding up sheep that are fitted with LEDs at night [7].
Here’s an interesting TED talk by Saul Griffith about using kites to generate electricity [8]. Unfortunately he didn’t give much engineering information, it was more of an “executive summary” of what he has done. He claims that if a wartime level of effort was put in place then wind could supply all the electricity needs of the US within 10 years.
Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) gave a talk for TED about his obsession with the Dodo [9]. One thing that surprised me is how his manner in that talk differed from his appearance in Mythbusters. It seems that most of his crazy antics in Mythbusters are an act to entertain the audience. The information about the dodo was really interesting too. He then went on to talk about his recreation of the Maltese Falcon. His work can serve as inspiration for other geeks who want to try sculpting.
Flame has written some ideas about building Linux Powered Battle Droids and demonstrating them [1].
It seems to me that the biggest problem with having a battle of a similar nature to Robot Wars [2] is creating a safe arena. Getting an area the size of a basketball court fenced off with bullet-proof plastic is not going to be cheap.
The first solution to this problem that occurred to me was to have a battle held underwater. Water really slows down projectiles. The disadvantages of this are that it’s slightly more difficult to view. The viewing options are to using a web-cam, having a port-hole in the side of the pool (impossible if you don’t own the pool), and having a transparent viewing platform on the surface of the water (which would also be difficult and maybe expensive). Another disadvantage of submarine warfare is that having a droid spring a leak and quietly sink is not very dramatic.
It might be a better option to use aerial warfare via helicopters and balloons. The amount of weight that such craft can carry is not particularly great so there will be no real armor and fairly weak weapons. A motorbike helmet and a heavy coat should be all the protective equipment that is needed if the usual rules prohibiting projectile weapons from such contests are implemented.
A petrol powered model aeroplane could do some serious damage if it hit someone at full speed. But I don’t think that an indoor basketball court or any other enclosed arena that might be available would be large enough for fighter-planes. So it would be just balloons and helicopters.
Stewart Smith has written about the removal of a blog from Planet Linux Australia [1] due to publishing a list of URLs that the Australian government wants to censor.
The first point I want to make is that even if you had a list with thousands of entries that are not likely to offend anyone or incur any legal liability then it’s still not suitable for syndication on most Planet feeds. The correct thing to do is to have a paragraph describing the list and why people would want to read it and then use the MORE feature of your blog so that the rest isn’t in the RSS feed. If you use WordPress which seems to have the MORE function broken then that would mean hosting the list somewhere else.
In regard to the specific post, in a comment on Stewart’s post Matt suggests that the Planet software somehow filter out certain blog posts. I am not aware of any way of doing that apart from through code changes, Matt could submit some patches to allow that sort of thing.
One thing that would be really good would be to have an exclusion tag or category in a blog feed. So you for example you could have feed URLs such as /feed/lca which would be configured to list all posts without the tag not-lca. Another way for a blogger to do this would be to use Yahoo pipes [2]. The people who run a Planet should be prepared to take any feed URL. It would not be difficult for a blogger to create a pipe that excludes all items that have “NSFW” in the title (or any other possible way of listing them).
A final option is to have multiple blogs. I have a blog for documents that I regularly update [3]. Many of those documents had been plain HTML files edited with vi for years before I started blogging. But WordPress is a reasonable CMS and as I use it for blogging it made sense to use it for other documents too. WordPress has no good option for managing two types of documents, ones that are date-based (regular blog posts with the date in the URL) and non-date based (which change periodically and have different date stamps). There are WordPress pages, but the support for having moderate numbers of pages is not great. Also on my document blog I will often have articles appear new regularly as I change the date when updating them. Anyone is welcome to subscribe to the feed for my document blog if they are interested in seeing new versions of the documents, but I expect that most people don’t want to.
The Debian WordPress package (as of last time I used it) and my fork of the Debian WordPress package have great support for multiple blogs. There is WordPress-MU for bulk blog hosting, but that is only designed for people who want to run something like LiveJournal or Blogger. If you just want a few blogs for friends and relatives then the regular Debian WordPress package will do the job well.
Some bloggers maintain two blogs, one for public things and another for close friends and relatives (people who ARE interested in what they ate for breakfast). Having one blog for the NSFW material would be a reasonable thing to do for certain bloggers.
Finally while I doubt that someone who runs a Planet installation faces any legal liability, there is also the issue of a PR liability. From a PR perspective I think it’s best for the reputation of Linux users in Australia for certain things to not appear on Planet Linux Australia. That said it would be good if there was a process for removing and reinstating blogs that was publicly documented. There will obviously be many differences of opinion as to what is too risky to allow on the Planet so we should expect that from time to time feeds will be temporarily removed. When that happens what does a blogger have to do to be done to be syndicated again?
Update:
A comment has revealed a way of filtering out RSS feeds via the feed URLs used by wordpress. A URL such as /feed/cat=-X will give a feed of all articles that don’t contain category number X. Multiple categories can be specified when separated by commas. So this allows WordPress users to exclude their NSFW category from Planet Linux Australia.
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