Older blog entries for etbe (starting at number 926)

9 Dec 2011 »

Some OWS Stuff

There is an interesting interview with Richard Wilkinson on ted.com about the damage to society that is caused by excessive inequality [1]. The conclusion is interesting, it seems that one part of the solution is to send the message that excessive greed is anti-social. The demonstrations against the greedy 1% seem likely to do some good in this regard. He also has a TED talk about this in which he shows that even the rich don’t benefit from great inequality [2]. If nothing else the links between great inequality and high rates of mental illness and murder should convince people that they don’t want to live in such a society.

Buying Cameras

Some of the radio news reports have claimed that some of the people in OWS camps in Australia are somehow unworthy because they have smart-phones and digital cameras. They seem to believe that people have to demonstrate great poverty to have standing to complain. The problem here is that owning a mobile phone is essential to getting employment in many industries, so the vast majority of people who are old enough to work but not near retirement age just have to own a mobile phone. Once you have decided to use a phone if you are going to use it a lot (which you probably will if living in a tent in a public place) then being on a contract usually makes economic sense. As the cheapest contracts include a “free” Android phone that means almost everyone who is old enough to be allowed out alone at night and young enough to be willing to sleep rough for a cause will have such a phone.

A related complaint is about people owning good cameras. One reason for this is the fact that the huge number of cameras deters the police from using excessive force – that’s a good justification for spending money on a good camera. But then a good camera doesn’t cost much nowadays, the specs on $100 cameras are quite impressive and a camera that costs $400 new will have features that are useful for professional photographers – and cameras are even cheaper on ebay.

In Australia social security payments for a single person who is out of work are as much as $486.80 per fortnight [3]. Therefore someone who is living on social security could buy a great camera if they saved up two weeks of social security payments or buy a similar camera on ebay for one week’s worth of payments.

When at a protest the widespread use of cameras is essential for protection against police brutality. It’s worth saving up for a camera.

But really they are missing the point, OWS is about representing ~99% of the population. Even people on the average income are suffering because of the greed of the rich.

Is Australia such a Great Place?

There have been claims that Australia is such a great place that OWS protests are not needed, supposedly we have a very egalitarian society. The ABS data shows that the level of inequality as expressed by numbers isn’t that great when restricted to just income if you restrict the analysis to the top 20% [4]. The mean gross household income per week is $340 for the lowest quintile and $2,380 for the highest quintile giving a ratio of 1:7.0. But when you look at total household net worth it’s $27,400 vs $1,720,700 – a ratio of 1:62.8! The ratio for the richest 1% would surely be a lot greater but a quick search of abs.gov.au didn’t turn up any statistics on them. Also Richard Wilkinson’s analysis puts Australia quite close to the US.

If the people who are in the top 1% earned their money, paid taxes, and didn’t pervert the political process then there wouldn’t be any OWS protests. The corruption in the political process and rent seeking by corporations isn’t as bad here as it is in the US, but it’s bad enough that we need some serious changes. Emily Manuel wrote an interesting article for Tiger Beatdown about the need for an Occupy movement in Australia [5]. Her description of the political problems in Australia is quite clear. But I wasn’t convinced by her analysis which suggested that Australia is different from the US in any significant way.

Really Comparing Income

To properly compare income it doesn’t make sense to compare a ratio of money earned, or disposable income which is often misleading due to disagreements about what is considered disposable. It’s really about which of the things that you want to do can be achieved on your income. One possible way of comparing it is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. The poorest 20% of households in Australia have a gross income of $340 per week. The ABS shows that the average of private rental prices in the 8 capital cities (where most of the population lives) is $218 per week [6]. Obviously the poorest households can’t afford an average rent unless you have lots of people packed in one house. No matter how you look at the numbers it’s going to be difficult for low income people to pay for rent and food. That puts them on the bottom level of Maslow’s higherarchy.

It seems to me that the benefits of increased income diminish and it becomes more of a contest to be richer than other people. Owning an old car is a significant benefit over having no car. Owning a new car has some real benefits over an old car. Luxury cars usually have safety features before they are introduced to cheaper cars, but apart from that the benefit of owning a luxury car is small. Owning multiple Rolls-Royces doesn’t seem to provide any real benefit, someone who would want to do that would probably be better served by hiring a good psychologist.

Update:

In a comment Brendan Scott cited The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. That’s a great point, and I’ll have to read that book! I still maintain that owning two Rolls Royces is a symptom of psychological problems, people who can sort out such problems won’t feel the need to try and prove that they have more money than others.

Charles Stross has an interesting article about wealth disparity etc [7]. Being a sci-fi author he also explores what life might be like after Drexler boxes satisfy most of our current materiel needs.

The Age has an informative article by Suzy Freeman-Greene contrasting the OWS protests in Melbourne which were broken up by police to the Catholic anti-abortion protests that have been going on for more than 20 years [8]. It seems that corporations aren’t the only large organisations that are pwning democracy!

Syndicated 2011-12-09 04:58:28 from etbe - Russell Coker

8 Dec 2011 »

Some OWS Stuff

There is an interesting interview with Richard Wilkinson on ted.com about the damage to society that is caused by excessive inequality [1]. The conclusion is interesting, it seems that one part of the solution is to send the message that excessive greed is anti-social. The demonstrations against the greedy 1% seem likely to do some good in this regard. He also has a TED talk about this in which he shows that even the rich don’t benefit from great inequality [2]. If nothing else the links between great inequality and high rates of mental illness and murder should convince people that they don’t want to live in such a society.

Buying Cameras

Some of the radio news reports have claimed that some of the people in OWS camps in Australia are somehow unworthy because they have smart-phones and digital cameras. They seem to believe that people have to demonstrate great poverty to have standing to complain. The problem here is that owning a mobile phone is essential to getting employment in many industries, so the vast majority of people who are old enough to work but not near retirement age just have to own a mobile phone. Once you have decided to use a phone if you are going to use it a lot (which you probably will if living in a tent in a public place) then being on a contract usually makes economic sense. As the cheapest contracts include a “free” Android phone that means almost everyone who is old enough to be allowed out alone at night and young enough to be willing to sleep rough for a cause will have such a phone.

A related complaint is about people owning good cameras. One reason for this is the fact that the huge number of cameras deters the police from using excessive force – that’s a good justification for spending money on a good camera. But then a good camera doesn’t cost much nowadays, the specs on $100 cameras are quite impressive and a camera that costs $400 new will have features that are useful for professional photographers – and cameras are even cheaper on ebay.

In Australia social security payments for a single person who is out of work are as much as $486.80 per fortnight [3]. Therefore someone who is living on social security could buy a great camera if they saved up two weeks of social security payments or buy a similar camera on ebay for one week’s worth of payments.

When at a protest the widespread use of cameras is essential for protection against police brutality. It’s worth saving up for a camera.

But really they are missing the point, OWS is about representing ~99% of the population. Even people on the average income are suffering because of the greed of the rich.

Is Australia such a Great Place?

There have been claims that Australia is such a great place that OWS protests are not needed, supposedly we have a very egalitarian society. The ABS data shows that the level of inequality as expressed by numbers isn’t that great when restricted to just income if you restrict the analysis to the top 20% [4]. The mean gross household income per week is $340 for the lowest quintile and $2,380 for the highest quintile giving a ratio of 1:7.0. But when you look at total household net worth it’s $27,400 vs $1,720,700 – a ratio of 1:62.8! The ratio for the richest 1% would surely be a lot greater but a quick search of abs.gov.au didn’t turn up any statistics on them. Also Richard Wilkinson’s analysis puts Australia quite close to the US.

If the people who are in the top 1% earned their money, paid taxes, and didn’t pervert the political process then there wouldn’t be any OWS protests. The corruption in the political process and rent seeking by corporations isn’t as bad here as it is in the US, but it’s bad enough that we need some serious changes. Emily Manuel wrote an interesting article for Tiger Beatdown about the need for an Occupy movement in Australia [5]. Her description of the political problems in Australia is quite clear. But I wasn’t convinced by her analysis which suggested that Australia is different from the US in any significant way.

Really Comparing Income

To properly compare income it doesn’t make sense to compare a ratio of money earned, or disposable income which is often misleading due to disagreements about what is considered disposable. It’s really about which of the things that you want to do can be achieved on your income. One possible way of comparing it is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. The poorest 20% of households in Australia have a gross income of $340 per week. The ABS shows that the average of private rental prices in the 8 capital cities (where most of the population lives) is $218 per week [6]. Obviously the poorest households can’t afford an average rent unless you have lots of people packed in one house. No matter how you look at the numbers it’s going to be difficult for low income people to pay for rent and food. That puts them on the bottom level of Maslow’s higherarchy.

It seems to me that the benefits of increased income diminish and it becomes more of a contest to be richer than other people. Owning an old car is a significant benefit over having no car. Owning a new car has some real benefits over an old car. Luxury cars usually have safety features before they are introduced to cheaper cars, but apart from that the benefit of owning a luxury car is small. Owning multiple Rolls-Royces doesn’t seem to provide any real benefit, someone who would want to do that would probably be better served by hiring a good psychologist.

Syndicated 2011-12-08 21:58:28 from etbe - Russell Coker

5 Dec 2011 »

CyanogenMod and the Galaxy S

Thanks to some advice from Philipp Kern I have now got my Galaxy S running CyanogenMod 7.1.0 which is based on Android 2.3.7 [1]. CyanogenMod has lots of configuration options that seem to be lacking in the stock releases and also supports some advanced features such as OpenVPN and a command-line. I can’t properly compare CyanogenMod to the stock Android as I’ve only used versions 2.1 and 2.2 of the stock Android. Presumably some of the things that I like about CyanogenMod are in the stock Android 2.3.7 release.

The process of updating a phone is difficult and has some risk. Fortunately Samsung provided “Download mode” in the BIOS to allow recovery. If you mess up the process of updating a Galaxy S and you can get Download mode by holding down volume-down, home, and then power buttons then you can almost certainly recover (so don’t panic).

The CyanogenMod people don’t provide any documentation on upgrading from Android 2.2 (which is what Optus is still shipping AFAIK). So you will probably have some difficulty when upgrading a Galaxy S that you get in Australia (it seems that Optus is the only company shipping them in volume).

As an aside if you want to buy a Gel Case for a Galaxy S in Australia then visit an Optus store. It seems that Optus is the only phone store that hasn’t run out their Galaxy S accessories in favor of the Galaxy S2.

I have previously written about the Galaxy S and Three Networking [2]. Now that I have the Galaxy S as my primary phone on the Virgin network all my data corruption problems are solved, the problem is entirely related to Three. With CyanogenMod there is an option to be able to toggle the LED “Flash” as a torch from the drop-down menu, this makes the lack of such a LED on the Galaxy S even more of an annoyance.

I have also discovered that the Galaxy S apparently doesn’t have a status LED! This makes it the only phone that I’ve ever owned that has no clear way of informing me when the battery is charged! It’s also really useful to have a flashing LED to indicate low battery when running a full screen app, and to have a flashing LED to indicate that email has been received.

Someone should design a phone with multiple LEDs to indicate different things. I’d like to have one LED to indicate charging status and another to indicate whether there is unread email or SMS. Whatever the cost of including a LED during manufacture it would have to be almost nothing compared to the ~$500 sale price of a phone. Wikipedia says “The Samsung Galaxy S features a PowerVR graphics processor, yielding 20 million triangles per second, making it the fastest graphics processing unit in any smartphone at the time of release. Also, upon release, the Galaxy S was both the first Android phone to be certified for DivX HD, and at 9.9 mm was the thinnest smartphone available”. I don’t care about any of that, I want a phone with decent battery life, a LED “Flash”, and a status LED.

The main benefit I get from the Galaxy S over the Xperia X10 is the greater storage. The Xperia X10 has a total of 1G of storage and only 465M of that is available for application install. My Galaxy S has 16G of internal storage of which 1.8G is available for phone apps and 13G is available for pictures and other mass storage. Having 1.8G for phone apps and internal phone storage used by such apps (which includes the offline IMAP cache) is a massive benefit, enough to outweigh the lack of a staus LED and a Flash LED.

What I Really Want

I’d rather have a Samsung Galaxy Note. The Note has a LED flash, a 5.3″ screen with 1280*800 resolution which is much better for running as a SSH client and also good for web browsing. I’m not inclined to spend money on a phone now, so I’ll probably use the Galaxy S until Virgin offers me a new phone or someone just gives me a new phone (I can always hope). One of the many nice features in the Galaxy Note is a built in stylus. When using my current phones for web browsing I sometimes find it difficult to have a touch registered to the desired part of the screen, this is a real problem with the Opera web browser which requires a long press to open a URL in a new tab.

Syndicated 2011-12-05 02:31:28 from etbe - Russell Coker

30 Nov 2011 »

Links November 2011

Forbes has an interesting article about crowd-sourcing by criminals and law enforcement [1].

Ulissescastr0 made a Youtube video showing how to install SE Linux on Debian/Etch [2]. Probably no-one is using Etch nowadays so this video is outdated, but it’s a good way of teaching people. It would be good if someone made a similar video showing how to do SE Linux things on Squeeze.

I discovered the above SE Linux video through Explow which provides a neat interface to multiple searches and information sources [3]. I don’t think I will be using Explow much in future as I could get the same result through Google video search. They also have a news portal but there are other sites for that. But it does seem that Explow would be useful for newbies.

Eric Michael Johnson wrote an interesting article about the inherent bias in Psychological research based in the US [4]. People who live in urban environments think differently in some ways to people who live in different environments or who have different lifestyles. Therefore generalising from university students in the US to the entire human race is likely to get incorrect results. This is something to consider the next time you are tempted to generalise to the wider population from your own friends, colleagues, etc.

The Daily Kos has a scary article about the TSA having a woman detained for reciting part of the US constitution [5]. The US will remain on my list of countries to avoid for the forseeable future.

Vorlon has written an informative article about the use of hardening options when building Debian packages [6]. It’s now even easier to do this, so every package that simultaneously deals with data of differing levels of integrity or sensitivity should be built this way.

Bunker Roy gave an interesting TED talk about his Barefoot College that teaches useful skills to people in rural parts of India who don’t have a traditional school education [7]. His talk really shows up some of the arrogance in the people who run traditional education.

Justin Hall-Tipping gave an interesting TED talk about ways of solving the world energy problems [8]. He started with explaining the problems and why they need to be urgently solved and then described in detail some of the research that his group has done to solve the problems. This includes flexible photo-voltaic cells, infra-red vision to save on lighting, and a way of using carbon nano-tubes to control the thermal properties of windows.

Syndicated 2011-11-30 13:54:42 from etbe - Russell Coker

23 Nov 2011 »

Receiving Death Threats

On occasion I receive death threats in comments on my blog. This doesn’t bother me, I had more than a few pathetic losers say similar things to me in high school but the difference is that a pathetic loser on the other side of the world can’t do much about it.

The latest one is on my post “Is Asperger Syndrome a Good Thing?” [1]. At 11:04AM my time (00:04 UTC) on the 23rd of November someone using IP address 82.14.50.190 (registered to “NTL Infrastructure for Tesco – Guildford”) and with the claimed email address of sharkbait @ tesco.net told me that I’m on his “to kill list“.

He was angry because my post apparently didn’t satisfy his need to “prove to people that they don’t want AS“. As it’s not possible to choose your DNA there is really no point in trying to prove that one set of genes is better than another, unless of course you want to harass people who have different genes to you.

Naturally he didn’t read my post, in fact the differences between his comment and what I wrote made me suspect that it’s something he was pasting in to lots of blogs, but it seems unlikely that he would use an iPhone for such a copy/paste job so he must just not read. For example he rhetorically asks “did you even mention it was a form of autism in your ‘negative points’” when I gave a link to the proposed DSM changes where Asperger Syndrome is being merged with “Autistic Disorder” and the word “Autism” appears 5 times in the post.

He has one specific complaint about people he knows who are on the Autism Spectrum, he says “Every time someone speaks to them they get angry and tell said person to back the fuck off. I’ve been on the receiving end.” Generally there are two possible reasons for being told to “fuck off”, one is that the person telling you is an asshole and the other is that you are being an asshole. If you are the type of person who sends death threats to bloggers then you really should consider the latter explanation.

He also suggests that I watch Boston Legal – presumably because that show has one character who is an Aspie. Now I have actually watched that show and it’s the worst legal show I’ve ever seen, when a legal show has such unrealistic portrayal of court scenes I don’t think it should be relied on for information on any other topic. I watched a couple of episodes of Boston Legal and only saw one scene with the Aspie guy, so I can’t even determine whether it’s a realistic portrayal – he’s a minor character. In any case there are plenty of Aspie guys in the Free Software community who I interact with regularly, I read forums such as AspiesForFreedom.com, and I’ve read some text books on the topic. So even if a TV show had a very accurate portrayal of an Aspie character I still doubt that I would learn anything by watching it.

As a general tip for flamers, if you want to accuse someone of being a member of a NAZI or KKK type organisation then the word you are after is Aryan not “ayrien“. If you don’t know a word then don’t use it.

Please note the conditions of sending me email [2], I reserve the right to publish all threats in any way that I wish.

A Final Note

Thanks sharkbait for adding me to your “to kill list“, I’m sure that there are lots of nice people on it and I’ve got good company.

If I didn’t get the occasional death threat I would worry that I’m not writing well enough or failing to address important issues. I will write more about Autism in the future.

Syndicated 2011-11-23 14:14:52 from etbe - Russell Coker

21 Nov 2011 »

Galaxy S vs Xperia X10 and Android Network Access

Galaxy S Review

I’ve just been given an indefinite loan of a Samsung Galaxy S which is more useful than the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 that I own.

I think that the main benefit is that it runs Android 2.2 instead of Android 2.1 on the Xperia. 2.2 is what gives it USB tethering support without extra software (something I haven’t tested yet but will use a lot if it works correctly) and Wifi AP support. Both phones are about the same size, the Galaxy S has slightly more RAM (reported as 304M vs 280M – which doesn’t really matter) and a lot more main storage (1.87G vs 465M usable after the OS is loaded).

The main down-sides of the Galaxy S is that it lacks a “flash“. I’m not aware of any phone camera having a proper flash, but the limited LED flash is useful for taking pictures at times and there are a variety of programs that can turn it on for use as a torch.

Also I wonder whether the Samsung people actually test their phones in real use or whether they just build them to spec. When you read the specs it sounds nice to have a phone that’s only 9.9mm thick (apart from the bulge at the bottom), but that makes it really difficult to hold. The Xperia X10 is 13mm thick and isn’t as slick so you are much less likely to drop it. I sometimes wonder whether phone companies are designing their products to be broken so that they can sell replacements.

Three Networking Sucks

My parents use 3G broadband from Three as their only connection to the Internet, this is fast enough for viewing Youtube on occasion and generally works well for them. However whenever I try to transfer any data to their system which has integrity checks it turns out to be corrupted. About every megabyte of data transferred has a corrupt packet that has a matching checksum – presumably it’s a bug in Three’s network. Because Three are desperate for customers they have given me a free 6 month subscription to a data SIM [1]. I’ve been using that SIM with my Galaxy S and found the same data corruption problem – and I’ve reproduced it in many places around Melbourne so this isn’t just one unreliable cell tower, it’s something broken in the core of the Three network.

The obvious solution to this is to use a VPN so the corrupt packets will be dropped. So I set up a PPTP VPN only to discover that it seems impossible to make the default route be via the VPN, there has been a bug report about this since 2009 – the iPhone allows configuring whether Internet traffic should go via the VPN, it can’t be that hard [2].

There is an option to use a proxy for web access, but when I tried that on Android 2.1 it only worked for the system web browser not for things like the Android Market. But there is no option for configuring a proxy for use when the VPN is active, so it doesn’t seem likely that I could run a proxy on the VPN network and direct all traffic to it.

Due to corruption on the Three network and the inability to get a VPN working correctly it seems that I can’t use the Three SIM.

Android isn’t Really Free Software

While Android implementations generally stick to the GPL and other free software licenses that are involved they seem to be a poor example of providing freedom to users.

My Xperia X10 is running Android 2.1 because Sony-Ericsson has locked the boot loader so I can’t install a newer kernel. They don’t care enough to release a new version – this is stupid of them because it means that I am much less likely to recommend their products. If Sony-Ericsson releases a newer Android release then it will be a total OS reinstall, unlike the way I can upgrade a Debian system an application at a time.

I can’t install new packages that replace system packages, so the Email and SMS programs that I’ve installed sit along side the ones that came with the system. Periodically the unwanted SMS and Email programs show up.

I can’t make my Android phones perform basic networking tasks that I’ve done on Linux systems since the early 90′s. Hiding the complexity from the newbies is OK, but they need to make the full capabilities of the system available to experts.

It seems to me that Android effectively gives the majority of users no more freedom than the iPhone does. Even for the small minority of us who are technically capable of rooting phones and installing CyanogenMod etc it’s often limited by technical measures and the amount of time required.

Update: Philipp Kern pointed out that his Galaxy S has a front facing camera. I have checked my phone and discovered that it has one too. When I published this post I criticised the Galaxy S for not having a front facing camera for video-calls based on a misunderstanding of the Wikipedia page (which says that SOME models lack it) and not testing it. Thanks for the correction Philipp and sorry for publishing wrong data.

Syndicated 2011-11-21 08:01:51 from etbe - Russell Coker

20 Nov 2011 »

Galaxy S vs Xperia X10 and Android Network Access

Galaxy S Review

I’ve just been given an indefinite loan of a Samsung Galaxy S which is more useful than the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 that I own.

I think that the main benefit is that it runs Android 2.2 instead of Android 2.1 on the Xperia. 2.2 is what gives it USB tethering support without extra software (something I haven’t tested yet but will use a lot if it works correctly) and Wifi AP support. Both phones are about the same size, the Galaxy S has slightly more RAM (reported as 304M vs 280M – which doesn’t really matter) and a lot more main storage (1.87G vs 465M usable after the OS is loaded).

The main down-sides of the Galaxy S are that it lacks a front facing camera (which means it can’t usefully do video-conferencing) and it lacks a “flash“. I’m not aware of any phone camera having a proper flash, but the limited LED flash is useful for taking pictures at times and there are a variety of programs that can turn it on for use as a torch.

Also I wonder whether the Samsung people actually test their phones in real use or whether they just build them to spec. When you read the specs it sounds nice to have a phone that’s only 9.9mm thick (apart from the bulge at the bottom), but that makes it really difficult to hold. The Xperia X10 is 13mm thick and isn’t as slick so you are much less likely to drop it. I sometimes wonder whether phone companies are designing their products to be broken so that they can sell replacements.

Three Networking Sucks

My parents use 3G broadband from Three as their only connection to the Internet, this is fast enough for viewing Youtube on occasion and generally works well for them. However whenever I try to transfer any data to their system which has integrity checks it turns out to be corrupted. About every megabyte of data transferred has a corrupt packet that has a matching checksum – presumably it’s a bug in Three’s network. Because Three are desperate for customers they have given me a free 6 month subscription to a data SIM [1]. I’ve been using that SIM with my Galaxy S and found the same data corruption problem – and I’ve reproduced it in many places around Melbourne so this isn’t just one unreliable cell tower, it’s something broken in the core of the Three network.

The obvious solution to this is to use a VPN so the corrupt packets will be dropped. So I set up a PPTP VPN only to discover that it seems impossible to make the default route be via the VPN, there has been a bug report about this since 2009 – the iPhone allows configuring whether Internet traffic should go via the VPN, it can’t be that hard [2].

There is an option to use a proxy for web access, but when I tried that on Android 2.1 it only worked for the system web browser not for things like the Android Market. But there is no option for configuring a proxy for use when the VPN is active, so it doesn’t seem likely that I could run a proxy on the VPN network and direct all traffic to it.

Due to corruption on the Three network and the inability to get a VPN working correctly it seems that I can’t use the Three SIM.

Android isn’t Really Free Software

While Android implementations generally stick to the GPL and other free software licenses that are involved they seem to be a poor example of providing freedom to users.

My Xperia X10 is running Android 2.1 because Sony-Ericsson has locked the boot loader so I can’t install a newer kernel. They don’t care enough to release a new version – this is stupid of them because it means that I am much less likely to recommend their products. If Sony-Ericsson releases a newer Android release then it will be a total OS reinstall, unlike the way I can upgrade a Debian system an application at a time.

I can’t install new packages that replace system packages, so the Email and SMS programs that I’ve installed sit along side the ones that came with the system. Periodically the unwanted SMS and Email programs show up.

I can’t make my Android phones perform basic networking tasks that I’ve done on Linux systems since the early 90′s. Hiding the complexity from the newbies is OK, but they need to make the full capabilities of the system available to experts.

It seems to me that Android effectively gives the majority of users no more freedom than the iPhone does. Even for the small minority of us who are technically capable of rooting phones and installing CyanogenMod etc it’s often limited by technical measures and the amount of time required.

Syndicated 2011-11-20 15:01:51 from etbe - Russell Coker

17 Nov 2011 »

Cruises

It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite economical vacations. The cheapest prices tend to be around $100 per person per night for an “inside” cabin (IE no window) with two people (there is a significant extra fee for having a cabin with only one person). If you book a room in a half-decent hotel with a pool in some moderately desirable place then you will probably pay about $200 per night which might get you free breakfast but won’t include lunch or dinner. Cruises include all the free food you can eat for at least 16 hours of the day with maybe an extra fee for getting food in the middle of the night. When a cruise ship stops at the port you can pay for an expensive shore trip arranged by the cruise company or have a cheap trip that involves walking on the beach or taking a taxi to somewhere local. Of course there are lots of extras that can make a cruise really expensive, but if you don’t plan to eat at speciality restaurants or drink much alcohol then that shouldn’t be a problem.

I’ve just booked a short luxury cruise, mostly as a trial of the cruise concept. The process of doing so was difficult enough that even if I hadn’t previously needed a holiday then I’d probably need one now. It would be interesting to compare the amount of time that a reasonable person would be likely to spend choosing a holiday and purchasing it for the different types of holiday, I expect that cruising would be a long way behind everything that involves flying to a foreign city and staying in a hotel.

The Issues of Booking

When booking a regular holiday you choose where to visit, then choose the time of year, the accommodation, and travel. While the order can vary it’s generally a sequential process without too many variables at any stage.

With a cruise one of the first decisions is to choose the cruise line, different lines cater to various market segments – it’s clear what Disney cruises aim for but often not so clear for others. Apart from Disney the other cruise lines don’t seem to make clear statements about who they are and aren’t targeting. Then there are a variety of ships run by each cruise line which in many cases offer different features, do you want 1 pool or 4? Do you want ice skating? The cruise lines that I have investigated don’t offer clear comparisons of their ships. As a cruise ship is essentially a hotel, a collection of restaurants, and some other entertainment you can’t just arbitrarily choose one the way you might choose a random hotel with a suitable price and rating.

Now while you can choose a hotel and generally get a room when you want a cruise booking has to be made when the ship is in a convenient port. So your holiday needs to be scheduled around the availability of the ship. CruiseCritic.com is an excellent source of information on cruises and has a very active and useful advice forum [1]. The forum appears to be dominated by retirees, presumably because retirees have time to just wait for a ship they like to visit their local port while people who have to schedule holidays around work projects etc.

When booking a hotel I have found that Wotif.com is really good for comparing hotels and finding a reasonably cheap one and they also have periodic mail-outs about special deals. I have made a couple of short vacations based on Wotif offering me unusually good prices on a hotel in a place that I was mildly interested in visiting. There are also special deals on cruises, but it’s a lot more difficult to take them. Firstly as cruises aren’t as interchangeable as hotels it’s not as appealing to take an offer of a cruise you didn’t previously consider because it’s going cheap. The second factor is that according to cruise reviews there is more variation among cabins than there is among hotel rooms. The design of the ship that is needed to cram everything in the available space means that some cabins apparently have noise pollution from various activities on the ship while others are considered to have problems for people prone to sea-sickness. Discounts probably only apply after people who pay non-discount rates have had a chance to book what might be considered the better cabins. Of course it could be a good thing to have most of the ship booked out, CruiseCritic.com has some reviews of individual cabins and presumably there are people who compare hundreds of cabins to discover what is ideal for them.

The Problem with Princess

I have booked a Princess cruise. I chose it because it was going cheap, but the first two travel agents that advertised it were unable to take my order because Princess only allows US based agencies (which means the discount agents on the net) to sell to US customers – I don’t think that the people who run the Princess cruise company know what the Internet is about.

So I booked the cruise through the Princess web site, they took my money, told me that a good chunk of that money would never be returned if I cancelled, and then sent me to the web page for providing all the information that they need – which is a lot. The big problem was when their web site absolutely demanded a passport number and said that I would not be allowed to board without one even though their FAQ (and common sense) indicated that a cruise which doesn’t involve any international travel has no need of a passport. Taking someone’s money and then telling them that they can’t attend due to not having a valid passport is one way of making a future passenger very unhappy.

I called the support people (which was Carnival) and had to listen to some really strange hold music – it was difficult to determine if the music was produced by someone with unusual tastes in electronic music vastly different from my own preference or whether the computer which manages the phone calls was producing noise instead of music. Eventually I got through to an operator who was very helpful and stored my drivers’ license number which was adequate.

While on the topic of their web site, when booking a cruise with Princess they list which types of cabin (interior, balcony, etc) are available and list the price for the cheapest category of cabin in each price. However if the cheapest category is all sold out then it will still list that cheapest price and thus be advertising a price that can’t be booked. This is misleading and annoying.

Further Hassle

But the difficulty doesn’t end here. On a cruise you have to book in advance for which dinner seating you desire – which is usually only early or late but some ships offer “anytime”. Then if you happen to be travelling with people who are in a separate cabin and paying separately (which one would expect to be fairly common) there is no obvious way of synchronising dinner preferences – the ship people might assign people to different tables. I admit that I haven’t fully explored the post-booking part of the Princess web site, maybe I can arrange a shared table – but for the moment my pain threshold for the cruise booking process has been exceeded.

Other Cruising Stuff

Insight Cruises (formerly Geek Cruises) offers a variety of educational cruises including science, astronomy, chess, art, history, and some other things [2]. From a casual inspection of their web site it seems that the cruise prices are around $300 per night for a 2 person cabin and the registration fees for the conferences are between $1200 and $1500. Most readers of my blog will consider this to be unreasonably expensive as registration for a Linux conference tends to be a lot less than $1000. But when compared to typical for-profit conferences $1500 isn’t anywhere near the high end of the range. Also while someone who is choosing a cruise holiday can easily get a cruise that costs less than $200 per day for a 2 person cabin, for commercial conferences it’s not uncommon to spend more than $300 per night for two people on accommodation and food. So the only noteworthy part about the cost is that accommodation will be quite expensive if you aren’t sharing a room.

If you want to run a conference on a cruise there are companies which specialise in such things, Landry and Kling is one company that specialises in planning corporate events [3]. They do seem to aim for the high end of the market, including chartering a small cruise ship or half a large cruise ship – that means ~1000 passengers. While there are some conferences with more than 1000 delegates it seems that most conferences top out at about 500 delegates. However I know that some conferences have limited the number of delegates to the maximum capacity of the biggest lecture hall available – as some cruise ships have a theater with more than 1000 seats it seems that similar conferences could potentially arrange a half ship charter. A half ship charter apparently allows exclusive access to one of the theaters (at least when it’s not needed for evening entertainment) and exclusive seating at the main dining room. It’s a standard feature that cruise ships have all the equipment you might need to run a conference.

Autism on the Seas is a brand used by the Alumni Cruise company for their holiday packages for special needs children [4]. They sell cruise tickets at the regular list price and the commission that they receive when acting as a travel agency is enough to hire staff to look after the kids while presumably still running at a profit. It seems to me that a similar model could be used for a computer conference, make a profit on cruise ticket sales and then have no extra costs for the conference – for people sharing a room that would be cheaper than most Linux conferences I’ve attended.

For smaller conferences and un-conferences there is no minimum reservation size. One down-side for a computer conference is the cost of Internet access, according to Wikipedia a personal installation of satellite net access costs $5 per megabyte and ship pricing for their Internet access is up around $30-$100 per hour per person! But in the old days when attending a conference meant a week of no net access we survived somehow.

It also seems to me that if a company had a small development team it could be productive to put everyone on a cruise ship with a server for testing and version control. They could do 9 hour days on board and still have lots of time for relaxation as it’s only a few minutes walk to the pool. Of course this wouldn’t work if some members of the team wanted to stay home due to slow and expensive net access.

Syndicated 2011-11-17 07:32:09 from etbe - Russell Coker

12 Nov 2011 »

Good Riddance to Flash

The Age reports that Adobe has ceased development of Flash for mobile systems [1]. This is described as leading to an improvement in the web experience for iPhone and iPad users, but the more important thing is that it will improve the experience for everyone. The Flash plugin has always been a resource hog and has never been properly supported on all the common platforms. Also most sites that use Flash never needed to as there were other ways of getting equal or better results without it.

Now that Flash is officially on the path to obsolescence everyone can move to HTML5.

I use the following configuration directives in my Squid configuration to block Flash, I selectively enable Flash for the few web sites which use it for useful things. Blocking flash in this manner means that desktop systems which have the Flash plugin installed probably won’t be vulnerable to Flash security flaws as it is unlikely that one of the few sites that I permit to send Flash to my network would end up hosting hostile Flash code.

acl swf url_regex swf$ swf\?
acl swftype req_mime_type -i ^application/x-shockwave-flash$
http_access deny swf
http_access deny swftype

Wikipedia has a comparison of HTML5 and Flash. One interesting benefit that is claimed for Flash is that it allows DRM and it supports inserting commercials and in other ways giving the user an experience that they don’t want. It seems that to put some more nails in the Flash coffin we need tools to suck video from Flash sites regardless of DRM and which skip commercials.

Syndicated 2011-11-12 11:34:58 from etbe - Russell Coker

31 Oct 2011 »

SE Linux Status in Debian 2011-10

Debian/Unstable Development

deb http://www.coker.com.au wheezy selinux

The above APT sources.list line has my repository for SE Linux packages that have been uploaded to Unstable and which will eventually go to testing and then the Wheezy release (if they aren’t obsoleted first). I have created that repository for people who want to track SE Linux development without waiting for an Unstable mirror to update.

In that repository I’ve included a new version of policycoreutils that now includes mcstrans and also has support for newer policy such that the latest selinux-policy-default package can be installed. The version that is currently in Testing supports upgrading policy on a running system but doesn’t support installing the policy on a system that previously didn’t run SE Linux.

I have also uploaded SE Linux Policy packages from upstream release 20110726 compared to the previous packages which were from upstream release 20100524. As the numbers imply there is 14 months of upstream policy development which changes many things. Many of the patches from my Squeeze policy packages are not yet incorporated in the policy I have uploaded to Unstable. I won’t guarantee that an Unstable system in Enforcing mode will do anything other than boot up and allow you to login via ssh. It’s definitely not ready for production but it’s also very suitable for development (10 years ago I did a lot of development on SE Linux systems that often denied login access, it wasn’t fun).

Kyle Moffett submitted a patch for libselinux which dramatically changed the build process. As Manoj (who wrote the previous build scripts) was not contactable I accepted Kyle’s patch as provided. Thanks for the patch Kyle, and thanks for all your work over the years Manoj. Anyway the result of these changes should mean that it’s easier to bootstrap Debian on a new architecture and easier to support multi-arch – but I haven’t tested either of these.

Squeeze

The policy packages from Squeeze can’t be compiled on Unstable. The newer policy compilation tool chain is more strict about how some things can be declared and used, thus some policy which was fairly dubious but usable is now invalid. While it wouldn’t be difficult to fix those problems I don’t plan to do so. There is no good reason for compiling Squeeze policy on Unstable now that I’ve uploaded a new upstream release.

deb http://www.coker.com.au squeeze selinux

I am still developing Squeeze policy and releasing it in the above APT repository. I will also get another policy release in a Squeeze update if possible to smooth the transition to Wheezy – the goal is that Squeeze policy will be usable on Wheezy even if it can’t be compiled. Also note that the compilation failures only affect the Debian package, it should still be possible to make modules for local use on a Wheezy system with Squeeze policy.

MLS

On Wednesday I’m giving a lecture at my local LUG about MLS on SE Linux. I hope to have a MLS demonstration system available to LUG members by then. Ideally I will have a MLS system running on a virtual server somewhere that’s accessible as well as a Xen/KVM image on a USB stick that can be copied by anyone at the meeting.

I don’t expect to spend much time on any aspect of SE Linux unrelated to MLS for the rest of the week.

Version Control

I need to change the way that I develop SE Linux packages, particularly the refpolicy source package (source of selinux-policy-default among others). A 20,000 line single patch is difficult to work with! I will have to switch to using quilt, once I get it working well it should save me time on my own development as well as making it easier to send patches upstream. Also I need to setup a public version control system so I can access the source from my workstation, laptop, and netbook. While doing that I might as well make it public so any interested people can help out. Suggestions on what type of VCS to use are welcome.

How You Can Help

Sorting out the mess that is the refpolicy package, sending patches upstream and migrating to a VCS is a fair bit of work. But there are lots of small parts. Sending patches upstream is a job that could be done in small pieces.

Writing new policy is not something to do yet. There’s not much point in doing that while I still haven’t merged all the patches from Squeeze – maybe next week. However I can provide the missing patches to anyone who wants to review them and assist with the merging.

I have a virtual server that has some spare capacity. One thing I would like to do is to have some virtual machines running Unstable with various configurations of server software. Then we could track Unstable on those images and use automated testing to ensure that nothing breaks. If anyone wants root access on a virtual server to install their favorite software then let me know. But such software needs to be maintained and tested!

Syndicated 2011-10-31 12:22:43 from etbe - Russell Coker

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