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  • Syria: Why Isn’t The West Making A Stand ?

    The interesting thing about what has been happening in Syria over the last few months is that people are just about beginning to ask why the West (as in the UK, France, USA, Germany, etc) are not taking the lead in doing something about Syria. There seems to be an assumption that we only did something about Libya, because it was easy and somehow in our interests to do so (i.e. “oil”).

    Well perhaps, although Libyan oil reserves are hardly big enough to risk that much over.

    But there are plenty of other reasons why the West isn’t taking the initiative over the Syrian situation.

    First, on several occasions those opposing the current Syrian regime have made it clear that they do not want foreign intervention. So intervention could risk making the situation worse.

    Secondly if you accept that there would be no Libyan-style intervention, you are pretty much limited to applying for and imposing sanctions of some kind. And the West has been doing that for some time – the EU has been imposing increasingly draconian sanctions since at least May this year, and the US has been imposing sanctions for far longer although in their case this has little to do with support for democratisation and more to do with punishing Syrians for having a government that supports Hezbollah. Yet despite all the talk, the Arab League has yet to impose sanctions. So who is taking the lead here ?

    Lastly, it is all very well expecting the West to take the lead in opposition to noxious regimes, but where else in life do you find a situation where nothing happens, because the one who usually takes the lead in a community of equals has nodded off? If the Arab League feels the West isn’t making a strong enough stand, there is no reason why they cannot take the lead here. The West is distracted at the moment with economic problems – in particular the Eurozone crisis; maybe it should be pushing harder for something to happen in Syria, but when it isn’t doing enough (and some people might argue that it is), the Arab League could push itself.

     

  • Islands In The Cloud

    I have an Android phone that automatically uploads photos to Google; you have an iPhone that automatically uploads photos to Apple’s iCloud service. We both want to send photos to a Facebook gallery for some friends.

    To solve this problem, we either have to copy photos manually from Google to Facebook, or make use of some special application to do the work for us. But isn’t this the wrong solution to the problem ?

    If the different propriety clouds used an open standard for uploading photos, it would be possible to automatically upload to Google from an iPhone, upload to Apple’s iCloud from an Android phone, or … to some new competitor. Or even for those of us who prefer to do our own thing, to our own servers.

    As someone who mixes and matches things, I have “islands of data” in different clouds – some photos are uploaded to Facebook (when I can be bothered), some are in Googleland, and some (the ones I regard as the better ones) are uploaded to my own server. And that is just photos; there are also contacts, notes, documents, drawings, etc. None of this can be easily moved from one island to another – sure I could move it manually, but why would I want to do that ? Computers after all are supposed to be good at automation.

    This is all down to the convenience of the cloud providers of course – Google makes it easy to use their services and hard to use others because it’s in their interests to do so, Apple is similarly inclined to keep your imprisoned in their “perfumed prison”. And so on.

    But it’s all our data and they should make it easy to move our data around. This not only would be useful for us, but less obviously would actually benefit the cloud providers. After all if I find it tricky moving from one online photo gallery “cloud” to another, I’m less inclined to do so.

    Making it easier to move cloud data from one provider to another not only means it is easier for a customer to “escape” one proprietary cloud, but it is also easier for a customer of another cloud to move in. And it would not necessarily be that difficult to do – just produce a standardised API that works across multiple different cloud providers, and let the application developers loose.

    To a certain extent this is possible right now – for example, Facebook has an API and Twitter has an API and it is possible to produce code to send status updates to both places. But the equivalent to update a Google Plus status does not seem to be available, and combining status updates in one tool just isn’t there as yet – I have a simple script which sits on top of two other tools (and very nicely pops up a window, a text input box, or takes the status on the command line). But with a standardised API, the code would be much easier to write.

     

  • Odd Ones

    Some rather less usual landscape images :-

    Blue Curves

    Even something in colour! This is a detail on the pier.

    Surf

    Something a little more conventional (for me) :-

    But perhaps should be called “Three Lines of Surf”.

    Peeling Paint

    Another detail from the pier.

  • Poppies, FIFA, Remembrance Day, and Remembrance Sunday

    The people of the UK (and indeed other places) are garlanded with poppies in remembrance of the soldiers who have lost their lives in the wars of the past and present. It is easy to get distracted by the politicians, the large ceremonies, and get confused about the purpose of the poppy and Remembrance Day. It is not about the glorification of war, or a bone thrown by the establishment – it is very much a grass roots thing better shown by local ceremonies.

    Those local ceremonies in villages up and down the land involve a few old veterans laying wreathes of poppies at local war memorials built to commemorate the fallen from the local community. A few local dignitaries get involved too, but the ceremonies have little to do with them – they would take place even without them.

    One of my favourite war memorials illustrates the point. Close to where my parents live is a small memorial :-

    4892

    It isn’t a grand memorial – most villages have far more dramatic ones built in stone. But it was put up after World War I by the local community in remembrance not of the local people who had died but for the millions of men that the local community had seen march through the village on the way to the port of Southampton before departing for the front-line in France.

    Whilst a cursory check of the history of Remembrance Day would seem to indicate that it was all a government thing, a deeper look indicates that whilst the establishment was involved, some of the initiatives were started by what were effectively ordinary people, and it was supported by the public at large.

    FIFA

    As anyone who has been watching the news the last week knows, FIFA initially prohibited the England and Wales football teams from wearing the poppy during this weekend’s international fixtures but later backtracked from this under pressure from a variety of sources.

    FIFAs initial ban on the poppy looks like gross foolishness, and indeed to a certain extent it is. But any organisation like FIFA is likely to be conservative and slow-moving in relation to making decisions about their rules, and you do have to wonder why the people wanting to start wearing poppies on their team strips during a football game left it until the last minute to query whether wearing poppies was ok.

    FIFAs rules on emblems of a political or religious nature are probably quite sensible, and whilst the poppy is neither it would be sensible to allow for plenty of time to persuade FIFA that it should be allowed. A year would not be an unreasonable amount of time. Yet the England and Wales football teams only recently decided that they wanted to wear poppies on the field – this is a new thing and not something traditional.

    You do have to think that FIFA has been treated a little unkindly over the last week.

    Remembrance Day And Remembrance Sunday

    It is strange how things change over time. When Remembrance Day was new, it was the main day for remembrance although not a public holiday. When I was growing up, the closest Sunday to Remembrance Day was called Remembrance Sunday and that was the main day for remembrance with Remembrance Day itself being a much quieter affair.

    Today, the pendulum seems to be swinging back in favour of Remembrance Day rather than Remembrance Sunday. Of course the Sunday events are still far bigger, but Remembrance Day seems to be getting more and more attention every year. It is time to consider making Remembrance Day a public holiday so we can remember the dead on the real anniversary.

  • The ARM Servers Are Coming!

    According to a couple of articles on The Register, a couple of manufacturers are getting close to releasing ARM-based servers. The interesting thing is that the latest announcement includes details of a 64-bit version of the ARM processor, which according to some people is a precondition for using the ARM in a server.

    It is not really true of course, but a 64-bit ARM will make a small number of tasks possible. It is easy to forget that 32-bit servers (of which there are still quite a few older ones around) did a pretty reasonable job whilst they were in service – there is very little that a 64-bit server can do that a 32-bit server cannot. As a concrete example, a rather elderly SPARC-based server I have access to has 8Gbytes of memory available, is running a 64-bit version of Solaris (it’s hard to find a 32-bit version of Solaris for SPARC), but of the 170 processes it is running, none occupies more than 256Mbytes of memory; by coincidence the size of processes is also no more than 256Mb.

    The more important development is the introduction of virtualisation support.

    The thing is that people – especially those used to the x86 world – tend to over-emphasise the importance of 64-bits. It is important as some applications do require more than 4Gbytes of memory to support – in particular applications such as large Oracle (or other DBMS) installations. But the overwhelming majority of applications actually suffer a performance penalty if re-compiled to run as 64-bit applications.

    The simple fact is that if an application is perfectly happy to run as a 32-bit application with a “limited” memory space and smaller integers, it can run faster because there is less data flying around. And indeed as pointed out in the comments section of the article above, it can also use ever so slightly more electricity.

    What is overlooked amongst those whose thinking is dominated by the x86 world, is that the x86-64 architecture offers two benefits over the old x86 world – a 64-bit architecture and an improved architecture with many more CPU registered. This allows for 64-bit applications in the x86 world to perform better than their 32-bit counterparts even if the applications wouldn’t normally benefit from running on a 64-bit architecture.

    If the people producing operating systems for the new ARM-based servers have any sense, they will quietly create a 64-bit operating system that can transparently run many applications in 32-bit mode. Not exactly a new thing as this is what Solaris has done on 64-bit SPARC based machines for a decade. This will allow those applications that don’t require 64-bit, to gain the performance benefit of running 32-bit, whilst allowing those applications that require 64-bit to run perfectly well.

    There is no real downside in running a dual word sized operating system except a minor amount of added complexity for those developers working at the C-language level.