Haiti: The Speed Of The Response

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 152010
 

Before reading further, go and visit http://www.dec.org.uk/ and make a donation.

One of the things that is clear from the current chaos in Haiti approaching nearly four days since the earthquake (and to be fair from other disasters) is that getting aid on the ground takes far too long. This is not supposed to be a criticism of anyone – I’m simply at this stage wondering what the delay is caused by.

Perhaps we have unrealistic expectations of how quickly aid can be sent in – I’m sure that it is a lot harder than we think it should be! I’m sure there will be those throwing criticism at the UN, the Haitian government, etc. all without much in the way of justification.

What are the politics of sending in assistance in situations like this? Normally if US troops were to “go in” to a country to help out n a disaster without permission from the government it would be an act of war – can you imagine how the Chinese government would react ? So normally we can assume that those offering assistance need to obtain permission from the local government.

But what happens when the local government has effectively ceased to operate ? The Haitian government has problems at the best of times, and was effectively unreachable for a while during the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Did the rescuers have to wait until they could get someone from the government on the phone ? I cannot imagine the UN operating any other way – they are (and in fact should be given their other work) the paragons of diplomatic nicety.

Perhaps governments could consider giving advanced permission along the lines of “Hey! If a really big disaster happens, you’ve got permission to come in and help and we’ll have a nice polite chat about it afterwards”. Do such arrangements already exist ?

The other thing that springs to mind is that there needs to be some way of arranging air transport very rapidly. In this case there is an airport close by, but an airport that is not up to dealing with a such a large influx of cargo planes. In many other cases, there is no convenient airport. Perhaps it is not possible to build a temporary airport in a matter of hours, but it is something that needs someone to think about a way of trying. At the very least it should be possible to “upgrade” the air traffic control system equipment in a matter of hours – which appears to have been a problem in Haiti.

People can survive without food for quite a while, and without water for not so very long, but those in need of medical help need it now. Do we need to consider parachuting in small medical stabilisation teams ? Obviously a full field hospital would be preferred but a small team (or many of them) with supplies that can be carried can at least stabilise causalities to give them a better chance of surviving until more comprehensive facilities are available.

Similarly in the event of earthquakes, parachuting in search and rescue teams with minimal equipment could accomplish quite a bit even before heavy equipment is available.

There is also the psychological effect of having someone on the ground. Even if those early aid workers cannot accomplish much for those who are fit and healthy, they at do least indicate that help is coming and that they have not been forgotten.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we need a more military approach to emergency aid in situations like this. And I’m not exactly a fan of the military! The military are used to reacting very rapidly to a limited extent with rapid reaction forces available to go into action on very short notice. If the UN were given the resources to setup an organisation that would work in the same way (but with different aims) it would be very much more effective at responding to disasters like this.

After all, we use the normal military in situations like this – who aren’t even properly equipped for performing this job!

Snow and Pavements in the UK

 General, Media, Politics  1 Response »
Jan 102010
 

I dare say everyone in the UK is familiar with this problem – pavements that after a big snow fall end up coated in a thin (or thick) sheet of white ice. It varies in slipperiness from “quite” to “you’re going down”, and is very tiring to walk on because of the strain of making sure you have a good grip before taking the next step.

Apparently in the dim and distant past – before the winter of 1962/1963 (which was a biggie if anyone is wondering), it was common for everyone to clear the pavement in front of their house. Now there’s still a few who do it today, or at least there are a few who eventually get around to it after a few days – suggestion: if you’re going to clear your pavement, do it early before it ends up as ice, it will be a lot easier!

But the vast majority of pavements do not get any kind of treatment until the council gets around to them. We could be all pathetic and whinge about how the council is not doing its job properly and do nothing else. Or we could do something sensible – like clear our pavements ourselves.

But what about all those dire warnings that clearing your pavement could make you liable for being sued when someone takes a tumble ? It is rumoured that this is why people stopped clearing their pavements after 1962/1963, after someone did sue. Well it’s a load of rancid rhinoceros dung :-

  • BBC News (the journalist says “possibly”; the solicitor says “It would be quite difficult to prove and quite difficult to proceed with a claim.”

There’s plenty of other articles out there saying that you might be sued for clearing the pavement outside your home; but you can be sued for popping out of the house and accidentally knocking over someone in your rush. The fault is not with the law (or with clearing pavements), but with morons who sue at the drop of a hat and at the sniff of a lucrative payout.

We could do with a law saying that those responsible for falls on icy pavements are a) the person who fell (whatever happened to personal responsibility anyway?) and b) the weather (or if you want a person to blame, start believing in one of those god people).

In the absence of such a law it is worth remembering that :-

  1. You are exceptionally unlikely to be sued.
  2. You can always counter-sue the moron for being an anti-social moron (well you can try).
  3. You could always clear half of the pavement so people have a choice of whether to use an untreated surface or a treated surface.
  4. You could always have a lottery for your street so you get to clear the pavement in front of a random house, and destroy the results afterwards. When the householder is sued they can legitimately claim “it wasn’t me wot done it”, and if you destroy the results of the lottery, and carefully forget who did what, the “culprit” won’t be found. Incidentally this also solves the problem of those who can’t or won’t help – those who volunteer get two or three houses to do, and the whole street gets cleared.

Going back a bit, the responsibility for falling rests with the person who slips and falls. It may be harsh, but so is life. It is perfectly possible to arrange for adequate footwear (and straight after this blog is posted, I’ll be buying online something equivalent to crampons). Blaming someone else for your tumble is the sort of behaviour that should bring howls of derision and a few rotten vegetables.

Similarly blaming “the council” for not sorting out the pavements is a little unfair – whilst the council may grit pavements when it is convenient for them to do so, their main responsibility is to ensure that food can get to the shops. In unusually harsh weather (which we have had just now), the council simply isn’t going to be able to get around to the “nice to haves”.

Part of the problem is the possibility of legal liability which the media does it’s unfortunate best to promote – not intentionally perhaps. But by mentioning it whenever the subject of clearing pavements comes up. Usually in a context that on the surface allows for the possibility that liability is ridiculous, but with an undercurrent that re-enforced the myth that clearing pavements could lead to legal trouble.

Is it too much to ask that the media leave this subject alone as much as possible ?

And lastly, lets ignore the possibility of being sued and just clear the pavements.

Inappropriate Gas Supply Whinging

 General  No Responses »
Jan 082010
 

In the recent inclement weather the demand for gas has gone up a trifle (bear in mind I’m English – we call a wild gale “a moderate breeze”). To help balance supply and demand, the National Grid has started started suggesting that certain companies switch to some other energy supply.

Now these companies with very high energy requirements bought into special contracts that basically say that their gas supply is very heavily discounted in exchange for the National Grid being able to cut their supply in certain situations. Like the current weather and associated increased demand for heating.

Now some of these companies on such contracts are now complaining about losing their gas supply and how this will affect their recovery from the recession. Now I’m going to say something the National Grid spokesperson(s) can’t or won’t say.

Shut up and get on with it! You took advantage of the cheap gas whilst times were good, and are now complaining about the reason for the cheap price. If you want reliable supply, you need to pay the full price like the rest of us!

OpenSolaris, and mod_security2

 Computing  No Responses »
Jan 072010
 

For various reasons I have decided that I need to install mod_security2 on my personal web server. This is a Solaris zone running on an OpenSolaris global zone with various bits of software provisioned by OpenCSW. Unfortunately (or fortunately at least from the point of view that I get to do something interesting), mod_security2 is not something provided by OpenCSW.

For even more various reasons, I decided to “formalise” my notes on building, installing, and configuring mod_security2.

Before attempting to build mod_security2, it is important to have a functional build environment. This includes :-

  • Installing the apache2_devel package from OpenCSW (pkg-get -i apache2_devel)
  • Installing the gcc3 package from OpenCSW
  • Installing the following OpenSolaris packages (pkg install XXX) :- SUNWhea, SUNWarc, SUNWbtool
  • Installing the SunStudio package from Sun. It may be possible that gcc3 is not necessary with this installed, but I ended up with both so advise you too as well. In addition to installing it in the standard location (/opt/SUNWspro) it is also necessary to create a symlink in the place where the OpenCSW developer placed his/her copy of SunStudio :- mkdir -p /opt/studio/SOS11; ln -s /opt/SUNWspro /opt/studio/SOS11/SUNWspro

The next step is to setup a shell environment appropriate to configuring and compiling mod_studio2 :-

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/SUNWspro/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/csw/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/csw/gcc3/bin
export CC=gcc

(The above presumes the use of a shell that understands the above syntax)

The next step is to unpack the module source code, and configure it  :-

cd /var/tmp
gunzip -c modsecurity-apache_2.5.11.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd modsecurity-apache_2.5.11
cd apache2
./configure --with-apxs=/opt/csw/apache2/sbin/apxs \
   --with-pcre=/opt/csw \
   --with-apr=/opt/csw/apache2 \
   --with-apu=/opt/csw/apache2//bin/apu-config

That should successfully general a Makefile. Edit this makefile and remove all references to “-Wall” (for APSX_EXTRA_CFLAGS, also remove the proceeding “-Wc,”). This is because modules will compile with SunStudio’s compiler no matter what we try to do to stop it, and SunStudio does not understand “-Wall”.

Now finally you can compile the software :-

make
sudo make install

Now we are at the point where we can start configuring mod_security2.

In the main httpd.conf file, add the following two directives somewhere appropriate (i.e. close to the other “LoadModule” directives) :-

LoadFile /opt/csw/lib/libxml2.so
#   Check that this library is installed!
LoadModule unique_id_module libexec/mod_unique_id.so
#   This will be already in the file but may be commented out
LoadModule security2_module libexec/mod_security2.so
#   And this is the one we're interested in.

At this point, try a graceful restart (/opt/csw/apache2/sbin/apachectl graceful) to be sure that the relevant code loads. Now onto enabling the module and configuring it with the “Core Rule Set” …

First copy the rules subdirectory to an appropriate place and fix the permissions :-

cp -rp rules /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity
chown -R root:root /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity
chmod -R o+r /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity
find /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity -type d -exec chmod o+x {} \;

In the file modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_global_config.conf, change SecDataDir to /var/tmp.

In the file modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_config.conf :-

  1. Change SecAudditLog to var/log/modsec_audit.log
  2. Change SecDebugLog to var/log/modsec_debug.log

Now add the following to httpd.conf :-

Include etc/modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_global_config.conf
Include etc/modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_config.conf
Include etc/modsecurity/base_rules/*conf

And gracefully restart Apache.

At this point, mod_security2 is running and blocking stuff, but has not been finely “tweaked” to the local applications – at the very least it partially breaks WordPress, and may well break other applications.

The Big Snow Reaches Portsmouth

 General  No Responses »
Jan 062010
 

So last night we had a huge whoomph, and this big pile of snow landed on Portsmouth (and many other areas of Southern England) last night. With something like 7cm of snow in Portsmouth this is probably the hardest hit Portsmouth has been since before I started living here. In fact I don’t recall many times the snow being this heavy anywhere (except in the US).

Of course other areas were even harder hit with up to 30cm is snow in places around the South. This has caused traffic chaos with people trapped in cars for up to 12 hours not too many miles from here, and at work this morning most drivers did not arrive. As the snow was continuing to fall heavily, work rather quickly decided to shut for the day and send us all home. Some of us continued to work from home 😐

Some of the thoughts that occurred as various reactions to the adverse weather set in …

Northerners keep criticising Southerners for being wimps when it comes to weather. Well this time the reaction was particularly irritating. The previous day the North also caught some heavy snow, but considerably less that the South got (yes some places in the North got more – places that get snow almost every day in the winter). Did Southerners start criticising when the North ground to a halt ? No we didn’t. It’s about time that Northerners stopped talking about soft Southerners when the weather we got yesterday and today was severe enough to cause the North to grind to a halt.

Businesses of course were whinging about all the money they will lose because of the bad weather – the lost production because of workers being unable to turn up, shoppers not diving in to spend money, etc. Well grow up, and live with it. Nature can’t be beaten, and there are more important things than making money – staying safe and avoiding fatal accidents in bad weather for one.

People are complaining about the council gritting operations being unable to keep the roads open and safe. They obviously don’t understand exactly how the “grit” works. In fact the grit is in fact rock salt and the salt helps to melt a limited amount of ice or snow. That is why gritters repeatedly grit roads when things get bad. What with abandoned cars getting in the way of gritters and the need to repeatedly grit roads, the number of roads that get effectively gritted goes down. Gritting cannot keep roads open in these kind of conditions.

I would say that drivers need to be a little more careful and a little more considerate of other road users, except that it is really the idiot car drivers who need to do that. It is just that the idiots are more prominent in these kinds of conditions. Some advice :-

  • If you don’t know how to drive in snow, don’t try.
  • Drive slowly … there is too great a chance of you sliding uncontrollably. I don’t care if you bend your nice shiny car, but I don’t particularly want to be smeared across the pavement at the end of your skid.
  • When clearing the snow off your windscreen, do the same for the rest of the car. All that snow will often leap off the car as you are moving along and the dropped snow will make things tricky for anyone else around. That is if it doesn’t hit anyone!

Lastly, whilst I have every sympathy for anyone who slips and falls in the present conditions there are some who wear entirely inappropriate footwear for the conditions. Wearing flat bottomed shoes with no grip and then complaining about how slippery things are just isn’t right.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries