I’m A Rascist

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Sep 122007
 

I’m part of the human race and I’m mostly happy about that. We have a bewildering variety of members … tall ones, short ones, fat ones, thin ones, bright ones, dim ones; we even have two different sexes (which makes things even more interesting). We also have a wide variety of different shades of skin colour, and for some totally incomprehensible reason some people seem to get excited about this. The overly excitable people seem to want to divide us up into different “races” based seemingly on what colour our skin is, and use this arbitrary division to make assumptions about the person wearing the skin. As if the colour of the dead matter that keeps the squishy bits in, and the Sun (and rain) out is particularly important. Of course it is not just skin colour that matters to these people …

Apparently I’m white (although it being at the end of the summer, I’m not really sure I’m white enough to qualify). Which makes me a member of a certain “race”. I’m also English which makes me a member of a smaller “race”, and could mean I’m also Anglo-Saxon (another “race”). I live in a land called “Britain” which gives me a good chance of being a member of the “Brythonic” “race” as well. I live in the south of England so I’m also a “southerner”, and I live in Portsmouth so I’m obviously better than someone from Southampton. In addition I live on the south side of a certain road which makes me far better than those who live on the north side.

Well that’s obviously rubbish! And for the record, historically that last division (north and south of a certain road in Portsmouth) was viewed in that sort of way. If you look closely, what I’m demonstrating is that if we get hung up on differences then we can make smaller and smaller sub-divisions where the group we belong to is “better” and those outside are “worse”. And the factors that determine what sub-division we belong to (skin colour, ancestry, etc.) are the worst possible factors in determining someone’s value.

Apparently being determined not to recognise any sub-division of the human race as being valid makes me some kind of liberal wuss, which bothers me not at all … and those who criticise and call me a wuss for holding this position should sit back and think for a bit. It’s not liberal wusses that cause so much grief with their artificial sub-divisions of the human race.

I’m a rascist and fully prejudiced in favour of the human race … every single last one of them.

What’s Wrong With The Apple Ipod Touch

 Computing  No Responses »
Sep 092007
 

Rather than look at what is right about the new iPod Touch as everyone else seems to be doing, what about looking at what is wrong with the new device ? There is apparently plenty to like about it, but there are a few problems. Some of which only apply to certain kinds of possible customer of course.

Where Are The Higher Capacity iTouches ?

8Gbytes and 16Gbytes are quite large for a flash-based device, but this is Apple’s flagship media player … compare the price with the iPod classic! So what options are there for something a bit more usable for those who like to carry all (or nearly all) of their music with them ? Obviously making a 32Gb or 128Gb model would require more flash chips than the single-chip based iTouch, and would cost a bit more. But why not give consumers the choice ?

Several years ago I said that the lowest capacity flash-player I would be interested in would be 32Gbytes or more. With an appropriate choice of encoding format I could still fit my full CD collection into a 32Gbyte player; not much chance of getting it into a 16Gbyte player!

What About SDHC Slot(s) ?

Apple seems to concentrate on the market segment who replaces their media player every couple of years, and their products show this … no easily replaceable battery, and no expandable storage. Now there are plenty of people who will buy new iPods as soon as they are announced, but there are also plenty of people who are more inclined to buy a player and stick with it until it breaks. This includes the poor who cannot afford to replace their player every two years.

Adding a bit of ‘future proofing’ to the iTouch is hardly going to stop the gadget freaks from replacing their player regularly, but will make things a bit better for those who do not (or cannot). Why not have a screw fastened case that allows the user to get at 2-4 SDHC slots (perhaps one or two already filled with the standard flash memory) so that they can grow the player themselves ?

Where Are The Audio Codecs?

Apple’s firmware for the iPods (and presumably iTouches) supports a very limited set of audio codecs; just compare with the list of codecs supported by Rockbox (an opensource firmware that runs on many Apple iPod players and many others as well). If a bunch of hackers working part-time can produce software that can support so many audio codecs, why can’t Apple?

Most people do not care (or even know) about audio codecs, but some do. As an example, I usually use the OGG format which is widely believed by audiophiles to offer the best quality at the lowest bitrate. In non-geek terms, that means I can fit more tracks on my iBox (a rockboxed-ipod) without compromising on quality. If I were to switch to an iTouch I would have to re-encode all my audio files to MP3 (or AAC) which would take an age and I would be able to fit even less on the player.

Film Review: Apocalypto

 Film  No Responses »
Aug 262007
 

Format: DVD

IMDB Entry: here

An entertaining man-chase through the jungle of pre Columbus central America. The hero of the story is taken from his village by slavers to a Mayan city where he only just misses being sacrificed, escapes and is pursued through the jungle by the men who captured him. An added twist is that his wife and child are hiding from the slavers in a hole in the ground and can’t escape from it without his help.

It is a pretty good film, but I was a little disappointed it was not better … given the claims for it. I think because it is a rare example of a film covering pre-Columbus America which did not compromise by insisting on making the audio language Mayan. Everyone then was under the impression that this was the film on Mayan civilisation, and the reality is somewhat less so. We only see a quick snap-shot of Mayan civilisation … perhaps 10-20 minutes of the length of the film.

The film however is pretty good but doesn’t quite come up to an epic portrayal of Mayan civilisation. I guess we will have to wait for that.

IT: Linux, ZFS and Open-Source Licenses

 Computing, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 252007
 

If you’re hoping to read about Linux finally getting ZFS (except as a FUSE module) then you are going to be disappointed … this is merely a rant about the foolishness shown by the open-source world. It seems that the reason we won’t see ZFS in the Linux kernel is not because of technical issues but because of licensing issues … the two open-source licenses (GPL and CDDL) are allegedly incompatible!

Now some may wonder why ZFS is so great given that most of the features are available in other storage/filesystem solutions. Well as an old Unix systems administrator, I have seen many different storage and filesystem solutions over time … Veritas, Solaris Volume Manager, the AIX logical volume manager, Linux software RAID, Linux LVM, …, and none come as close to perfection as ZFS. In particular ZFS is insanely simple to manage, and those who have never managed a server with hundreds of disks may not appreciate just how desireable this simplicity is.

Lets take a relatively common example from Linux; we have two disks and no RAID controller so it makes sense to use Linux software RAID to create a virtual disk that is a mirror of the two physical disks. Not a difficult task. Now we want to split that disk up into seperate virtual disks to put filesystems on; we don’t know how large the different filesystems will become so we need to have some facility to grow and shrink those virtual disks. So we use LVM and make that software RAID virtual disk into an LVM “physical volume”, add the “physical volume” to a volume group, and finally create “logical volumes” for each filesystem we want. Then of course we need to put a filesystem on each “logical volume”. None of these steps are particularly difficult, but there are 5 seperate steps, and the separate software components are isolated from each other … which imposes some limitations.

Now imagine doing the same thing with ZFS … we create a storage pool consisting of two mirrored physical disks with a single command. This storage pool is automatically mounted as a filesystem ready for immediate use. If we need separate filesystems, we can create each with a single command. Now we come to the advantages … filesystem ‘snapshots’ are almost instantaneous and do not consume additional disk space until changes are made to the original filesystem at which point the increase in size is directly proportional to the changes made. Each ZFS filesystem shares the storage pool with the size being totally dynamic (by default) so that you do not have a set size reserved for each filesystem … essentially the free space on every single filesystem is available to all filesystems.

So what is the reason for not having ZFS under Linux ? It is open-source so it is technically possible to add to the Linux kernel. It has already been added to the FreeBSD kernel (in “-CURRENT”) and will shortly be added to the released version of OSX. Allegedly because the license is incompatible. The ZFS code from Sun is licensed under the CDDL license and the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL license. I’m not sure how they are incompatible because frankly I have better things to do with my time than read license small-print and try to determine the effects.

But Linux (reluctantly admittedly) allows binary kernel modules to be loaded into the kernel and the license on those certainly isn’t the GPL! So why is not possible to allow GPLed code and CDDLed code to co-exist peacefully ? After all it seems that if ZFS were compiled as a kernel module and released as a binary blob, it could then be used … which is insane!

The suspicion I have is that there is a certain amount of “not invented here” going on.

Computer Security

 Computing  No Responses »
Aug 102007
 

The UK news this morning (and last night) had an item on about plans to tackle the problem of phishing with various suggestions (most of which make sense). Similar stories about phishing and how people are being ripped off by fraudsters regularly come up on the news. One thing that rarely gets a mention except in passing with a suggestion to run a ‘protected computer’ is how regular computer users who ignore security are contributing to the problem.

Almost all spammers (and phishers) these days use botnets to spew out their sewage; as someone who runs a mail server for a large organisation I regularly take a look at where spams entered the Internet mail system. In the vast majority of cases it has entered via a location that is obviously a client machine operated by an ‘innocent’ person ignorant of what their computer is being used for.

There are plenty of places to point the finger of blame …

  • The companies who produce operating systems that are so vulnerable to being compromised when connected to the Internet.
  • Those who use viruses and worms to create ‘botnets’ of vulnerable machines to be used for a variety of purposes.
  • The ISPs who irresponsibly fail to block outgoing mail not going through their mail servers. Whilst some (me!) should be able to opt out of such a block because we (I) run our own mailserver it should not be open by default.

Finally, the person who runs a computer irresponsibly is also to blame. Obviously not everyone wants to become a security expert, but there are a few easy steps to make it more difficult for your computer to be broken into. And they should accept that if they get infected they could get slung into a ‘quarantine’ … ISPs can and should be able to detect infected machines being used by spammers and sling them into a ‘quarantine’ network with limited functionality. This ‘quarantine’ is dead simple to setup, as I’ve done it myself.

To reduce it to an analogy, if you were to leave a car parked with the handbrake left off are you totally blameless if someone leans against the car and it rolls down a hill and kills someone ? People tend to regard leaving an infected computer online as being a trivial matter; it is not.

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