Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be preparing a presentation for a middle school class here in Switzerland, where I will try to present the a rational response to the “Piracy is Stealing” propaganda machine. I’ve created an “Ask Slashdot” submission, to try and gather some good ideas/inspiration/references/facts and figures. I didn’t write the blurb very well though. Anyway, I’d appreciate any comments, tips, and citations anyone has.
G.
So, let’s have a look at the NY Times headlines today. Here are my favorites:
I always recommend reading the articles of course, but look at what we can get from just the headlines: The financial crisis dominates, which isn’t suprising.  Our pres. wants to dump a lot of money into kickstarting the economy, which is probably not a bad idea. On the other hand our fiscal deficit is getting absolutely terrifying. So we need some creative ideas for cutting spending. Well, as usual we find we are cutting funding for humanities studies. No big surprises there. One that did however catch my eye, and inspired this post, its the  fact that some states are apprently considering halting the death penalty in order to save money.
Well, I think cutting humanities education is a bad idea. The american populace is already sorely lacking in critical-thinking skills and cultural. social, and historical awareness. Good democracies require a thinking voting population, and vocational training doesn’t teach critical thinking. But cutting the death penalty is pretty interesting, since it’s such a debateable practice.  That one caught me by surprise.
What would surprise and delight me however, would be for major policy makers to start talking about ending the war on drugs, and switching to a harm-reduction policy regarding drugs. The only discussion I’ve seen in the major media here is the article “Latin Americans Decry U.S. Drug War”. The headline certainly doesn’t say anything new to anyone who has been paying attention.
I have to do some research, and provide some good citations to back up the following claims, but that will have to wait for another post. The evidence all pretty much points to the same conclusion though: We can do a better job of preventing and treating drug-dependancies and drug-abuse by spending money on treatment and education, rather than dumping the money into a racist “war on drugs”, which vilifies and destroys other nations, subjegates huge chunks of our population, and creates criminals where there need be none. Harmless drugs which offer positive social and medical benefits need to be decriminalized entirely, and marketed through legal and controlled channels
To start with, let’s decriminalize marijunna, and restrict its sale to people above the age of 18. As people grow a little more enlightened we can extend this to magic mushrooms, and later perhaps even lsd, ecstasy, and ketamine. If we, as a society, want to exercise a little more control over drug abuse, why not the following proposition: In order to enjoy recreational drugs, you have to get a licence to purchase them, just like you need a licence to drive. If you engage in antisocial behavior while one drugs (like a drunken and disorderly conduct, or driving while intoxicate for examples), you can have your license suspended.   When you purchase drugs you consumption can be tracked, and if your consumption exceeds certain limiits, you can be sent for evaluation and counseling. A particularly innovative approach would be to make the legal status of a drug actually depend on the danger levels of the drugs (toxicity, danger of addiction, social harm), and its benefits (medical, psychotherapeutic, recreational and social).  Under such a system, tobacco and alcohol would be more tighly regulated than marijuanna.
Suddenly we’ll have a lot less people in jail, which will reduce our (huge) budget for the “correctional system”. People who just want to smoke a joint, won’t be labelled criminals. People will have more respect for the law, since there will be fewer useless, unfair, restrictive, pointless and patently harmful laws on the books. We can tax the drug consumption, and increase government revenues. Police budgets can be reduced, or rechannelled into useful activities: i.e. fighting crimes that are actually harmful. You know, things like rape, homicide, white collar crime…
On the positive side, at least some mainstream media are reporting on this issue, without the usual bias. On the other hand, Obama’s comments thus far regarding the drug war have not been promising. Whether this is due to actual indoctrination on Obama’s part, or a sense of pragmatism is unclear, but I suspect it is more the latter. The guy has a lot of things he has to change, and campaigning against the drug war can be a real political liability. So let’s try to change that situation!
I’ve picked 3 dongle manufacturers who have professional websites, and make a positive impression regarding support and quality. All support Java Native Interfaces (JNI).
I manage 5 Fedora installations: my work and home PC’s, my laptop, my fiancee’s laptop, and my buddy Charles’ PC, who is generously giving Linux a shot. I told him he’d probably have an easier time with Ubuntu, but that I would have an easier time helping with Fedora, as that’s what I know. Often I update these machines at widely different intervals, particular with Charles’ PC, since I don’t see him that often.
Fedora is great in many ways, and I stick with it because I’m pretty happy with it, philosophically and technically, but you often have to put a little work on it, particularly if you’re a 64-bit user and you to use a good graphics card. Anyway, I thought it would be handy for me to have a checklist on the web, so I don’t forget anything the next time. This is just a collection of solutions I’ve dug up somewhere else, but it might still be useful for others.
These are the things I have to do to get Fedora working acceptably:
1. Fix the DNS bug
Apparently there is a known bug, which mucks up the domain name lookup with certain ISP’s, of which bluewin (my ISP) is one.  In the bug description the complaint is that you get unreliable name lookups, but in the case of bluewin, you get no successful lookups. A workaround is described here. All you have to do is:
2. Access to fusion:
Fusion is a merge of the largest existing addon repos, and means to be the extra repo for fedora, including (separate) free and non-free packages that Fedora is not able to ship of license or export regulations (see comment by ingvar).
# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
3. Add mp3 support
I use Amarok as my primary music application. Fedora comes with Amarok 2, which I am still evaluating, but I found Amarok 1 vastly superior to the alternatives, so I’m hoping Amarok continues to be awesome. I actually hate switching apps. Unfortunately, just installing Amarok gives me no sound. After running Amarok in a console and checking out the output, I tried:
# yum groupinstall phonon*
which did the trick. I Finally, to support mp3’s, you can do:
# yum groupinstall sound-and-video
4. Get Flash (i.e. Youtube) working
This solution comes from here.  I quote verbatim:
At this point you tube shows up fine.
5. Enable your 3d hardware acceleration
In my case, I just run ‘yum install kmod-nvidia’ and restart X. If you have a radeon card, I suppose the solution is the obvious one.
6. Make the fat drive writeable, and add NTFS write support, so people can easily work with Windows.
For any fat partition, change the umask in fstab to 000. For NTFS support, ‘yum install ntfs-config.noarch’.
7. Disable “physical” file folders.
This is the annoying behavior, default in gnome, that opens a new window for every folder that you open. Get rid of it by double clicking on a folder, and in the resulting window open edit->preferences->Behavior, and check the box for “Always open in browser windows”. There is a scriptable way to do this, so if someone wants to tell me, please do.
8. Allow automounting of usb drives etc.
I really hope this is an error, but it’s possible it’s a security precaution. By default, if you plug in a usb stick or some such storage device, you won’t see it automatically on your desktop. This is because automounting isn’t allowed by default. You can change this by going to System->Preferences->Authorizations and click on hal->storage->Mount file systems from removable drives. Click on the Edit box in the Implicit Authorizations sections, and change Anyone to yes.
9. Scripts:
I have a script which installs a lot of the stuff I typically want but is not included in Fedora by default. These include mplayer, par2, rar, amarok(music listening), emacs, development tools, etc. If you want it, the script is here.
Well, at this point things are getting as bad as I figured they would. The Lehman brothers are going bankrupt, and Merryl Lynch is being sold to prevent the same from happening to them. The USD is at 1.1 CHF. About a year ago I warned my relatives they should put some money in other currencies, since I figured the USD would tank to about even with the CHF when the sub-prime crisis finally hit. I don’t think anyone listened to me, but at least I tried.   I remember telling Herta I estimated it as about 50% probable that the USD would hit about even with USD sometime in the next two years, and I figured about a 5% chance that it would hit a real crisis, like 0.2 USD to the CHF.
Well, my 50% probably hit right in the middle of the time interval I gave (back in May). It’s crawled back up to 1.1, but now with the latest wave in the crisis, I’m thinking it’ll go down again. Selfishly speaking, I hope it tanks quickly over the next week, so my money is worth more when I travel to the States. And of course, it makes my student loans cheaper.
But the Lehman brothers going under is pretty scary. This summer I was working for an investment compan in Zug (one floor below the Mark Rich group). The lead investor was telling us the investment infrastructure was provided by said Lehman brothers. Already then there was quite a bit of discussion about their troubles in the financial mags. Someone asked if the company was concerned about the Lehmann brothers troubles. The lead investor made the comment that “well, if the Lehman brothers go under we have a lot bigger problems than just losing our infrastructure” -> referring to the overall infrastructure collapse that would be caused by such an event. That will now happen.
On the comforting side, the government is at least stepping in to regulate the collapse, to try and mitigate the repercussions. Let’s hope it works.  And lets hope we can get the Republicans away from the controls come November.
Life has been very busy.
I picked up what may be the best training aid I have found to date: “The Triathlete’s Training Bible” by Joe Friel. It’s extremely well written and clear, and it touches on nearly all of the questions I have about training and recovery. It’s so good I think anyone training seriously for anything, regardless of whether or not they have any interest in any of the triathlon disciplines, would benefit from reading it. And of course it’s wonderful if you are training for any or all of the triathlon subsports. It compiles a lot of information that is otherwise hard to find, or at least never synthesyzed elsewhere, to give the reader a better ability to coach him or herself.
A big issue in training is recovery time, and this is also true for fat-ass athletes like myself. One point which is especially important for hobby athletes like myself is the problem of burning the candle at both ends. I (and I don’t think I’m alone) have the tendency to think of my sports activities as fun and relaxind, something which I use to balance my work and intelectual stress. Up to a certain point it works this way: more sports means I’m able to work better and more effectively in an intelectual capacity. It helps my mood, concentration and energy levels. But too much stress, be it from work, personal responsibilities, trying to keep to my training plan, or even the purely physical stress of getting a bit rambunction on an exciting mountain bike ride, can tip you over towards that overtraining zone. Go too far and the energy levels get low, recover time stretches out, and everything suffers.
On the other hand, you get your best performance if you regularly approach this overtraining level, without quite crossing the line. Surfing the overtraining wave, but getting out before it crashes. I’m not sure if Bettina and I are doing a good job of that, or a bad one.
Two weekends ago we did 1/4 of the Many-Hills show, a bike-marathon trail around Zurich. We actually customize it a little, starting out at our home in Hirzel, biking down to Sihlbruck, following the traditional many-hills route over the Albis to the Uetliberg, and then taking the Uetliberg downhill into Zurich. The last bit is total downhill candy, and primarily works out our finger muscles from all the riding the brakes.  We then take the train to Horgen, and ride over Horgen oberdorf back home to Erni. This is maybe a little over 40km, and maybe something like 1200 m in climbing, but much of it is pretty steep, bringing our pulse rate about the 90% range. So this compeletly kicked my but. Did a few easy workouts but I was still sore when Sunday rolled around.
Sunday Bettina and I drove to Leukerbad, where we tried out the biking section of the Gemmi Triathlon. I’m happy to report that our legs are up to the task. Afterwards we hiked up in the mountains, camped out, had dinner, and hiked back down the following Sunday.
I’m always amazed out how a hike completely kicks our asses. We both run, walk, bike and swim regularly, but strap on a backpack and hike 20-40 km with 1000-2000 m elevation, and man we suffer for days. Today my legs finally feel somewhat normal, although my shoulders are still a bit sore. But it was a beatiful hike, if a little stressy with the time constraints.  There was a good bit of scrambling and scary stuff, which was kinda fun.
I’m also happy to report that in the last year, while my weight has only dropped about 2km (from 92 kg to just under 90), my body fat percentage has dropped from 22% to just under 17%.   So probably by next year I’ll be back to my fighting form again.
This weekend I suffered terribly from overtraining. On saturday B and I rode the bikes to Rothenthurm (which is about 24 km away, no terrible hills) to look at a new used car. I was incredibly weak. I could barely puff up the hills, which would ordinarily pose no problem. We took the train home since I was so worn out. I was supposed to be social and show up at a party for one of Betinna’s friends, but I was completly ko and had to just go and lie down.
Sunday wasn’t much better. I felt completely worn out. No energy, and in paritucular no strength in my legs. I could barely make it up the stairs. My legs weren’t sore, they just had no power. I wore some long underwear which I though qualified as compression tights, and my compression socks all day. I’m convinced that this helped. I also worked through some stretching routines, which seemed to have immediate benefits.
This morning I woke up at 7:30, surprised that Bettina had woken and made it out of the house without waking me whatsoever. But I felt refreshed. I got my stuff together, packed up my backpack, and ran the 14 km to work. I feel awesome now. I’m not even vaguely fatigued. I feel alert and energetic. If anything I feel hyper.
It’s fantastic to finally be reaping some benefits from all of the training I’ve been doing. For months I’ve spent most of my time feelilng fatigued, tired, and or sore. I still have a little soreness, but it seems to be a good sore. Okay I had a couple of rough days this week, but now I’m back at training fit. So I think the Swiss bike masters 75km race is well within reach (5 weeks to go: 4 training, 1 taper).   I’m still holding flat at 90kg, but my body composition is certainly changing.
In the last month I’ve made the following changes to my training routine, which I think are working: First, I’m doing a little yoga/stretching every single day, especially when I feel miserable.  Secondly, I’m taking creating supplements (which I will continue until the bike race, at which point I’ll stop until the triathlon). Thirdly, because I’m focusing on the triathlon in the long run, I’m doing more multi-sport/cross training.   And it seem to be working so hooray.
Bettina seems to be suffering at the moment. I’m hoping she’ll get her energy back soon, but it’s good that I get a chance to get a little lead on her in the training. Maybe I can finally beat her in a race.
I went to a Jewish school grade 1- grade 5. I spent my summer with my ultra-catholic, ultra-traditional German grandparents. My grandfather wore a Hitler-mustache. I’m told he used to say “I had mine first. Let Hitler shave his.” My grandparents were worried I would go to hell because I was going to a Jewish school. These opposing forces in my life left me a sort of perpetual inner conflict.
I recently gave my Swiss girlfriend Maus to read, and it was interesting hearing her perspective on it. Since I went to a Jewish school I grew up learning more about the holocaust than your average American, particularly on impact on the Jewish people and how it pertains to the modern Jewish identity, in particular Israel. Back there, my sister was the only kid I knew who didn’t personally know someone that had survived the holocaust. I think they all had a relatively direct connection to the Holocaust, whether it was a family member, or just a distant friend of the family now living in Israel. We spent a lot of time covering both the historical and emotional aspects thereof.
Now that was always kinda interesting for me, because I had to reconcile that with my German grandparents, who were responsible adults, even property owners, during the war. They were later refugees who had to leave their land in the Sudatenland, and resettle in Bavaria.
Now most Germans suffered as a result of WWII, by the end for certain. So as a result of this, and as a result of the moral implications of supporting the Nazis, it’s pretty hard to find a survivor who will admit to being supportive of Hitler and his policies. Okay, nowadays there aren’t so many survivors alive who were culpable adults during WWII, but back in the seventies there were plenty. I’m certain that if you would have taken a poll in the seventies, you would come to the conclusion that Hitler managed to take over and run Germany with the support of <1% of its population. This of course was not the case.
History shows, of course, that very very few of the German population actively opposed Hitler (I would love reference for this). Certainly not to the point of taking any significant risks. Well, very few of them survived it anyway, and my grandparents certainly did not. At the very least they supported Hitler with their silence and complacency, but they were my omi and opa! They were the next best thing (or maybe even sometimes better) to my parents! So of course I worshiped them. At the same time of course I believed every word they were teaching me at the IL Perez school.
I believe that it is for this reason that I worry so much about history repeating itself, with regard to the evils that feed fascism. Even if we disregard fascism per se, the fear of the harm (physical, psychological, economic and spiritual) that an out-of-control system or institution can perform is terrifying.
I knew my grandparents were sweet, nice, loving people, who almost certainly supported Hitler at some point in his career. This was never explicitly discussed, but I guess the majority of Germans supported Hitler at some point in his career, and I see no reason to believe that my Grandparents were an exception.Now, it’s impossible to get good information about this, because they didn’t have freedom of speech, but I wonder at what point most Germans stopped supporting him? Probably when it started negatively affecting their standard of living.
So I quickly came to the conclusion that anyone was capable of being a good nazi, just following orders. This of course proven by the Millgram experiment, but it’s a heady realization for an eight year old.
All of this is a really long winded buildup to saying that healines like: “Bosses’ power to check email”, and “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear”, and “Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in U.S.” really fill me with anxiety.
So, I was thinking about setting up a page to track companies I think are worth avoiding, and what alternatives are available.
I haven’t been able to find a site that does this, at least not in the way that I would like. A buddy and I had talked about starting a site called coporateconcience.org, but we never got past the planning stage. Busy lives. But let’s face it, consumer power is now a bigger player in the world socio-economic development than democratic power. I don’t approve, but in my analysis, it’s the reality. It’s not often talked about directly, but it does crop up in music and speculative fiction. Maybe it’s just blase… everyone knows it so why talk about it? I don’t know…
Anyway, I was recently reading about how Creative, who have been making my sound cards for >10 years, shut down a modder. Legally of course they had every right to do what they did, but in these days where the corporations dictate the laws, “legally” is not equivalent to “morally”.
Details are available here but the gist of it is as follows: Apparently creative “broke” their support for certain Audigy features under Vista. This was done intentionally, as a marketing strategy, in order to force Vista users to upgrade their sound cards. They did this by programming checks for which OS the computer is running, and in the event it is Vista, switching to buggy drivers. This modder took out those checks, and had Vista also go to the working drivers. The point I wish to make is this was an intentional act by Creative.
The most telling line in the whole article is this:
O’Shaughnessy [Creative’s VP of corportate comunications] also wrote that whether ornot it cropples its Vista drivers is a “business decision that only we have the right to make”
Okay, I don’t want to say this kind of behavior is on the same scale as manipulating elections, unscrupulous lobbying, unscrupulous lawyering, or using 13 year old sweat shop slaves to produce your goods. But it freaking annoying and arrogant as hell, don’t you think? Do you want to buy your stuff from a company with that kind of attitude? I certainly don’t, and I happen to be in the market for a soundcard (I’ve been making do with the onboard audio since I built my last PC, but I’m a bit fed up with it), so I’m going to dig around and find an alternative to audio, hopefully one that isn’t quite so asshole-ish to its customers.
Seriously, imagine you’re using your soundcard for several months, one day you update your drivers, and bang, everything is broken. Maybe you have the old drivers, or can find them, and you can make it work, but maybe not, and anyway what a hassle. Or you do what they want and get an upgrade. Well, if that scenario happens to me I’m gonna look hard for an alternative. In this case I’m going to try to avoid the scenario in the first place.
What bugs me is how ordinary this is. This is really the norm in the computer industry, software and hardware. It might be irrational, but I really blame Microsoft. They pioneered these kind of strategies, and virtue of being the big boys on the block, they legitimized them. I can remember several years ago, when Apple implemented a typical Microsoft feature into their Quicktime drivers — a pop up question to ask if you’d like to upgrade to QT-Pro. There was a lot of discussion at the time whether Apple should use such strategies, since it would be losing a certain amount of moral highground over Microsoft, and since they might lose customers. But it seems to have been successful, and this lovely feature remains with us to this day.
In the end though, the problem lies with the consumer. We are all such bloody idiots. That’s the failing in free-market doctrine. The benefits of a free-market economy come only to the extent that the assumption of an informed consumer is true (amongst other assumptions). This assumption really only holds to a limited degree, and marketing departments serve mainly to decrease this degree.
So maybe I should start a corporate conscience site. Maybe it would balance all the people in Marketing out there. I think Bill Hicks was right on when he would say “Anyone out there who’s in marketing? Kill yourselves! Seriously, I’m not joking, go home, put a gun in your mouth, and pull the trigger! I’m not kidding…”
Which gets me to the curmudgeony part of this post. Man, I feel a bit bummed out by how litigous the internet has become. How much like real life… I remember ten years ago, back in the wild west days of the net, where you could say whatever bullshit you liked, and it was virtually unheard of for your words to come and bite you in the ass. Ah well. Let me at least say that wistful reminiscences aside, I don’t thing the net is a worse place than it was.
Well, I finally learned about the Gnu autoconf tools today, and modified the appropriate files so that Meep++ now compiles what it’s supposed to. I finished the reworking of the last name dependancies too, created a svn repository for the code, and made a page for the project. Next step is to generate the latest Doxygen docu, and see how readable things are now. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be in a position to add in the machinery for customizable update loops.
And of course I took Butchie for a run. This time Bettina came along on the mountain bike. Hope you aren’t sick of pictures of great danes in the swiss woods, cuz here’s another one.
The breeders who sold us Butchie have a couple of 6 month old Danes looking for homes. With the two homeless pups, they have 8 danes to take care of. I shudder to think of how much food they go through. So if you’re near Switzerland and want to adopt a nice dane, go check them out.