Too geek or not too geek?

Misquote of the day: 6 meters of sea level rise in 30 years

2008-10-15T12:30:00.006+01:00

Spot the difference between the following quotes and tell me who's right and who's wrong.

The newest scientific insights show that it's very urgent...We don't have 100, but only 30 years to take measures in order to prevent earth from getting warmer in the next centuries and to prevent a sea level rise of 6 meters. This is stated by ...Professor Pier Vellinga (De Telegraaf15/10/2008 source)

And this one:

The newest scientific insights show that sea level will have risen by 6 meters, not in 100 years, but probably already in 30 years. This warning comes from the Dutch...Professor Pier Vellinga (Knack 15/10/2008 source).

In the first quote, we have 30 years to do something - the effects will be visible in a couple of centuries. In the second quote, the effect is there in 30 years. What a difference - you'd expect journalists to do some fact checking first.

Richard Stallman on web applications

2008-10-13T16:33:00.004+01:00

I always believed that Richard Stallman - the author of the Emacs text editor - was a bit weird, but now I have irrefutable proof that the guy is completely nuts.

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software." (source)

He's talking about webmail applications like Gmail, but the very same is true about search engines of course.

So, according to Stallman's logic, if you want to search something on the internet, you should download a copy of all possible websites to your local computer (or order the 20-million CD-box) and do a local search on it.

Happy 'grep'-ing...

Fortis: who has been fooled by Wouter Bos?

2008-10-09T16:16:00.002+01:00

After the nationalization of the Dutch part of Fortis and the takeover of it's Belgian part by BNP Paribas, there was a lot of criticism by Belgians towards Wouter Bos, the Dutch Finance Minister. The impression in Belgium was that Mr Bos forced a split and brought the Belgian part in trouble by suggesting it had serious problems. And this just to buy ABN Amro at a price which was much cheaper than Fortis bought it at the time. But is Mr Bos really the unfair player that brings a complete loss to the Belgians? Did he really pay too little for Fortis NL/ABN Amro?

Honestly, I think Fortis (with tens of billions of Euro debt and at least ten billion Euro in bad loans) could not be saved given the current financial crisis. And I think Wouter Bos takes a serious risk, after all:

Fortis Nederland as a debt of 34 billion Euro, together with the takeover price, this results in 50 billion Euro in debt. Even at a modest interest rate of 4%, this results in 2 billion Euro interests per year to be paid by the Dutch taxpayer. The total amount of money is completely coming from a loan of the Dutch government.
Running a bank in the next 5 or even 10 years, will be a different and harder game than it was in the last 10 years. I doubt Bos will be able to easily sell ABN/Amro soon with a huge profit in the next couple of years. Moreover, the longer he waits, the higher the interest he will have to pay.
In fact, I think the Dutch government will only be able to sell if it successfully integrates ABN and Fortis into one single entity, which involves cutting around 7500 jobs. As a socialist, Mr Bos will have to make tough decisions between profit and employment.
The Dutch government will have to be very careful not to disrupt their internal bank system. The impression might exist that ABN/Fortis has a competitive advantage over other Dutch bank. But masses of people taking away their money from ING or Rabobank and bringing it to the state owned ABN/Fortis might turn out catastrophic as well. Mr Bos might have avoided 'contamination' from other countries, he created a contamination danger within his country.

On the other hand, the Belgian government only invested 4 billion Euro and already has a profit (virtually though) of 1.6 billion Euro. They have no worries and their hands and wallets free to face the following episode of the global crisis.

No I don't think the Belgians played a bad game. Those who are fooled here are - as always - the man in the street.

The Dutch taxpayers might see Mr Bos as their savior now, but they will feel it in their wallet sooner or later.
The Fortis shareholders (a lot of Belgians) are fooled by Mr Leterme, who bought Fortis Bank at a low price and immediately sold it to BNP Paribas with a profit. And this only one week after he stated that Fortis was saved.

I think he real winners in this story are the Belgian government and BNP Paribas.

Fortis's rescue = Europe's failure

2008-09-29T11:28:00.003+01:00

With the 11 billion bailout of Fortis by the Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg governments, Fortis is probably saved from bankruptcy. It is however unclear to me why there was no intervention at European level. Indeed, it would be more natural for the ECB to intervene in the case of Fortis, because:
- Fortis is one of the biggest banks at European level and the number one bank in more than one EU country.
- As the instution that controls several key interest rates, the ECB plays an important role itself in the financial crises.
- The ECB is the monopolist supplier of money in the Euro-zone
- The ECB is the ultimate lender at European level
- Securing financial stability is one of the core tasks of the ECB
- There's a precedent in the US, with the bailout of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac by the Federal Reserve

Instead, we saw an effort of several EU countries taking action, and the EU (ECB) itself...did nothing - not even a single comment on their website. The crisis around Fortis should be a wake-up call for people in the BeNeLux who still believe their future lies in Europe. The fact that a crippled Belgian government (over its head in regional problems) was more decisive than the European institutions, is an example that Europe will not be able to act when times get rough. A multi-speed, multi-direction Europe, with a slow-moving consensus on trivial points and ad-hoc alliances of countries (or countries acting alone) that take the real decisions, is not a 'nightmare' for Europe. It's today's reality.

Quote of the day

2008-09-22T09:24:00.003+01:00

Ann Coulter might be politcally incorrect, and I had no intentions to comment on the upcoming US elections, but this gem is just so spot on that I was lead into temptation.

And now in 2008, we have Democrats attacking Sarah Palin for being a Christian, while comparing Obama to Jesus Christ.
(Ann Coulter on her official site).

Misquote of the day

2008-09-10T12:53:00.006+01:00

Paul Krugman, Ph.D. at Princeton and writer for the New York Times says:

Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist who has been driving much of the recent high-level debate, offers some sobering numbers. Surveying a wide range of climate models, he argues that, over all, they suggest about a 5 percent chance that world temperatures will eventually rise by more than 10 degrees Celsius (that is, world temperatures will rise by 18 degrees Fahrenheit) (source).

Weitzman's paper can be found (here), and his statement on the 5% probability for a 10°C temperature increase is found on page 7:

Without further ado I just assume for purposes of this simplistic example that P[S2>10°C]~5% and P[S2>20°C]~1%, implying that anthropogenic doubling of CO2-e eventually causes P[dT>10°C]~5% and P[dT>20°C]~1%, which I take as my base-case tail estimates in what follows. These small probabilities of what amounts to huge climate impacts occurring at some indefinite time in the remote future are wildly-uncertain unbelievably-crude ballpark estimates - most definitely not based on hard science.

So much for unbiased journalists.

Battlestar Galactica

2008-09-04T09:28:00.002+01:00

Almost everybody I know agrees that Battlestar Galactica is great, but strange things seem to happen when people try to make the comparison between the Battlestar-universe and our world. In a magazine, a reader made the comparison between Israel and the Palestinians (with of course Israel being the evil cylons hunting down the good humans, whose only response is to use terrorist tactics). I, on the other hand, couldn't help to see the parallels between Barack Obama and the traitor Baltar in the saison two finale: Baltar wins the election by calling the voters to end the war driven by religious zealots and to 'believe in change'. The resulting occupation of New Caprica can also be seen as a failed multicultural society.

But isn't that what makes Battlestar Galactica great? The fact that you can see your own truth, no matter what your political ideas are. People under pressure have to make decisions, some turn out to be good ones, some turn out to be bad ones. Some mistakes can be forgiven, others not. It's only after the fact that you can make a judgement. If you're labelling people good or bad without knowing the outcome, you're often doing so based on your personal political ideas, rather than on some objective moral standard.

Technology I actually use

2008-08-08T08:13:00.000+01:00

I'm normally quite skeptical about new technology (I prefer to use the tried and true), but I noticed there are some things that actually changed my life. Things that I once considered as 'gadgets' and that I now use regularly. Here are the most important ones.

Online shopping: since the moment that there are two kids screaming for attention, shopping time got a lot scarcer. My favorite shopping time is now somewhere beteen 10pm and 11pm behind my laptop.

GPS's: I really used to take pride that I had a decent sense of orientation. However GPS's are sooo addictive after while. I'm in the other camp now: I don't care how I get to my destination, I'm confident that my GPS will take me there in a decent way.

Wireless networks. Despite slower network connections and the difficulty to run them under Linux (got a lot better in the last year), I do prefer to enjoy the comfort of sitting where I want.

External harddisks. Maybe I'm a bit different than the masses here after all. My external harddisk is in fact a raid-enabled home NAS.

For the rest: mp3 players, iPhones or PDA's don't say that much to me. I'm thinking of buying an Eee PC someday, but I'm not in a hurry to do so.

Kyoto protocol: results

2008-07-24T09:17:00.004+01:00

The Kyoto protocol became active in 2005 and it's main goal is to reduce CO2. We're now 3.5 years later and when you try to look at results, it's difficult to find any. The graph below shows seasonal averaged CO2 since 2000 (data can be found here). As you can see, it will be difficult to find a significant change in the trend.

Another way to look at the Kyoto protocol can be found here: at the time of writing, the Kyoto protocol has reduced temperatures by 0.005345962 °C and cost more than 515 500 000 000 USD (source). If the results are so poor, wouldn't it be better to spend the money on other things? 515 billion USD is a lot of money, one should be able to find some use for it instead of burning it like the way we're doing now.

Only one year left before we're doomed

2008-07-18T07:56:00.003+01:00

Apparently the next President Of The United States needs to save the world from global warming next year or we're all doomed. It's a pity Jesus Christ isn't running for president.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.
Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.
-- James Hansen, director of Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies (aka Nasa's chief climatologist) in a testimony for US Congress Source

Especially the last sentence is intriguing, as if climate ever was 'in humanity's control'. As a kid, I surely have read a story about a crazy inventor who invented a weather machine, but I didn't know people at NASA were actually using them.

I want you for Belgium (again)

2008-07-15T17:01:00.003+01:00

A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail asking me to sign a petition 'to help Belgium' and against institutional reforms. Besides the unsolicited nature of the e-mail and the fact that my name was in the 'to' list together with 10 headhunters or so, something else annoyed me. The guy who sent me the e-mail is a Belgian guy working for a Luxembourg company. At the time I met him, he specifically told me he wanted to work for a Luxembourg company because...taxes are lower there.

Isn't it a bit hypocrite to want 'unity' and 'solidarity' and not wanting to pay the price for it (or rather, wanting others to pay the price)? Besides, when the Flemish want institutional reforms and the Walloon are using their rights to block those reforms, I think a petition against reforms will not help to bring the two people closer together.

On the other hand: the separatists are wrong too when they say Belgians have nothing in common: hypocrisy and tax evasion eagerness is something we all share.

The petition can be found here, but beware: some of the organizers are politicians and any privacy policy is completely lacking.

Computers are still not user friendly

2008-07-01T10:01:00.001+01:00

My wife does not care at all about computers. She only uses them when she needs to and even then, she doesn't want to know the technical details. Of course, this makes her the ideal person to test user friendliness of applications. Recently she wanted to send a couple of family pictures via mail to her friends. Unfortunately:

My camera produces 2.5Mb pictures, and she added 3 or 4 of them in a mail

She sent the pictures to 25 persons, 2 of the mail addresses where incorrect and the server respondend with the complete original mail, including attachments.

When she found out that she was effectively blocking the whole system (because of the limited upload/download speed), she tried to gracefully exit, hitting the 'save as draft' button and 'send/receive' buttons a couple of times first. Since we're using IMAP mail accounts, this made the situation even worse.

Later that night, I could be the hero again by showing her how to reduce the size of the images from 2500x2100 to something like 640x480, which takes around 15 times less space and which made it possible to effectively send the pictures in a couple of minutes instead of hours. But honestly, is it so difficult the write some code that informs the user that his actions will probably block the system for more than an hour and proposing a decent fallback? Is there any e-mail client that offers this function? I don't think so. Of course, power users will feel this is patronizing the user, but looking at the number of mails with pictures I recieve, I think this one can save some headaches.

Quote of the day

2008-06-23T09:47:00.002+01:00

On IT-Business alignment:

The solution isn't more or less business alignment, it's recognising that alignment itself it a fallacious concept. Discussions about alignment are a by-product of the FUD put around by consultancies as the big enterprise integration initiatives of the nineties went off the rails. They created this mental model of something called the "business" and something called "IT" that need to be aligned. It's all the business. You never hear marketing talk about aligning with finance and yet they each perform distinct but complimentary roles that need to cooperate to make a company successful.

I’d go so far as to say that if alignment were possible it would ultimately be detrimental anyway, because the “business” at best would only get exactly what it asked for, without the chance to examine what it could have had if only it knew the capabilities available. To move away from requirements and into possibilities IT needs to grow up, take accountability for its own actions and stop seeing itself as the uninvited guest at the party (source).

Julian Brown

What's hot in DNS scams?

2008-06-13T09:06:00.003+01:00

A couple of days ago, I received this mail.

Dear ... ,

Having had your name and address from China Council for the Promotion of International Trade,we now avail ourselves of this opportunity to write to you and have something important need to confirm with your company.

We are registration service center authorized by CHINAGOV (THE DEVELOPMENT CENTER OF THE STATE COMMISSION OFFICE FOR PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM) in China.We received a formal application from a company(According to The China Law & Privacy Policy,Hidden The Real Name) is applying to register " ... " as their domain names and internet brand in China and also in Asia on June 10,2008. Considering domains and internet brand would involve the intellectual property of your company’s name,patents,trademarks,and copyright, and in order to avoid confusion between them, so we inform you urgently.

At present, many domain name registries or domain name investment companies in China and even the world register domains and internet brand,and then sell them to the owner of trademark at high prices to make huge profit. Therefore, we remind you particularly that if you considered these domain names and internet brand are very important to you and there is necessary to protect them by registering them first, please let someone who is responsible for trademark or domain name contact me as soon as possible,according to the register principle, the original owner of the trademark has the priority to register.Thank you for you cooperation.

Looking forward to your prompt reply,

Kind Regards,

Dr. Jason Wang

Chief Law Officer,Senior Consulting Director

Internet Brand Justice & Safety Dept.

FireTrust Technology Ltd.

Address: Unit2-602,Building4,Third Qianjiang Community,Hangzhou, China

Tel: +86-571-28927205 ext.805(Mon?Fri,9am to 6:30pm,GMT+8) Fax: +86-571-28926277

Email:... Web: ...

This seems to be the latest trend in DNS scams. It almost sounds like an honest business proposal and they certainly raised some concern about the 'intellectual property rights' on the domains I manage. My suspicion got raised because they sent their mail to the obvious 'info' address, which is different from the e-mail address listed in my DNS registration records, so they couldn't have had my 'name and address from China Council for the Promotion of International Trade'. The 'info' address was not in any official record.

What's their proposal? Selling me 20 or so domain names in Asia for 250 EUR per year? No thanks.

The broken window fallacy

2008-05-08T14:42:00.006+01:00

From an article on USNews:

"This issue of energy and global warming has the promise of creating millions of new jobs in America. It can be a win-win, if we do it right."—Sen. Hillary Clinton, at last night's Democratic debate in South Carolina

And with that, Clinton seemingly stumbled into the classic economic trap known as the Broken Window Fallacy. As described by the French economist Fredric Bastiat, the fallacy imagines some punk kid chucking a rock through a store window. A bad thing, right? Yet a contrarian onlooker offers that the troublemaker may have actually helped the economy because now the storeowner will have to hire a glazier, who will make money replacing the window. Then the glazier will use that money to buy bread from a baker, who then might buy shoes from a cobbler. And the "multiplier effect" goes on and on, creating a more prosperous economy.

Wikipedia has a good description of the broken window fallacy. It's main application is of course war, where first buildings (and human lives) are destroyed and that in its turn 'stimulates the economy' because the very same buildings are reconstructed. Since no added value is created, there is no net gain for the economy. The only thing that happens is that money is transferred from one party to another. Or in case of the Iraq war: from the American taxpayer or the Iraqi citizen to Halliburton.

Another addition to consider that the glazier might have paid the boy to smash the window, in that case, the only right classification is theft.

So it goes when you replace existing technology with 'CO2 neutral technology': the only thing that happens is a money stream from one party to another. No real added value is created and therefore, there is no economic benefit. Probably, it doesn't even create jobs. One point that is left to be figured out is whether Al Gore or Hillary Clinton are equivalent to the innocent onlooker, the boy paid by the glazier or the glazier paying the boy.

Quote of the day

2008-05-05T09:01:00.003+01:00

Though it's a one month old quote, it still deserves to be saved for the archives.

"If steps aren't taken to stem global warming, we'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable."

Ted Turner, CNN founder. Source.

Upgrading to Fedora 8

2008-04-16T12:52:00.002+01:00

All my fedora boxes have been upgraded to version 8 and here are the results of the Belgian jury:

Upgrading on i386 was a no-brainer, yum upgrade ran without too much problems.

Upgrading on x86_64 was a major pain.

yum upgrade failed on the following error message: " Error: Missing Dependency: python(abi) = 2.4 is needed by package rpm". Obviously, removing the 'rpm' package - the standard solution for similar problems - was not an option.
Going for the upgrade through Anaconda revealed the anaconda-hang-during-upgrade-bug.
Additional compexity was that the server was a domU instance and the server was physically located at a remote location. So I wasn't keen to burn a new DVD and physically go to the server.

Fast forward to the solution:

Use the command-line program 'virt-install' to start the installation and
Add the updates=http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/updates-f8-yumloop.img option

This automatically downloads and uses the anaconda patch from the right location.
Conclusions:

Always be prepared for unpleasant surprises. I'm still considering moving away from Fedora to something else with less upgrade cycles.
Hurray for command-lines
Hurray for virtualization

A good error message is half the solution

2008-04-03T10:14:00.006+01:00

A have small Storex NAS server at home which is running BSD and supports NFS. Unfortunately, when I tried to mount an nfs share from my fedora box, I got someting like the following error message.

Wrong fs type, bad option or bad superblock

No decent error message in /var/log/messages either. Spent a couple of hours googling the error message without success. This was badly broken.

I didn't need this option badly, so I left the matter as it was, but found it strange that Ubuntu could connect without any problems. I presumed a kind of strange incompatibility between fedora and bsd and filed it under 'will look at it when I have really a lot of time'.

I became suspicious however when it still didn't work under a more recent kernel version and decided to dig to the bottom of it. So I went all the way through:

Switching between a bsd and a linux based nfs server -- no difference

Upgrading my fedora box to the very latest version -- didn't work

Installing a stock fedora 8 system on a different box -- it worked

Comparing packages and services on both boxes

Until finally, finally the solution was there:

yum install nfs-utils

Aaarggh. Why didn't anyone think of more decent error message like 'nfs client missing'. It would have saved me at least a full day.

2008-03-23T22:00:00.005+01:00

I was really surprised to find the following two people in my LinkedIn network today:

John McCain has a LinkedIn profile too, but he's not in my network.

Though I suspect there is some cheating going on (I don't really believe I am a real 3rd degree connection to either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama), it is of course great from a marketing point of view: it it gives you the feeling you are really connected with those people. In reality however, I think the chance of having a chat with one of them on how their kids are doing, is practically equal to zero.

And finally, here's my voting advice to my American friends: vote for the best candidate, whatever that may mean for you.

Webmail

2008-03-19T14:25:00.003+01:00

Forget about the Evolution/Thunderbird/Outlook debate. Large quotas and a good webmail is all you need. My favorite webmail program is Roundcube, together with the Mvision theme (which I found in their forums). Loads fast & user friendly interface. It's been so addictive that I'm using roundcube for 90% of my mail actions now.

Until now, I was using a beta version (v0.1 - rc2) with little or no experience of bugs. Their first stable release (v0.1) is available since March 3rd. Let's download and install the beast...

Xen: reclaiming dom0 memory

2008-02-19T10:27:00.002+01:00

I've always experienced that starting and stopping several virtual hosts in a xen environment, memory is not always given back entirely to the dom0 domain. In the long run, this can lead to your dom0 bailing out of memory. Luckily, there's a trick

xm mem-set 0 1024

Sets back your dom0 memory to 1 Gb.

Browser requirements

2008-02-15T09:35:00.004+01:00

I never thought I would read this on the corporate website of a company with a turnover of more than 500 million EUR, listed on Euronext.

800 x 600 is the best resolution for this website. Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Navigator 4.7 (or later versions) are the supporting browsers. For optimal use this website requires cookies.

Common guys, we're 2008, the browsers you talk about died 10 years ago.

Al Gore: North Polar icecap gone in 5 years

2008-02-03T22:22:00.000+01:00

We could take the whole session talking just about the new scientific evidence of the last few weeks and months showing that the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections have warned us. Perhaps most dramatically one of the new comprehensive studies and computer models of the North Polar icecap now shows that it could be completely and totally gone during summer months in as little as five years.

Al Gore 24 Jan 2008
Hat tip: LVB (http://lvb.net/item/5966)

Boot times take soooo long

2008-01-16T14:01:00.000+01:00

I happily believe that processors have become 20 times faster in the last 10 years, boot times are still horrible. Here's the time it takes to boot the OS, log on and launch firefox with a correct display of the google homepage on a couple of PC's I use. I takes me around 3 seconds to type my user-id, type a password and hit enter, so you could argue that these 3 seconds should be subtracted - on the other hand, it is still time lost.

Professional laptop, Windows XP, wireless network: 1 min 57 sec
Professional laptop, Fedora 8, wireless network: 1 min 27 sec
Home PC, Fedora 7, wired network: 1 min 16 sec
Professional laptop, wired network, connected in a corporate network: 2 min 20 sec

My home PC, which is running on pretty old hardware, has been decently tuned, the others are more or less using the default values.

My guess is you could end up in the 1' - 1'30'' range for all boxes after decent tuning, but why oh why can't this be reduced to, say, 20 seconds or so? I remember this 1'30 - 2'' boot time duration since I was booting MS-DOS from floppy disks. The progress in 20 years: zero, nada, nothing.

Another rather embarrassing conclusion: why oh why do companies spend so little effort in keeping boot times low? A company with 1000 employees that can reduce the boot time with 30 sec (something wich doesn't seem too hard to achieve in this case), saves 8 hours per day, or 1 full time equivalent. Hiring a guy who's only task is to speed up the boot process seems perfectly justified.

Acer e-recovery passwords

2008-01-09T11:23:00.000+01:00

Acer has a nice built in backup/recovery tool. Only drawback: you need to define a password when making your first backup, and by the time you do a restore, you sure have forgotten it.

Luckily, the password is stored in plain text on a hidden partition in the following file: /TOOLS/AIMDRS.DAT
The hidden partition can easily be mounted with any linux live cd.

Too geek or not too geek?

Misquote of the day: 6 meters of sea level rise in 30 years

Richard Stallman on web applications

Fortis: who has been fooled by Wouter Bos?

Fortis's rescue = Europe's failure

Quote of the day

Misquote of the day

Battlestar Galactica

Technology I actually use

Kyoto protocol: results

Only one year left before we're doomed

I want you for Belgium (again)

Computers are still not user friendly

Quote of the day

What's hot in DNS scams?

The broken window fallacy

Quote of the day

Upgrading to Fedora 8

A good error message is half the solution

Linkedin

Webmail

Xen: reclaiming dom0 memory

Browser requirements

Al Gore: North Polar icecap gone in 5 years

Boot times take soooo long

Acer e-recovery passwords