Technophile Monkey

This is part three of my series of articles about studying at the University of Liverpool online using GNU/Linux. They “officially” only support Mac OS X or Windows, although things work just as well using GNU/Linux.

At some point, your Intake Coordinator will send you a contact form to fill out. The file comes in a proprietary, non-standard format (.doc). Luckily OpenOffice.org 2.x can open it and probably save it again in a way that also works in your Intake Coordinator’s software, but there is no way to guarantee that. Due to the closed nature of the formats the UoL uses, there is absolutely no way they can make sure that every student and every coordinator will get the same results. They are completely at the mercy of the company whose secret this format is, in this case Microsoft.

Add another shame point or two: This contact form could very easily be made into a plain and simple web form, something that is entirely standards-based and has been a proven solution across all platforms for more than a decade. Coupled with the security measures I’ve mentioned in previous Liverpool posts (SSL encryption for data transfers over the web), it would even be more secure than the current solution.

Then there is bloat. The document they send around is 137 KB. The same thing as a web form could be done in less than 10 KB. Multiply this by a reasonable number of students and you get 267.5 MB of data transfer cost vs. only 19 MB using a web form, savings of 93%. Factoring in that many of the UoL students are studying in countries where bandwidth is very expensive, this proprietary format seems a particularly bad choice.

Now add human error. The coordinators presumably need to send out this contact form by hand, then receive the filled out forms and copy the information into some database system. During this process, there is great potential for human error. A web form could automatically talk to the required databases and the coordinator would merely look through the submitted information and correct any mistakes.

As a last point, versioning overhead. Each coordinator can potentially copy the form to their own machine and send it from there. What if the master copy of the form changes and some coordinators forget to update their copy? With this same form somewhere on a web server, you centralize this. The only person who can change the form is the one responsible for the web site, and once the form changes, all students and coordinators receive the same one instantly. The source of version errors is eliminated.

All combined, I would say that the current solution could be massively improved by scrapping it and moving onto the web.

This is part two of my series of articles about studying at the University of Liverpool online using GNU/Linux. They “officially” only support Mac OS X or Windows, although things work just as well using GNU/Linux.

Once you’re fully and completely signed up with UoL, you’ll receive an e-mail entitled “University of Liverpool – Start Pack Email”. This contains a link to a website where you can find out your username and password for the virtual classroom.

The page also contains a download link for the Windows or Mac OS X version of what UoL calls “Emabnet”. Embanet, however, is just a company, a solution provider. They run the FirstClass servers UoL use as virtual classrooms. FirstClass is a BBS software. Must be well over a decade old now, as I remember being administrator for a FirstClass server on Mac OS 7 more than ten years ago.

Fortunately for us, FirstClass also offers a GNU/Linux version of their client on their own download page. So go ahead and grab the package that matches your distribution best (Ubuntu and Debian users choose the .deb package), then install it with your favorite package management tool.

The screenshot above shows the settings dialog with the settings you need to connect to UoL’s FirstClass server hosted at Embanet. To get that far, you must first launch FirstClass from either /opt/firstclass/fcc or from your desktop environment’s application menu (in Ubuntu, that’s the “Applications” menu, under “Internet”). Start FirstClass now. In the first screen that appears, click “Setup…” and change the server address to fc.embanet.com. Change “Encryption” to “Default”. Save your settings, enter your username and password in the main login dialog box and there you are — connected.

Once you’re in, this is the “desktop” you should see:

The screenshot was resized from its original size, of course. Once you get there, continue as instructed by your Intake Adviser.

Telepolis has an excellent article (German, unfortunately) that explains how, even now that Microsoft was proven guilty, their tactics have already changed. Unbundling products like the media player and offering competitors access to MS interfaces (for a fee!) will not stop them from stifling innovation and destroying competition by unfair means.

They have started applying for software patents in European countries even though these are not legal here. They have been lobbying to legalize software patents in the EU. The result? Let’s look at the competition in the media player sector. Windows Media Player is a very average product. VLC or Mplayer are European media players that can play a much wider variety of media files with a lot less fuss and no need to cumbersomely install extra codecs. They also come with far, far greater functionality across the board, offering everything from built-in live encoding and streaming to very advanced picture processing. On top of that, they are free, and in some cases even funded by EU government grants. It is in the best interest of the EU to develop such Free Software, in the EU, through EU citizens.

But, and here’s the problem, there are potentially hundreds of very, very trivial software patents registered in the USA that could theoretically apply to these products. These software patents are registered willfully by big corporations for the express purpose of being abused as weapons against competitors. They do not benefit the “small inventor”, which is what patents were intended to accomplish. If these same patents were legal in the EU, and if the patent holders (not in every case Microsoft) were to raise charges against the projects, this could potentially destroy them. Even if a judge only orders a preliminary injunction, it could mean the death of the project as people look for different media players to fit their needs.

This is the threat, and the threat still remains. If you are an EU citizen, you should do everything in your power to say no to software patents — they stifle innovation, they massively strengthen billion-dollar companies at the expense of small and medium size enterprises and they cut into your own freedoms as a computer user, as a software developer, as an employee and as a person.

We are currently finalizing the server consolidation in our department. The product we chose for virtualization is OpenVZ, because it sports creepy Russians.

All in all, it was a bit of a roller coaster ride, but once we figured out that most of the problems came from our own incompetence, we quickly stopped pointing fingers and shaking fists and instead read some documentation. Then all was good. We went from 12 servers to 5, killing 7 physical servers and saving roughly 1500W of power consumption. The new virtualization servers we used were actually the old database server and the old main web server, both overpowered. A change in the mentality and the technical competence level required from our students in the last few years has made the extra power for these boxes unneccessary. Now we’re using them much more efficiently because each of them runs several virtual servers.

Technicalities

We wasted a lot of time learned a lot by going the opposite route when it comes to OpenVZ configuration. Most people are advised to start with a BIG configuration for each virtual private server (VPS), we started with a tiny one. This meant that memory parameters were at a bare minimum, normally mimicking the specs of the hardware machine we were virtualizing. In the same go, we grouped services differently so that we could reduce the number of servers, again making better use of the available hardware. For servers that are created from scratch (not based on an existing physical machine), we also started from a minimal config file and went up from there.

This approach not only made me grow at least six new white hairs in my beard, but it also taught me about the importance of KMEMSIZE. KMEMSIZE is your friend. KMEMSIZE loves you. KMEMSIZE is soft and fluffy. Trust KMEMSIZE.

The problem with KMEMSIZE was that while we did assign enough memory in the main UBC memory categories (vmguarpages, oomguarpages, privvmpages), we didn’t have enough KMEMSIZE for our NUMPROCS. Just picture this! The poor NUMPROCS! The net result was that the server couldn’t fork new processes once its amount of KMEMSIZE was eaten up. So after multiplying our expected NUMPROCS with the estimated unswappable memory consumption per process, things worked perfectly.

Now our OpenVZ environment is very, very stable and very, very efficient. We’re very, very happy. This is a very, very success story.

I’ve recently discovered the albums Krákan and the self-titled album Eivør Pálsdóttir by, well, Eivør Pálsdóttir (page on last.fm available too). Do NOT try her English album “Human Child”. There is a non-English version too, I heard, but I don’t know when it’s coming out.

One of the most powerful Eivør tracks I’ve heard so far is “Nú brennur tú í mær”, released on Krákan. It’s the sort of track that sounds like it could be electric, but it’s all acoustic and full of wobbly percussion and makes you shiver for various reasons, but you never quite know which one you’re shivering about that very moment; her voice, the emotions, the crescendo of the instruments, the perfectly placed pauses and quiet passages, the power, the despair, the sorrow, the background choir, wha?

Tastes good!

Interesting side note: Just look at that Faroese! It’s like a cute-as-a-button mish-mash of Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic. I wonder how people on the Faroes can still talk to each other without breaking out in bouts of giggling.

Yesterday, a video I saw made me realize how disconnected we as silly civilized westerners are from the violence that happens in war areas, even if we see it on the news every day. The clip I mean is simply titled “West Bank”, and it is part of the No Comment series by EuroNews. You can download those clips in Miro for example, here’s the channel page on the Miro guide.

In case you don’t know EuroNews’ No Comment: They are very short clips from various places in the world, but without any commentary. Pictures that speak such a powerful language that they don’t need to be narrated. In this West Bank clip, there is no real violence. A soldier shoots at something that is off-screen once. Two cars that look like they are used to transport prisoners drive up to each other, back to back, and a prisoner is switched from one car to the other through the rear hatch. Gunshots are heard, far off and then closer. We are watching a group of well-equipped soldiers sneak around the outside walls of a house. From their equipment, I’m guessing they are Israeli. That’s all you see in the clip.

But even if that’s all you see, that’s not all I felt. The clip is permeated by an atmosphere of violence. It’s as if war itself had grown a toweringly huge body and is now stalking through the neighborhood, turning the air thick, leaden and unbreathable, messing with soldiers’ nerves. Have a look at that clip, maybe you can see what I mean.

This is something I once felt quite some time back, during the genocide in Rwanda. Some news stations had dared to broadcast nearly unedited material from the area, and it was sickening. It’s also the same feeling I get when watching some of the more serious movies about World War II. We look at these movies today, thinking “How could anyone ever be so cruel? How could they do this to each other? What turns a man into that kind of monster?” and we shake our heads. We shake our heads disbelieving what we see, we chalk up the atrocities shown to the creativity of the director or the drama of the actors.

But reality has no director, real pain is not acted. It happens right now, today, all over the world. I am glad there are things such as No Comment, that turn this reality into a video clip. This puts a barrier between the viewer and the subject, a barrier that is similar to what Hollywood does for us when we watch those WW2 movies. It is very weird that it takes this barrier in order to make me truly feel the way I should feel whenever there is talk of wars and violence. Maybe it’s the immediacy of the videos that drive the point home. Maybe Hollywood has conditioned us to react emotionally on queue and in time with what we see on screen. I’m not saying that I have the brains to find out why this is so, but this little clip has shown me that there is something there in how human empathy works that is worth studying and exploring.

I’m just glad the clip wasn’t from Darfur.

Google Reader came out of beta. How did I notice? Not by the absence of the “Google Labs” logo, but because Google is now completely ignoring all of my language settings! Everything is suddenly German, even though I have explicitly set English as preferred language in both Google and in my browser.

People from Korea have the same problem, and the suggested fix does not work right now.

Sob. I want my Reader the way it was. “Feed-Einstellungen”? “Alle als gelesen markieren”? Honestly

Update: After some amount of outrage on the Google Reader forum, they’ve fixed it now. The estimated physical location of your IP address no longer plays a role in deciding what language Google Reader uses. They’re now going strictly by the one you’ve set in the Google preferences. Bad things can be said about Google, but at least they listen to the audience and act very quickly.

Shane M. Coughlan and I are trying to be video bloggers. We’ve just launched an online show called High Density that attempts to take rather complicated and/or new concepts from technology and/or politics and break them down into easy to manage chunks. Each show is 10 minutes long or less. Later episodes include special guests.

Scary!

What’s special for me is that I also do the post-production, editing etc., and I use only Free Software. The editing itself is done in Cinelerra, audio cleanup in Audacity. We encode to MPEG4 using ffmpeg and to Ogg Theora using ffmpeg2theora. You can subscribe to the show using Miro or iTunes, as you can see in the show itself, which you can also watch on YouTube so you don’t create a chicken/egg problem. Yay!

The EU Judgment Court of First Instance has confirmed the commission’s findings: Microsoft is guilty of abusing their dominant market position. They will have to pay the EUR 497 million fine set by the commission, plus EUR 280.5 million for not not complying to the initial orders. The rest of the decision was also mostly upheld.

The decision is here, with (German) commentary by Heise Online.

This is a great day for interoperability and will set the stage for a development that is wholly alien to companies like Microsoft: Moving towards fair competition in the market.

As a study by Janco Associates finds, Internet Explorer is rapidly losing importance in the business sector. Among B2B-Sites, its market share has dropped to close to 60% (down 10% from the same time last year).

If even the slow to move B2B sector has recognized the shortcomings of MSIE as a browser and a platform, it means that there is finally no excuse to develop broken browser-dependant websites (i.e. websites that work only in one particular browser, such as MSIE). This is a small victory for interoperability.

In the IT sector meanwhile, MSIE has lost most of its significance, with a market share of merely 25% on influential sites such as Heise Online. Again, this makes it ever more important to develop sites that work everywhere.