tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76799026394817007392023-11-16T06:21:26.365+00:00Kriek's blogUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-32462700593665479162015-12-17T20:47:00.001+00:002015-12-17T20:48:16.955+00:00php 5.6 on CentOS 7 using puppetCentOS 7 ships with php 5.4.16 but php is fast moving again so sometimes someone wants to use the new shiny version.<br />
<br />
The potentially best supported set of new software for CentOS and Red Hat is Software Collections (SCL)<br />
<br />
Here is how to set up SCL with puppet and have php 5.6 installed:<br />
<br />
<br />
<script src="https://gist.github.com/kokey/9cf7f9b66730392e09fd.js"></script>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-87103879034542174912015-10-19T10:14:00.000+00:002015-10-24T18:57:23.948+00:00Different EnglishI have lived in and traveled to a number of countries, and every day as part of my work I deal with people from countries I have not even been to yet. We speak English to each other, but it's not the same English, it's different, and some of the differences are huge and can cause some comical misunderstandings. People are usually not really aware that parts of their local version of English are so unique, until they find this out the hard way.<br />
<br />
I'm outlining some examples that I have come across:<br />
<br />
England... Burgers and patties, and burgers.<br />
<br />
Everyone knows what a hamburger is, or often called simply 'a burger'. Well, not really. The Wikipedia description is 'a sandwich consisting of one or more cooked patties of ground meat, usually beef, placed inside a sliced bun' That's all good and well, until you go to where English comes from: England.<br />
<br />
USA: What do you call that piece of meat inside of your burger?<br />
England: A burger.<br />
USA: So, you have a burger inside of your burger?<br />
England: yes.<br />
USA: Does the burger inside of your burger have a patty inside of it?<br />
England: No, and what is a patty?<br />
<br />
Very confusing, and then they'll tell you that they eat tea.<br />
<br />
India... Metamorphosis involved in communication<br />
<br />
Most countries have people saying things to other people, and then those people will reply to them. In India they have complex religious beliefs and rituals, and it seems to appear that they attempt to communicate with people who are likely reincarnated versions of themselves. This leaves the option open of reversing the reincarnation to communicate back to their former selves. Yeah, it's complicated.<br />
<br />
India: The document you have requested is attached. Revert to me if you have any questions.<br />
England: I have a question, but I don't think I evolved from being 'you' into being 'me' and I don't have the ability to reverse this evolution to be able to transform back into you. I suppose if I was able to turn back into you, I will also possess the answers you have. I think I am stuck with having to reply to you with a question instead.<br />
<br />
Well, perhaps they are confusing the world 'revert' with the word 'reply'<br />
<br />
South Africa... Goodbye, in the meantime<br />
<br />
South Africans are aware of a lot of some of their common unique expressions, like 'howzit' and their word for traffic lights, which they call 'robots' However, many of them are not aware that the phrase 'so long' only means something similar to 'goodbye' to the rest of the world.<br />
<br />
South Africa: Good day sir, table for two?<br />
England: Yes, please.<br />
South Africa: Smoking or non smoking?<br />
England: Non smoking<br />
South Africa: Here you go, would you like to order drinks so long while you look at the menu?<br />
<br />
Now to Mr England above, it comes across like the following:<br />
South Africa: Here you go, would you like to order drinks, Goodbye! while you look at the menu?<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-46652068992602971722015-02-05T17:52:00.000+00:002015-12-17T20:50:18.116+00:00logstash rule for PowerMTA accounting filesIt turns out that the logstash, elasticsearch, Kibana (ELK) stack is also very useful for mail server logs from PowerMTA. PowerMTA's main method of logging is to the accounting files, this is a CSV format file, and logstash has a CSV filter.<br />
<br />
To use the logstash filter on an accounting file:<br />
<br />
<script src="https://gist.github.com/kokey/86b77bd6b299e8bd3a7f.js"></script>
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-53581930338629322212012-07-25T11:18:00.002+00:002012-07-26T12:36:02.333+00:00Don't Pirate, Support Alternatives<div class="usertext-body">
<div class="md">
People just consider the
marginal cost of the media when they steal it and don't consider it as theft. But most of the cost is for the licence, you've stolen a piece
of data, just like one can steal an idea or steal a name or steal a
title. You don't deprive the owner of the item, but you do deprive him
of the value of your extra copy. <br />
If I steal your idea without your permission and implement it and
gain from it, without giving you your cut, then I have deprived you from
those gains.<br />
<br />
What really disgusts me is when people justify piracy this way as
their means to acquire material if they don't agree with the price and
distribution mechanism. That's the same kind of thinking as that of a
thief, a thief doesn't want to pay the price of something so steals it
instead. That is bad for everyone. If one is really angry at the
movie, music and software production and distribution industry or their
prices and media, stop consuming their stuff.<br />
<br />
For example, it's better to switch to Linux than pirate a copy of
Windows. If you pirate a copy of Windows you create a dependence on the
product with the bad price and distribution method, where you will land
yourself in a position where you have to purchase the product anyway.
If you switch to Linux and throw your support behind it instead, you're
contributing to an improved alternative, Linux grows, gets better and
beat Windows.<br />
<br />
Stop listening to big music record label chart noise and rather
support artists that offer you their music through distribution methods
you agree with instead. There's a darn lot of good music out there
like that, and the big record labels will lose your business and learn
to adapt or go out of business. If you pirate the chart rubbish instead
then you develop a dependence on formula music and at some stage will
cough up for their music, shows, merchandise or be influenced by it if they're
used in advertising.<br />
<br />
Do your bit. Support Linux, eMusic, Spotify, Rdio and Netflix.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-12556732833922063542012-07-11T20:36:00.002+00:002012-07-11T20:36:29.241+00:00We Don't Need No Population Control<div class="usertext-body">
<div class="md">
Yes, the world can't
sustain the current level of growth of population forever if everything
else continued to be done in the same way.<br />
<br />
The reality is, everything else doesn't continue to be done in the same way.<br />
<br />
If we kept on using
wood like we did 100 years ago, we would have run out long ago. It's
not because we suddenly came to this realisation, it's because we ended
up in a position that other materials are better and cheaper to use and used more of that instead. You know, economics. Population growth through birth is also subject to the
same economics, these things adjust themselves, it's beautiful.<br />
<br />
Starvation is not an issue of a lack of resources today, it's because
of the lack of efficiency and distribution and horrible economic
atrocities committed by the governments of some third world countries. We produce more food than we consume, and waste some, yet people go hungry in other places.<br />
<br />
Just because the problem in these areas would affect less people if
there were less of them, doesn't mean the solution would be to make less
people.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-80384813500414776382012-07-06T12:51:00.001+00:002012-07-06T12:51:35.444+00:00Life in the First World, and London<div class="usertext-body">
<div class="md">
You leave the house, with
your car parked in the garage, where you could get to the garage through
an inside door. Garage door opens electrically with motors. You drive to work,
you park in the parking garage underneath the office, get out and walk to
take the lift up to the floor where you work. After work you can drive
past the ATM and get some cash out, and to the drive-through take out and get some food, and drive home,
and park in the garage.<br />
<br />
When you go shopping, it's to a mall, where you
can park. The mall has a roof over it, so when it rains the water
doesn't fall onto your head when you move between shops, and has air conditioning so you don't break too much of a sweat doing your
shopping in summer, or heating in winter.<br />
<br />
It's only when I moved to London that I realised this way of life is
not obvious, and people spend much more time just getting the basics
done like getting to work and back and shopping, and also less free time to spend with friends and family.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-59419445682129576082012-06-29T16:41:00.003+00:002012-06-29T16:41:39.216+00:00Redistributing Wealth in the Eurozone<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">I find the dynamics of the
expectation of countries having to bail out other countries in the Eurozone quite interesting.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">Normally, inside a nation, say France, you have
wealth distribution since politicians and the public can, through taxes,
take money from the rich in order to help the poor. This works
where the notion exist that it's fair to take money from the rich, because the rich are rich because
of luck or power, or whatever and the poor are those who are less fortunate.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">Now it gets interesting where you get
the same dynamic in the Eurozone, where the countries that can't manage
their economy well because of their bad policies, corruption,
incompetence, etc. want to get financial assistance. They want countries that have managed their economy well to bail them out.</span></span><br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">It gets extra interesting, since Germany is a country
where wealth is not something that was created because of imperial
conquest or the likes, or because of abundant natural resources. They
lost a war, and half of the country was even under communist rule until two
decades ago. They achieved their wealth, and Merkel in particular don't
see having to pay some kind of achievement guilt tax as being fair.</span></span><br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">The real irony here is that the countries that are in financial trouble, are mostly so because of taxing success and cushioning failure.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-14452600237849639492012-06-28T10:39:00.002+00:002012-06-28T10:44:23.486+00:00Piracy Crackdown Doesn't Need a Strong Case<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">In <a href="http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/dotcom-search-warrants-declared-illegal-ca-122374">New Zealand news</a> today it is reported that the warrants for Kim Dotcom's raid weren't exactly legal. There have been a lot of reports of the weakness of the charges brought against Dotcom.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">The reality is, having a strong case was never a priority to the FBI. It's just part of a crackdown effort. This tactic is not new, and
has worked in the past. I'm thinking of a piracy crackdown about 20
years ago. Back in those days, it was a network of dial-up bulletin boards, and
people who would commit phone fraud to upload and download data,
operating as couriers, in groups. The boards would often fund their
hardware through credit card fraud, and many of them made money selling
tapes full of pirated material.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="comment"><span style="color: black;">The crackdown involved raiding the
boards, getting the user details, tracking the phone numbers of the users, and
getting various people raided in various countries. A lot of the
time the cases would collapse in court on various technicalities, but it
would be a year before people would get their seized computer equipment
back. The authorities in all the countries involved also learned who these people are, and how they go about their ways. The crackdown was a success.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-4474888168838907532012-06-27T12:08:00.001+00:002012-06-27T12:11:12.483+00:00Baby Boomers and Generation X and Y in the Workplace<div class="usertext-body">
<div class="md">
Some people try to categorise the behaviour of people in the workplace with what generation they are. Like Generation X people do this, and Baby Boomers do that. Personally, I think that behaviour at work
have little to do with the period that people grew up in and more with the age
these people are at the moment.<br />
<br />
When you're young and start working, you have grown up spending most of
your teens being exposed to the latest trends in information
distribution, whether it's computers and the internet now, television
before that, radio before that, newspapers before that, books before
that. You have a hard time comprehending the world without these sources.<br />
<br />
There is always a new source of influence for a newer generation. Any group, regardless of generation type, usually benefit from better access to information and education and mental stimulation than
anyone before them. Whether they use it is a different matter, but the options are there. The point is that what decade you grew up in influences your taste in music and fashion more than your attitude to work and behaviour in the workplace.<br />
<br />
When you're done with formal education (or
simply done with being a adolescent) you still want to question a rigid
work environment and still want something more like your student
environment where you were surrounded by people who wanted more freedom. It's normal to
question large organisations and culture, partly because you're at an
age where you are not in control of the business world or government yet.<br />
<br />
After that, you're at the age of having a family. Then all of a
sudden giving the best to your family matters, and you start to work
hard. The baby boomer thing is a mostly Anglo-Western society thing,
where there was population increase. If you look at any area with large
populations in Asia, middle class people are very competitive and have
to work very hard in order to maintain their class level.<br />
<br />
When you're younger, being loyal to an employer doesn't matter so much, because your
nature of exploring makes you change your job, friends and
surroundings, and you move around a lot, in order to have more
experiences and find what you like. When you get older you don't seek
this excitement and you seek the comfort of your family and children and
grand children and an established community<br />
<br />
You realise how much of
your money during your life you have wasted on entertainment and
depreciating material goods. You also realise soon you'll be at the age
that you won't be able to work any more, so being efficient with money
is important. You also realise that you won't be in the position to
move easily if your environment changes, or be in control of your
society any more, so for you a stable society is important.<br />
<br />
You are
tired of the stresses of having to think up new solutions to the same
old problems, and do things slower and in a pragmatic and disciplined
fashion as you have developed through your life. You start to become more conservative, and even your political opinions shift this way. <br />
<br />
These attitudes to life and work isn't determined whether you grew up in the swinging 60s or are of Generation Y, it's just simply how you progress as you age and how you act your age at work.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-69213807454756530592012-06-26T11:22:00.003+00:002012-06-26T11:22:52.103+00:00Random VisitorOne evening, many years ago, when I was living in Johannesburg, I was sitting talking on the phone when I saw movement on
the side of the house where no one ever walks. Next thing I know, this
blonde woman, not bad looking and nicely dressed, walks into my house. Past me and my housemates, into my bedroom and climbed into my bed and
promptly fell asleep.<br />
<br />
A few hours later she got up, walked around the
house a bit, and realised she didn't know anynobody. She introduced herself as Dr
Conneley and seemed somewhat embarrassed. We told her it's fine, we
don't know her either. She went back to sleep in my bed. My one housemate was out, so I slept in his bed instead.<br />
<br />
The next
morning she woke up and realised she was so drunk the night before, that she walked into the wrong house one street away, and promptly left.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-7495733783335221672012-06-25T12:36:00.002+00:002012-06-25T12:36:35.317+00:00Receiving Signals from a Distant Civilisation<div class="usertext-body">
<div class="md">
I think receiving signals
from a civilisation, that has gone extinct by the time we received it, would still be a very exciting. Mainly because
if we're lucky we might receive hundreds of years worth of signal, and
we can learn a lot about them, e.g. their culture, their technologies
and language etc.<br />
<br />
It's going to happen regardless, if we pick up a signal we can assume
the society has either died out already or advanced significantly.
We'll also know it's likely a very long time before they'll even be able
to detect that we exist<br />
<br />
In other words there's no point for making
contact, but the amount we can learn from it will be tremendous. It
will also change society dramatically knowing that we are not alone, and
would put more importance on space travel for us.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-13060620949653829752012-06-22T11:19:00.000+00:002012-06-22T11:19:32.132+00:00Online Gambling Industry<i>I've worked for a very large online gambling company for a couple of years, and I wrote this during my last week employed by one. This was in response to someone commenting about the fact that they have an IT job at a land based casino in Vegas and really shouldn't be in that job because they don't know what they are doing, but get paid fairly well anyway.</i><br />
<br />
I
think this kind of thing is normal in the industry. First you have an
industry where many land based casinos have little competition because
of license restrictions making it hard for new entrants, and many online
casinos had little competition because they were brave enough to
operate in a legal gray area that any well run business wouldn't dare
enter. That's apart from the fact that it's a type of business that
takes money quickly off the majority of people who mistakenly think
they're luckier than probability theory determines.<br />
<br />
The industry is slowly maturing and the margins are getting lower.
For land based casinos it's purely because of the credit crunch. For
online casinos it's both the economy and because of increased
legislation and the enforcement of it.<br />
<br />
What you end up having are two things: One is that many of these
companies were founded by people who would likely fail in other
businesses but somehow ended up in this one that made lots of money
easily. For online gambling this includes a lot of young entrepreneurs
who did well but actually have no experience in how to keep a business
running when margins are considerably tighter. The second thing is that
just like the actual product, people in this business have a bit of a
gambling mentality themselves. They took a risk and it paid off.<br />
<br />
What is happening now is that as the profit margins are coming down
dramatically, you have budget constraints so a lot of cuts are being
made. Then you have people with no experience in making things more
efficient when margins are lower, so the cuts are generally in the wrong
place. It's all due to a lack of experience or even the ability to
manage budgets and risk properly which is incompatible with a high risk
gambling mentality.<br />
<br />
The result is that you have lots of people with no experience and no
contribution getting high paying jobs not doing much, and this lasts for
a while before the company is really able to weed these people out.
People with real skills and experience are surrounded and outnumbered by
these types. It's hard to fix. It actually requires a dramatic
culture change which is a very hard thing to pull off in companies that
have been enjoying very big revenues and have people involved who
developed egos over this and can't let go.<br />
<br />
One good thing comes from this. It means there's a lot of gaps in
the market for companies that can offer a better product with lower
overhead. We'll see both this happening, and the big players merge and
consolidate to get some efficiency gains.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-89227723749688087122012-06-21T07:22:00.000+00:002012-06-21T07:22:59.634+00:00Swimming in post-Apartheid South AfricaI grew up in South Africa as a white boy and saw the whole
end of apartheid thing. Because of the previous regime a town would
generally consist of white suburban neighbourhoods not unlike you'd
expect in the US with a commercial centre with malls and whatever, and
then just outside of town would be a black 'township' that had dirt
roads and most people lived in metal and wooden shacks and basic brick
houses and would take the bus or minibus taxi into the main white town
if they had work.<br />
<br />
The town I lived in had a public swimming pool, and as facilities
were being opened to all races this was opened too. The white
population of the main town was about 8,000 people and the township had
about 25,000 people in it. The black kids from the townships were
obviously very keen to try out this swimming thing, especially since
they had no pool up in the townships. The pool became very busy with
lots of black people. None of them had any swimming experience but the
whole thing went without any major drowning incident. The white
families were very freaked out by this influx of black skin and stopped
going to the pool. They also spread stories about how the pool is now
80% urine and all sorts of stuff, which my dad could debunk easily since he actually specialised in municipal sewerage systems.<br />
<br />
Anyway, by the next summer the whole swimming novelty wore off for
the black kids, and most of them stopped going to the pool. That summer
was great. It was a massive pool with diving boards, and every
afternoon we were about 4 white kids and 8 black kids that had the
entire pool to ourselves. We all got on fine and had a good time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-70550245303337143402012-06-20T13:29:00.000+00:002012-06-20T13:29:32.765+00:00A Trip Down a Gold Mine.<div class="usertext-body">
<div class="md">
I travelled down a gold
mine once. A proper gold mine in South Africa. First we went down
2.3km, changing elevator half way because one elevator can't go that
whole way. Once at the bottom, we got onto a little train that
travelled 6km down a little tunnel to where one of the more profitable
parts of the mine was, it produced 40 grams of gold per cubic tonne of
rock. We saw the people working there and had a go at the drill
ourselves.<br />
<br />
Apart from it being very hot and humid, the most striking thing to me
about the whole trip was not the depth and engineering achievement of
all of it, but the people. This mine worked around the clock, 8000
people worked down there in a 24 hour period. They did very hard work,
and very dangerous work. This affected them psychologically.<br />
<br />
We travelled down the elevator with some miners, and with them was a
guy who tried to kiss everyone in the lift. Like a crazy person. We
were told that's not unusual, there are people that would try to beat
you to death if it looks like you are going to touch one of the bolts
that holds the elevator together. Accidents happen, people lose friends, people are trapped underground
in absolute dark for many hours at a time, sometimes they don't make it
in the dark, or their friends don't<br />
<br />
People of all races worked in the mine, they all got equal treatment
based on their input, and they go through all this for a piece of metal
which is hard to think of being worth that cost. I'm sure conditions are a hundred times better for workers in these
mines nowadays compared to decades ago, but they're still no picnic. As long as there's a worth, mines would
offer an employment package that would make people choose to work in
these conditions. The more we're going to
start valuing the human cost of mining, the more expensive these
materials are going to get. That is, until we innovate to get this work done with machines instead of humans.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-43882154058722616062012-01-06T13:51:00.000+00:002012-01-06T13:51:12.331+00:00Roll your own Unix or something similarI came across this <a href="http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/">very interesting tutorial by James Molloy</a> on how to roll your own Unix like clone, with nice, detailed, step by step instructions. It assumes your development environment is going to be a GNU/Linux environment.<br />
<br />
It's aimed at developing a *nix like operating system on x86 architecture. All the way through setting up a development environment, boot loader, interacting with the screen, dealing with interrupts and the timer, user mode, etc.<br />
<br />
This tutorial can be used as a guide for creating any operating system, or simply boot programs, for x86 and x86-like architecture, for example the RDC CPUs used on devices like the Bifferboard.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-8760342945094356572012-01-04T14:16:00.000+00:002012-01-06T13:40:23.076+00:00Introduction to VMWare vCenter OperationsI'm busy looking at VMWare vCenter Operations Enterprise. I've never dealt with it before so it could be interesting. I'm going to give an overview of what this product is, where it comes from, and what it tries to achieve. I'll also give some first impressions as a user of it.<br />
<br />
It appears that VMWare bought a lot of products in order to give their customers various comprehensive IT management capabilities for their software and platforms. Like with most big vendors buying other software products and integrating it with their own offering, I expect some quirks with the integration.<br />
<br />
VMWare vCenter Operations started life as a product called Alive by Integrien. Integrien was acquired by VMWare around August 2010, so VMWare has had some time to assimilate the product to make it their own. vCenter Operations comes in a few different sizes, Standard, Advance and Enterprise:<br />
<ul>
<li>The smallest is <i>Standard </i>which handles up to 1500 vSphere deployments, so it's not that small.</li>
<li><i>Advanced</i> is Standard plus Capacity IQ, VMWare's capacity planning product.</li>
<li><i>Enterprise </i>is a whole combination of things. It includes what Advanced has, plus Smart Alerting, vCenter Configuration Manager and then deep integration with major monitoring products on the market (including the open source varieties). This enables it to also include a view of non-VMWare environments, inside and outside of the organisation (e.g. physical builds and other providers like Amazon)</li>
</ul>
VMWare's strategy with this combination is to bring performance, capacity and configuration management closer to each other. They also want to make sure vCenter Operations integrate deeper with other VMWare products, which can be both a good and a bad thing.<br />
<br />
What this software aims to give you is a powerful dashboard for your enterprise. It basically allows you to view the status and health of your applications, systems and infrastructure, help you find faults, the cause of these faults and alert you on faults. It also makes an attempt to predict faults that may happen in the future, and also goes as far as trying to show the financial impact of faults or underutilisation.<br />
<br />
Anyone with experience of monitoring and management tools knows getting the above right is no easy task. A lot of customisation needs to be done, and the interface has to be flexible enough to be able to build the right views.<br />
<br />
The interface for vCenter Operations is a web interface, a fairly usable one. It's very customisable, and you put together views in a portal and widget style. It also has a lot of graphing and other graphical features, making it look attractive during a sales presentation and when showing it to management. That said, in a large environment a new user will still need to be shown where to find what they are after and also need some help in setting up their dashboards the way they want.<br />
<br />
With regards to health and thresholds, the product tries to rely on setting these by itself mostly. In a large environment, and especially in a dynamic virtualised environment, it's impossible to manage thresholds individually. The product makes note of what it believes are normal trends in the operation of a system, and alerts when there are anomalies. If they get this right, it would be very good, but this is also not an easy thing to achieve technically, so it will be interesting to see how well this works out.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-53149827075160463252011-12-30T13:47:00.001+00:002012-01-09T13:27:16.774+00:00Overview of Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) Configuration FilesIn a previous article, <a href="http://www.kriekjooste.com/2011/12/introduction-to-veritas-cluster-server.html">Introduction to Veritas Cluster Server</a>, I gave a general overview of the VCS product and how it's put together and what you can do with it. In this article I'll give a general overview of how you go about configuring it.<br />
<br />
Before writing this, I have had no dealings with with product before, so hopefully what I cover here will help some lazy folk out there to quickly get an idea of what configuring this product is about. I'm going to be looking at it from a Solaris perspective, since I believe most of the deployments of this product out in the field is on Solaris, and it's what I may have to support and perhaps you too. I think it's very similar to the way it's done on Red Hat, so don't fear.<br />
<br />
<b>Files</b><br />
<br />
The configuration files are normally in: /etc/VRTSvcs/conf/config<br />
<br />
There are two main configuration files:<br />
<ol>
<li>main.cf that defines the entire cluster.</li>
<li>types.cf that defines the resource types. </li>
</ol>
There are more like the above, if more agents are used. For example Oracletypes.cf. <br />
<ol>
</ol>
These configuration files are loaded an maintained in a specific way. The first node to start up in the cluster reads the configuration file from disk and keeps it in-memory and when other systems come online they have this configuration synchronized to them. They write these files back to disk, and also updates to it gets written back to disk this way. The only time you can really edit these from the command line is when the cluster is stopped. Then you edit it on one server, start that server up and the others after it.<br />
<br />
The language of the configuration file would look familiar to most system administrators. You use curly braces around most things, and there are include clauses to import configuration from other files.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-23228730182628253142011-12-30T12:30:00.002+00:002011-12-30T12:30:44.749+00:00Blackberry's futureRegardless of outages and platform problems Blackberry is experiencing, I believe the phone that always tends to win in the long run is the one that wins both with the
user interface and durability. Early on this was Nokia, the user
interface was intuitive, steps were thought through to happen in the way
people would actually use it. You make a call, you get an SMS at the
same time, the SMS won't stop you from using DTMF tones to navigate your
voice mail, when deciding to read the SMS the default options enable
you to reply or erase with the easiest to reach button. This couldn't
be said for Ericsson phones at the time, where the steps that I described on the Nokia phone was a pain on the Ericsson. Durability wise Nokia also won. I've never had a
broken Nokia, I've only had one Ericsson phone and it broke a few
times. I suspect Nokia must have done something similar to what Apple
is rumoured to do, have lots of internal designs and prototypes compete
it out until they get it right. Nokia did slip up a couple of times,
probably in a rush to market, for example with their first WAP phone and
their first megapixel camera phone. I suspect it's because they made
shortcuts with the selection and refinement process. Unfortunately
Nokia got worse at it all, and Apple and Blackberry took over with smartphones.<br /><br />Blackberry
phones did some things good and, until the iPhone, they did them very well
on the usability front. They had a decent battery life, the buttons
were good for e-mail, the scroll wheel and later the ball was good for
navigation. The menus weren't cumbersome and quick and easy to navigate. It still is not bad at those things, probably better than
other phones with that. The user interface is simple but works well
with most of the things you want to do with e-mail and things like
Facebook. That said, durability wise I found it to be horrible. I've
had 5 blackberry phones from work, and they were all replacements of phones that has broken while I had it. Only one of the times it broke was it totally my fault (I dropped it in the toilet), but this
is offset by the fact that I rarely used it anyway (I used my personal
phone more) and that it was inside of my bag most of the time so not
even exposed to the environment. I am also not counting the times it just
had parts swapped out like batteries or the ball. This was only over a
period of 3 years.<br /><br />In the end the Blackberry seems to lag
massively behind on usability that new Android and iOS phones rule now.
Maps are nowhere close to being as good, web browsing is nowhere close, interfacing with
these kinds of apps and others are nowhere near. That said Blackberry phones are still a lot
cheaper and it's also lighter on bandwidth so for many that it still makes
sense for people to buy them. I can't comment on the durability of Android based phones, but
the iPhone beats the Blackberry, hands down.<br /><br />Apple always operate
in the premium side of the market, so I'm expecting Android offerings
to do well in the market below that. Both in kicking Blackberry butt,
and also in converting formerly non-smartphone Nokia users to Android
using smartphone users. Google seems to have copied a lot of Microsoft
strategies when it comes to Android, while Microsoft was asleep at the
time and didn't even notice their own strategies, so I am not holding my breath for Microsoft to regain much market unless they spend to the scale they did with the Xbox. I expect Android to
do to smartphone competition what Windows did to Novell, OS/2 and many
others. This doesn't mean there won't be a market for Apple
products, I believe that Apple will still do well for a while, however there is no
Steve Jobs any more but I think the company has one good phone left
where he still had a lot of input and they'll work hard to make it good
so people still have faith in the company and stick with them until the experience, or cost, starts to suck.<br /><br />After that, is
anyone's guess, but I doubt Blackberry will be one of those unless they
have a very good shakeup, a shakeup that Nokia didn't manage to pull off successfully. I'm not holding my breath.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-91913694794828730662011-12-28T14:34:00.000+00:002011-12-30T13:51:35.317+00:00Introduction to Veritas Cluster Server (VCS)I somehow managed to escape having to deal with Veritas products over the years. Now I have been tasked to deal with some of it, so I'm taking this opportunity to familiarise myself with it. The product I'm looking at more specifically is Veritas Cluster Server, which is a different product from their popular file system and backup products. Veritas is now also a Symantec product, but I'm looking specifically at the shape of the product before the Symantec acquisition, because it's the form I have to support. Hopefully the details I cover here will help others who also end up having to support a VCS installation.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Description of VCS</span><br />
<br />
Veritas Cluster Server is software used to facilitate and manage application clusters. Examples of these would be to manage an Oracle database cluster, a web application stack, or handle the clustering of Veritas file system products, or various combinations of all of these in a global operation.<br />
<br />
I have been told it's a good product, but also quite expensive. It's more focused on managing a cluster for high availability than for performance. In other words its main purpose is to detect failures and perform failover operations, reliably.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">How it works</span><br />
<br />
It is run as a service (or a set of services) on top of the operating sytem on each server. It has its own heartbeat and synchronization system communicating over the network at layer 2 level, wanting several redundant network links to do this. It provides service over a virtual IP on the system node which is currently active. In other words clients only connect to the virtual IP, and VCS makes sure that something is available to provide service over that IP address and does all the failover magic in the background to achieve that.<br />
<br />
It is also configured to know the dependencies of resources on each other, and will shut down and start them up in the most optimal order. For example to start up an application, it will make sure that the file system resource is brought up first, then the database, then the application. It will also make sure the network is up before making sure the IP address configuration is brought up. It also does this optimally so it will make sure that certain services can be started in parallel where possible.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Service Groups</span><br />
<br />
Systems can also be grouped, in Service Groups. These are used to group systems that form a particular service. For example a bunch of web servers and database servers are in one group, and when there is a fault on one of the database servers the entire lot is failed over to another set of web and database servers. Failover can also be done for maintenance purposes. Service Groups can be in active-standby configurations (called 'failover'), active-active (called 'parallel') or a mix of these (called 'hybrid')<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Resource types and agents</span><br />
<br />
To shut services down and bring them up, VCS interacts with the system through commands supplied to it. You have to define these in the configuration, with defined stop, start and monitoring procedures. These are coordinated by agents. Bundled Agents, Enterprise Agents and Custom Agents exist for the various resource types. A resource type could be, for example, a database, web server or file system service, e.g. Oracle DB or an NFS server. On initial startup, VCS will determine which agents are needed to manage the services, and only those agents will be started. Each agent can manage multiple services of the same resource type on a system. For example the Oracle agent can manage multiple Oracle databases on one server.<br />
<br />
Agents have entry points, which are usually points perl scripts are triggered to perform certain functions. It doesn't have to be perl, extensions can be developed in C++ or bolted on using other scripting languages. There are various entry points: <span style="font-style: italic;">online</span>, to bring a service up, <span style="font-style: italic;">offline</span> to shut a service down, <span style="font-style: italic;">monitor</span> to check the status of a resource and other entry points such as <span style="font-style: italic;">clean</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">action</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">info</span>.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Daemons</span><br />
<br />
There are three main daemons, and one module, run on each system, that makes up the VCS service.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">High-Availability Daemon (HAD)<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span></span></span><br />
This is the main daemon controlling the whole show. It's typically referred to as the VCS engine. It maintains the cluster according to the configuration files, maintains state information, and performs all the monitoring and failover needed. It runs as a replicated state machine, so on each node it contains a synchronized view of what's going on in the whole cluster. The replicated state machine is maintained through the LLT and GAB daemons.<br />
<span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span><br />Low Latency Transport Daemon (LLT)</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span>This daemon is a low latency, high performance replacement for the IP stack, for cluster maintenance. This is done over a private network and requires two independent networks between all the cluster nodes for redundancy, and to be able to tell the difference between a system failure and a network failure. It has two major functions:<br />
<ol>
<li>Traffic distribution - it spreads internode traffic between all the private links, for speed and reliability.</li>
<li>Heartbeat - This is used by the GAB daemon to determine the state of cluster membership.</li>
</ol>
<span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Group Membership Services/Atomic Broadcast (GAB) Daemon.</span><br />
<br />
This does two things:<br />
<ol>
<li>Maintains cluster membership, setting nodes as up or down based on heartbeat status.</li>
<li>Handles cluster communications, doing guaranteed delivery of point to point and broadcast messages to all the nodes.</li>
</ol>
<span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">I/O Fencing Module</span><br />
<br />
This makes sure that only one cluster survives a split of the private network. It determines who remains in the cluster and makes sure that systems that aren't members of the cluster any more can't write to storage.<br />
<br />
<b>Other Processes</b><br />
<br />
Veritas Cluster Server comes with a couple of other commands and processes:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Command Line Interface - to manage and administer VCS.</li>
<li>Cluster Manager - This comes in two forms. One is a Java based graphical user interface, the other is a web interface.</li>
<li>hacf - This is a utility that can verify the configuration file or make HAD load a configuration file while running.</li>
<li>hashadow - This watches the health of HAD, and restarts when needed.</li>
</ol>
<br />
<b>Cluster Topologies</b><br />
<br />
VCS supports a lot of different cluster topologies, this is where you can start to see the value and strength of the product. It supports from the most basic topologies up to fairly complex, and useful configurations.<br />
<br />
The most basic form is the asymmetric, or active-passive setups. This is where there is one live server that runs an application, and there is another server that can be started up and failed over to when needed. Then it can also support symmetric, or active-active setups. Here you can have one server with one application, and another server with another application, and when one of the servers goes down, the application on that server gets launched to run on the other server along with the application already on there.<br />
<br />
The possibilities get better from here. For example you can have multiple servers sharing a few spares, banking on the fact that not all of them will fail at the same time so you can get away with only a few spares. Another is that you can have a bunch of servers running multiple applications each, and if one of them fails it can shuffle them around on the remaining servers that has available capacity to run the application on. It can also handle failover between data centers, for example for disaster recovery. Neat.<br />
<br />
<b>Configuration</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
I think it's best that I cover configuration in another article. So, I've done that in the <a href="http://www.kriekjooste.com/2011/12/overview-of-veritas-cluster-server-vcs.html">Overview of Veritas Cluster Server Configuration</a> article.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-43685566755279895412011-01-29T15:47:00.006+00:002011-12-28T14:28:38.998+00:00The Media Causes Peanut Allergies<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_XUVJ87D7QjoT_F9OlIPks2yiBoMbi0VJBGWE815fUuy2-9xnGu0Q7ramlmdfRaAL9PBMjfiRr_XLn1gpviomuPq2QxwMipR_7UB9mqSY2empXSO5FKlWOH8VIuk0j0etFnYumFRCOho/s1600/peanuts.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_XUVJ87D7QjoT_F9OlIPks2yiBoMbi0VJBGWE815fUuy2-9xnGu0Q7ramlmdfRaAL9PBMjfiRr_XLn1gpviomuPq2QxwMipR_7UB9mqSY2empXSO5FKlWOH8VIuk0j0etFnYumFRCOho/s200/peanuts.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568056848096577506" border="0" /></a>Anyone who has children probably know a few other parents who claim their children are allergic to certain kinds of foods, including peanuts or nuts. It also seems this is becoming more common. Is this really so? I don't believe so, and I blame the media a bit for making it seem like that.<br /><br />Here are some interesting bits of trivia:<br /><br />25% of families believe their children have food allergies. 4% of them actually do.<br /><br />Peanuts are legumes and the other tree nuts are dried fruits. Allergies to them are different, but it's not uncommon that a hypersensitive person is allergic to multiple things.<br /><br />About 3-4% of people have reported food allergies. Most of them to certain fruits, then vegetables, then milk, then seafood, then latex, then tree nuts and only 1% of them to peanuts.<br /><br />The most common reaction to a <span class="il">peanut</span> <span class="il">allergy</span> is eczema (40%) hoarseness (37%) , asthma (14%), anaphylaxis (6%), digestive problems (1.4%).<br /><br />According to current statistics about the same amount of people get struck by lightning per year in the US as people who get anaphylaxis from <span class="il">peanut</span> <span class="il">allergy</span>.<br /><br />Yet the Food <span class="il">Allergy</span> Initiative say: "<span class="il">Peanut</span> <span class="il">allergy</span> is one of the most common, serious and potentially fatal food allergies."<br /><br />Only 13% of severe cases of allergies to foodstuff are to people over the age of 17.<br /><br />Most of the studies indicating an increase in peanut allergy in the US didn't include an actual <span class="il">allergy</span> test. The widely report study in the UK that shows the occurrence of it has gone up from 0.5% to 1% in the UK was not considered 'statistically significant', especially considering the small sample size. It was obviously not insignificant enough not to make headlines all over the papers.<br /><br />In other words, adults who claim they have a <span class="il">peanut</span> <span class="il">allergy</span> that will cause serious anaphylaxis, or digestive problems, are extremely rare.<br /><br />What makes it hard to study it properly is that people with <span class="il">peanut</span> allergies are quite rare and it is quite hard to test reliably. Because of the remote risk of it being fatal the only true test by oral challenge (making them eat it, placebo controlled) is not always done, about 40% of people who respond to blood or skin tests don't actually show symptoms when eating it.<br /><br />People have the right to believe whatever they like about their own allergies, but the sad news is that according to another study, children who were told that they were allergic to peanuts had more anxiety and felt more physically restricted than children with diabetes.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-29914423294361849592009-12-23T15:26:00.013+00:002011-12-29T13:44:18.598+00:00Precautionary principle and vested interestsI'm noticing some interesting parallels between two very controversial topics normally supported by very different camps. The one is invading, or liberating Iraq, the other is action over climate change.<br />
<br />
The case for invading Iraq was put forward by politicians. They portrayed it as if they were acting based on information from the experts in intelligence and military employed by various government funded institutions. The threat was Saddam Hussein and the notion that he had weapons of mass destruction. This threat had been established by the experts based on evidence. The evidence wasn't open to the public eyes for various reasons. One reason was the fact that it's sensitive information that could compromise the security and intelligence sources of many nations. Another reason is that it's not necessary to release it, since various experts in the field of intelligence, military and politics have had a look at it and they are the experts who are better qualified than the public over this matter.<br />
<br />
The case for implementing treaties between nations in order to force a curb on carbon emissions were put forward by politicians. They portrayed it as if they were acting based on information from the experts, the climate scientists employed by various government funded institutions. The threat is that if we keep on developing as we are, with transportation, heating, manufacturing and electricity running on fossil fuels from oil, gas and coal, we are going to pump so much CO2 into the atmosphere that it will heat up and change the weather catastrophically. It will significantly alter the climate and increase the effects of weather based natural disasters, droughts and displace people because of rising sea levels. This threat has been established by thousands of scientists working for various government funded institutions and by the IPCC, an organisation established by the UN for the purpose of studying the risks of climate change caused by human activity. Some of the data they work with is not completely open to the public, and they've had various reasons for not sharing it, but it doesn't matter since all the experts agree and they have peer-reviewed each other's data.<br />
<br />
The case for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam was based on the opinions of the experts, even though they didn't have conclusive proof to show to the public, and Saddam was accused of keeping it secret. The precautionary principle was put forward for action. The logic is that even though they can't prove beyond reasonable doubt the level of threat that Saddam posed to the region or the rest of the world, the risk of doing nothing is that he could use these weapons and expand his power and end up doing terrible things to the world. These things could be comparable to the atrocities of the world wars less than 100 years ago. We were told that we have to invade now to ensure this won't happen, we can't just 'do nothing'.<br />
<br />
With global warming the same precautionary principle is used. It is said that if we do nothing, and follow the 'business as usual' approach, the potential effects are catastrophic. Doing something about it, they say, is like buying insurance for your house.<br />
<br />
We know with the Iraq war, doing something about it cost a lot. We actually don't know how much it has cost yet in total. I believe we'll learn even more lessons in hindsight regarding the cost. The cost was not only money, but also the respect the world lost for the US and the UK which will constrain them diplomatically in the future. It certainly cost a lot more than what they told the public, and likely more than they believed themselves. The fact that the US economy was going through a massive boom on the back of low interest rates at the same time as it was fighting a very expensive war might teach us more about other causes of the recession.<br />
<br />
After the Iraq war, it now appears that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately we'll never know for sure, especially since the person who is the most likely to know, Saddam himself, has been executed. Even with that, we still can't say conclusively that it was the right thing to do or not, it's still open for debate. What we do know is that hundreds of thousands of people died violently, and it cost a lot of money.<br />
<br />
There are many things we can learn from this. One is that the public often know better than the experts, even if they don't have the information the experts have. Especially if the experts, the organisations they work for and the politicians have the potential to gain power and money by stressing the issue. Going to war was never a decision that the public had a chance to vote on, and neither is action over climate change. In the UK and the US both the main opposition parties were supporting the war, or during the elections they were all promising action over climate change. The IPCC, CRU, GISS etc. are all organisations that have seen their budgets increase exponentially on the back of global warming hysteria, and people like Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri both have serious vested interests in many companies that will make fortunes on the back of a cap and trade system.<br />
<br />
The precautionary principle is either useless, or dangerous, if you don't weigh in the costs and all the right alternatives correctly. Especially if your data is biased. I always see the parallel between the precautionary principle and Pascal's wager. Pascal justified spending his life on religion by weighing up the pros and cons of the potential of Christian faith, where the reward is a good eternal life. The problem was that he didn't calculate in the probability of picking the wrong religion out of the number of different religions around the world. The probability would be very high that we was going to pick the wrong one, but based on the information he received in the part of Europe that he lived, his data was biased.<br />
<br />
I believe our approach to these major issues with such low levels of certainty involved, should really be closer to buying insurance, with the cost worked out correctly based on the uncertainties of the event happening, and the uncertainties around the proposed solutions. The insurance should not cost more than the house.<br />
<br />
For example, instead of spending a fortune on invading, damaging and then building up Iraq, it would have been cheaper to put together a treaty specifying that the rest of the world will take any means necessary to remove Saddam from power if it turns out conclusively that he has weapons of mass destruction. The evidence could have been with his first use of it, which could have been terrible. However, even if he was evil and insane enough to wipe out Israel in one go, he would have been hesitant to have done it knowing the majority of the world is an allied force that will wipe him out in retaliation. I also believe such a deal would have had a better chance to get support from the entire UNSC. I also don't see how you could distinguish the value of the risk of Israel being hit first compared to the value of the risk of the people of Iraq dying in the efforts to remove their dictator. It also would have been cheaper to make sure the world is armed better to fight off this potential threat if it happens, than using the ammunition on the people and infrastructure of Iraq.<br />
<br />
With regards to climate change, let's pay for insurance now in the form of investing in things that will help us mitigate the effects if it happens. Weather related natural disasters affect poor people more, so let's make sure poor people are richer instead and make sure a richer world is ready to withstand any other changes in climate. We know, even without man made influences, the world has suffered a lot of natural catastrophic climate change events and it has happened quickly without warning in the past. I feel it's cheaper to prepare for it, and safer, than to try eliminate one of the potential causes of it happening. Just like before the Iraq war, we aren't able to predict the real effects of our action in advance. The risk of not being able to predict the cost of these actions are not like buying insurance at a price that makes sense.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-65394232697258185242009-08-25T17:57:00.008+00:002011-12-28T14:28:38.999+00:00E-numbers are not Evil-numbers<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh63xDvVjN-eWNRN-I79wLoVS_Y651cZCCRWdFMQNYFzJ1yGevrNuwiBDLnunNlwvx_qvdZ3cR9R90CctiVvxMQnpd7hbKJtizi2NXUErHCxQ5uMo6PZZ4inzgwEyy3EzY2KSgPwOVMrLk/s1600-h/e.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 101px; height: 115px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh63xDvVjN-eWNRN-I79wLoVS_Y651cZCCRWdFMQNYFzJ1yGevrNuwiBDLnunNlwvx_qvdZ3cR9R90CctiVvxMQnpd7hbKJtizi2NXUErHCxQ5uMo6PZZ4inzgwEyy3EzY2KSgPwOVMrLk/s200/e.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5418452975858073506" border="0" /></a><br />The E-numbers system is a European system to abbreviate various substances included in food products, and appears on the packaging. It seems like people are naturally suspicious of these codes, probably because they appear to indicate something very artificial and we would rather trust something that's more natural. For some, it's more than just a suspicion, which offers an opportunity to market products as being 'Free from E-numbers'. <div><br /></div><div>I suppose the original purpose of E-numbers was to actually allow product manufacturers to use less printing space on their packaging to list the ingredients, and to eliminate ambiguity. This is particularly useful when printing information on small or multi-lingual packaging. Unfortunately it seems like this effort to help the consumer be more informed has backfired. </div><div><br /></div><div>E-numbers are intended to be used to list any ingredient that has an E-number, but commonly used to list additives with long chemical names. Some of these can indeed be harmful, while some people are allergic to others, but many, or even most, are not only perfectly safe, but something you should actually want. The E-numbers in the range E200-E299 are preservatives, including sulphur Dioxide (E220) and carbon dioxide (E290). The range E300-E399 are antioxidants, including Vitamin-C (E300) and Vitamin-E (E306) and so on. These are chemicals found in many natural sources like fruit and herbs.</div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, all sparking mineral water contains E290. In fact, a sparkling drink with vitamin-C would contain both E290 and E300. Many organic food products contain E-numbers, it's just never listed like that. In organic products, the full name of the plant material is used, even though the plant can contain dosens of substances which have their own E-numbers. Many natural ingredients derived from natural processes like fermentation have an E-number (e.g. xanthan gum). Even many of the popular food colours, like beta-carotene (E160a), are also sold as beneficial supplements to maintain and improve your health, or occurs naturally in carrots.</div><div><br /></div><div>The substances that are normally obtained in a synthesized form, are usually based on something we used to extract from natural plant materials. The synthetic process is cheaper, and contrary to popular irrationality, a cheaper process means it's more efficient and has less of an impact on the environment. In other words we don't have to grow and destroy loads of styrax trees to obtain benzoic acid any more, just like we don't have to harvest many willow trees to eat the bark, instead of using simpler raw materials to produce aspirin.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many people believe, mistakenly, that foods, medicines and supplements that are naturally produced are somehow potentially less harmful to their health than something synthetically produced. Having some unnatural sounding numbers for these substances make it seem even worse. However, all of this shows a clear lack of understanding what the E-numbers really are, and a general lack of understanding of food chemistry, and just general irrationality.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of the time decisions about what we eat are not based on logic, or even on being rational. It's a very emotional thing. We base our food decisions on knowledge, but knowledge that we select emotionally. If we care about our health, and most of us for the environment too, we are influenced by information presented to us that reminds us, emotionally, of wholesomeness. Cold, hard chemicals would appear to be the opposite to us.</div><div><br /></div><div>It would be perfectly normal to list freshly squeezed organic orange juice to contain E300. However you will probably find it hard to sell. Actually this resistance to E-numbers has gone quite far. I've just had a quick look through all the food I have at home, and so far I could only find two items listing E-numbers, and the one is probably very old stock. I only have one 'organic' product at home. Not even the Coca-Cola products list the E-numbers any more, and I remember these being the first products I noticed with these codes.</div><div><br /></div><div>Consumer choice wins, even though consumer choice is not entirely rational, or at least not in line with my own choice. Personally I would have preferred that all the products that I'm actually allergic to list the E-numbers, instead of some leaving them out again since there is no space.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-13290483189066445792009-05-26T23:12:00.001+00:002011-12-28T14:31:41.002+00:00Clay on a plate<div>I got a bit of clay today, put it on a plate, and made the following little video.</div><div><br /></div><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/u-6lZEt3QAo&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/u-6lZEt3QAo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-71712109148473546242009-05-16T14:26:00.006+00:002011-12-28T14:31:41.002+00:00Some time lapse videos from GibraltarI've been toying with running scripts on my digital camera, and making time lapse movies from them. I thought it would be a good way to make little videos to go with the music I make.<div><br /></div><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CkleifujCz8&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CkleifujCz8&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><div><br />and a slightly older one...<br /></div><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QMdQjXLx0vA&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QMdQjXLx0vA&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7679902639481700739.post-88796886992621700342008-07-28T17:07:00.014+00:002011-12-28T14:30:06.885+00:00Primitive understanding of money<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFciR23XWJRwjZmbnQw7-HVr1HmTEpYzKXbDNrd0Gb9jGixBayCiaYyop37KArzwYFbZGLlGdVOt166MKVXijZSvcfilqZ89bfnFcWd321Tk2GDLzI1MULtqpOwGPFyGmJfrIml48Z_jE/s1600-h/money-tree.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFciR23XWJRwjZmbnQw7-HVr1HmTEpYzKXbDNrd0Gb9jGixBayCiaYyop37KArzwYFbZGLlGdVOt166MKVXijZSvcfilqZ89bfnFcWd321Tk2GDLzI1MULtqpOwGPFyGmJfrIml48Z_jE/s200/money-tree.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5228122458731247090" border="0" /></a><br />"Money is a man made creation and in itself worth nothing. Why are we compelled to affix price tags to everything?" I'm going to try to explain:<br /><br /><span class="nfakPe">Money</span> is just our convenient measure of the worth of things. It's a bit like saying gallons aren't worth anything, but at the same time more gallons of fuel are worth more than less gallons of fuel.<br /><br />Perhaps some people might benefit by having a fresh look at money to realise why we measure things in this way. Some people have a very simplistic view of <span class="nfakPe">money</span> and of economics in general. The kind of view you develop when you're a child in your parents' house.<br /><br />Your mother is the source of a cake and other such treats, and if your brother gets more of the cake it means there is less cake for you. All pocket<span class="nfakPe"> money</span> and decisions about freedom comes from your parents, and you grow up to realise the importance of some of the rules they have established with you when you were young, like not letting you run across the highway when you're 6 years old. <span class="nfakPe">You learn that money</span> for material things like video games, music, bicycles, skate boards and clothes comes from your parents, and you know that you can't have more of these things because your parents won't give you more <span class="nfakPe">money</span> for these things, and they tell you that they don't have more <span class="nfakPe">money</span> to give, so you realise that this <span class="nfakPe">money</span> is important and you learn that the <span class="nfakPe">money</span> at their disposal is finite just like the size of the cake is finite.<br /><br />After school you might go and study, where it might be paid by your parents, or paid or subsidised from tax <span class="nfakPe">money</span>, you go to educational institutions filled with teachers who normally have never achieved success in the commercial world outside of academia, or only know about getting education or educating others and getting paid by their employer, the educational institution, who gets their <span class="nfakPe">money</span> from your parents either directly or indirectly through taxes.<br /><br />Up to this point you learn that <span class="nfakPe">money</span> is important, and that the disposable amount that anyone has is finite, and that it's their choice as to how much of that amount they want to give to others or not. You know that they get their <span class="nfakPe">money</span> from employers, and employers decide how much they get or they don't get and that if they want to have more they have to convince these employers to give them more money.<br /><br />Then you develop the belief that those who are poor are so because someone has decided to give them less <span class="nfakPe">money</span>, and there are others who have a lot of <span class="nfakPe">money</span> at their disposal who can afford to give these people more <span class="nfakPe">money</span>, but don't. This seems all very unfair and is a bit like your mother deciding to give your brother two thirds of the cake and you only a third. You feel that to correct this, the employer or the government has to fix it by adjusting the portion of the handouts fairly. You also develop the idea that your mother, employer or government are what controls the allocation of money, and that you need to combine the strength of everyone in the same position in order to campaign and persuade these authorities to give you more. For instance if you and two of your siblings tell your mother that you don't want to eat asparagus, and want carrots instead, your mother is more likely to comply especially if you all refuse to eat or refuse to stop screaming together. The same goes in forming unions to prevent employers from exploiting you and your fellow workers, or forming lobby groups or nationwide strikes to convince the government. You develop the belief that this is the only way to bring chance and establish fairness.<br /><br />I can easily see how this thinking develops. It's a product of the way we grow up and the society we grow up in. It's hard for us to understand how this came to be. We learn about previous kings, dictators and rulers of the past, so there's always been an elite class with more control over the distribution of wealth, just like our parents had more control over our lives while we were growing up. This way of perceiving the system is familiar to us, and we see the suffering of others, just like we suffered when our mothers took away a treat, freedom, privilege or pocket <span class="nfakPe">money</span> if we didn't do something in a way she wanted. We focus on those in control, since they obviously have the means, and hold them responsible for the suffering of ourselves and others.<br /><br />Perhaps you can start seeing it in a different perspective if you take a society from scratch. Let's start with a small family, mother, father and three children. The father goes hunting, the mother prepares food and feed the kids. The oldest child makes sure the younger children won't kill themselves by going out too far and fall into the river or get eaten by lions. The older child has learned that his mother and father is angry at him in unpleasant ways if he doesn't do what they say. They instruct and teach him to do things in this way because they want him to know what to do to stay alive and succeed, and help them stay alive and succeed at that. The younger children learn this at the same time. No <span class="nfakPe">money</span> is involved in establishing the worth here, only love and the will to survive and better their life and chance of survival. When facing external danger like predators or food shortages, they help each other at fighting, hunting and sharing the food. Within the family you have natural solidarity, or socialism.<br /><br />Brothers and sisters could implement some kind of measurement between each other when it comes to the value of their acts, for example if one gets more honey than the other they might fight over it to settle that and decide everyone should get an equal amount except for the one who's hurt the others on purpose during play, but if the oldest brother gets more meat then they could all agree that it is fair since he needs to be strong in order to protect the younger children from predators. See, even now you have to put a measurement on the worth to the older brother, even in a family structure driven by love and solidarity.<br /><div><br />Let's say you have two families like this, the father of one family is good at hunting while the father of the other family is good at finding edible fruits and mushrooms. Since it's better to live on a diet of meat and fruits instead of just meat and just fruits because of the pattern of migration of the animals and the seasonality of the fruits, the two families share with each other.<br /><br />But let's say one of the families don't provide as much of something as the other one, or not all the time, how do you determine how much<span class="nfakPe"> fruit</span> and meat do you share with the other family? What happens when the other family just eats a lot and get fat, and only bring food to you from time to time? So you learn to trade, the families swap <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> and meat with each other, but not in equal amounts because certain factors determine their value. In winter it takes triple the effort to find fruits as it is to do hunting, so you learn that you need to give triple the amount of meat for the same amount of <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> during winter. If the hunter doesn't agree that value with the <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> <span class="nfakPe">picker</span>, he could decide not to trade at that value. He could either decide to stick to meat in winter or dry some fruits during summer to eat in the winter, or both. The <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> <span class="nfakPe">picker</span> wants access to meat in winter so he decides to lower his price. Alternatively the hunter could decide that hunting is still less effort and a lot better than doing the whole dried <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> thing, so he decides that during winter it's worth paying more meat for <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span>. In summer he has to hunt less for <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> since <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> is cheap. Hey presto, efficiency reached, in winter the hunter works harder and ends up providing meat for his family and the<span class="nfakPe"> fruit</span> <span class="nfakPe">picker's</span>, and the <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> <span class="nfakPe">picker</span> works harder during the end of summer so that he has enough <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> to provide for both families over winter. All this happened without having to rely on a higher authority, campaigning or violence in order to make things fair and efficient.<br /><br />Anyway, that's Econ101. Unfortunately it's hard for people to take that concept and scale it up to more complex arrangements, like we have today. Where the hunter subcontracting the hunting duties to younger and healthier males to do the running around, where the price of meat is affected by running out of animals in the forest, where the<span class="nfakPe"> fruit</span> <span class="nfakPe">picker</span> starts to grow foods, and find foods that can store through a whole winter, where they develop a medium of exchange (<span class="nfakPe">money</span>), one that can be stored and traded later, where governments starts to determine the value of the medium of exchange and can create fake <span class="nfakPe">money</span> out of thin air and the distortion and loss of value is called inflation, where the hunter can give meat to the <span class="nfakPe">fruit</span> <span class="nfakPe">picker</span> in exchange for a promise that he'll be given more<span class="nfakPe"> fruit</span> in summer, plus some extra since he had to wait so long etc.<br /><br />We have the vast and complex system as we have today. Even while it's efficient, and everyone is better off exponentially more than before, and exponentially more than other older or failed experimental systems like socialism, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, feudalism and the likes, there are still some who suffer. We still want to blame the winners for the losers.<br /><br />Unfortunately it's hard for people to understand exactly how and why, even many smart people. Instead we fall back to the way we understand the system as we learned to discover it as we were growing up under our parents and while being students. Some deny the fact that it was the system we have that gave us the platform to develop all the technologies we have today that makes life so easy for us that we can sit in an air conditioned office all day and work light and socialise with people around the world over the internet and get drunk afterwards, or at the bottom of the scale make it so cheap to produce food that there isn't a democratic and capitalistic country in the world where people die of hunger.<br /><br />I hope I'm doing a charitable deed by trying to help educate people who struggle to understand all of this, since the well intended solutions to try help those who suffer can actually bring terrible suffering to this world.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2