Fjodor's thoughts

Swatikas, common sense, and the lack hereof…

By Fjodor on Jun. 6, 2011.

While this might not be the most visited blogs of all times (especially since some of my previous posts were in Danish), I do happen to think that if I have reached just one person with any one post, it’s worth it, so here goes;

The swastika has been around as a cultural piece of imagery for something like 5,000 years or so, and has been seen across a multitude of locales during that period. For a short while – my memory is not one I would buy if offered, the German Nazi party made it’s headway in 1935 and convinced a nation that I still believe – and believe you me that they are now, weren’t aware that they were enabling a raging dictator.

However, the misappropriation of an ancient symbol was our collective fault, inasmuch as we let it be their coat of arms. For all the different uses that the proper swastika has served for so many years, they are but dust.

Hence, my suggestion is to front neo-nazis by regaining the swastika, as it, by all means, is just a way of wishing another person good luck…

Do you think that the neo-nazis could hold on to the swastika, if we took its old meaning back?

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A very bad idea

By Fjodor on Mar. 22, 2011.

This might be one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard of.

Basically, it’s a system to measure the stress level in the voice of whomever happens to call for help – in the present case case for military emergency response but with the possibility to expand into civil emergency services, to determine which calls should get priority if there is a back-log.

Now, for a military purpose, I can almost be persuaded to believe that military training for stressful situations might make this a useful metric, but for civil use, not so much.

I have had the distinct displeasure of calling ambulances for others a number of times, and as I have been taught that speaking calmly and responding to questions about details in a coherent manner, I usually make it a point to do just that – stay calm, leveled and objective, not letting the specific “badness” of the situation interfere with my attempt to convey the precise scope and nature of the emergency.

Now, the article says that the system has a very low error margin when tested on previous calls, where the prioritization of the operator in question is known. I take that to mean that it would make the same choice that the operator did. What is not mentioned is if said operator relied more on the apparent stress level of the caller or on the specifics of what was reported to make the choice of priority for the dispatch. I could, given data, easily be persuaded that the operator used the same metric as the system, and that said metric might not be the best.

A case would be an incident that took place when my oldest younger sister worked as a tourist guide in Turkey and I was there to visit. During the pick-up for departure, and elderly lady had a heart attack, and some other people in the bus stated that they were proficient in CPR, so we agreed that my sister would keep the other guests calm and alert her colleagues to the fact that the bus might be delayed, so they would have a chance to inform the airport of a number of delayed passengers, they would administer CPR, and I would call for an ambulance.

In the case of a heart attack, immediate first aid, in the form of CPR is paramount, so I had to work out this division of tasks quickly and then go on with my own. I found a local who could give me a number for the nearest hospital, called them, explained the situation and had the local describe where we were.

During all this, I made a conscious effort to keep as calm as possible, in order to understand and be understood by the local and the hospital. Furthermore, I had delegated the actual act of CPR to others who said that they were proficient in it (sadly, it turned out that they were not), so to my own mind, I think I came off as rather collected and coherent to both the local and the hospital – hardly with any significant stress level apparent, since I didn’t know the woman, but was aware that it was serious, so I should stay calm.

If a system as the one mentioned had been in place, and if the priority of the call would be set by the stress level, I rather doubt that it would have been given a sufficient level of priority, whereas a hysterical parent to a child with a minor cut on a finger or some such would probably score much higher.

In summary, I might be able to understand an argument that this could be useful in military situations, where one would expect every caller to have at least some experience and/or training in/for emergency situations, but for the civil populace, this idea is about as bad as they come…

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Taxation of the rich vs. the poor

By Fjodor on Sep. 3, 2009.

I saw this comment on a slashdot.org article tonight.

In essence, it’s an explanation of the US tax system, explained in the setting of “beer for 10 people” by a professor in economics.

While one may (rightfully) question the quality of a great many slashdot comments, I find this one rather profound.

I’d say it could be adapted to many other countries’ tax schemes with an equivalent conclusion – perhaps because politicians worldwide seem to be more eager to please the readers of daily newspapers, than to listen to sensible science…

Update 11:12 – link fixed. Thank you Thode :-$

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Svar på uopfordret snail-mail-reklame

By Fjodor on Apr. 14, 2009.

Hejsa,

Jeg har netop modtaget et tilbud om at købe Danmarks sidste polarmønt, hvilket fører til to modsatrettede spørgsmål:

1) Kan jeg, såfremt jeg køber denne mønt, være sikker på, at I opsporer og destruerer alle andre eksemplarer?

og

2) Hvis ikke, vil I så venligst undlade at sende uopfordrede og løgnagtige “tilbud” til min adresse?

Med venlig hilsen,

Sune Mølgaard
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX

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Lost posts

By Fjodor on Nov. 29, 2008.

Presumably due to a DNS foul-up on my part, my last few posts weren’t moved from a now defunct server onto the new one. Bummer

All is not lost, however, since there was a constructive comment to one article by my good friend Therese, who happens to have a more informative post than my usual ramblings on her blog, so if you can read Danish, do yourself a favour and sample her blog at http://www.version2.dk/blogs/theresehansen

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A challenge!

By Fjodor on Sep. 9, 2008.

Let’s say that when they begin doing real experiments with the Large Hadron Collider (as opposed to just circulating some protons as they will begin doing tomorrow), the world actually does come to an end…

In that case, I am willing to buy a round of beer for every sensation- and conflict-worshipping pseudoscience journalist out there. If it doesn’t, however, I shall expect such an apologetical beer from every sorry one of them.

Request the address of my favourite bar in the comments section of this article guys!

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Going telemagenta for a while

By Fjodor on Apr. 3, 2008.

As you may or may not be aware, http://www.engadget.com was recently asked to discontinue their use of the colour magenta, which is apparently trademarked by Deutsche Telekom AG in connections with its services and products.

Trying to extend this copyright to cover the services and products of Engadget.com seems like a long shot at best, and to show support, I have chosen to go with the html equivalent (#bf1773, found here) of the RAL4010 colour “Telemagenta”, which Engadget has identified as the one covered by Deutsche Telekom’s copyright in this previous post.

Oh, and in case anyone wants to place a phone call from my mobile, please mail me, and we’ll work out a small fee. How’s that for similar products and services?

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Slashdot anniversary party

By Fjodor on Oct. 5, 2007.

As you may know, slashdot.org is celebrating its 10 year anniversary this month, suggesting that people throw parties all over. I have registered a party in Århus on Oct. 19th (that’s the current plan, anyways), so if you plan on being in Århus that night, please register at slashdot, and add yourself as an attendee at this URL.

Hope to see you,

Fjodor

EDIT (20071005:11:45:00GMT+1): There will be free t-shirts and thinkgeek.com gift certificates for people signing up no later than Oct. 13th (provided they don’t run out, which I doubt).

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The Madness of Wireless Linux Drivers

By Fjodor on Apr. 11, 2007.

Late last year the technology blog The Jem Report attempted to shed some light on the state of wireless network connectivity under *BSD and Linux. In an article, author Jem Matzan addressed the problems for open source driver developers with regards to getting support from hardware vendors. He presented various drivers for Linux and *BSD and offered statements from driver developers and hardware manufacturers in the cases where he was able to get responses. Matzan stated that he had been unable to elicit any response from the MadWifi project, and speculated that this might be due to pressure from Atheros. MadWifi developers dispute that assertion, and claim they never heard from Matzan.

Getting wireless networking going under Linux can be a breeze or a hassle, depending on the network card or device you’re using. Complicating matters is the fact that, especially for wireless network devices, manufacturers seem either unwilling or legally unable to provide even the most basic information for open source developers as to how the hardware should be operated by drivers.

In the case of network cards using chips from Atheros, the people of the MadWifi project strive to deliver Linux drivers, and by most measures are quite successful at that. This author’s wireless home network is backed by a Linux box that provides Internet access through a MadWifi-driven Atheros card, and it works flawlessly. However, the MadWifi driver relies on a binary-only, closed source hardware abstraction layer (HAL) file from Atheros.

I spoke with Michael Renzmann, Will Herrick, and Kel Modderman, three members of the MadWifi team.

Fjodor: How would you describe you relationship with the MadWifi project?

Michael Renzmann: When Sam Leffler decided to abandon the Linux port of his driver back in 2005, I was one of the guys who stepped up to keep the project alive. Today my main task is to maintain the server that hosts various madwifi.org services, and I’m involved in strategic plannings related to the project.

Will Herrick: I do a bit of work on the wiki and help folks on #madwifi.

Fjodor: Would you have been able to answer Jem Matzan for the project?

MR: Yes.

WH: The questions regarding the MadWifi driver have had answers on public offer since well before the that article came out. Google or a browse of the Web site will satisfy all who wish to check that.

Fjodor: Jem Matzan claims to have sought to contact you. Did any such attempt actually get through to you?

MR: No, otherwise I would have answered.

WH: I saw no sign of him. No one did, as far as I can tell. We maintain an IRC channel, four mailing lists (with two online archives), a wiki, a Trac site, an SVN site, a Web page of contact and developer info, and generally have a visible presence on the Web.

Fjodor: Which modes of contact do you usually respond to? E-mail? IRC? The avenues described on the project’s homepage?

WH: All of them. You can see that by inspecting the archives. They are listed as resources and there is a link to that page on the wiki’s homepage.

MR: Even if contacting [us] directly failed, it would have been quite easy to get in contact with [us] through other channels, or to contact the project as such by sending an inquiry to one of our mailing lists. It did not happen in this case.

Fjodor: The article is mainly about company support for open source efforts to develop drivers. Have you had any contact with Atheros during your efforts?

WH: Not enough.

MR: Atheros has a history of supporting our work. One of the most notable events in that regard may be the contribution of a large amount of code that introduced support for multi SSID operation on one physical card (virtual access points). This contribution improved the functionality of MadWifi a lot and made it one of the most advanced WLAN drivers available for Linux today.

Fjodor: Have you sought contact with Jem Matzan in response to his article?

MR: Yes. I used his user forum to reply to the MadWifi-related part of the article. The whole thread got quite a bit of attention by the administrator (who, as far as I can judge from his comments, is Jem Matzan). However, he obviously didn’t care enough to answer my posting.

Fjodor: Matzan asserts little interest from you in supporting ar5k (the open source effort at making a HAL for Atheros chipsets). What are your views on ar5k?

WH: Once the ar5k base code passed its review for legal hygiene and was reported clean, it was only days before a new branch was added to the MadWifi SVN and work began on OpenHAL. Look at the commit log and you’ll see it’s been worked on steadily since inception.

MR: ar5k is used as base for OpenHAL, which is currently ported to Linux and integrated into MadWifi. Nick Kossifidis, who is the maintainer of this port, has joined the MadWifi team and now maintains his work directly in our Subversion repository. It’s our long-term goal to get MadWifi into the mainline kernel, and the results of Nick’s work on OpenHAL are definitely an important milestone for that goal. That was discussed at length around December 2006, for example.

The work is done in two branches of our repository, dadwifi-openhal and especially madwifi-old-openhal, has received a lot of attention so far.

I fail to see how Jem came to the conclusion that ar5k had “virtually no support” from the project.

Fjodor: Do you have any closing comments?

MR: I’m disappointed by the quality of the article, at least that of the part about MadWifi. There was a public response to his article, telling him where he was wrong and why. The fact that he didn’t bother to react to that, in my eyes, demonstrates a lack of interest and professionalism. That leaves me wondering about the reliability of the rest of the article.

Matzan’s allegations regarding pressure from Atheros to squelch the ar5k/OpenHAL’s inclusion in MadWifi are wrong. He should have easily spotted that while writing the article, even without getting in direct contact with us. To wrongfully cast Atheros (on /. no less) as a company discouraging FOSS wireless helps neither the Linux community nor the project, but only discourages this company from continuing and expanding their support.

All this is sad, because this would have been a great chance to explain the FOSS WLAN issues that face driver authors and chip makers every day. And in case Jem changes his mind, I’ll still be available for a public discussion of his questions.

WH: Atheros deserves recognition and credit for their participation in BSD and Linux wireless driver support. The current MadWifi code base is derived from source and documentation provided by an Atheros code drop, for example. The BSD work goes back several years. Rewarding Atheros for their past help might encourage them to take future FOSS steps.

Matzan’s response

The author contacted Matzan to give him a chance to comment on this article. The following reply to the initial mail came forth, and none on a subsequent request for a clarification on the nature of the more substantial assertions and the lack of a reply to Renzmann’s comments on the article:

Jem Matzan: The only thing I alleged [sic!] about the MadWifi developers was that they were difficult to contact. I phoned several times, left a voice mail message, emailed a few different addresses listed on the MadWifi developers page, and all I got was silence or mailer daemon bounces. That’s really all I’m qualified to comment on regarding the matter.

Disclaimer: I am not directly associated with the MadWifi development team. I am, however, a long time user of their driver, and a regular visitor to the #madwifi channel at irc.freenode.net.

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