Serendipitous altruism

Ever since the Linux Advanced Routing & Shaping HOWTO introduced it, I have been a big fan of the Wondershaper, a traffic shaping script that drives Linux‘s class based queuing with stochastic fairness queuing (SFQ) in a pretty effective attempt at maintaining low latency for interactive traffic while at the same time maintaining high throughput. There is even a ‘wondershaper’ Debian package that includes some additional polish. This script is key to the joy of perfectly responsive SSH sessions while peer to peer file sharing traffic saturates the uplink.

Some people have even concluded the resulting quality of service is good enough for voice traffic. But even with the Debian Wondershaper ruling my ADSL link I noticed that SIP and IAX still suffer too much packet loss with the saturating traffic occupying the background. I needed better traffic control.

As usual, being a late adopter I am not the only one to have hit that obstacle, and solutions have already been put forth. After rummaging through various mutations, I found Robert Koch’s version of the Wondershaper for the Asus WL-xxx documented on the Wondershaper package page of the WL-500G wiki to be quite promising. Compared to the standard version it prioritizes VOIP traffic by source port for idiot proof configuration, but also by type of service which is much more flexible and can be used thanks to Asterisk being capable of correctly setting TOS fields. As a bonus, using TOS also makes this version of the script capable of distinction between console interactive SSH traffic and bulk SCP traffic using the same protocol and port. And to top it all, it is based on the better hierarchical token bucket (HTB) discipline which is standard since Linux 2.4.20 while the Debian Wondershaper version uses the more based queuing which used to be the more widespread one.

The first shortcoming I found is that it prioritizes SIP and RTP but not IAX and others which I’ll have to add using the SIP stanzas as templates. The other is that taking lists of low priority ports as arguments could make the command line messy and configuration puzzling for the inexperienced user, so I prefer to have this configuration item as a documented variable allocation inside the script. But those are trifles compared to the new VOIP support, enhanced SSH discrimination and overall upgrade.

Hacking on the script I couldn’t resist reorganizing a few things. I originally intended to provide a diff, but that would be pointless since I ended up touching most of the lines. Also be warned that I do not understand why putting ‘prio 1’ everywhere makes the script work whereas other ‘prio’ values at various places made traffic end up in the wrong class and did not make sense at all. In effect, I think that by putting ‘prio 1’ everywhere I just eschewed the use of priority bands inside the classes, which is just fine with me for the intended use. But this show that my tc fluency is still limited and that there are therefore surely ways to enhance this script. I’ll also welcome feedback – whether it works for you or not.

Anyway – it works ! I had a few VOIP conversations across an IAX trunk with lots of background traffic on the uplink and no perceptible effects on voice quality. Life is good. Now that I have removed the last obstacle to taking full advantage of VOIP at home. Soon all my traffic will be routed through Asterisk and there shall be no more RJ11 nor their French T-sockets alter ego in my home.

Here is my modified wondershaper script in all its glory – contrary to Robert Koch’s version it is a drop-in replacement for Debian’s package. Inheriting from the original Wondershaper it is licensed under the GPL so enjoy, modify and share !

I work as a project manager for a very large ISP that Dilbert readers would sometimes find strangely familiar. But nothing prepared me for the shock and disbelief I experienced when some of my co-workers in the information systems division asked me why I kept sending them mail written in 10-point Courier New font whereas I was sending them plain text.

Following on their remark I soon found that many people found likewise that my messages are difficult to read because of that poor choice of font. Apparently, no one realized that plain text is rendered as whatever you want it to render as, including Fette Fraktur or even Zapf Dingbats if you fancy hieroglyphic form.

Sometimes I wonder if I am really working for an ISP. If you think that such company is an oasis of Internet culture, then if you joined one nowadays you would be sadly disappointed.

Anyway here is a tip for them, straight from the horse’s mouth :

1. From the main Microsoft Outlook window, on the “Tools” menu, click “Options” and then click the “Mail Format” tab.
2. Click “Fonts“.
3. Next to the “When composing and reading plain text” box, click “Choose Font“.
4. Select the fonts you want, and then click “OK“.
5. Enjoy my plain text messages in your favorite font and size.

Plain text grants the recipient freedom to render as he sees fit, including in Braille or as audio speech – plain text is that flexible.

I do not have a fetish for the spartan aesthetics of plain text in green monospace font on a black text console. What I appreciate is universal portability : I can read plain text on any device in any situation and process it with any tool including old or underpowered ones – and I actually do. That is the power of plain text.

Of course, as an interpreted markup language, HTML can also be rendered in a variety of ways and I could probably use it, but plain provides even more freedom. HTML being a standard I nevertheless welcome it in my mailbox even if I seldom send any HTML mail. A good maxim to live by when you are writing anything which has to interoperate with other systems is : “Be liberal in what you receive, and conservative in what you send”. It is as old as the Internet but it’s a great way to make things highly compatible and interoperable.

Writing this rant probably dates me as a unixian dinosaur… But it could be worse : just wait until someones gets me started about proper mail quoting !

Youthful ignorance can be horribly embarrassing, but I hope this confession will help others follow the righteous path. I plead guilt about having in a not so distant past grossly misused Microsoft Excel for writing monster spreadsheets that really begged to be databases. When you reach Excel’s row number limit on several tabs with several occurrences of vlookup on each row, please consider it as a sign that you should reconsider your choice of tool !

This lack of judgment is so common that there are now even Excel add-in tools that mimic joins for users who can’t leave the comfort of their spreadsheets. But a better solution would be to stop being afraid of the big scary database. SQL is not that hard, and if it comes to misusing Excel and not having a MySQL server at hand you even have a credible excuse for using Microsoft Access.

Once you’ll have performed joins in a proper way and seen your files deflate a hundred fold and your query time divided by a thousand, you’ll understand how spreadsheets and relational databases are answers to different use cases – the linked article is thirteen years old but no less true today.

And to help get the message through, I coined a meme that actually seems to have found some traction in the office : vlookup is the poor man’s join !

Urban transport in Africa is chaotic and only getting worse by the year – degrading infrastructure, growing megalopolis and rising energy costs are not helping. I traveled in quite a few African countries and I had the dubious privilege of using public transportation such as the legendary minibuses which are a mandatory part of the African experience. At home in Paris, I mostly ride my bike. I always wonder why bike transportation is not more developed in Africa : it would be practical, sustainable and consistent with the local standard of living while extending business opportunities and access to goods and services – all while using few imported goods and mostly local workforce.

“At first glance the bicycle seems ideal transportation for many in Africa cities: most are flat, trip distances are short and money for private motor vehicles and public transit systems is scarce. But generally bicycles are underutilized in Africa” writes David Mozer in “The Bicyclist’s Dilemma In African Cities”. He notes that “a survey of literature by Africa writers indicates that bicycles were a prominent mode of transport during the first half of the twentieth century. But for reasons that are not totally clear the bicycle and bicyclist don’t fare well in the contemporary Africa city. [..] Bicycles are used less in most African urban centers than in many European and North American cities. Africans show a substitution directly between walking and motor transport as income increases“.

The difference with Asia is striking. Ten years ago, at the UNCHS (Habitat) Regional Symposium on Urban Poverty in Asia, A. Rahman Paul Barter noted many differences between bicycle use in Asia and Africa : ” In most Asian cities, bicycles are within reach of many poor households and have been widely used for the last several decades (Replogle, 1992). In Asia, unlike most African and Latin American cities, bicycles are affordable even to many of those for whom public transport is not affordable (Godard, 1997; Howe and Dennis, 1993; Tiwari and Saraf, 1996)“.

The difference may have a lot to do with the presence of a deliberate industrial development policy geared towards the building of a sustainable local cycling manufacture and maintenance industry : the UNCHS paper goes on : “Several Asian countries have successfully pursued policies in the post -World War Two era which enabled a local bicycle manufacturing industry to flourish and for large numbers of affordable bicycles to be available on the local market. The main low-income examples is China but bicycle manufacturing is also significant in India and Pakistan, while earlier Japan and Taiwan also developed very large bicycle industries (Replogle, 1992). In China before 1979 bicycle ownership and production remained something of a privilege but with market reforms bicycle ownership rose steeply (Hook and Replogle, 1996). China has also long provided direct government and employer-based subsidies to workers for the purchase of bicycles (Replogle, 1992). India and China have also managed to become large exporters of bicycles. The lack of a significant domestic bicycle industry and high tariffs on imports in Bangladesh contributes to bicycles being beyond the reach of the poor in Dhaka (Gallagher, 1992). There are some examples of successful credit schemes for the purchase of non-motorised vehicles by low-income people in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh (World Bank, 1996)“.

Why African governments have disregarded the opportunity to develop a home grown light industry consistent with local manpower, local competence, local needs and ressources is a nagging question, especially since such light industry can be the seeds of an economic biotope within which more sophisticated industries can develop in a grassroots fashion.

But practical obstacles and hostile individual attitudes toward cycling are also to blame, most of them catalogued in Rahman Paul Barter’s paper. I had the opportunity to interview locals about them. The objections related to security and afford ability are easily invalidated by the fact that in many African countries light motorcycles are overwhelmingly the popular way to provide individual transportation as soon as it is within economic reach, as anyone who has ridden among the hordes of mopeds can testify.

So what remains is prejudice against human powered vehicles in general and bicycles in particular as a serious mean of transportation. As I have heard from potential users in Africa, riding a bicycle is not recognized as a dignified mean of transportation. Physical exertion being shunned, the bicycle being seen as a child toy unworthy of an adult, cycling being incompatible with the socially accepted role of women… The objections I witnessed in Africa are strangely similar to the ones I hear in Paris. And apparently they are the same elsewhere in the world. A lot of communication work remains to be done everywhere in the world so that cycling becomes a serious choice for transportation. It is sad that even where it makes the most sense and delivers the most positive externalities, cycling still needs propaganda to convince transportation users.

Of course, cycling is not a universal solution. But it is a valid tool which is currently underrepresented in the transportation mix, especially in poor countries where in many situations where it is economically and practically optimal, it is neglected for irrational reasons. I hope that African entrepreneurs will see the opportunity along with micro-credit institutions and ambitious politicians who can foster awareness initiatives.

Openness is everything – the rest is details. The technology is there and people have been talking about it for more than a year. Let’s bow to the inevitable : just as Compuserve, AOL, The Source, Prodigy and their ilk have all dissolved in the Internet, Twitter will find a decentralized replacement. And let’s make the inevitable happen by pushing XMPP !

Techchrunch reported that “over the last few days a number of popular bloggers have complained, loudly, that it’s time to ditch Twitter and move to a decentralized version of the service that won’t go down every time usage spikes“. But I could not care less about that : I am not even a Twitter user. But I think there are good uses for micro-blogging and social instant messaging, so I want a free and open solution. That means decentralization in the classical Internetworking style.

After reading the USP and elevator pitch for Ack, someone took the time to review the hype and make his own opinion about ack. It appears to him that although Ack is not a drop-in replacement for Grep, the DWIM factor makes it a very interesting alternative for many situations where interactive use by a human is involved.

So I decided to give it a spin. ‘apt-cache search ack’ matched 15971 packages related to crack, backup, pack, slack and whatever else you can imagine, but an ‘apt-cache search ack | grep -E ^ack’ solved that problem at once.

In Debian, there was already a kanji code converter named “ack” – but since we don’t intend as far as I know to write Kanji anytime soon I tought it was reasonable to alias ack=’ack-grep’ so that our shell takes advantage of the short name.

After toying with it a little, it appears that Ack is indeed a handy tool which I’ll be definitely using in the future. There is a performance tradeoff when operating with the C locale, but since we strive to be an all UTF-8 shop I don’t care much about that. And anyway, in most interactive situations, brain usage and fingers motricity are far more precious ressources than run time or CPU time…

Now that in its 2.0 incarnation Ejabberd supports publish-subscribe and therefore personal eventing, it is time to play with it and demonstrate to the wider world the marvellous use-cases that the future holds. A nice first one that should be popular and therefore useful for propaganda purposes is using Psi so that contacts can see in your presence status the music that you are playing. I stumbled upon an Amarok script that notifies Psi’s through the tune file interface and lets Psi publish the currently playing song status via PEP – and it looked good.

PEP is defined “XEP-0163: Personal Eventing via Pubsub“. And Pubsub is defined by “XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe“. So far so good. But digging around a bit I learned about “XEP-0118: User Tune” and then it dawned on me that there appeared to be room for improvement : the script outputs a composite “tune” element which is a radical simplification of the schema specified in XEP-0118.

So I had a go at modifying the script to get it as close to the specification as possible. You can judge of the resulting output for yourself : not quite XEP-0118 compliant but a good step in that direction.

The source code is available from the usual dump, but if you are an Amarok and Psi user you might actually want to use the Amarok script package that installs and runs in a coupe of clicks – thanks to the previous authors whose work I built upon.

While I was at it I discovered a bug that causes Psi 0.11 to use the element tag “source” to contain the album information, so I promptly provided the psi project team with the trivial patch needed.

It is is 3:30 AM and a few hours ago I did not realize that upgrading Ejabberd would get me that far for today…

I keep my regular daily reading sources in publicly available aggregator built with the excellent although not updated for a good while Gregarius. I thought it might also be useful to gather all my private feeds into another Gregarius instance for my exclusive perusal.

Kudos to LinkedIn whose “Network Updates” feeds is available through an URL with a path long enough to actually be used as a basic shared secret, which is adequate security for protecting such a low value information. This lends itself perfectly to the sort of private aggregation I want.

But no brownie points to Facebook whose behavior toward open communications never fails to disappoint. Last April, Facebook made its “Friend’s Status Updates” feed available in RSS format through the same sort of pseudo secret URL as LinkedIn. So far so good : a nice gesture of openness which made me happy when I pointed Firefox at my feed’s URL.

As I was compiling the list of feeds I was going to aggregate, I tested each of them from my web server’s Z shell to check their reachability. When I pointer ELinks at my “Friend’s Status Updates” feed URL, here is what I got :

You are using an incompatible web browser.

   Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it

   real with one of the following browsers:

     * Firefox

     * Opera

     * Safari

     * Flock

Baaad Facebook ! This is so incredibly lame : not only is it an unnecessary annoyance, but it is also completely ineffective since I’ll just have to insert a wget download in my hourly Gregarius update script and tell wget to pretend being Firefox. Gregarius will then happily download the local copy through my web server. I just tested and wget –user-agent=”Mozilla” works just fine.

Even easier : I’ll modify my local Gregarius copy so that util.php at line 539 reads “$client->agent = Mozilla;” instead of “$client->agent = MAGPIE_USER_AGENT;” so that Magpie (the RSS import library for Gregarius) tells Snoopy (the HTTP client for Magpie) to use whatever Facebook wants to hear to deliver the goods.

So Facebook :

1. Gratuitously annoys its users
2. Does not even do it competently

Now, isn’t it time to really open instead ?

The openMosix Project has officially closed as of March 1st 2008. This brings nostalgia of the toy OpenMosix cluster I once had running for a few years, assembled using the ailing collection of dusty hardware heating my apartment and infrequently put to productive use for large batch jobs. Soon I found that a single less ancient machine could perform about as fast if not faster for less electricity, and batch jobs being what they are I could just as well let them run during my sleep. But in an age when I had more time than money (I now have neither…) and when compression jobs were measured in hours, OpenMosix was a fun and useful patch for which I foresaw a bright future.

A few years later the efficient scheduler in recent Linux releases lets me load my workstation to high values with barely any consequence for interactive tasks, so I don’t really feel like I’m starved for processing power. But I still spend too much time staring at progress bars when editing photos, so more available CPU could definitely speed up my workflow. This is why I look longingly at the servers in the corridor who spend most of their lives at fractional loads while the workstation is struggling. Manual load balancing by executing heavy tasks on remote hosts is a bit of a chore, so I go browsing for single-system image clustering news, wondering why easily pooling local system resources is not yet a standard feature of modern operating systems.

One of the major obstacles to the generalization of SSI clustering outside of dedicated systems is that software such as OpenMosix or Kerrighed require an homogeneous environment : you can’t just mix whatever hosts happen to live on your LAN. For most users, homogenizing their systems using one Linux kernel version, let alone one type of operating system is not an option.

But nowadays, virtualization systems such as Xen are common enough that they may represent a viable path to homogenization. So I envision using it to extend my workstation to the neighboring hosts. I would run the workstation as a normal “on the metal” host, but on each of the hosts I want to assist the workstation I would run a Xen guest domain running a bare bones operating system compatible with taking part in a single system image with the workstation. Adding capacity to the cluster would be as simple as copying the Xen guest domain image to an additional host and running it as nice as desired, with no impact on the host apart from the CPU load and allocated memory.

This approach looks sane to me on paper, but strangely I can’t find much about it on the web. Is there an hidden caveat ? Did I make an obviously wrong assumption ? Tell me if you have heard of other users extending their workstation with SSI using Xen guest domains on random local hosts. Meanwhile, since OpenMosix is now unsupported, I guess I’ll have to dive into Kerrighed…

Fan failure is a common life-ending event for electronic hardware, and so did I send my three years old HIS Radeon 9800 Pro IceQ to the retirement drawer when overheat crashes helped me discover it was not pushing much air anymore since the fan motor seized.

This was an excellent pretext to acquire a faster graphical adapter. I chose a Sapphire HD 2600 XT AGP 512 DDR3 (reference 100229L) because it is currently an excellent performance for money at €85, and also because that is one of the few remaining choices for upgrading my aging AGP system significantly. It is such a rarity that I can’t even find a decent review to link to and the picture shows the 256 MB version which nevertheless looks exactly the same.

With Linux, all is mostly well : the RadeonHD driver provided me with the basic functionality I need, and I was hopeful it would make me forget the lacking Xorg 3D support with my former card. But alas for now RadeonHD does not support 3D for graphic adapters with a PCIE to AGP bridge – and that includes the Sapphire HD 2600 XT AGP. Users are ranting about the lack support for ATI HD 2600 AGP support so at least I am not the only one. In that conversation, someone with apparent insider information noted that “Linux support for AGP HD2xxx cards has not yet been released, but is being worked on”. So maybe I’ll have Linux 3D some day…

I then executed ATI Catalyst installer to upgrade my dusty Windows XP drivers in case we manage to throw a LAN party for the first time in months since we all let family and professional duties creep on our schedule, I was faced with this message : “setup did not recognize compatible drivers”. And the installation process would abort.

The Wikipedia entry for the Radeon R600 series mentions this issue :

Note that Catalyst drivers 7.10, 7.11 and 7.12 do not yet support the AGP versions of Radeon HD 2000 series cards with RIALTO bridge. Installing Catalyst drivers 7.10, 7.11 or 7.12 on those cards will yield the following error message: “setup did not find a driver compatible with your current hardware or operating system.” The cards, which are yet to be supported, with their PCI vendor ID are listed below:^[46]

GPU core	Product	PCI device ID
RV610	Radeon HD 2400 Pro	94C4
RV630	Radeon HD 2600 Pro	9587
RV630	Radeon HD 2600 XT	9586

Niiice ! ATI lets manufacturers produce hardware it does not provide drivers for… At least this teaches me that they can even do worse than their proprietary binary drivers.

The solution is to head to Sapphire’s archive of old drivers which contains the 10th March 2008 release of the “Hotfix Driver for AGP version of ATI RADEON HD 2400Pro/2600Pro/2600XT/HD3850 Windows XP(32-bit)” which contains the old AGP support I needed.

On installation, the system complains about that driver not being “Windows certified”. The lack of that fairy dust does not hinder normal operation the slightest bit, but it does hint that this driver was rushed as a stop-gap.

I was competent enough to sort it out, but this is the sort of problem I would expect from cutting edge hardware, not from a mass market product designed to appeal to the value-for-money segment which is less technically aware than the free spending enthusiast segment. I can imagine many better ways for ATI to show respect toward its users.

As far as I have looked, is no working FQL console application (I just tested the four FQL consoles that are published in the applications directory on Facebook but they either don’t load or crash on query). Although Facebook mentions that one is supposed to exist in the “Tools” page, there is actually none there at the moment. I guess I’ll have to build a small PHP application for playing with FQL.

My immediate practical goal is to be able to select members of two different groups. The query should be something like ‘SELECT uid FROM group_member WHERE gid=my_gid AND uid in (SELECT uid FROM group_member WHERE gid=my_other_gid)’ – for example to cross special interest groups or geographical areas.

There is plenty of potential for useful data mining that is not exposed by Facebook’s default interface. Search with multiple criteria of the same category is an obvious need for finding interesting people. Maybe did Facebook decide that the cost of additional clutter was not worth it for the average user. Or maybe they would prefer that the users don’t realize how much information can emerge from mining their data…

48 police vans, 65 motorcycles and more than 200 security personnels, around the flame (one would almost forget the flame bearer drowned among them with an uneasy smirk while Chinese flame guards frame him) dozens more riot police vans at various locations along the way, 3000 police officers dedicated to the event on foot, horseback, roller blades and boats, full mobilization of local security forces for maintaining the outer security perimeter, helicopters… I had never saw such extensive measures in Paris. Was anyone taking notice that the olympic flame was not welcome in Paris ?

So why did I wait for the flame just to shout my displeasure at it ? First, let it be known that it has nothing to do with Tibet, nor with Chinese internal political life. I support the freedom of people and individuals when the struggle is within my reach, but I also recognize the diplomatic need for Realpolitik. I like my cheap Chinese goods and I am fully aware that they cost lives. At the moment we, as a nation-state, do not have the means nor do we really have the will to impose our values on China. We do have an influence, but let’s not delude ourselves about it.

Here are a few interesting items from the fundamental principles of olympism enumerated in the olympic charter :

2. The goal of olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.
4. The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising port, without discrimination of any kind [..]
5. Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.

Human dignity, absence of religious or political discrimation ? Am I the only one who believes that the IOC is being more than slightly hypocritical ?

While our relationships with the Chinese government are diplomatic and commercial links between equals, the IOC is an international body and as such it must be considered fully accountable to its members. So my message was not addressed at China – the intended recipient were the IOC and my own government, to put pressure towards an organization of the games more in line with international ethical standards.

Respecting the spirit of olympism within the sport events is one thing I support. I can also understand the economic needs of sponsors and the career stakes of athletes. But I won’t stand for our governments surrendering all diplomatic leverage. We need a strong symbol to express our political views while not needlessly sabotaging the event. I therefore believe that we should be absent from the official ceremonies, while letting our athletes participate as they see fit. As for the sponsors, I wish them all the negative publicity they deserve.

I witnessed with satisfaction the flame being extinguished and the crowd showing hostility toward the traveling circus. I am grateful toward Reporters Sans Frontières for actively expressing ideas I share with them – I donated to them in the past and I am not disappointed by their enduring passion for press freedom. And I salute the anonymous people of Paris who did not let this propaganda event unfold unopposed.

But I am more than displeased about the way our government handled the event. Was it so difficult to recognize the public mood and choose a low key ? Was it absolutely necessary to push through in force, making the torch convoy a ridiculous police caravan ? And most of all, who did order the police to rip the Tibetan flags and RSF olympic flags away from the hands of those who were waving them ? This is an utter disgrace ! Since when is it illegal to wave a flag in our country ? Do we really have to do the bidding of the Chinese police state ? I am outraged at the attempts of the police, reported by multiple persons along the flame’s path, to remove the flags while the Chinese flags were flying. Not that I care that much about one nation annexing another when the interests of my nation state are not even remotely concerned : my outrage is about freedom of speech in my own country and respect of the law there by its own police force.

I do not know if the governments will listen, but I wish there will be a joint Euro-American action so that the message will be effectively passed while not letting China single out specific countries for retorsion. Once more we dream about the European Union coming of age – but meanwhile let’s hope we can at least coordinate our diplomacy somewhat.

Now we pass the olympic torch to our comrades in San Francisco and beyond… Why should only the Chinese use the relay as a propaganda event ?

On my Palm Treo 680 with Notes 1.3.2 on Palm OS 5.2H, I have a document that causes a crash reboot when the Notes application opens it. I reproduced the problem every time, in various system states, with or without a GSM session active. I could not obtain the same behavior with any other document. the document in question is small (about 25 lines) and contains only low ASCII and tabs – a sort of tab separated data table. The crash behavior started after I added a line on top of the file. A two-way hotsync made the problem disappear with no loss of data.

I am yet unable to imagine a probable cause for the whole thing, but I find very worrying that the content of a text file can cause a Palm to misbehave in such a way. And no, I can’t show you the document – or then I would have to kill you.

I stumbled upon this gem in Hannah Arendt‘s book The Origins of Totalitarianism :

“The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect’s friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles. Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police: a look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish, not who is who or who thinks what, but who is related to whom and in what degree or kind of intimacy. The totalitarian ruler knows that it is dangerous to send a person to a concentration camp and leave his family and particular milieu untouched; [It is a common practice in Soviet Russia to arrest whole families; Hitler’s “Health Bill” also foresaw the elimination of all families in which one member was found to be afflicted with a disease.] the map on the wall would enable him to eradicate people without leaving any traces of them-or almost none. Total abolition of legality is safe only under the condition of perfect information, or at least a degree of knowledge of private and intimate details which evokes the illusion of perfection”.

Hannah Arendt‘s nightmare social mapping system was somewhat mitigated by the technological limits of her time – The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 and in her mind the information processing technology capable of supporting an extensive social graph was still about as far away as it seemed to the Czarist secret police. But today we are all busy building representations of the social graph to support and enrich our interactions. We are busy on social networking tools making the secret police’s work and making their dream come true.

Have we lost our minds and forgotten about the dangers ? Not quite : privacy management remains at the center of most social graph use cases. But this is a superficial defense : if a totalitarian state was to emerge among our society I know I would be as good as dead – or rather disappeared without a trace.

Luckily I am an European and I therefore enjoy the benefits of a life with historically high levels of freedom. But evil is never as far away as we imagine, and the generation of our grandparents who experienced totalitarism will not remain among us much longer to remind us that.

“You must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government” — Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837

In spite of the hype surrounding micro and nano UAV and how important they are becoming to winning the struggle for tactical information, I can’t find any reference about how to defend against them. As their current use is mostly on the strong side of asymmetrical warfare, it seems that the industry and the users have simply set the problem aside for now.

But it won’t be long before two high-technological forces equipped with swarms of nano UAV will find themselves fighting against each other, and they will both certainly clamor for a better fly swatter. Since I can’t foresee very large fly swatters being part of standard issue kit anytime soon, there is a clear need for some new form of air defense against air vehicles as small as a mapple seed.

Will we see micro air defense units in action, complete with toy-size automatically guided artillery, dust-like shrapnel and tiny missiles ? This heralds the appearance of new dimensions in the tactical environment, and those familiar with nanotechnological prospective will have recognized the first step of a downscaling war.

Meanwhile I think about the potential for pest control – selectively killing flying intruders seems definitely better than spraying nerve agents in my home…

Let us make it clear from the start that apart from the color and the number of wheels, those two skates have not much in common. The FSK Crossmax is my trusty urban assault vehicle, rugged, comfortable and quick to react to the unexpected. But on the open road, the Crossmax feels like short legs. So I took advantage of the winter clearance sale to acquire cheaply the Fila M100 I had been coveting. My feelings after a short test ride are about the same as anyone trying 100 millimeter wheels and carbon shoes for the first time, but I guess I’ll get used to the bigger and stiffer legs.

Since a picture is worth 10^3 words let me show you the graphical impression I had when I dropped the newcomers next to the incumbent pair :

Now you understand what I mean when I say “bigger legs”, especially if you realize that the Crossmax is anything but a toy skate.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy the potential for powerful pushes, sheer speed and efficiency in long distance raids, but I’ll definitely need to upgrade my maneuvering technique. And I’ll most certainly keep using the Crossmax for everything but the great wide open !