After a long while, a… mixed mix!
I wasn’t quite in the mood for blogging, but after all, I decided to put here a summary on my recent wanderings. Almost non-IT…
Europe? Who cares about Europe? A few days ago, the reading of an article made me feel even more strongly that the European project is a failure: «L’Europe est prise en étau entre néo et ultralibéraux».
Otherwise, the results of the EU voting can be seen graphically in The Guardian and in Financial Times, with details for each country. Overall, the situation is kinda blue…
From the Slashdot story Software Bug Adds 5K Votes To Election, we’re told that the entirety of the software used in the electoral process in Belgium has been published online! The nice thing is that it is… MS-DOS software!
Bien entendu, j’aime l’utopie, quoique le Parti Socialiste français (qui n’était plus socialiste) est mort, les communistes ne font rien, et le NPA n’est pas si sympa que ça.
Good old times...
Sauf que le traître de Daniel Cohn-Bendit risque de troubler les eaux…
J’ai dit traître en pensant à ceci: “Lorsque, dans dix ou vingt ans, M. Daniel Cohn-Bendit et ses amis seront doyens, recteurs, ministres ou l’équivalent sous quelque autre nom…”
Apparemment, il y a une psychose sur le tube de Pitot qui équipe l’A330. L’hypothese des capteurs de vitesse défaillants fait que le syndicat Alter de pilotes de la compagnie française appele le personnel navigant à “refuser tout vol sur des A330-340 n’ayant pas au moins deux sondes Pitot modifiées”.
À vrai dire, un document interne d’Airbus daté de novembre 1996 fait preuve du fait que les paramètres mesurés par les Pitot “pourraient être sévèrement dégradés même si le dégivrage de la sonde fonctionne correctement” lorsque l’avion se trouve dans “de puissants cumulo-nimbus”, “particulièrement dans la zone de convergence intertropicale”.
Bien qu’on ne sache toujours pas encore si ces tubes sont à l’origine de l’accident d’AF447, on peut se demander pourquoi ces avions sont conçus… comme en 1914. Ces sondes Pitot ont l’air assez rétro. N’a-t-on vraiment pas moyen de connaître la vitesse en comparant en temps réel des données GPS?!
On sait que Marx était pour la libre-échange, mais moi, je suis pour le protectionnisme, en en voici pourquoi: Le retour du protectionnisme et la fureur de ses ennemis.
C’est la déflation salariale importée via le libre-échange dont la Chine et ses voisins sont responsables qui fait impossible tout progrès social. On ne peut pas avoir des droits des salariés dans les pays développés quand dans des pays comme la Chine, on travaille 16 heures par jour, dans des conditions parfois atroces, et pour une paye de misère!
Random article: Meerkats Don’t Spoil Their Mind-Numbingly Cute Babies. The youngster is from here. Other animals: it’s a wild zoo out there; or a set of felines; or maybe a lamb.
OK, so the DesktopBSD Development Comes to a Halt. That’s too bad, because PC-BSD has switched to KDE4 (and I hate their PBIs anyway), Desktop NetBSD is nowhere, and I can’t find any good reason to use the vanilla FreeBSD — the OS whose committers called me “a moron” in the past. DesktopBSD had the advantage of a very interesting GUI package manager.
OTOH, it looks like the current status is also affected by the upstream, most notably the idiotic X.Org bugs that have been reported for Intel video chips and for Radeon Xpress 200M. Looks more like the recent Linux distros, right?
I should end with a link to one of my three non-sexual enjoyments — which are: coffee, tea (green, and no mint!) and cocoa (with sugar and water; no milk!). Here’s How To Brew Turkish Coffee.
Oh no, I forgot one of the fundamental questions that puzzle me. In several of Agatha Christie’s books, we are told that the mail was delivered in London twice a day, once in the morning and a second time in the evening. In those times, there was only plain mail, not DHL/Fedex/UPS/etc.
Questions: how come that in those “slow-paced times” the postal services were organized in such a way that the postman could have visited you twice a day, and in our “fast-food era” you must rely on expensive couriers to get the same result?!
Even the collecting of the mail from the public postboxes is done nowadays only once a day (say, around 6 PM) in most places of the world. And I remember times and places when the mail was collected 3 to 6 times a day! (Nowadays, a postcard arrives after you return from a trip.)
Complementary question. As I don’t drive a car, my memories regarding this issues are close to zero. Here’s the topic: years ago, when the world was less of a “society of services”, you were offered the service of filling your car with petrol at the gas station. It was not for you to put gasoline in your car, it was for the gas station person to do it for you!
Nowadays, you are FORCED into a self-service modus operandi. No matter you could stain your suit, you MUST service yourself with gas! Why, when we’re today officially in a “society of services” and in a “world of the comfort and of the progress”, the quality of this kind of service has so severely deteriorated?
Most importantly: WHEN has this changed to the current status?
Jun 9, 2009 at 14:06
London postal service:
Charles Dickens' personal correspondence shows he could post a dinner invitation to another London address in the morning and receive a reply the same day in good time to make suitable arrangements.
You can also find that mail used to be delivered even on Christmas day well into the middle of the 20th century. We only recently lost our second daily deliveries, which is a pity but inevitable now that most business correspondence is done by other means. I guess the telex and the fax were killing postal delivery well before the age of email.
Jun 9, 2009 at 14:07
And the widespread use of the telephone!
Jun 9, 2009 at 14:13
It looks like the French could lose the next-day delivery! (Read somewhere.)
But it's not about the killing of the postal deliveries. The postal services are still very much needed! Business or not business, it's a tragic way to get REGRESSIONS because of the… technological progress! (Not only in Linux, hehe.)
Jun 9, 2009 at 14:22
>> Europe? Who cares about Europe? <<
Exactly my thoughts, and the exact reason why I didn't bother to vote on Sunday's Europawahl here in Germany :p
Concerning the quickly-approaching death of DesktopBSD, maybe now'd be the right time for a "Why BSD isn't ready for the desktop" article. Who's up to the challenge?
Jun 9, 2009 at 14:57
Oh, the Britons had quite a choice
http://www.frozenreality.co.uk/comic/bunny/strips/040609.jpg
Jun 9, 2009 at 15:00
"looks like the French could lose the next-day delivery"
Ceci est à la fois déjà perdu en fait (beaucoup de lettres arrivent le surlendemain, faute de personnel : il faut trouver le bon créneau horaire et le bon destinataire, dans un bon quartier, avec des postiers en bonne santé, pour avoir une lettre le lendemain, comme ce qui est affiché) et démenti officiellement (ça fait muvais effet en termes de Relations Publiques)….
Jun 9, 2009 at 15:02
Just a small remark.
Couldn't help but laugh on your last thoughts on self-service gas stations. It's remarkable that a socialist leaning person such as yourself misses the comfort of trivial, servant jobs. I always found that job particularly pointless and worthless, the kind that technology has to render obsolete for the enrichment of society. Put machines cleaning our sewers and filling our cars, not people dude.
Jun 9, 2009 at 15:11
Well, for the time being it's not a machine filling our gas tank, it's THE CUSTOMER!
The next thing would be to go to a restaurant and bring myself the soup from the kitchen?!?!
This has nothing to do with socialism. I might have 80 years of age and I might find difficult to service myself with gas. I might be well-dressed for a wedding or for a funeral or for a reception or for a congress and I couldn't AFFORD to get my clothes stained!
Once again, it has nothing to do with socialism. It's not like buying a soda from a vending machine, it's dealing with gasoline in a potentially dangerous and dirty way.
Jun 9, 2009 at 15:25
Filling the car: you must visit India! The petrol stations alone if recreated in Europe would guarantee a full employment society. If there are 4 pumps you can see anywhere from 8 to 15 people ready to leap into action to fill the tank, check the oil, rub the windscreen with a dirty oily rag :-), check the tyre pressures and so on. Probably you could have a glass of chai and a hot snack with chutney and pickle arrive as well. Unfortunately I was travelling by bicycle so never got to experience the full delights of this labour intensive treat, only to watch and admire. In UK we have terribly and unhappily confused the concepts of service and servility so we too often get grudging, rude, lousy, resentful service, or none at all.
But my favourite petrol stations are in Thailand because in the minds of Thais these are of course the ideal place to stop, eat, drink….but also to get out of the car and have a smoke. Brilliant.
Jun 9, 2009 at 15:27
Oh c'mon, you're blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
The only way you get yourself dirty is if you're not careful. And if you can't service yourself in gas because of physical impairments of any sort, my guess is you wouldn't be in condition to drive a car now would you?
You're right that it's dangerous, of course it is, but its not like you need a qualified technician to do it. Never heard of someone occidentally blowing themselves up because they were smoking a cigarette while pumping the car, have you? No, it's dangerous but trivial.
And the whole argument is stupid, you just would like not to do it, c'mon at least be honest. And you're entitled to it, I too think it's a pain, but I'd rather do it myself than have another person do it for me. Rather seat on my ass and have a machine do it though.
Of course it has something to do with socialism. You know, the people, well-being and all that. But that's my take, maybe you look at it from a different perspective. To that I'd say "fair enough", but still wouldn't agree.
Jun 9, 2009 at 15:40
"Never heard of someone occidentally blowing themselves up…"
Actually, I did!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgAaj3DkA-w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdCaQ3eWnkc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgfaNGlp1ZI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsJLL21_Wl0
etc.
Jun 9, 2009 at 16:00
> Ces sondes Pitot ont l’air assez rétro. N’a-t-on vraiment
> pas moyen de connaître la vitesse en comparant en temps
> réel des données GPS?!
errr, nope, you're missing the point of the tube pitot: it measures the *air* speed, not the ground speed. can you guess which one affects the flight dynamics?
Jun 9, 2009 at 16:05
OK, it obviously affects the dynamics, but can’t you tell by the plane stability (or lack of it) alone whether you *must* or not increase the speed?
Jun 9, 2009 at 16:39
" but can’t you tell by the plane stability (or lack of it) alone whether you *must* or not increase the speed?
"
well, it seems to be too late when a plane becomes unstable…. and having measuring instruments which are wrong is very distressing (errors can be positive feedbacked, then), even in a stable vehicle….
Jun 9, 2009 at 18:27
> If it’s the relative speed measured (plane versus the air > or air versus the plane), then why is the failure of such
> a tube fatal?
airspeed is one of the most important flight parameters and not maintaining appropriate values is guaranteed to cause Bad Things. now whether the failure of one tube can cause misreadings (when everything but the toilet on a modern aircraft is designed to be redundant), or whether a skilled pilot can detect such failures and compensate accordingly - these are different questions.
> Besides, if a plane has 800 km/h, how much can the speed
> of the air be? 100 km/h?
it can be 800 km/h +/- max(hi-alt winds speed). considering that high altitude winds can reach hundreds of knots, a range of 400-1200 km/h is not unconceivable (but it is well outside the spec for jetliners).
you're asking the question backwards though because it is the airspeed that must be controlled at all times, not the ground speed. airspeed keeps the plane in the air, everything depends on it (lift, stall point, structural stress, etc.) and there are some very well defined limits that must be observed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_speeds
ground speed is pretty much irrelevant in comparison (except, well, you do have to make it to destination sometime).
but the whole pitot tube hysteria is premature, nobody knows what the hell happened yet - it might have been the north korean satellite coming down just as well.
Jun 9, 2009 at 18:34
Ugh… it's tough to be a pilot.
I'd rather suspect a technical revision checked on the paper but not properly performed in practice. Some unnoticed failure-to-expect.
Because A330 is overall a safe plane, not like DC-10 in its early years.
Jun 9, 2009 at 19:36
great youtube clips, thanks.
You'd love the hot food stalls at Thai filling stations ….burners going, food cooking….all outside…one good fuel spill away from excitement and intarweb fame.
Jun 10, 2009 at 09:39
Radu, have you ever tried DragonFlyBSD?
I read that Matthew Dillon, the DF BSD founder, had disagreements with BSD camp (I don't know if they call him moron too).
He then took the other direction with the code and made DragonFly BSD.
So it left me wondering if you ever consider trying DF.
Jun 10, 2009 at 09:46
DragonFly BSD? A few years ago: http://beranger.org/index.php?article=2717
(Baby steps with DragonFly BSD 1.8.1)
I lack the proper time for customizing (post-install) stuff like NetBSD or DragonFly BSD.
Maybe in the future…
Jun 10, 2009 at 17:48
Eu lucrez intr-o statie de carburanti, si servesc lumea de cate ori pot, treaba cu servitul tine de cine conduce statia si cine lucreaza acolo, vorba aia omul sfinteste locul!