I started working in the worst school in one of the worst districts in the U.S. a few months ago, and the level of brokenness of the entire system is shocking. I won't go into too much detail, or talk about the insane assumption that teachers will purchase supplies for their classes, something I have never witnessed in other professions. Instead, I'll talk about something that makes we want to cry.

I got a new student last week: she's a refugee from a Central American country. Her father was killed by the gangs there, and when her family fled through Mexico, they were kidnapped and raped for weeks. She speaks no English at all, yet she makes more effort than 98% of my other students, and I can teach her algebra and geometry in half the time it takes the other kids. Wonderful, right? The only problem is that she's going to be deported in a few weeks because her family has applied for refugee status, but they won't get it because the people who want to kill her don't work for the government.

Meanwhile, about 15% of my students are known undocumented aliens (read that as illegal), but schools aren't allowed to talk to immigration.

Summary? The kid who really needs and would profit from staying in country won't be able to (and will likely be killed when deported) because her family tried to follow the law, while people who didn't make any attempt to and merely sneaked into the country are staying.

A little while ago, someone on Slashdot pointed me at the Sale of Goods Act in relation to purchased electronics. The act, for those unfamiliar with it, requires that goods be 'suitable for the purpose for which sold.' This is a fairly broad term, but it basically means that they must be able to do anything that the seller claims that they can do. Under this law, you have 6 years from the date of purchase to file a lawsuit if the item does not match the claims.

This was relevant to me because my MacBook Pro is now out of warranty and the battery is dying. Looking in the System Profiler, its full charge capacity was showing up as 1476mAh after 56 charges. When new, it was 5500mAh. These numbers don't mean anything by themselves, but Apple claims that their batteries retain 80% of their full charge capacity after 300 charge cycles. Claiming this means that a battery that does not retain 4400mAh after 300 charge cycles is not suitable for the purpose for which sold, and they are legally required to refund or replace it (irrespective of the time that has elapsed, although I can only sue them if they don't within 6 years of the time of sale).

I called their support line and was put through to an Indian woman, who explained that the warranty had expired. I quoted the relevant parts of law to her, and (after being kept on hold for a bit), was transferred to someone senior. He very quickly agreed to send out a replacement battery.

Interestingly, he did not ask that the original battery be sent out, nor that I provide a credit card number where I would be billed if the battery turned out not to be defective. I've had two batteries replaced in warranty, and this was standard procedure then, so apparently I get better service out of warranty. I don't have a great deal of use for a battery that only lasts about 35 minutes on a full charge, but I'll probably keep it as a spare.

As always, it pays to know the law. It's a shame that Apple, which claims to be a customer-focussed company, doesn't educate its support team about this though. Possibly the Indian call centre deals with people from everywhere English speaking, while the Irish one only deals with people in the UK and Ireland, so the people there are more familiar with British law, but if I had not quoted the relevant act then I would have been charged £99 for a battery, on top of the £1.50 it cost to call their support line for half an hour.

I'm planning to start a computer tech club at my school, oriented around receiving donations of parts and putting computers together for poor families (possibly of other students). Of course we'll need to put a free OS on them.

Any suggestions on what organizations would be likely to donate or how to approach them? What pitfalls should I avoid? Do you think this is a reasonable way to get kids involved in the hardware side of computing? I've never done anything like this before.

I found it exceedingly amusing, reading the story "Google Logo Changes Again, Hinting RT Search?" where many people do it off as "pure speculation" and then doing a Google Search this afternoon and getting "Google Instant".

Sure, from the doodle it couldn't be deduced, but I bet someone at Google actually posted this to slashdot to get some extra attention.

So, RT-Search is named "Google Instant".... Just in case you missed it ;-)

Developer to me (laptop boss is busted, so I'm trying data recovery first):

You're booting with Linux to recover data? That's not going to work because Linux doesn't read FAT32...

*blink*

I couldn't even grasp what he was talking about. Any recent Windows system uses NTFS and second, Linux can read FAT32 and NTFS just fine, thank you very much....

Did these people even try Linux recently?!? (Or Windows, for the matter?)

Anyone have any invites? (Flashback to trying to get a GMail invite.)

1. I want a WYSIWYG HTML5 editor the uses two CSS files (one for print format and one for flow format) and a simple tar.gz or zip file to hold the HTML, images, and videos.
2. I want XMPP and identity in my browser.
3. I want NOT to have to race Slashdot's loading of more articles when I got to the bottom of my journal page in order to click "Write in journal."

Thank you.

Some time around 2005, Slashdot ran an article about a new hosting company, MacMiniColo that was taking advantage of the new machines that Apple had just released to offer cheap hosting. I got in contact with them, and a little while later, I had a Mac Mini, sitting in a rack somewhere, running OpenBSD and acting as my dedicated server. A 1.42GHz G4 CPU, 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB disk was (and still is) more than adequate for my needs. The biggest load on it is eJabberd, and even that only used under 1% of the CPU.

I had really great service from these people. The hard drive failed a little under a year after I bought the Mini, and Apple refused to honour the warranty because they couldn't find the records of the sale (then, a few weeks later, they could, but by then it was out of the warranty period). MacMiniColo replaced the disk for me at their own expense.

After five years with them, however, I had a little look around and noticed that VPS hosting has gone down in price a lot. I've written a book on Xen, so I thought I might try a Xen-based VPS now that FreeBSD has Xen support.

GigaTux only claims to offer Linux, but I dropped them an email and they were happy to install FreeBSD for me. I still haven't tried the Xen-enabled kernel yet; they installed the stock x86-64 kernel in an HVM domain for me and performance has been fantastic.

I'm sharing a server with 64 other guests and in spite of that performance tends to be better than my ageing Mac Mini. I was getting 1000IOPS while untaring the ports tree, which is far more than the Mini's old 2.5" laptop drive could handle, and is amazing considering that it's going via the slow, QEMU-derived, emulated device, rather than the fast PV driver. I've been installing software from ports, so everything is compiled on the machine, and even that has been fast.

And my Mini? They found someone else who wants it, and offered me about a third of what I paid for it originally - not bad depreciation after five years of constant use. Shipping it back to the UK would have cost almost as much as buying one on eBay, so I sold it on. Hopefully someone else will get some good use out of it.

As an aside, I've been really impressed by how well OpenBSD works on Mac/PowerPC hardware. If you've got an old Mac Mini lying around, chuck OpenBSD on it and you've got a reasonable low-volume server. The newer ones, of course, are x86 hardware, so will run just about anything.

Saw this on facebook this morning:

"It's like everyone agrees that a car should have rubber tires and then Microsoft brings out a car with stone tires and expects all roads to be made using Microsoft rubber" -- Jeremy Naus on Microsoft Networking

I thought it was a very good car analogy :-)

The guy is someone who went to University with me. I asked him if I could re-use it, he agreed but I needed to quote him. Consider it done. :-)

There are two reasons why I don't use GNU/Linux: One is GNU, the other is Linux. Of these, the larger reason is GNU, and specifically the glibc part. The most recent reinforcement of this is Ulrich Drepper's inability to read the C specification.

For those not familiar with the C specification, all identifiers that start with an underscore are reserved for the implementation (see section 17.4.3.1.2). You should never use them in your own code, because your compiler is completely free to do whatever it wants with them. By convention, single underscores are used for global non-standard libc extensions and double underscores are used for compiler builtins.

You can find a number of these in existing compiler. Microsoft exposes SEH with keywords like __try. GCC provides __asm for inline assembly, ICC uses __cpuid for accessing the CPUID instruction, and so on. Clang added __block as a type specifier for their variables that are copied to the heap for use by blocks (closures).

Unfortunately, it turns out that the glibc headers use __block as a parameter name. There are several things wrong with this. One is that they use double underscores at all. By convention, these are reserved for the compiler, while single underscores are reserved for the libc. The second is that they used underscores at all in a parameter. Parameter names are not in the global scope, so they can be anything to prevent name clashes.

The result of this is that, if you use glibc, you can't also use blocks. This is a shame, because we (Etoile) were shipping a working blocks implementation six months before Apple. Well, working on *BSD and Solaris (and probably Windows, QNX and Symbian with PIPS, but not tested there). This problem means that it doesn't work on GNU/Linux.

No problem for me. I only use platforms with libc implementations written by people who can read specs. It may be a problem for some of you, if you use a broken platform with a libc maintained by someone who'd rather salvage his ego than fix a problem, and if it is then I'm sorry for you. My suggestion is that you remember that there are other options.

James Randi comes out as at 81. He discusses his life as a closeted gay man, and why he is now at age 81 coming out, and why he hasn't been publicly open about his sexuality sooner. He describes the possible impact his coming out may have on his tireless work advancing skepticism and critical thinking. He discusses his atheism, and whether it, or his sexual orientation, influences the mission of the James Randi Educational Foundation. He talks about gay rights issues such as marriage equality. He discusses his detractors and what they might make of the news of his homosexuality. And he explores the relevance of gay rights to the skeptical movement.

I've got to buy a graphing calculator for a teaching competency exam I'll be taking in about two months. Despite doing 2 years of engineering, I've never used one of these things (they weren't useful for my courses in the 80s), and I'll have to become proficient in that time, as well. Does Slashdot have any recommendations for an inexpensive, easy-to-learn graphing calc?

Suicide Linux

Awesome graphics: shit story.

The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) in Thailand announces the Thailand ICT Contest Festival 2010, and the announcement page uses tons of blink tags. OK. Not Really. It uses animated GIFs to do basically the same thing. I thought that shit was dead.