I’m truly afraid for the United States

I’m truly afraid for the United States, and I’ll tell you why, when Consumers are more satisfied with Fox News sites than newspapers or any other News Services for that matter, it boggles the mind. I can’t imagine, the only News service Fox News, that can Legally Lie is the most satisfying News service in America.

I’m very, very afraid for the intelligence of the U.S. population.

More Pseudoscience in the Press

This video at the BBC U.S. Site that claims Technology ‘rewires’ our brains Is yet another Pseudoscience attempt to baffle with Bullshit, the viewer. It comes off all Super Tech and is really no better than claiming that “Technology destroys our Brains”. Just more Yellow journalism. The disappointing thing is, that it’s coming from the BBC. This is for the U.S. (read American) audience, so I suppose it has to be Dumbed down to that level of that group.

But it is a sorry thing to watch happen.

The real Question, from the big Picture.

A fellow Blogger at A Networked World made the connection with another blogger. And Got me thinking about The Real, Next Big Question! He states;


…the talking heads all talk about this recovery, but its always a recovery “from” the crash and never, ever, about what our lives and communities and economies will look like once we have “recovered”.

What are we recovering TO?

It can’t really be the same as it was before. We have to seek new things, new jobs, and a different way of life than that which was before. That world is gone! IT will NEVER return, or better yet, SHOULD NEVER be allowed to return. It’s unsustainable and WILL collapse again (for the worst) should we ever ‘Recover’ it.

What’s needed is Vision and leadership, something sorely missing in the Irish mindset, let alone the mindless Government mindset.

Ireland offline, as in no broadband.

If anyone wants to know the benefits of having an Internet connected population only needs to skim this article Economic Benefit of Getting Everyone Online in the UK


– Digitally excluded households are missing out on average savings of
GBP560 per year from shopping and paying bills online

– The most economically disadvantaged families are missing out on savings
of over GBP1billion

– 1.6 million children in digitally excluded families could increase
their lifetime earnings by GBP10.8billion

– Unemployed people who get online could increase their lifetime earnings
by over GBP12,000

– If 5% of digitally excluded unemployed could find work by using job
websites it would deliver an estimated GBP560million to the UK economy

– Internet savvy workers can earn an average increase in lifetime
earnings of over GBP8,000

– Government could save at least GBP900 million a year in customer
contact costs if all digitally excluded adults got online and made just
one electronic contact per month

and while the amounts will be different in Ireland, the benefits will be similar, maybe even better.

The price of a Green PC server.

I keep calling this DYI project a server, which it is currently doing, Samba server, MySQL server, Apache server FTP server. But beyond this it’s also a desktop server with all the features of your average desktop PC. 2GB of Ram, 128MB Video, 250GB disk DVD-RW DVD+RW, Gig Ethernet and low power consumption of less than 50 watts. All this for 271 Euros delivered!


DYI_server_price

As you can see I purchased the parts from Elara but you should be able to pick up the parts anywhere you can find them. You may be able to buy a pre-made server/PC elsewhere but then you wouldn’t learn anything new 😉

Give a man a fish…

Everyone has heard the old saw:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Lao Tzu


But no one seems to think that it applies in the Economic Crisis facing Ireland, with the loss of low end construction and manufacturing jobs, and the multi nationals leaving, the fish are gone. Ireland needs to concentrate on educating fishermen. Or maybe better yet, high tech Developers, Designers and Programmers, Engineers, and scientist which are sorely lacking here. A major investment in education is the only lifeline for Ireland. And even if it doesn’t rescue the Irish Government, it would rescue the Irish people.

WordPress MySQL exercises

Not that this is going to be instructive, but about a month ago I thought that separating my technical blogging from my ‘life’ blogging would improve the clarity of my thinking. But it has not, it was a distraction, and a bit schizophrenic, and actually an inhibitor to posting. I can’t really separate my techie from my personal opinions. They are intertwined and interact on more levels than would seem, at first, to be evident. So in that vein, I was required to reintegrate the two blogs.

This looked easy, but since I had included all the posts from my three or four years of blogging, selected from each by their respective ‘slants’. It was not a simple dump and load of the MySQL database in which the content resided. So I downloaded the latest MySQL community server and various tools and recreated databases containing the two dumps from the blog databases and cross seeded them to patch them back together. Simple! Except that the original blog was wordpress 2.6.2 and I had built the second one as 2.7. Guess what, my original MySQL dump that included ALL the compied posts before the split, was a different schema from the the newer dumps. But owing to the fact that I’m a brilliant DBA, it only required two days of backbreaking, mind exercising MySQL learning to solve the issues 😉

Now I’ll never be a WordPress expert, but I actually liked the work. It’s refreshing to learn, that I can learn new things at my age. While I am an excellent Sybase DBA, and now feel very good about knowledge of MySQL also.

They just have to fix this one quibble or two I have with MySQL where it involves ……

The (subtle) war on Science

Outside of the blatant Anti-Science attacks like Sarah Palin’s War on Science! There are more subtle attacks, a smearing of Science research that undermines Science such as this article; The world’s smelliest magnets I call BS on these sort of studies, any farmer knows that cows face away from the Sun when grazing. No Magnets involved. But the assertion is that this is what constitutes ‘Science’. The attempt is to make a mockery of more Hard Core Scientific Research. Science has a hard enough time getting funding, but to allow anyone to point at magnet cows as an example of ‘Fundamental Scientific Research’ undermines all scientific research. So the next time you muse at a ‘Scientific Study’ of why Men find red-clad women hotter you will know that you are being manipulated against Science.

Twitter and Jaiku performance issues

One thing I’ve noticed about Twitter and Jaiku, is a common thread in IT, Scaleability! It’s an issue that I worked on in my days with AT&T Wireless. Mobile phone vendors have been dealing with SMS and voice connection transactions for many years and the volume of such transactions have only grown over the years since I had to deal with 25+ million transactions per day. If the current growing pains of these Web 2.0 social networking systems are projected, they are both headed for failure in the form of catastrophic system overload. While I admire innovative Ideas, like these services, their infrastructure does not appear well thought out. A bit more foundation in the infrastructure, and less optimism of the performance, should have been the first design requirement.

Being a database kind of guy, I can’t help but believe that a fundamental disconnect in the understanding of transactions utilized in these systems is the root cause here. I have yet to see a significant teaching or understanding of database issues in the current crop of programmers. There seems to be belief that data analysis is not a worth while task in current programming efforts. I see this in the form of articles detailing new ‘database’ products and methods, and new ‘lightweight’ database processes, etc. Mostly the requirements for ‘new’ DBMS and ‘Lightweight’ processes, is the underestimations of the data tasks of most modern IT functions. If you don’t know your own data, you don’t know anything. Any system that is not fundamentally tied in with a database system is merely a calculator.

Monopoly’s new game, or how to profit from Global warming.

Having seen the Christmas Ad’s starting up, and this years crop of children being introduced into corporate finance in the form of the old board game of Monopoly, I was inspired to create a new variant Global Warming Monopoly What a great new way to teach our children how to profit from the future disasters of our new world.

In America, the news is no news.

For Christmas, I spent the usual stressful week with the parents, and brothers. Aside from from the normal family conflict, I was struck by the lack of any real news. Sure there were car wrecks, plane crashes, murder and what not, repeated endlessly every hour in sound bites as if someone could miss them. But no politics, international news, opinion, or discussion of world affairs. If the event unfolded beyond 50, or 100 miles from where you are listening, nothing.

I felt like I had blinders and cotton in my ears. The closest thing to world news was in the form of the 24 hour weather channel on the television. Its no wonder everyone watches it. Ask anyone about what is happening in Japan, India, Ireland or any place beyond 100 miles away, nothing, but ask them what the weather is there and they can give you the five day forecast for anyplace in the world.

It’s no wonder Americans are ignorant of world events, isolationist in their thinking, they literally are unaware events happen anywhere else in the world.

The U.S. is now the isolationist bubble George Bush was seeking, ignorance in education, and news alike. Not what you would wish on the leaders of the free world.

A Generation lost

Crime statistics aside, much of the current crime has been committed by gangs. Gangs formed in the absence of alternatives in the infrastructure and jobs. Note also the glamorization of drugs and alcohol and the easy life. All these things are the results of neglect 10, 15 and 20 years ago of community infrastructures and youth facilities. Facilities still missing, and continuing to contribute canon fodder, in form of a lost generation, to the crime.

The old saying, the crows have come home to roost fits perfectly. And this will continue to happen until facilities, good facilities, youth centers, job training, and educational facilities. More funding for schools, and school facilities and good jobs, for students to look forward to working at, could provide alternatives to crime.

And of all things decentralization, of all things, could also be the facilitator of less crime. Rat studies years ago have noted that high population densities increase community violence. Decentralization of industrial jobs and government must lead to increased community infrastructure, schools, shopping and transport in more rural areas.

We are living in a generation lost, and it will not be mended by treating the symptoms, but by attacking the root causes. We will not save this generation until we save the next one.