Too Busy For Words - The PaulWay Weblog

Lost Opportunities 001

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:20:00 +1000

Attention anyone looking for a business proposition - set up an electric vehicles parts supplier business on the eastern coast of Australia.

There is a small but thriving market here for batteries, motors, controllers, and most importantly the peripherals that bind them all together. The problem for most hobbyists - and that which puts them off committing more money sooner - is that each one of these parts has to be individually sourced, often from the USA or China. Few people like paying thousands of dollars, including lots of shipping fees and import duties, and waiting weeks or months in order to find out whether the part they've ordered works with their planned setup or not. Having a local supplier would mean a lot more purchases.

Sure, there's EVWorks over in Perth. Dennis has been relatively helpful to my enquiries and stocks a good range of batteries and other things. I'll probably buy most of my stuff from him. But he's very busy, not only with running the store but with his own instals, and I still begrudge having to freight a hundred odd kilos of batteries across from Perth to Canberra. Having a supplier in Sydney or even Melbourne would cut down on that considerably.

If I was able to, I'd do it; but overcommitment and inexperience prevent me from pursuing it. So I'll have to hope that someone else takes up the baton.

File system sequences

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:52:00 +1000

I recently had the occasion to create a new filesystem on a partition:

mkfs -T largefile4 /dev/sdc1

This creates copies of the superblock on a bunch of sectors across the disk, which can be used for recovering the superblock of the disk should something tragic happen to the main one (such as overwriting the first megabyte of a disk by accident). A useful tip here is that one can do the same command with the '-n' option to see what sectors it would write the superblock to, without actually reformatting the partition, in order to then provide a copy of a superblock to fsck:

mkfs -n -T largefile4 /dev/sdc1

In my case, these copies were written to these offsets:

Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
	4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 
	102400000, 214990848

What determines these magic numbers? Well, you can see from 163840 and 819200 that they're multiples of 32768. If we work out the multiples of the beginning offset for each offset, we get:

98304 = 3 * 32768
163840 = 5 * 32768
229376 = 7 * 32768
294912 = 9 * 32768
819200 = 25 * 32768
884736 = 27 * 32768
1605632 = 49 * 32768
2654208 = 81 * 32768
4096000 = 125 * 32768
7962624 = 243 * 32768
11239424 = 343 * 32768
20480000 = 625 * 32768
23887872 = 729 * 32768
71663616 = 2187 * 32768
78675968 = 2401 * 32768
102400000 = 3125 * 32768
214990848 = 6561 * 32768

Hmm. 3, 5, 7, eh? Then 9, which is 3 squared; then 25, which is 5 squared. Interesting. The 27 throws us for a second before we realise that that's 3 cubed, and it comes between 5 squared and 7 squared. And, sure enough, there's 81 (3^4) and 125 (5^3) ... it seems to be the sequence of successive square, cubes, etc. of 3, 5 and 7. It's a sequence of successive powers.

Why? Well, the whole object here is to make sure that a copy of the superblock survives if some tragedy happens to the disk. There are two broad kinds of disaster scenario here - destroying a contiguous block of disk, and destroying multiples of a specific sector offset across the disk (e.g. 0, 10, 20, 30, 40...). For the first, we can see the successive powers method quickly generates fairly large numbers without leaving any obvious large gaps - the ratio of number N and number N+1 never goes higher than 3. For the second situation, you can fairly quickly see from number factor theory that multiples of N will increasingly rarely intersect with the successive powers series, and only when N is (a multiple of) 105 will it intersect all three sequences.

It's perhaps arguable here that drive technology has made some of this irrelevant - ATA block replacement changes the mapping between logical and physical block numbers - and in fact the types of disaster scenarios this scheme of superblock copies addresses aren't really reflected in real-world usage. For example, if you're striping blocks across two disks then all your superblock copies are going to start on one disk (even if they then get striped across the second disk) because the successive power series always generates odd numbers. But as a way of avoiding some of the more obvious failure modes, it makes a lot of sense.

Another little bit of trivia explained.

Energised communities

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:35:00 +1000

Last week I went along to a group at once new and very familiar. They all were passionately keen about a new technology, and yet they'd all had to explain the benefits over and over again to disbelievers. Most of them were working on their own projects but came together as a larger community. While they all knew it was the inevitable way of the future, powerful commercial interests were working against them and governments and the general public seemed indifferent to their cause.

This was, of course, electric vehicle hobbyists.

For my part, I'm keen on constructing an electric motorbike. I'm also interested in adding open source components and microprocessor controllers to various parts of the project, partly to keep the cost down (some of the proprietary parts are really expensive) and partly for the fun of tinkering.

There were three main topics of discussion during the night:

Firstly, there's a lot of interest in the local group in starting a EV racing standard and, within one to two years, getting actual races happening. Initial ideas revolved around a standard car chassis that is fully CAMS approved (which is necessary for official racing), but then someone mentioned go-karts as a lower-cost entry level category which also got a lot of nods. There's already moves in this direction (CAMS has had an Alternative Energy division since August 2008) but getting the community groups - schools, Scouts, youth groups, etc - involved is a great idea.

Secondly, the group is trying to collect information about building EVs into an online resorce. I put in my oar and proposed using a wiki (which they sort of have already) and keeping it public (opposing the person who said it could be monetised in the future), both of which met with general agreement. The current process they're using is for one person to be a 'subject matter expert' that collates all the ideas from the group into an article, and that then gets put on the Wiki and people can edit it from there. This combines the best of both practices of document writing, and I think it's an excellent way to go.

Thirdly, there was a lot of interest in the hardware hacking theme that is all the rage at the moment. Everything from makerbots and repraps to arduinos and programmable fridges was met with interest and requests for more detail. I'm trying to find their email list to make a general announcement and I'm hoping that I'll get a few people coming along to the next CLUG meeting. There's a number of projects out there, from David Rowe's work on controllers to the Tumanako project that are applicable to EVs. I really need to point the Canberra EV group in the direction of the Electric Saker sports car - a New Zealand project!

My main quest for this month is to make the plans for my new electric motorbike, and to understand what a battery management system does and find one that doesn't suck.

WOMBATs in the health care system

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +1000

A couple of weeks ago I had an appointment with a specialist (the details of which are otiose to this blog post). I turned up on time at the surgery, and the receptionist asked for my referral form. Stupidly, I had forgotten it. This turned out to completely prevent me from seeing the specialist at all, as the doctor's surgery didn't have the referral on file and thus couldn't fax it through, and I wouldn't be able to make the round trip back home to pick the form up before my booking time had expired. So I had to schedule this work for another day, which is tomorrow, and I'm already nervously thinking through the list of every concievable piece of paperwork and ephemera that they could want in order to make sure I have it with me tomorrow.

So let's think this through. What actual purpose does this form serve? It's not needed to book the appointment - they did that over the phone and didn't require any form of identification or authentication information then. It's not needed to validate me as the person who made the booking - I have plenty of other valid forms of identification on me. It's not needed to validate me as the person requiring the treatment - the doctor's surgery could easily do that, and in many ways that would be more secure than me doing it via the form. I can't use this form to access any other specialist for this particular problem because it specifically names the agency that's going to provide the service, so giving me the form doesn't serve as a general letter of introduction to any specialist I want. About the only reason to give me the form is so that I can read what's written on it, but that's hardly useful as its written in medical jargon that I can only decode by being already familiar with the problem.

So as far as I can see there is no actual purpose served by giving a patient their referral form and requiring it to be given to the surgery before treatment can proceed. When this doesn't happen, and I'll bet dollars to cents that it happens a lot, it's lost time for the patient, lost time for the surgery, and a lot of hassle all round. That hurts people and it hurts the economy. All because, as far as I can see, the doctor's surgery doesn't send the form directly to the specialist.

I'll ask the doctor and the specialist when I see them in time, but in the mean time I'd love to hear from anyone who can give me some good reasons why things are done this way.

Martial Arts for the knowless man

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:17:00 +1000

With a view to improving my fitness with something also useful, on a whim I went to a Martial Arts "Birds of a Feather" session at LCA yesterday evening. Cool things were seeing the different types of martial arts, from Aikido to Shaolin Gung Fu (Pia Waugh on animal styles, unlit poi balls and quarterstaff) and having a friend, dealing with a knee injury and Leukaemia, show that he can still easily demonstrate some pretty effective combat styles. Slightly painful but still fun things were having the various holds tried on me, including a surprising number of ways you can make someone's wrist really hurt (fortunately, for a short period of time). Slightly less fun but fortunately not painful was the Capoeira guys, who had a bit too much ego for their own good I felt. Capoeira is a rather curious combination of martial arts, dance moves and gymnastics, but I don't think I'll be trying it any time soon.

We started with a bit of a warm-up, and then the experienced people in the group demonstrated some of the different styles. I don't remember much of the exact details, so the highlights were:

Aikido is purely defensive - in standard Aikido there are no tournaments. In some sub-disciplines, the competitions have two combatants starting with an agreed hold and seeing how they resolved.
Shaolin Gung Fu seems to have the most number of cool props, but that might just have been Pia's collecting habit kicking in.
Most people there learnt something from everyone else, and in particular watching Ian's expression of 'wow, that's so cool' as he worked out how painful each hold was going to be just - before it was actually applied to his arm.
Capoeira includes a lot of different elements and is based on lots of motion.
Most of the people in the core group were either teaching the style of martial arts they learnt, or just about to. Every one of the teachers agreed that teaching was just really great and they were still learning cool stuff from their students.
We all had different observations about what martial arts was about - words like 'self-discipline', 'self-control', 'harmony' and 'balance' were used - but they all seem to be about the same ur-concept.

Pia was talking afterward about setting up her own dojo for her style of Gung Fu and I immediately put myself forward. It seems to be pretty full on, but not incredibly aggressive or macho and seems to concentrate on discipline and harmony. It's going to be a question of what I give up to make time for it, and possibly the same question for Pia. But it was a pretty cool time, even for an absolute beginner. I thought of demonstrating some of the SCA fighter technique but having swords with basket hilts that are tethered to your hands is kind of vital to reducing the number of injuries...

Capitalising on success

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:26:00 +1000

I watched "RiP: A Remix Manifesto" the other day on SBS - good on them for showing it on mainstream TV. I fear it won't really have reached many more than people like myself, who already know the problems and want to get to the solution, but on the other hand any activism is good in this issue, because there are a bunch of memes we're fighting against here that need taking down good and proper.

The main one that struck me now is that the underlying theme is hypocrisy. The copyright industry is hypocritical in so many ways that it just permeates the whole process. Take, as an example, Walt Disney animating the old fairy tales - Snow White, Pinnochio, Cinderella, and so on; these were stories that had no copyright attached, and then Walt Disney (by redoing them) attached a copyright to them and prevented anyone from using them. That's perhaps a broad statement, but just imagine reprinting the story of Snow White and illustrating it without being a target for lawsuits from Disney Corporation - it's basically unthinkable. That's how much Disney has appropriated an out of copyright story and put their own copyright on it. The film documents countless other examples of artists using a riff or melody from someone else who's no longer around (or large enough, or is still naive enough to think that it's OK), and then suing any further artists who try to do the same thing with the melody they've just appropriated.

Strangely, I see this hypocrisy as actually now forming the basis of the whole "intellectual property" castle in the sky. Ask yourself why we have the laws of copyright, patents and intellectual property. Well, you tell yourself, imagine I'm some inventor with a brand new gadget, or a musician with a new song, or a film-maker with a new movie. If I don't "protect" that new thing, someone's going to come along and rip it off, and all my hard work will have been wasted because the cost of duplicating my work is much less for them than for me. That's why we have "All Rights Reserved" on CDs - because the idea that someone could take your hot drum lick and make the next Amen Break out of it and become instantly famous without paying you a cent and leaving your less popular work mouldering in the dust is a harsh thought to bear.

But let's think about this for a moment. Who is actually likely to carry out this threat here? Well, it might be someone you know or someone you show your thing to, but even in the days of ubiquitous internet distribution that's still a tiny tiny fraction of the actual people around. (Remember, we're ordinary people, we're not already famous - so we're unlikely to have people targeting us specifically.) For the most part the people that actually appropriate our work are going to be people just like us - artists, inventors, photographers, sculptors, and so on - and we all know what goes around comes around, and sooner or later if I copy my next door neighbour's work she's going to find out. Likewise, they probably don't have a huge internet following or lots of money to print CDs or pictures, so their ability to actually capitalise on taking our idea is limited. So it's not likely that we are the people who will take our fellow person's intellectual property and rip it off.

The people we have to most watch out for have three basic properties. One is lots of money - it means that any costs of duplicating our ideas isn't going to be an immediate barrier. Two is lots of distribution - not just big servers or copying machines but the ability to take that idea and distribute it to lots of people to generate some sales. Three is legal untouchability - not that they might be right in taking our thing (we've already established that we're using patents or copyright or whatever to prevent that) but the ability to entangle us in legal battles far beyond our resources to fight - or even the ability to take that new spatula idea and sell two million of them in China where you never go and have no knowledge. Who has all these three properties in one?

Well, it's obviously a what: the big corporations. That's right, the same big corporations who have been telling us that copyright and patents and intellectual property is for our own good; that it protects the artists who are just like us, that it stops people doing things we don't want with our ideas, and (in the case of patents) it helps puts ideas in the public domain for everyone to use. And we know that at the same time they're telling us its for our own good they're forcing us to pay for everything and fighting against every possible fair use of their products. It's hypocrisy on such an awesome scale that it's hard to take it all in.

I mean, we know that companies like Microsoft regularly rip off everyone else's intellectual property (e.g. the i4i lawsuit) at the same time as their vigorously defending their own intellectual property (e.g. the Tomtom lawsuit). We know in the software industry that its an unwritten rule not to look at anything that even hints of anyone else's intellectual property lest you be found to be deliberately infringing (rather than just 'accidentally' coming up with the same idea). We know that our ideas down here at the bottom of the heap don't matter one whit and its only the big end of town that gets a patent on every little idea they have and enforces it. We know that that "intellectual property" is being so vigorously enforced that DVDs force you to watch their ads and CDs install root kits to prevent you copying them and other forms of massive collateral damage in the neverending hopeless quest to prevent ideas doing what they do naturally, which is spread.

And yet to sell us on the idea that it's for our own good that we submit to this kind of intellectual thuggery takes guts. Guts, I'd argue, and a complete and childlike faith that the system is right.

Because we know that "intellectual property" is really a dead end. It's a noose that the corporations have made for us, but it tightens not around our necks but theirs, slowly choking them of talent and ideas and good will until they thrash around gasping desperately for the people that will not buy their goods and will not sell their ideas to them and will not buy into the marketing. We've known this since before John Lennon wrote "Imagine", but a more forceful statement of the truth is hard to find.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one; I hope some day you will join us and the earth will live as one.

Postscript: I'm surprised that it's not made more of in the film, but the absolute key statement of the pro-copyright position is in the section where a spokesman from the RIAA talks to a bunch of schoolchildren about illegal copying. One kid asks him why they charge so much for copying each song (with the tacit comparison to the little you can pay for the same song if you'd bought it on a CD), and he goes briefly into a spiel about copyright. He posits writing a song about love, and as an aside says "Of course, I can't copyright the idea of love, boy, I'd love it if I could do that..." (emphasis, of course, mine). If they could get away with it, they would copyright the idea of love, and charge everyone who feels it in whatever form at whatever time howsoever derived. The fact that he even thinks it not only contemplatable but desirable that one person could own the idea of love and prevent others from thinking about it or feeling it shows how truly beyond rationality the intellectual property corporations are.

Power from the people

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:18:00 +1000

I read the article at http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2778257.htm with a kind of despairing interest - because what it says is absolutely right, and it makes me feel very sad about the democracy we supposedly live in.

A precis of the story is: the "Mandatory Filtering" the Federal Government is proposing to introduce will not be stopped by writing letters to your Member of Parliament or to Senator Conroy, signing a petition or blacking out your home page or avatar. It will be pushed through, because the ALP is (supposedly) indebted to the Australian Christian Lobby (the ACL) and because they wield enormous lobbying power at the highest levels of government. We need to change our tactics of getting through to our politicians, Josh says, or fail to stop the filtering being enacted.

The problem here, I would argue, is not that those opposed to the mandatory filter (like myself) are mumbling to themselves. We are doing all the traditional things that people do when trying to get their members of parliament to listen to their opinions: writing letters to politicians, talking to our friends and organising media coverage. These have worked for most issues in the past. Trying to organise avatar blackouts and internet recognition is a way of socially protesting in modern times, and it isn't really intended to reach the politicians.

The problem I see here is that politicians such as Senator Conroy and the various other ministers I've written to and spoken to are all basically plugging their ears to the voice of their electorate. We get form letters that reiterate their invalid, nonsensical and specious arguments, don't answer a single point we raise, and keep on going in their own direction without listening in the slightest to anything we say. They're listening, instead, to the ACL, who get to whisper in their ears directly and imply that they have all these unseen, unnamed christian voters out there who agree with them. As Josh says, the ALP owes the ACL a few favours - favours that the ACL are more than happy to imply are worth much more than they really are.

And the opponents to mandatory filtering are not without friends in Parliament House. Politicians from Senator Kate Lundy and NSW Minister Penny Sharpe down are trying to also counter the spin and the denialism of Senator Conroy and the ACL. But what are the ordinary people supposed to do? Have a cake sale and raise a couple of hundred thousand dollars to buy a couple of high-profile lobbyists? Start setting fire to cars and blowing up ISPs? Donate some money to the ALP with a little note in the bag? Do as Bernard Keane suggests and create a letter so complicated and confused that bureaucrats actually time to answer it (as if...)?

The problem here is that the public are not being listened to. A majority of Australians don't want mandatory filtering. It's being sold as stopping child pornography but the Minister has said that it could be extended to blocking information on euthanasia, abortion and safe sex - things which the Christian right gets all hot under the collar about but where the information alone is not illegal in Australia. It doesn't stop the real criminals, or even a determined teenager, and the whole illusion of children being randomly exposed to 'unwanted' content is a nebulous decoy.

What are we supposed to do if the politicians who represent us don't listen?

Power seller

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:08:00 +1000

I had known for some months that my laptop battery was gradually waning in power. When, at OSDC, the battery light started flashing three short orange and one long green, I didn't need to Google it (though I did, of course) to find out that this was the laptop's electronics saying "you really need to think about changing that battery soon".

The problem was, however, that in my previous examination of the situation I discovered that most of the people selling laptop batteries under website names that look like they should be Australian are, in fact, pretty much one or two companies in Hong Kong operating a plethora of different web fronts. Using 'whois' on their domain names mostly tells you the truth, as these people don't bother to get an address in Australia to use as their administrative contact. Do not be fooled by use of '.au' in their domain names or Australian flag icons appearing in their banners.

These are made more dodgy still by then having spammed the Canberra Linux Users Group list shortly after I posted to it asking "where do I buy laptop batteries at a decent price from an Australian company?". The behaviour makes me think of the stereotypical chinese market hawkers, yelling at you to try their products, very cheap, for you special price, broken English permeating the whole transaction with the feeling that somewhere, somehow, you're going to be ripped off. I resolved, after OSDC, to find an Australian company that would sell me a battery for my still perfectly serviceable Dell Inspiron 6400.

Lo and behold I found one - Laptop Plus, which advertises itself as "Proudly Australian Owned & Operated". I also found a few eBay sellers advertising batteries, but since eBay cares as much about verifying the location of their sellers as they do about checking whether the postage is reasonable, I decided against shopping there. There are a reasonable number of sellers of Inspiron laptop batteries claiming to be in Australia, some even selling the 7200mAH batteries. But I decided to go with Laptop Plus, even though they were more expensive.

My decision was rewarded with prompt service, prompt answering of my questions, and speedy delivery. The battery came in a nice foam-padded box and checks out by the laptop hardware. It just worked, and I'm very happy with their service. I can only hope they will be around in another three years so I can buy another battery from them.

The new age of programming

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:48:00 +1000

I gave a lightning talk at OSDC this year and thought I'd write my thoughts up into my blog. It was the confluence of a number of ideas, technologies and thoughts gradually merging, and I think it's going to be an increasingly important issue in the future.

Most laptops now have at least two cores in them. It's hard to get a desktop machine without at least two. The same chips for ordinary x86-architecture machines will soon have six, eight and twelve cores. The Niagara architecture has at least this many and quite possibly more. The Cell architeture allows for up to sixty-four cores on-chip, with a different architecture and instruction set between the FPE and SPE cores. The TileGX architecture includes one variant with a hundred 64-bit cores, connected to three internal DDR-3 memory interfaces and four internal 10-gigabit ethernet interfaces.

The future, it can therefore be said, is in parallel processing. No matter what new technologies are introduced to decrease the size of the smallest on-die feature, it's now easier to include more cores than it is to make the old one faster. Furthermore, other parts of our computers are now hefting considerable computation power of their own - graphics cards, network cards, PhysX engines, video encoder cards and other peripherals are building in processors of no mean power themselves.

To harness these requires a shift in the way we program. The people who have grown up with programming in the last thirty years have, by and large, been working on small, single-processor systems. The languages we've used have been designed to work on these architectures - parallel processing is either supported using third-party libraries or just plain impossible in the language. There have been parallel and concurrent programming languages, but for the most part they haven't had anywhere near the popularity of languages like Basic, C, Pascal, Perl, Python, Java, and so forth.

So my point is that we all need to change our way of thinking and programming. We need to learn to program in small units that can be pipelined, streamed, scattered and distributed as necessary. We need larger toolkits that implement the various semantics of distributed operation in the best way, so that we don't have people reinventing thread processing badly all the time. We need to make languages, toolkits, and operating systems that can easily share processing power across multiple processors, distributed across cores, chips, and computers. We need to help eachother understand how things interact better, rather than controlling your own little environment and trying to optimise that in isolation.

I think it's going to be great.

The journey is the destination

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:10:00 +1000

I attended CodeCon 2009 this year, along with two friends from Canberra. This is an event where you go camping in a nice out-of-the-way location with no internet connection, take along your laptop, and hack away on code. There's lots of talk, lots of coding, enough seeing and walking and doing to keep the various personalities interested, and lots of sharing of ideas and thoughts. Peter Miller organises it, including hiring a generator and bringing along a bunch of tarps, poles, cables, and other stuff to make it all work - he does a splendid job and gives a lot of his time to making sure it all runs smoothly.

My feelings, coming back from the event, are overwhelmingly positive. This is the sort of affirming event that LCA is to me - talking to people who share the same jokes and ideas and worries, being able to help as well as ask for it, and realising that there are people of all ages who enjoy both geeking out and camping out. It's not for everyone - you have to be prepared to bring everything you'll need, cook your own meals, set up your tent and not have running water or a light at the reach of your hands. But obviously some people do enjoy it, and that's just fine by us.

Highlights for me were those belly laughs from brilliantly timed witticisms by other people; seeing a Lyrebird about 20 metres away (thanks, Kate, for lending me your small binoculars); getting a whole bunch of coding done; those quiet times discussing how life works; and how, sometimes, you just have to be a bit patient to wait for the annoyances to move off.

This isn't really a hour-by-hour account, as I'm not sure that kind of write-up would do it justice. But it was really great, and if you're at all interested in camping and hacking on code then it's well worth making the effort to go to. You don't really need access to the internet to get things done!

(I should investigate the possibility of running something similar at the Yarrangobilly Caves - thermal springs ahoy!)

The wonders of modern technology

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:35:00 +1000

On Sunday I had some friends around to play computer games. Actually, due to one of those typical glitches in communication which happen when trying to arrange things a fortnight in advance with people on a Sunday night, only one friend turned up. The game we were most familiar with was StarCraft, which I still think has the best idea for getting people interested in playing - a 'spawn' version that allows you to run up to eight people on one registered copy of the program. Considering the problems I'm having trying to convince these friends to spend even $10 (for Supreme Commander through Impulse), a spawn version of some of these games makes perfect sense to get people interested without them having to shell out up front.

Of course, we first had to go through that dance of getting the networking set up and the machines talking to eachother. My machine would appear on his display when I first set up the game but would immediately disappear. Wireshark from another computer on the same switch showed traffic from both, but short of being on a dumb hub (and who has them these days) I couldn't tell where the problem was. Probably a firewall problem somewhere. Rather than spend a lot more time faffing around with networking settings in Windows, something I'm not entirely familiar with these days, I went with plan B.

Plan B worked perfectly, first time. Instantly we could see eachother, and our games went perfectly smoothly with no lag or hitches. What was this wonderous technology?

Serial cable.

By some miracle both computers had nine pin RS-232 serial ports; by another miracle I had a null modem cable with nine (and twenty-five) pin connectors. I deduced that it was a null modem cable because it had two female plugs. StarCraft did the rest. Hours of enjoyment.

The next day I found how to get the two machines talking to eachother - more precisely, how to convince the Windows Firewall that StarCraft was one of those programs it could deliver outside packets to. So next time we won't have to get the serial cable out. But I'm pretty happy that the option was there...

Understanding the chinese room

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:17:00 +1000

The Chinese Room argument against strong AI has always bothered me. It's taken me a while to realise what I dislike about the argument and to put it into words, though. For those of you who haven't read up on this, it's worth perusing the article above and others elsewhere to familiarise yourself with it, as there's a great deal of subtlety in Searle's arguing position.

Firstly, he's established that the computer program as is comfortably passes the Turing Test, so we know it's at least an artifical intelligence by that standard. Then he posits that he can perform the same program by following the same instructions (thus still passing the Turing Test), even though he himself "doesn't understand a word of Chinese". Then he proposes that he can memorise that set of instructions to pass the Turing Test in Chinese in his head, and still doesn't understand Chinese. If he can do that while not understanding Chinese, then the machine passing the Turing Test doesn't "understand" Chinese either.

So. Firstly, let's skip over the obvious problem: that the human trying to perform the computer program will do it millions of times slower. This speed is fairly important to the Turing Test, as we're judging the computer based on its ability to interact with us in real time - overly fast or slow responses can be used to identify the computer. A human that's learnt all the instructions by rote and follows them as a computer would still, I'd argue, be identifiably slow. We're assuming here that the person doesn't understand Chinese, so they have to follow the instructions rather than respond for themselves.

And let's skip over the big problem of what you can talk about in a Turing Test. Any system that can pass that has to be able to carry on a dialogue with quite a bit of stored state, has to be able to answer fairly esoteric questions about their history or their current state that a human has and a computer doesn't (e.g. what did you eat last, what sex are you, etc). I'm skipping that question because it's an even call as to whether this is in or out for current Turing Test practice: if an AI was programmed with an invented personality it might be able to pass this in ways a pure 'artificial intelligence' would not. It's a problem for the Chinese Room, because that too has to hold a detailed state in memory and have a life outside the questioning, and the example Searle gives is of a person simply answering questions and not actually carrying on some external 'life'. ("Can I tell you a secret later?" is the kind of thing that a human will remember to ask about later but the Chinese Room doesn't say anything about).

It's easy to criticise the Chinese Room at this point as being fairly stupid. You're not talking to the person inside the room, you're talking to a person inside the simulation. And the person executing all those instructions, even if they're in a high-level language, would have to be superhumanly ... something in order to merely execute those instructions rather than try to understand them. It's like expecting a person to take the numbers from one to a million in random order and sort them via bubble sort in their head, whilst forbidding them from just saying "one, two, three..." because they can see what the sequence is going to be.

To me the first flaw in Searle's argument is that his person in the room could somehow execute all those instructions without ever trying to understand what they mean. If nothing else, trying to learn Chinese is going to make the person's job considerably easier - she can skip the whole process of decoding meaning and go straight to the 'interact with the meaning' rules. Any attempt by Searle to interfere here and say that, no, you're not allowed to do that really has interfered with any attempt to disprove that the person doesn't understand Chinese - if he makes her too simple to even understand a language, then how does she read the books; if he makes her incapable of learning then how did she learn to do this process in the first place, etc. So the basis on which Searle's judgement that the AI doesn't really "understand" because the person in the room doesn't "understand" is based on the sophistry that you can have such a person in the first place.

But, more than this, the fundamental problem I have is that any process of trying to take statements / questions in a language and give responses to them in the same (or any other) language is bound to deal with the actual meaning and intelligence in the original question or statement. It's fairly counterintuitive to make an AI capable of interacting in a meaningful way in Chinese without understanding what makes a noun and a verb, understanding its rules of tense and plurality, or understanding its rules of grammar and structure and formality. If Searle would have us assume that we've somehow managed to create an AI that can pass the Turing Test without the programmers building these understandings of the actual meaning behind the symbols into the program, then I think he's constructed somewhat of an artificial (if you'll forgive the pun) situation.

To try and put this in context, imagine the instructions for the person in the room have been written in English (rather than in Python, for example). The obvious way to write this Chinese Room program, therefore, is by having big Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries and a book of rules by which the person pretends that there's another person (the AI) answering the questions based on the English meaning of the words. I argue here that any attempt to obfuscate the process and remove the use of the dictionaries is not only basically impossible but would stop the Chinese Room being able to pass the Turing Test. It's impossible to remove the dictionaries because you're going to need some kind of mapping between each Chinese symbol and the English word that the instructions deal with, if for no other reason that Chinese has plenty of homographs - symbols which have two different meanings depending on context or inflection - and you need a dictionary to distinguish between them. No matter how you try to disguise that verb as something else, you'll need to put it in context so that the person can answer questions about it, which is therefore to make it meaningful.

So once you have a person capable of learning a language, in a room where symbols are given meaning in that language, you have a person that understands (at some level) the meaning of the symbols, and therefore understands Chinese.

Even if you introduce the Python at this point, you've only added an extra level of indirection to the equation. A person reading a piece of Python code will eventually learn what the variables mean no matter how obscurely the code is written - if we're already positing a person capable of executing an entire program literally then they are already better than the best maintenance programmer. If you take away this ability to understand what the variables mean, then you also (in my view) take away the ability for the person to learn how to interpret that program in the first place.

Searle's argument, therefore, is based on two fallacies. Firstly, that it's possible to have a human that can successfully execute a computer program without trying to learn the process. Secondly, that the program will not at some point deal with the meaning of the Chinese in a way that a person would make sense of. So on both counts Searle's "Chinese Room" is no argument against a machine intelligence "understanding" in the same way we understand things.

What really irritates me about Searle's argument here - and it does not change anything in my disproof above - is that it's such an arrogant position. "Only a real *human* mind can understand Chinese, because all those computer thingies are really just playing around with symbols! I'm so clever that I can never possibly learn Chinese - oh, wait, what was that?" He's already talking about an entity that can pass the Turing Test - and the first thing I would argue about that test is that people look for understanding in their interlocutors - and then says that "understanding" isn't there because it's an impelementation detail? Give me a break!

And then it all comes down to what "understand" means, and any time you get into semiotics it means that you've already lost.

The cost of beliefs

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:43:00 +1000

I was recently walking around the Australian National Botanic Gardens with friends when we discovered a sign that had been vandalised. References to geological times had been scratched out in a crude attempt to remove any reference to how long ago various features of the Australian continent were formed. My partner, who frequents the gardens, noted that the Creationists had vandalised the sign. It was certainly hard to refute - nothing else on the sign was touched, and the erasure was limited to those specific words, so there's little evidence for any other objective than obscuring the date ranges of geological periods.

I have a large amount of contempt for the vandal(s) that did this, and those that think that defacing public property is reasonable as long as it supports their own world-view. It costs the gardens about $1000 to replace that sign - that vandal has just asserted that their point of view is worth $1000 or more. And in the grand scheme of things it's hardly proving their point - they leave no other information or evidence to prove any contrary assertion. So really this is just a childish attempt to stop someone else from being heard by shouting louder.

Yet this is not done by a child - the scratching is fairly precise and it's too high for a child to reach. So some adult has thought that it's perfectly valid to deface public property to keep their own little world-view intact. The same adult would presumably be outraged if their church was defaced; so why is their defacement OK?

The thing that really annoys me is that it's not even a scientific debate. There's only one type of person who does this - people who believe that a literal interpretation of their own holy book is absolutely right and no amount of scientific evidence can show differently. They're so prepared to ignore scientific evidence they'll try to remove any sign of it. These people fiddle with scientific procedures to prove their own conclusions - they put their hand on the scale when weighing the evidence. Science and logic has always tried to reason out its arguments based on common ground that we all agree on. This person hasn't even tried to be reasonable.

Why do we keep being reasonable with them?

Paul's top ten songs

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:58:00 +1000

Pia's post of her top ten songs has made me think about what ten songs I consider most memorable - things that have really changed my life.

Quench - Dreams. The first one is easy - this was the song that turned my ears to trance and techno. I'd been sort of imitating this style of in my head, and irritating my brother by doing it 'beatbox' style, for years; it was like there was techno in there but it hadn't discovered what it was yet. Then I heard Dreams on Triple J and it nailed me to the spot. I listened to this album again recently and it's still a brilliant and powerful fusion of good beats and killer analog synth lines. The "Dreams 2001" remake and the Hybrid remix of Miss Shiva's rework of this classic are great, but the original is still the best.
beXta - Rhythm Gun. It was the afternoon before going to my first rave; I was listening to 4ZZZ's "Crucial Cuts" programme and they had an interview with beXta, who was playing that night. This mind-pounding, rip-snorting raver started up and in that moment I knew I was going to have an awesome time at the rave. One little secret I feel I can let go of now: the second time I was at a rave and beXta was playing, there was a sort of mini-stage beside her that a couple of people were dancing on; they didn't seem to be choreographed or dressed up or anything. So when "Rhythm Gun" came on I got up on that stage and danced, raising my hands in the air with the chords. I got off the stage after, feeling embarrassed, but if I hadn't got up there I'd have spent a lifetime regretting it.
Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene II. It took me a while to track this down in high school, but then I played it until the tape wore out. I listened to this album recently too and it still amazes me - it's so sonically dense yet it has this great sense of space, and the melody line is just so instantly recognisable. How did he make those -- those -- those amazing rippling, wooshing, stereo-sweeping sounds?
Mike Oldfield - Crises. A classic album in its own right, with "Moonlight Shadow" being Oldfield's one mainstream hit, but the twenty minute title piece has some brilliant lead lines and has this dark, story- laden feel. The first and second themes and their reprises - in particular the sequencer + delay line section toward the end which builds and builds and builds... musical genius. It was this album that got me started with Mike Oldfield - the second was Incantations, which is another wonderful album. Crises, however, was the one that my friends recognised and liked too.
Yello - The Rhythm Divine. Off the brilliant and inspiring album "One Second", each piece holds up in its own right, from the wonderfully atmospheric "La Habanera" and "Goldrush" to the instrumental story-telling of "Hawaiian Chance" and "Si Senor The Hairy Grill" (wtf?). But "The Rhythm Divine", with Shirley Bassey's liquid vocals, grabs you right in the heart and tugs. The last chorus, when she just continues effortlessly up the scale, gets me every time. This is one of those tracks for me that defines musicality and expression (over, some might argue, my other preferences).
Tangerine Dream - Logos. I remember going into the record store in Indooroopilly Shopping Town with some spare money and looking for this band called "Tangerine Dream" that a friend had mentioned I might like, if I liked Jarre and Vangelis and so forth. This was a total risk - I had no idea what I should buy - so I figured a concert album would probably be a good bet. Unlike some of my other purchases before and since, this was an absolute winner - it's classic analogue-era TD: melodic brilliance, moving chord progressions, and a pulsing beat that refuses to be stopped. Like "Oxygene II", compilation albums often cut this short but it must be listened to in full length just for the atmosphere. I also found a good friend of mine had been in the audience at that show - I could only say "Wow!"
Art Of Trance - Madagascar. Another chance encounter - in the departure hall in Heathrow Terminal 3, spending the long hours between 5PM (when I finished work at BAA) and 11PM (when my flight departed) I was browsing around looking for something to listen to. I espied the "Platipus Beginners' Guide" and recognised the label as one that published several tracks I had enjoyed in the past. I stuck this in my CD player and never regretted it the whole flight home, particular "Bluebottle" by POB and "Rock Rose" by Star, and in fact the whole second disc is an ambient classic. But it was a particularly significant flight for me for other, personal reasons, and I remember listening to "Madagascar" in the last hour of the flight, as I espied Toowoomba and Redland Bay and the familiar landscape of my home town pivoted under me. The driving pulses of the main theme felt like they were pushing the plane on, and I really wanted to be home...
Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer. What's not to like? A driving song, easy to sing along to, and a video clip by Aardman Animations. This track has cheered me up on some dark days, but it's hard to explain exactly how I relate to the lyrics.
Kate Bush vs Infusion - Running Up That Road. I rarely frequent record stores, but I occasionally go in just to look around and present the appearance of a DJ. So imagine my surprise when I found a limited-release single by Infusion, remixing one of Kate Bush's more memorable pieces, in the 'miscellaneous' bin. The B side is simply blank and there's no record label details or anything - that's how rare this record is. It's this kind of gem turning up in the mullock heap that makes all those other crappy purchases all worth while.
Vangelis and Jon Anderson - I'll Find My Way Home. Another of those pieces that means so much more to me than it really should. Jon Anderson's beautiful, clear voice combined with Vangelis' musical genius and mastery of sound. I tried to explain to my mum once what I thought the story behind the lyrics was and I got too choked up with emotion to speak. I don't really think I can explain it now, either - especially because the most moving bit for me is the bridge, where there are no words at all.

There are so many more that I could list just on being awesome, or love listening to. Heaps of Trance, Techno, Drum & Bass and Psy Trance that is great stuff and cheers me up; wonderful orchestral works and modern classics; Goon Shows and Irish music and 80's Pop and Rock and the Doctor Who theme and all sorts of other stuff. But those tracks above have a special place in my history and in my heart.