Cellular telephone network access in Canada is expensive, and after having a look around it turns out that it is one of the most expensive around.  Now given the land mass to cover, the network upgrade costs moving into the 3G/LTE age and the population density I can almost understand why it is not as cheap as other countries.  I can also understand a company wanting to make profit.  However as Adam Smith predicted we are now in a situation where we have allowed companies the same rights as a single person in terms of allowing them access to the political system and they have abused that power.  Now this is just the latest example of this abuse, I would suggest we are seeing similar abuse of power in the Music industry with their persecution of the people to support their broken business model and in the Banking industry where the people taking the risk, the investors and the people making the profit, the bankers through their bonuses, were not the same people.

If we are to continue down the road that Adam Smith set the foundation for I would suggest we need to follow his advice and remove the political access from these companies and ensure the accountability of the people running these companies through transparency and professional accountability of the people in charge of these companies.

However this is just my thoughts, I wonder how the world will move forward, will we allow the unchecked influence of ever increasing power hungry and unaccountable global corporations in our political systems or are we going to accept the need to build a framework where creative companies are allowed to take risk and reap the rewards while holding to account the actions of the people running these companies.

Take care.

Now to be clear even if I am disgusted by the debate I am still glad it happened.  We should never be afraid to ask a question, more questions lead to more answers.

My problem with this debate however is a rich white man living in comfort never before experienced suggesting that the way to make them even more comfortable is to somehow limit future world population growth.

I personally take a great issue with this as I believe that the past great developments in human history have come from our diversity.  Quite basically the more people we have the more individual views on the world we will have and this will bring new understanding of the universe around us.  This new understanding of the universe around us will (as it has done in the past) provide us with all of the resources we need to continue to survive at the rate we continue to grow the population.

Some people might argue that we cannot support the number of humans currently on the planet so why should we be adding more.  I would suggest that has a lot more to do with the current balance of power than anything else.  If we were to take the worlds resources and provide living space that is livable and food for everyone I think we would overcome most of the challenges and be able to live in comfort.  I have this beliefidea because we have managed in the past to do this on a small scale country-by-country basis.  All we need to do is expand the same thinking to the rest of the world.  If you don’t believe me then have a look at the conditions for the common man in Victorian Britain and then have a look at modern day Britain.

So what you may as is stopping this utopian future.  I would suggest simple greed.  People like the man starting this debate in The Economist are simple scared.  They are frightened that if they are to start sharing resources with everyone around that they will not have as much to themselfs so they grab for more and more to ensure their own comfort.  This feeling is understandable and one most people have, rich or poor, but it should not be excused or accepted any longer.  If resource is your main worry for changing to such a system I would suggest you think of the following.  For each new mouth to feed we have another pair of hands to plant seeds, make tools or perform one of a million tasks required to keep everyone in comfort.

The last argument people will use to disguise this fear is to suggest that we now simply do not have enough raw materials.  Without going too far into this side of my personal thinking (I promise I will write this down later) I can only suggest that this people have clearly been spending their lives looking at the ground for the solution to their problems rather than up to the stars where we have all the resources in the universe to use for the good of mankind.  I guess that almost closes this on a religious note, if we look down we are destined to a life of suffering and poverty for mankind, however if we look up we might just be able to create a heaven on earth.

Finally please remember this is a blog and as such is my personal thoughts and views on the world.  I put them here to share with the world in the hope that they can both be challenged and inspire others to think.

Take care

So a little over a year ago I was at my sisters “parents evening” for her last year of high school and I decided to have a chat with my old computing teacher. I figured I would let him know that the local LUG was starting up so he could tell the kids in his class that were using Linux. I was shocked to hear that none of them had even heard about Linux, the open source development model or the founding principals of Free software. However being a geek and not a teacher I had no idea what I could really do about this.

Fast forward to FOSDEM 2009 and the closing keynote by Leslie Hawthorn of Google. She did a most amazing talk about GSOC, Melange and GHOP. Now I seeing this I knew that something could be done about the problem I could see of our high school students being locked into believing that they do not have the right to run, study, copy, modify and distribute as they wished. Yet again Google had the answer

So I pestered Leslie and got some advice about what would be the best way to solve this problem. I logged on to IRC one night and suddenly all of these good ideas were dumped in my lap about how this could work as a classroom project bringing together students from different subjects to work on the same project and how that would encourage working together and give the kids experience of what it is like to work in the ‘real world’ where we all have to work together.

From here I somehow managed to convince my good friend Shelley, who just happens to be a teacher , to come over and hear my crazy idea out. Turns out she is just as crazy as me and loved the idea, FTW! Shelley also had some excellent ideas about how open source development can fit in with the new Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland. Turns out the new curriculum has a lot of the same founding principals as Free Software so this should make things a little easier.

Then a few nights ago I got another update from Leslie with links for more people working on similar things at Teaching Open Source so at the very least we are not alone

Now here we are a teacher and a geek working together with the community, and lots of work there is too!!! So if you are reading this first of all pass the link on to anyone you think might be able to help, this includes parents, people currently in high school, teachers, open source developers and everyone else! Now if you can help directly even better because we are going to need lots of it, drop me an email at rob@lazzurs.net

Lots more exciting things happening with this but I want to get this post out finally so more to come soon.

Take care.

Well a few things have been happening, I am working at TomTom which of course is mega exciting. I just did not one but two talks at FOSDEM on the most excellent Cobbler/Koan and with luck should be going to more Free software conferences this year.

More to come soon on Linux storage, KVM and Python scripting for fun and profit!

Oh yea, and I upgraded Wordpress

Take care all.

What seems like a long time ago now I went to see RMS (Richard M Stallman) talk at Glasgow Caledonian university as he was receiving an honorary degree from the university. As I imagine he always does RMS taught the key points of why information and software should be free to all people. If you wish to understand more about his views they can be found here.

I have never forgotten that speech nor what I was taught there and while it has sometimes caused me discomfort I have always tried to encourage the companies I work for to do the same, some have been more open to this than others.

Now as I am sure people are aware recently one of the major challenges we have faced is finding a storage system that can scale not only technically but in terms of cost as well. I believe we had found a solid partner in Network Appliance until very recently. As usual a few days ago I was reading /. and found this.

I then decided to do some further reading and found the blog postings by both the NetApp CEO and the SUN CEO. The impression I get from the available evidence is that more than anything this is a marketing exercise, however the SUN CEO does have a valid point in that NetApp have held on to their software for a long time and not really done anything innovative that I can see recently. They have always pushed storage systems in what they can do with the current technology however putting together heads which are basically over priced PC’s with NVRAM and Infiniband cards and selling them with shelfs made by someone else and installing a UNIX based software stack which each feature costs another £10k license to use. This is not innovation, it is just providing a reliable product at the price the market will bare. Eventually companies like Left Hand Networks, Datacore and Pillar will fully catch up and be able to offer the same facilities at a fraction of the cost. I have to wonder if NetApp has already seen this in their future and have decided to go down the litigation route. I hope not as we have all seen how well that ended for SCO (here, here and here).

What ever happens I am very glad to hear that SUN are going to be at the FoWA as well as my good self and I hope to have a chat with them about being in the same business….serving our customers (not paying for a team of lawyers next cruise).

So I decided to go and buy some flying disks, surprisingly hard to find, usual catalog outlet of choice did not have them, neither did any of the local sports shops however surprise, surprise Tesco did, for the princely sum of 50p

It has now become a nice relaxing activity at work that we can take a spare 10 mins out and have fun with. While playing outside in the sun is not exactly productive it always helps re-focus me and usually we keep it to the lunch times If you are sitting bored at work wondering what to do I would highly recommend spending the 50p, you will burn off some lunch, get some fresh air and best of all just have some ‘good old-fashioned fun’!