Plugging the trickle and ignoring the torrent

South Africa is again set to get stricter smoking laws, including making it illegal to smoke pretty much anywhere that's even remotely public, graphic warnings on boxes, and other anti-puff actions. As a non-smoker, I'm all for this. I look forward to going to a restaurant in summer and not having the pleasant outdoor areas reserved for those slowly killing themselves off by tarring their lungs. I also applaud the stricter rules regarding smoking around children and heavier fines. There are those who are skeptical about how effective and policeable these laws will be, but then there were skeptics when SA first started clamping down on smokers, and look how our culture has adjusted to the changes.
I really have no complaints about the emphasis being placed on regulating such a dangerous, selfish habit. What concerns me is that something far bigger gets almost no media or legal focus in this country-tackling climate change. Cigarette smoke (primary and secondary) is proven to cause numerous health conditions and shorten lifespans-but how worthwhile will these extended, healthier lifespans be if within a couple of decades we'll be dealing with serious food and water shortages and an onslaught of climate refugees? Will we look back and pat ourselves on the back for dealing harshly with cigarette smokers or will we realize we should have been placing at least as much emphasis, if not a lot more on cutting down emissions to prevent reaching the climate tipping point.
We hear on the news how Eskom is currently reporting back to parliament on their struggles with coal shortages-yet their expansion program focuses on new coal power and the pie-in-the-sky pebble bed nuclear reactor. The SA government even refuses to agree to carbon emission limitations for fear that it would impact this expansion process. Where are the safe, cost effective, renewable and future-proof solar-thermal projects that would go hand-in-hand with emission limits?
We hear of the poor in need of jobs, housing, clean water and sanitation, and that another reason for refusing emission limits is to avoid stunting economic growth. How much worse will their plight become when the price of foodstuffs skyrocket as agriculture is brought to it's knees by a warmer, drier climate in our country and our already limited water sources begin to dwindle. Will their new jobs at newly built coal stations pay enough to cover the cost of bread at record highs?
Our politicians aspire to an Americanized way of life with multiple cars, big houses and an endless cycle of buying and disposing of stuff they don't really need-in turn providing materialistic role models to millions of up-and-coming young black individuals who follow their example. Why when the American lifestyle of greed, waste and excess has brought our planet to the brink of extinction are we trying to emulate it instead of developing and modernizing the sustainable traditional African way of living, with a focus on community instead of personal wealth and advancement.
We have shown through the progressive legal and cultural change in attitude towards smoking in this country that South Africa can be a cultural leader and an example of  positive lifestyle change, now why can't we apply the same effort and enthusiasm to combating the environmental crisis that we face? As John Robbie asked recently on his morning show, why aren't we making "rock stars" of the individuals who are making it their life's purpose to combat climate change? Why can't we pull climate change out of the "funny stories and science bits" end-of-the-newscast status it has and bring it center stage, to be dealt with using strong laws and cultural change? Unless we do that very soon, we will see South Africa face a steady decline as all the gains made over the last couple of years are lost to the effects a changing climate will have on social stability.

Posted via email from Matt's posterous

Browsing on a Bandwidth Budget

Despite the recent landing of the SEACOM cable and operators rolling out their own local infrastructure, it's easy to forget that many local users are still severely bandwidth constrained, be it due to corporate policies or restrictive internet packages-if only at the end of the month when we start watching that limited bandwidth allocation tick down to zero.

The good news is that one of the best things that the explosion of cellular internet has resulted in many major websites and services to implement low bandwidth versions of their offerings to grab that precious mobile browsing market share. All a bandwidth-limited web user needs to do is get into the habit of using these mobile versions in their PC browser when bandwidth starts getting tight.

Bookmarks and the All-in-One Firefox Sidebar

Firefox's All-in-One Sidebar extension is a great host for these mobile-formatted sites. The narrow view is very much like the screen they were designed for and the text wrapping logic that often makes them unreadable in a full size browser screen works well within the sidebar's limits.

Mobile website sometimes have crazy URLs hidden behind automatic agent detection scripts triggered when the top level URL is visited, so it's worth storing these in a bookmark once they have been tracked down. I use the bookmark toolbar exclusively for these mini-sites.

In Firefox 3.5 the process is very simple:

1. Visit the mobile page you want to bookmark as normal, by entering the URL directly into the address bar or following a link.

2. Click the star icon in the address bar once to bookmark the page, and then a second time to bring up the bookmark parameters.

3. In the "Folder" drop-down list, choose "Bookmarks Toolbar" and click "Done". The bookmark favicon and title should now be visible in your bookmarks toolbar.

4. Right click on the icon for your new icon and select "Properties" to open the extended properties for the bookmark.

5. (optional) If, like me, you prefer to keep your toolbar label-less (the favicon makes it quite clear which site the bookmark represents), clear the "Name" field.

6. Check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar", and click "Save".

You should now have a simple button with the site's favicon that when clicked opens the site in your sidebar.

Sidebar everything with Google Reader

Some of the biggest browsing bandwidth hogs are the unnecessary stock images and huge banners (ads or otherwise) displayed on many websites. All you really want is the content after all. A great way to cut down on all that bandwidth leeching is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite sites in Google Reader and use Google Reader's great iPhone version (http://www.google.com/reader/i/) or generic mobile version (http://www.google.com/reader/m/) in your sidebar as above. Some sites do limit their RSS articles to just be a summary of the main articles, but at least in those cases you're just getting hit for the articles you actually want to read.

Other google services

Google has implemented mobile versions of just about all their services, and direct URLs for some of them can be found here. If there's anything missing, chances are visiting the main URL on your mobile (i.e. mail.google.com, calendar.google.com, etc) and then using the resulting URL should work just fine.

Sidebar social networking

Social networking sites often have some of the best mobile website implementations. As an example I find Facebook's mobile version is actually more useful for quickly getting in, checking messages and notifications, and getting out. URLs for some of the popular services include:

Twitter: http://m.twitter.com

Facebook: http://m.facebook.com

Flickr: http://m.flickr.com

FriendFeed (third party): http://www.fftogo.com

Ebuddy (for chat across many services): http://m.ebuddy.com/

You'll notice that very often the mobile site url is simply m.whatever.com and that's usually a good starting point to track down whatever mobile site you're looking for.

FreeNAS

As fantastic as XBMC is, we found a shortcoming recently when Natz picked up an MP3 player to use at work. XP's handling of FTP servers mapped as a drive is horrible, and since XBMC doesn't implement a SAMBA server there was no easy way for her to access al the the CDs I laboriously ripped to it.

I initially tried to pick up an inexpensive off the shelf NAS enclosure, a Vantex Nexstar LS. It turned out that the enclosure doesn't implement any kind of TCPIP networking, but rather requires the installation of a driver on windows and mac based machines to access it. Funnily enough Vantec spin this as being more convenient than 'complicated network settings'. I suppose they've never heard of DHCP. Anyway, after that disappointment, and with 'proper' NAS enclosures being a bit more expensive than I could justify splashing out on I took @dreamfoundry's advice and checked out FreeNAS.

As it's name suggests, FreeNAS is a free NAS server, supporting an impressive array of sharing protocols, including Samba, FTP, UPnP and many more, numerous data security solutions are included as well. The server is implemented as a lightweight FreeBSD distribution with a web interface to the core components. The entire installation weighs in at a little over 32MB and requires a measly 96MB of system memory to run. The machine I resurrected to install it on is a humble old AMD 800MHz box with 384Mb ram.

The initial installation is basic, simply burn the image available on the download page to disc, and boot the target machine on it. Select the appropriate installation type from the menu presented (I installed to one of the hard drives but a USB is available for machines with USB boot support). After the short installation process and reboot, a menu is once again presented which includes the option to set the IP address (or enable DHCP). From here on in it's time to start up a browser on another machine on the network and continue the setup through the web interface (default username and password are admin and freenas respectively).

By default no drives or sharing services are set up. These must first be added (Disks->Management) and assigned mount points (Disks->Mount Points). Finally, services can be enabled from the Services menu. Each service has it's own required settings, but they're all pretty self explanatory.

The entire setup process shouldn't take more than half an hour from start to finish. For a more complete setup discussion this guide is a really great resource (though the look of the server has changed since it was written). The end result is a NAS solution that just works, and is extendable with a number of addons available from the FreeNAS.org forums.

Posted via email from Matt's posterous

We will resume normal programming shortly..

The last six weeks or so have been really rough. Our (as yet unannounced) Xbox title is on the verge of release. As any game developer (and many other programmers) will tell you, end of project is pretty much a time in your life where everything other than work ceases to exist. Things are finally winding down a bit though (though the PS3 implementation will keep us busy), so I've finally had a chance to get some home geekiness done. I'll be at the coast this weekend, but next week I should be able to get a post done on my recent FreeNAS installation.

Until then, the only thing I have to say is: congrats Paulus and Liques, I'm sure you guys brought an amazing little one into the world, and the world is already a better place as a result :) Congrats!