Mike's musings

Dog, hurricane, stuff

Today, we went to the vets with Suzy, not expecting to take her back. She's become increasingly incontinent (urine only) - i.e. she's peeing a lot. There's clearly nothing she can do about it, and it's not such a big deal (though we've been using the washing machine more and more over the past few days for her bedding), but she was getting a bit upset by it, and, more importantly, we were concerned that it might be a symptom of kidney failure, which is always a problem when a lot of diuretics are at work. So, we went to the vets, and met two other Newfoundlands (and owners) there, and had to wait quite a long time, trying not to get too wound up, until we could be seen. The good news is that the vet we saw has seen other Newfs with similar problems who have lived for quite a long time, and feels that if we balance the diuretics with some other medicine to increase her continence, she should be able to carry on quite well for a while. So, having steeled ourselves for a difficult decision, it was a huge relief not to have to make it. My boss, Peter, was very understanding (partly due to his having had dogs before, I suspect), and everyone at work seemed pleased to hear that she's fine.

The news on the South of the US continues to get worse. The breakdown of law and order, the deprivation, the homelessness and the suffering continue to escalate, and with the eyes of the Developed World watching, we're drawn closer and closer to the problems. I'm going to step even further away from my initial posting on this subject, and acknowledge a couple of points that have come up. The first is that it's become increasingly clear that the entirety of New Orleans needs to be evacuated, and that no country can shift upwards of a million people in the space of a few days. The other was brought to my attention by the Chairman of the Black Caucus in the US Senate (I believe - he was interviewed on Radio 4's Today Programme), who pointed out that the people least able to respond to an evacuation order are the poor, who (at least in this part of the US) are black, and that they are suffering disproportionately. Due to lack of thought on my part, the relative suffering of the more/less privileged in society hadn't occurred to me. Obviously, there has been a lot of leveling, but again, as law breaks down, the weak, the poor - and, often, women - are particularly at risk. We are hearing of murders and rapes - even in the stadium used to house people temporarily - and it's astonishing to think how close we are to a life which, according to Thomas Hobbes, at least, is "nasty, brutish and short".

On the upside, there was a fantastic interview on the PM Programme with a woman whose brother owns a huge retail store in Houston, Texas, which they're throwing open to evacuees. She'd been awake for 48 hours, and when the interviewer asked her when she was going to get to sleep, she nearly broke down in tears about how she can't bear to see children, old people and all the others suffering. He'd earlier queried her use of the word "neighbours" (though she would probably have spelled it without the "u") to refer to these people, and she was having none of it. She didn't mention religion once, which, for some reason, seemed to give her comments all the more dignity, and I couldn't help but think that this was a perfect example of Christian charity, by people who might be of any religion, or none. The Good Samaritan steps forward at times like these, and it is thanks for stories like this that we should be offering up with/as our prayers, not rebuke to God.

Welcome to liberranter, who visited from Washington, D.C. and left a good long comment. (A quick aside: I don't have a huge amount of experience in locking down Debian, but I'd look at the SELinux debian packages if I were you, and learn to roll your own kernels if you don't already. I'll see if there's anything else I can think of at some point). He mentioned that they're seeing refugees turning up in Washington, D.C., which is really a long way from Louisiana and Mississippi (which even I knew!). His view is also that the relief effort has been badly mismanaged. We're beginning to get some reporting of criticisms over here, now, but most of the coverage has been on the aid effort itself and, of course, the suffering that people are enduring.

A company called Cachelogic have recently moved into the same building as us at Cryptomathic on the Science Park in Cambridge. They do some groovy stuff transparently caching popular p2p files (see here and here (pdf) for an introduction to file-sharing and my pages for some thoughts on the trust issues). They boast that because they use transparent IP techniques (their products are aimed at ISPs), p2p users can't "opt out" - but neither do they need to opt in. I began thinking about whether p2p users would _want_ to opt out, and I think that for the current file-sharing model, they probably wouldn't (though I can think of ways in which they could, actually, but that's another story). But what about third party attacks? What if the RIAA wanted to disrupt the service, for instance? I need to think about these issues, but I like what CacheLogic are doing, and it generally feels like a "win-win" scenario for both ISPs and p2p file-sharers.