Slightly less Random Ramblings

The UK House of Lords is considering new laws banning forced labor and involuntary servitude. In a shocking oversight, these laws are not expected to cover the huge amounts of labor required of Britons to pay the taxes levied on them by the government. Clearly, private slavery is the only bad kind of slavery.

I drove through a Walmart parking lot and noticed how well the drainage system they have works. It takes some serious flooding to damage a Walmart to the extent that roads, schools, and government buildings have been damaged during the recent flooding in the Atlanta area. I snapped a pic of it. It was doing a very good job of keeping that parking lot clear. That’s very different from what we see of government “services,” where the need to please the customer is lacking, to say the least.

Charles Rangel, the first black man to head the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and Congress’s foremost proponent of slavery, has perhaps topped all of his peers at displaying contempt for those he supposedly serves. In response to reporters’ questions about hidden personal assets, Rangel responded:

I recognize that all of you have an obligation to ask questions knowing that there’s none of you smart enough to frame it in such a way that I’m going to respond.

Well, at least he actually does give an accurate assessment of the press. Truth in politics is such a refreshing change of pace.

One of the major factors which will fuel Linux and other open source projects’ development will be the developing world. I was listening to a podcast about Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation. One of the interesting things which was mentioned was the ability of members of the community to sponsor code. That is, a person can offer a bounty to have bugs fixed or features added. The fact that incomes vary very widely across the globe can actually help a lot here. Most of the consumers of this software are located in the developed world and have higher incomes than the developing world. As people in areas which have very low average incomes become more technically savvy in software development using free software, some of them will be able to earn nice incomes using their knowledge. This is outsourcing writ large.

I decided to install Ubuntu 9.04 to my 2GB CF card. I wanted to avoid wearing out the CF with writes, so I settled on this method. I installed the server to one partition, so /usr/local is in the root filesystem. You can create the script anywhere in the root filesystem, but i used /usr/local.

Create a /usr/local/bin/mounttmpfs.sh file with the contents below:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs -o mode=1777 /var
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/

Make a soft link from it to /etc/rcS.d with:

ln –s /usr/local/bin/mounttmpfs.sh /etc/rcS.d/S23mounttmpfs.sh

This will cause it to run right after the filesystems are mounted, before any services which write to /var are running.

Add a cron.hourly script to rsync from /var to /var.perm, and you are all set!

I modified this a bit after the inital post. I changed the mounttmpfs.sh script:

#!/bin/sh
find /var/ -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs -o mode=1777 /var
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/
mount -o relatime /dev/vgraid/lv_squid /var/spool/squid3

The find line is actually only needed once. I just deleted the files from the underlying (flash) filesystems, leaving the directory structure. No need to waste space. After that, I mount the /var manually, then copy the permanent files into it. Finally, since I run squid on this server, I mount the squid cache directories after /var. All the other local filesystems get loaded from the scripts in the /etc/rcS.d directory. I also have an hourly cron job which runs the following:

#!/bin/shrsync –delete-excluded –delete-after –exclude=*.pid \
–exclude=spool/squid3/??/??/* –exclude=cache/apt/archives/*.deb\
-av /var/ /var.perm/

This copies all the directory structure, and most files, from /var to the flash card. I skip the squid cache files, since they take up too much space.

A friend of mine, who has a young child, has begun to replace a certain concept with the word “socialism.” For example, “my son just took a massive socialism in his diaper.” Could there be any better description of the nature of the thing than that? It is easily applicable to any number of situations. Something really disgusts you? Scream “socialism” in complete disgust. It works well in some common phrases. “Socialism happens.” “Same Socialism, Different Day.” But I think it works nowhere quite so well as in a phrase used by the older folk during my childhood: “you don’t socialism where you eat.” That one works whether or not you do the mental substitution.

The heroic Norman Horn interviews private security expert Gil Guillory about security without the state.
Listen to the Podcast.