For almost two years now, I own a href="http://www.sharp.co.uk/zaurus/">Sharp Zaurus [EN]. In the beginning,
I thought that a Linux PDA was a really great idea. When I finally bought one
(EUR 299 at the time, special offer), it was fun to play with it. To make it
really useful, however, I require mobile Internet connectivity. I thought that
getting a Bluetooth card might be a good idea. Another EUR 300 later, I had a
Socket Bluetooth CF
card [EN], which was even supposed to work under Linux.

By the time I got the Bluetooth card, I had encountered several annoying
problems with the Sharp ROM, so I had reflashed the Zaurus with href="http://openzaurus.org/">OpenZaurus [EN], a slick open distribution
designed specifically for the Z. Now, I entered a version limbo that was
almost as bad as the confusion surrounding incompatible RPMs for the billions
of RPM-based distributions out there.

I found a href="http://affix.sourceforge.net/gprs-zaurushowto.shtml">HOWTO [EN] that
provided information on how to get online using Bluetooth with Affix and
OpenZaurus, but at the time, I could not get affix to work with the
then-current OpenZaurus. I found affix modules for the Sharp ROM’s kernel, but
they made the machine so unstable it crashed after mere minutes of Internet
usage.

Then, OpenZaurus development ground to a halt when the developers decided that their
build system was ultimately doomed, and so they started work on a completely new system,
named OpenEmbedded [EN]. It took about a year
for OpenEmbedded development to get to the first OpenZaurus beta, and at that point I
decided to take another look at it. There were no binary packages available, only a bk
URL to pull the current version of the build system and build the system yourself.

By the time I got this working, I noticed that almost all the old packages
were ported – except for the Bluetooth apps, of course! So I dove in and fixed
a number of packages personally, tested and submitted them to the project.

Two days ago, I finally managed to get a complete Zaurus system built with OpenEmbedded,
including all the bluetooth stuff that I require. I field tested the thing today, and even
though it wasn’t "tap-tap, online" stuff yet, I managed to make it from suspended
to online in about 10 seconds, just executing a single script. The only thing missing was
a graphical web browser. I didn’t manage to build konqueror-embedded due to some weirdness
in the automake files that confused the name of the PCRE library with the -lpcre link option.

Since OZ 3.5.1 was released in the mean time, I thought I could take my
three-days-before-release system and simply upgrade using ipkg. I entered the
feed descriptions and attempted to install konqueror-embedded from there. This somehow
seems to have broken the libstdc++, though I have no idea why.

Now, OPIE [EN] refuses to start
with a Bus Error and I’m back to about zero. To make things a bit worse, when I tried
to work on the machine while it was plugged into the docking station (thus physically
obscuring the keyboard) with the included stylus, the tip suddenly fell off. The Zaurus
is from 99% functionality this morning back to something close to 0%, I have invested
tons of money and countless hours of work into this PoS and got nothing in return.

I really should give Windows CE a try.

One of the fundamental tenets of cypherpunks is

All crypto is economics.

Indeed, under close observation, it turns out that almost everything
related to human behaviour is. This seems to be a common conclusion, at least
among people who just discover economics, see this
this
terribly written k5 article for reference.

Cypherpunks and various other anarcho-capitalist sects share the view that
economics are fundamental, and that they represent an extension of the
evolutionary selection process to human affairs – among competing alternatives,
the most economically optimal will survive in the long term. One of the most
interesting consequences from this theory is a decline in nation states’
ability to use economics as a tool of public policy – when a government
distorts economic parameters too much against mobile factors, they will simply
be outcompeted and lose business to competing governments. This is called
regulatory arbitrage, and is precisely what we’re observing large businesses
doing for the last few decades.

This is probably one of the reasons why European-style social democracies
face so many problems with maintaining the 20th century models of income
redistribution – the occurence of mobile factors is higher among employers
and high-income persons than among the rest of the population, and if the
cost to them isn’t worth what your country provides, they’re going to leave.
At least for labor-intensive industry production, European societies obviously
aren’t all that competitive any more.

Now, I’m not a protectionist who thinks that regulatory arbitrage is
necessarily a bad thing, but there seems to be a democratic majority here
who thinks that income redistribution is a good idea. Of course, that doesn’t
really make it a feasible idea, as (allegedly, STFW for discussion) Alexander
Fraser Tytler noted in the early 19th century:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves
largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always
votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury
with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy,
always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest
civilizations has been 200 years.

The depressing thing about economically dominated life is that it makes
taking economically non-optimal choices a luxury, and if competition is strong
enough, there is little margin for such luxury. So, does this domination of the
economy mean that there’s no way we can enforce our ethical beliefs if they don’t
match?

The "economic positivist" argument goes like this: Economic exchange is
fundamentally voluntary, and so every economic exchange should leave all parties
happier than they were before – where happier of course goes a long way from
"richer" to "a bit further from starving". From this it
follows that a maximum of economic activity should produce a maximum of
happiness, and since all hampering of unfettered economic exchange reduces the
"total amount" of happiness available, it is necessarily evil.

What makes this view interesting is that while it implies unhindered
individualism (Do what you want…), it also ultimately leads to a forced
acceptance of cultural standards if one expects to have a life style at least
marginally resembling everyone else’s (… but don’t expect anyone to feed you
whily you enjoy yourself) since you need to produce something others want from
you if you don’t want to spend your whole life sustaining your basic
livelihood.

The basic divergence between this view and the current European-style social
systems is that the underlying view of "justice" in pure economic
positivism does not imply that it’s desirable to somehow divide the produced
happiness equally among the populace, and so doesn’t really provide any
justification for income redistribution.

A rationale for income redistribution can be produced in a number of ways -
either by asserting that happiness is not directly proportional to an income
and that the lower parts of the income are disproportionally more important.
This is a quite popular assertion, and it seems obvious that "more
happiness" is produced when a thousand people get to rent a home and feed
themselves instead of Bill Gates adding another million dollars to his pile.

However, the theoretic argument against this assertion is that while it
looks good in the short term, it will cause a reduction of economic incentives
for those already producing more than their sustenance requires, thus
ultimately leading to a smaller amount of distributable income.
Anarcho-capitalists tend to assume that a society with unfettered capitalism
will, even with all the inequality it fosters, provide better living through
more overall growth to almost everyone. Also, remember the theory that economic
exchange does benefit both parties – when this is considered more closely, it
resolves a lot of the rethoric fireworks about "oppressed workers"
and the like – how is anyone not doing forced labor opressed? In a somewhat
lawful society, every worker has the ability to quit his job and look for
another – and if there is no other job, than there probably isn’t all that much
oppression, probably just a lack of value in the work the person provides.

Now, who is right, anarcho-capitalists or socialists? In a way, it seems that
nobody is. Economics is not an experimental science, so it’s hard to judge the
accuracy of theories, since they hardly ever survive in a pure form outside the
heads of academia. Mises’ Human
Action [EN] is very compelling in theory, but that doesn’t mean that an
anarcho-capitalist society is ever going to be established in practice, and so
it’s hard to judge its real value.

From my point of view, it seems that at least for Austria, a bit more
economic freedom would do a lot of good, even as everyone is clamoring against
"neo-conservative reforms", since it is basically impossible to
actually acquire capital by employment because of an immense tax burden. I also
don’t see any real opportunity for change in that direction, since there is
nobody on the political spectrum who promotes such a policy. There are two reasons
for this that I can imagine:

• misanthropic view: people don’t like this kind of justice. Ayn Rand is right
  and society works to exploit its more productive members in favour of those who don’t
  want to contribute, all in the name of altruism.
• philanthropic view: Mises’ praxeology is just a bunch of theoretical crap
  that would never work in the real world, and politicians understand that, which is the
  reason nobody suggests change in that direction.

Instinctively, I’d veer to the misanthropic side of things, but then again,
as the eminent David Brin [EN] href="http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=90772">said [EN],

Try giving your neighbors a break. Individually they may seem
like dopes, but together, somehow, they are making a civilization.

(Observe the use of the classical "invisible hand" argument by
someone who likes to denounce anarcho-capitalists for their unfounded and self-righteous
theories :))

You know hippies [EN] href="http://images.google.com/images?q=hippies">[IMG], right? Well, for
much of my life, I just saw them on TV reminiscences and thought little about
them. I gathered that their culture was mostly about being nice to animals and
plants, taking lots of drugs and having lots of sex, which is nice all by
itself, but didn’t sound too interesting to me as a technophile.

The first time I ever got a glimpse that the 1960s counterculture might have
something interesting to say was when I read all the secondary literature
surrounding Illuminatus! – especially href="http://www.rawilson.com/main.shtml">Robert Anton Wilson [EN]‘s essay
Abolition
of Stupidity [EN]. Wilson, along with href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary">Timothy Leary, was
convinced that they were approaching a breakthrough in human evolution,
triggered by what Leary dubbed SM2ILE,

While it seems that their efforts didn’t enjoy too much success, I find the
implied optimism amazing. Earth becomes crowded and will probably be destroyed
by nuclear war? We’ll just migrate into space. Can’t solve the problems we
face? We’ll just work on increasing our intelligence and try again. And it
probably won’t be too late for you personally, because we’ll soon find out how
to live forever. If that was indeed the spirit those people lived and worked
under, they must have had an amazingly positive environment (and have been in
for a really abrupt wakeup call when the Nixon era and the associated backlash
hit them).

Compare that to today’s unexciting perspective on the future – I don’t
really see anyone proposing goals for humanity that seems worth pursuing on a
grand scale (sure, there are plenty of Wars on Something around, but they seem
to be mostly cover stories to redirect tax money to some interest group), and
so the best thing one can hope for is to make a decent of money with some new
technology while it’s fun and get out before it turns into yet another
corporation.

Of course, transhumanism is alive and well, but it seems to consist mostly
of people imagining how great it is going to be when you no longer have to
brush your teeth because they’re made of diamons, without any tangible evidence
that the imagined greatness will actually be available any time soon.

… a call from a coworker. $IMPORTANT_LINK is down, we need it immediately, nobody who
knows what to do is around. I get out of bed and try to SSH to the Linux box in question.
All I get is the dreaded

ssh_exchange_notification: Connection closed by foreign host

error. An
immediate realization that this is going to be fun dawns on me. I fire up minicom and dial
directly to the machine’s modem port – luckily, it seems that the chain from mgetty to login
to bash never forks, and so I get to log in, but I’m greeted with the a page of

fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

messages from my .bashrc.

This means I can’t ls, I can’t ps, I can’t grep.
And of course, I don’t have sash or any other all-in-one toolkit installed to
save the day. Luckily, this is Linux, and there’s a /proc file system mounted.
ls is easily emulated (echo *, enable line wrap in minicom), and since
ps is basically just an ls in /proc, I’m almost there.

I find out that this machine is running a few thousand processes, which is
definitely not good. Most of them are concentrated in the 26000-32000 range, which probably
means that some service is running berserk. This is urgent, so I decide to carpet-bomb first, think
later,

for i in [23]???? ; do builtin echo Killed $i ; builtin kill -s KILL $i ; done 

After the loop completes, I expect relief, but it still steadfastly
refuses to let me launch processes.

fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Bastard. I try some more carpet bombing (?????), but the problem remains. At
that point, I remember my Unix skillls and since there are still tons of /proc
entries for processes I just absolutely sentenced to death, that can only mean
one thing – dire zombies, feasting not on human meat but on rare process table
entries. A quick mini-cat confirms my fears:

while read line ; do echo $line ; done < /proc/27995/status

yields, among others,

Name:   pppd
State:  Z (zombie)

Of course you can not kill what is not living, but there’s still a chance – init
does care enough for its children to at least ask their exit status, and so give
them peace (and me the opportunity to launch processes).

/proc/$PID/status also contains a line like

PPid:   4036

and so, a quick

builtin kill 4036

later, the great reaping commences and I
can use a normal environment again. It turns out that my carpet bombing also
eliminated cron, the name server and the DHCP server, but that is easily fixed.

So now it’s not even 9 AM, and I’ve already worked for an hour before I normally
even get up. I bet it’s going to be a great day.

A few years of enterprise software development suggest the following quip:

A message bus is for people who don’t understand routing.

To elaborate a bit, experience suggests that the people in charge of planning communication
in enterprise projects rarely have any networking background deeper than plugging their
notebook into a DHCP-enabled ethernet. The only problems they see involve getting information from
point A to point B, and when a vendor consultant comes in to tell them that with the message bus,
everything will be everywhere, their brains get swamped with morphines and they think that all
problems are solved. This leads to funny situations, like GBit ethernets swamped with traffic from
a handful of applications, or we’d-have-to-shoot-you-if-you-knew data ethernet-broadcasted to every
machine on a whole site. But hey, anything for conceptual simplicity, right?

After posting the last entry, I got to think about my interest in philosophy
and how it all started… I think I can blame it on href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_rand">Ayn Rand [EN] href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand">[DE]. and here’s the story:

When I was going to school, I shared the belief of many of my fellow geeks
(and most other people, I guess) that philosophy wasn’t to be taken too
seriously. Good and Evil were mostly defined by consensus or authority, and we
had all been brought up to try and do The Right Thing™ whenever possible.
One of the things that I had absorbed from my environment was the real Austrian
(ironically, 180-degree different from the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School">academic Austrian) view
of economics, which suggested that the economy was more or less a vehicle to
provide jobs and livelihood to the people, more or less tolerating free
enterprise while providing for market failures – somewhat typical of a European
state after a few decades of socialist (later renamed to social democrat) rule.
I also had a strongly traditionalist (see the last post) view on economic
activity – nobody in my family considered amassing riches their primary
motivation or thought that it was a good idea to devote much of one’s life to
acquiring capital, greed and selfishness definitely had a negative connotation
and modesty was considered much more important and valuable than success.

I wasn’t all that involved in economic life at the time – I worked as an
intern during the summer months and did various small tasks for a software
company 40 hours a month during the school year to help pay the Internet bills.
I had discovered Linux and the wealth of OSS/Free Software (did we even have
that controversy back then?), and I liked the way it seemed to work – everybody
worked on the product, people were nice to each other when certain rules were
obeyed and the output was world class. It certainly reminded me of what I then
generally considered the ideal form of society – communism. I’m not entirely
sure whether someone actually told me or whether I figured out from
the simplified information that I had available, but I subscribed to the view
that communism was a good thing in principle, but couldn’t really work since it
lacked adequate incentives for the people to contribute to the good of
society.

Mind you, I wasn’t all that interested in politics and philosophy back then
- that was the time where I learned to code in C and 8086 assembly, and I
thought that tweaking the interrupt vector table to write TSR programs or
implementing a correct AVL tree were somewhere close to the smartest things
a person could do in the world.

I was aware of the Cold War during my childhood, of course, and I was
somewhat sure "we" were neutral, but leaning on the Americans’ side,
though I didn’t question the reasons behind that. I took the failure of the
Soviet regime as a consequence of the systematic problems I described earlier,
but my opinion was more of the "noble experiment" flavour. I hadn’t
bothered researching the internal history of the Soviet Union, of course, or
it would probably have set me thinking back then.

Anyway, it was with a somewhat indifferent to leftist stance on politics
that I took up Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. I had seen numerous references
to it in Slashdot comments – the opinions uttered therein were all over the
spectrum, from "best book ever" to "worst piece of crap". I decided to see for
myself, and without really knowing what it was about, I ordered it from Amazon
and started to read.

One of the first things I noticed was that the book was written with an
agenda. On the first pages, one of the book’s lesser characters, Eddie Wilter,
walks home through a desolate New York city and encounters a beggar asking him
for money. Rand’s description of the beggar and his behaviour was offensive to
me – the beggar as an ungrateful, appalling figure. It clashed directly with my
expectations and compassionate views. In my phantasy, every beggar would have
had a story of undeserved hardships that reduced him to his current state, and
would have risen out of poverty if only an opportunity occured (I hadn’t heard
of Horatio Alger back then, but I had seen a few Dickens movies) – here, Rand
shows Wilter repelled by the beggar, and rightfully so. This theme went on
throught the first few chapters, where I couldn’t help a feeling of unease when
each of the characters who were introduced felt just a little bit wrong – Dagny
Taggart the greedy industrialist portrayed nicely, her philantropic and
generous brother James shown more as weak and inconsequential.

Gradually, however, my initial outrage grew milder as I noticed that many of
the traits that Rand’s characters exhibited were close to things I had observed
in the real world – like the abuse of the altruistic ideal for emotional
blackmail, and accusations of selfishness to stifle competition and obtain
handouts from others who work harder/better/more. By the time of John Galt’s
first appearance, I was already quite convinced that Rand’s total individualism
was a great idea. What Atlas Shrugged gave me was an enormous relief on my
conscience – it was perfectly okay and socially justifiable to be selfish, to
place one’s enlightened self-interest above others’ well-being. Galt’s glorious
"A is A" speech finally convinced me that this was more than just an opinion, it
was a deep philosophic discovery, and anyone who argued otherwise was either
deceiving himself or dishonest.

It was a glorious time for me – I believed that the fate of the world was
guided by a few exceptional individuals and their dedication to their ideals,
and I was quite sure I was one of those people (Calvinism, anyone? :)). I had
finally discovered that it was philosophically justifiable to be selfish, and
that allowed me to feel better about a lot of things I was doing. I was also
finally at piece with capitalism, since its perceived unfairness was gone from
my view. One of the things I had learned from John Galt’s speech was that no man
should be without a philosophy – if there is no clear statement of your
principles, you can not lead a principled life. This started my interest in
philosophy, and even though I know today that objectivisim has glaring flaws, I
think the radically different way Rand’s novels portray the world, compared to
my old world view from philosophically disinterested days, was a very important
discovery for me.

I have even told people that Rand should be required reading for school
education, because this exposure to her very different view broadened my
perspective considerably, and that’s probably the most important first step for
a philosophic education – you need a firm reminder that a large part of what you
believe is "the only way" or "the right thing" is just that because you have
never alternatives. This is both a somewhat depressing and a very enlightening
experience, and for me it was a prerequisite to actually remake much of my
belief system according to what I think are rational rules, which made me a
much more rational and balanced person. Not bad for a somewhat insane Russian emigrant, huh?