theducks.dreamwidth

As I write this, I see many people on the twitters and facebooks posting a quote supposedly from Martin Luther King Jr, which posits:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Not forgeting Gahndi's

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".

Or Yoda's

"Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering"

The US spent 14 years and over $1 Trillion finding Bin Laden, and surrrprise surprise, he was shot while resisting capture. "Dead or Alive", as George W put it. All we can do now is move forward and make change you can believe in, erm, amends, and try to not let it happen again. Yeah, right.

Yoda was spot on, for the record.

It probably goes without saying for most of you reading this, that you are aware that morality is relative, based on where you're standing. Some people though, don't agree/quite remember that Right and Wrong are moral choices. For the most part, it is difficult to judge people based on morality other than your own. Sure, as society we have moral standards, but many are not rigidly black and white, there's a lot of gray.

Given the audience I have for this post, I'll put this out here - chances are, you're not American. Some of you are, sure, but you're more likely to be either Australian, Canadian or "other" (Hi Rosie!). The fact is, they are a different culture. Sure, there are plenty of similarities, similar language, but we do have individual identities. Thankfully.

As a trope, many people think of blood magic as inherently evil, regardless of the intent.

Many people think that about celebrating a death too, regardless of the victim. It's just something you _don't do ever_.

And you're allowed to think that, regardless of why. Such is your own individual moral choice. But this is one of those areas for me where it's a grey area of morality. Celebrating a death isn't going to make someone more dead. How many layers of abstraction do you need to place between a death and the results of someone's passing before it becomes ok to say that the change is good? Does that abstraction really do any good? Aren't they still morally the same?

What is the difference between saying "I'm glad SEAL team six launched a 40 person assault on a compound in Abbotobad Pakistan and shot Osama Bin Laden in the eye" and saying "I'm glad that Al-Qaeda no longer has a definitive figurehead"? I see them as equivalent, if somewhat differently phrased ways of portraying the same thing.

Let me Godwin this out for you: how is "I'm glad the Nazi's were defeated" different from "I'm glad allied troops took back Europe from Nazi forces by killing anyone who didn't surrender?".

If you launch a war of aggression, and murder thousands of innocent civilians, you and I clearly have some different opinions on how to influence people and what is right and proper behaviour, and I'm happy for you to be dealt with under your own moral code.

I'm sad that they were unable to capture Osama Bin Laden and bring him to trial, however his moral views would have had no problem with the manner of his death, and if he didn't mind, I don't believe we should either. There are more important things to address now. Reducing everything to soundbites and metaphor reduces the ability to rationally discuss, but.. "live by the sword, die by the sword". He styled himself as a warrior, who brought death to innocents, on the assumption that he would one day die, preferably in battle.

I saw comments calling for his body to smeared with pigs blog and strung up outside the White House. Some people over-react, and I'm happy with calling them out for it to. The US did the right thing in giving him a mostly religiously appropriate burial. In much the same way that the location of Hitler's death is now a parking lot, you would not want his burial location to be used as a shrine. It showed their respect for his religion, even if he corrupted that religion for his own ideals.

The actual operation raises a number of questions - particularly about Pakistan's sovereign rights to not have US armed forces kill people inside its borders, but the dynamic of terrorism and how to fight it is not one that respects diplomatic norms. I'm sure the US will say sorry and promise that if they ever have to catch-or-kill Osama Bin Laden again, they'll ask first. But they're not going to say anything about Mullah Omar. It's all very well to use the Niemoller quote of "at first they came for the X [..] then when they came for me, there was no-one left", but it's not a slope that is that slippery. For anyone else, they'll just get your government to extradite you.

The information that lead to this assault apparently came out of a US detainee. I don't know where, and I don't know how. I'm hoping it wasn't torture, because there are fates worse than death, and that is one of them. We are the good guys, we shouldn't do that. I am hoping that the reason Guantanamo Bay was kept open this long was because they got it from someone in there, and they did not want that person talking before they could act on it. Wikileaks very nearly gave the game away, last week releasing a report mentioning a courier for Osama Bin Laden based out of Abbottabad.

I'll put it out there: I'm against the death penalty, I'm not in favour of wars of aggression, and I'm glad he has been "neutralised", however it occurred. In this case, I think the ends justify the means, as they sometimes do, and that's a moral call on my part. I know I couldn't be the guy going in with the SMG killing people, but that's why I'm not in the military. This is also why we have a military, to do distasteful things on our behalf.

Were I in Obama's place and had the head of the CIA come up to me and say "We're 99.99% sure we've found Bin Laden. Can I send a 40 man team into Pakistan to capture or kill him?", I'm confident I would say yes. But that doesn't make it any easier.



Conventional wisdom/morality is easy to understand because we've seen the paths that decisions lead in, the normal ones and the outliers. We know the risks. The problem is that there are situations where normal morality doesn't apply easily, because the questions are so uncommon that there is not an adequate amount outcomes to evaluate. The classic questions here are the ticking timebomb/torture scenario and survival lottery scenarios. By not taking the morally reprehensible option, you are making things far worse than the consequences of taking the option.

I'm glad that the news of his defeat has helped give closure to many in the US and around the world who were affected by his acts. If 300 of your co-workers were killed on someone's orders, wouldn't you be at least a little bit glad to see him gone? How about 3000 people from your town? Your city? At what point does it become not ok?



Bin Laden was more than a person to many on both sides of the equation. The inability to catch or kill him gnawed at the western world, but particularly the American consciousness. He was the boogeyman strawman in so many positions taken by people, both good and bad, to justify their actions, both good and bad. I have great anger towards him for the measures our governments have taken in his name that erode our freedoms and civil liberties. I'm not thrilled with them either, but we have elections, a way to theoretically make them change. I am glad he now cannot be used as an argument to influence, as it will be a harder sell to continue them in the future.

The biggest surprise to me was as Obama announced the details of his death. I was expecting something along the lines of "grave/bones found/dna testing complete". I thought he was long dead. The fact he was killed in the last 72 hours is something I can't get over.

What I'm really looking forward to is what happens next. We've killed the bogeyman. Job well done, now let's get rid of all the blankets we put up to keep him out.

Oh Canada, how cute you are in your politeness.

Last night we took the Canada line downtown for jedinic's birthday. The train was crowded. What didn't help was that there were some seats spare. But of course, Canadians being polite.. no-one would take them, since other people were standing. I've also seen this happen on buses. They'll be packed with people standing, but then there will still be empty seats.

It gets to a point where it's counter-productive. People can't get on because standing room is full.. but there's still seats.

Frustrating politeness.

Watching Hoarders tonight..

One of the consistant themes from these hoarders is worry about throwing things out because they might have to buy them again.

I went through our financial records from moving in here - a good starting point right? We moved over here with 4 suitcases, and had to buy everything else. We're pretty happy here - we live reasonably sparsely, but even then, not too boringly.

Anyway.. everything we bought over here initially to set up a house cost us $6000 - including $2000 of LCD TV/DVR. It came with a dishwasher/fridge/freezer/washer/dryer, which made things cheaper, but it's nice to know that you can start over for that little.

Well that was a full on 4 weeks.

We got a taxi back from the Airport, and most of the way from there to our place is what I do on my evening commute home from UBC.

It didn't seem familiar.

I think it's because in the last 4 weeks, I haven't though about this place at all. I have barely had time to. During our time away, we caught up with family, as well as alias_sqbr, alkland, anxiolytic, aphrodite, auntpol, bookbuster, distantcam, dorothygale, dr_jekyl, drabbo, ducts, e_bee, elaran, erikarn, flyingblogspot, frenchiephish, goth_grrl, grahame, greteldragon, infamyanonymous, kadeton, kokomo, maelkann, maxfenig, miss_kittylix, mkj, mpfl, myfyr, oliverm, originalnilson, paperishcup, pennae, pooxs, reaps, shigawire, silverai, stephiepenguin, tevriel, tommmo, unfoldedreality, utopos and velithya



You'll note Melbournian stephiepenguin in there. That's because our flight back here went through Tokyo, and we took a day trip to hang out with her :D

Had an awesome but small games day yesterday with grahame, oliverm, paperishcup, flyingblogspot and of course lizbyrd. Was a lot of fun.

flyingblogspot and I bonded over how awesome Carl Sagan was and showed paperishcup the pale blue dot video to demonstrate.

paperishcup introduced us to an awesome game, the name of which is both the point of the game and now forgotten to my memory.

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Today we went into the city and thanks to foursquare caught up briefly with pooxs, who I don't think we'd seen in person for many moons.

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Tonight we have plans of noms with drabbo, kokomo and perhaps others.

Am in Perth. Yay Perth!

But I'm not feeling so great - have a nasty gluggy sore throat and stuff, so haven't been calling people. Hopefully will be well again soon...

Leaving again on Jan 6 - would like to catch up with many of you.

With our upcoming visit to Australia, we're doing backups before we go away. But alas! Elizabeth's USB drive didn't work. It became unmounted, and when she plugged it back in, no volumes were found!

.. by OSX

Never wanting to throw away the contents of a drive, I started digging. On a Linux box, I used parted to look at the disk and find that it did indeed know about all the partitions that should be on there, but for whatever reason, they weren't being enumerated.

Satisfied the data was still there, I went back to my Mac and started poking around. I could see that /dev/disk1 existed, and had no partitions, just as OSX would have be believe. Using the gpt command line utility, I got the following:

# gpt -r show -l /dev/disk1
start size index contents
0 1
1 1 Pri GPT header
2 32 Pri GPT table
34 6
40 409600 1 GPT part - "EFI System Partition"
409640 1464471472 2 GPT part - "Time Machine Backups"
1464881112 262151
1465143263 32 Sec GPT table
1465143295 1 Sec GPT header

Twirling my evil moustache, I thought if I could relabel one of those partitions, it would make it rewrite both partitions, and she should be apples.

# gpt label -i 2 -l "Time Machine Backups" /dev/disk1
/dev/disk1s2 labeled

But no. I then wondered if /usr/sbin/diskarbitrationd was saying anything helpful about the situation, and ran it in debug mode (edited /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist as root to add the -d flag to startup), and then kill -HUP `cat /var/run/diskarbitrationd.pid` and then tail -f /var/log/diskarbitrationd.log and I got this:

18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with cd9660, failure.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with exfat, ongoing.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with exfat, failure.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with msdos, ongoing.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with msdos, failure.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with ntfs, ongoing.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with ntfs, failure.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with ufs, ongoing.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, with ufs, failure.
18:11:14 probed disk, id = /dev/disk1, no match.

Good effort though, right? I mean, I'm sure Apple must expect regular users to put diskarbitrationd into debug mode on a regular basis.

Anyway.

Found out from this blog post that gdisk was available for OSX. Downloaded, installed and ran it:


# gdisk /dev/disk1
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.6.13

Partition table scan:
MBR: not present
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present

Found valid GPT with corrupt MBR; using GPT and will write new
protective MBR on save.

Command (? for help): ?

To avoid prolonging the story any more, wrote the partition table to disk, and hey presto, there's all the data back.

So what did we learn from this? Neither Apple, nor Linux, will try using a backup GPT if the primary one becomes fubared.

And despite all assurances to the contrary, USB bus-powered 2.5 inch HDD's only just work with OSX's meager power provision, and if they get unplugged, they won't have enough juice to flush caches.

The big news in BC yesterday was that Gordon Campbell stepped down as Premier. Some were loudly proclaiming victory, or expressing happiness of his departure.

As he put it in his statement: When public debate becomes focused on one person, instead of what is in the best interest of British Columbians, we have lost sight about what is important. When that happens, it’s time for a change.

Cause let's look at the mess he left BC in:

• One of the lowest unemployment rates in Canada.


• third highest average hourly wage in Canada


• lowest tax rate for low-income (0%) and middle-income families in Canada.


• up to a 70% tax reduction for low income families


• opened 80 new schools, increased education funding every year, more seats in universities, highest per-pupil funding in Canada


• Balanced budgets for 9 years until the biggest recession in half a century.


• 42% reduction in provincial budgets before service cuts


• A provincial credit rating that has been upgraded 7 times in a row to AAA (the highest possible)


• biggest real GDP growth in Canada


• $195 million in new Arts grants


• $80 million in new permanent sport grants and funding


• 20% increase in the amount paid per person by income assistance


• Low-income support program spending up by more than 4x


• Reduced carbon and greenhouse gas emissions - the most aggressive targets set in Canada, with legal enforcement in place

(ganked from voice_of_experience on reddit)

Oh wait, that's the good stuff.

And yet, there's a downside.. apparently some people don't like the HST (which, when you look at what else the province gives, is actually a reasonable measure..) or they didn't like the Olympics (what are you going to do about that now? it worked out fine. Sure it cost a lot of money..) or that the Canada Line doesn't have enough capacity (it grew faster than expected, that's success isn't it?), or that he once got arrested for drink driving (let me tell you about Ralph...)

I'm confident of history's view of this period in politics. Also, has anyone seen Idiocracy? No? Never mind, you'll find out soon enough.

I know I already posted about the Boeing Tour, but here's something I wrote up for Airliners.net, but can't post because their forum tries to be smart, and fucks it up too much..
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So this will be a trip report with a difference. I didn't actually fly anywhere, but I got to see a whole bunch of aircraft. For the sake of interest, let's say it's a journey from CYVR to KPAE, KBFI and KPDX. By car.

Every day, the Future of Flight Museum puts on tours of the Boeing factory, walking through high level galleries and observing construction down below. I'm sure many of you have been on it, and it's very interesting. I've done it twice, once in 1999, which almost ended very unplesantly due to a high speed car chase we came across as we were leaving the factory, and again in 2009, which was substantially more unremarkable.

Once a year though, they put on a special tour, called the Aviation Geek Fest. This geek fest however, includes a tour with a difference.. it's actually walking through the factory floor.

While my wife and I live within spitting distance of CYVR, we had a fair few diverse places we wanted to go in the Pacific North West, so driving was the most convenient option. For the sake of demonstration, this photo was taken from our balcony.



So, having decided to drive, we packed up our mighty 2005 Toyota Prius, and started heading south at 9AM, for a 1:30PM rendezvous at KPAE. On a saturday morning, the Peace Arch (I-5) Border Crossing into the US generally takes about 2 hours, and that would be pushing things, so we went to the Pacific Highway (SR-543) crossing instead, which only took us 60 minutes of sitting in a lineup to get to the actual frontier. But my wife and I are Australian, and hadn't been down since April, so we can't just drive straight through, we have to go visit US ICE and get a paper entry permit. Which takes about 45 minutes. So, 1 hour and 45 minutes later, we had moved about 500 metres, and were on our way.

We made our rendezvous time at KPAE with about 15 minutes to spare, and headed into one of the function rooms at The Future of Flight. We had a greeting from the director of The Future of Flight, and David Barker Brown from AirlineReporter.com, who had helped organise it. Then we were treated to a session by Mike Lombardi, Boeing's official historian, about Boeing from 1970 to today. Mike's session was great, he talked about how Boeing got through the 1970s by diversifying, building boats and mass public transportation systems, as well as development of their product lines through that time.

After Mike's talk, we had about 15 minutes wandering around the stratodeck, taking photos of the flightline. Which is currently pretty full, with 787s and 747-8f's, as well as the general pre-delivery aircraft, and apparently some other aircraft waiting for seats (thanks Koito!)



At the appointed time, we headed to the FoF cinema to watch the standard video about Captain Vancouver's 14 month journey to seek settlement with Spain over the loss of some British ships, "or in other words, it was a business trip", followed by a short Q&A with the tour leader while our bus arrived. We then hopped on the bus, and off to the factory.



Because this was a factory floor tour, we had a brief safety induction to begin, and were issued safety glasses and confidently informed that "no-one dies here today". Which made me feel a lot better...Unfortunately it was still a no-cameras or electronic devices tour, but Boeing did have someone with a camera there, so we did get some photos taken of us during it.



We got to do a walk through of what seemed like the whole factory (seriously, it took well over an hour..) and saw probably 30 aircraft in various stages of production, including:

The first 747-8i


The 787 Static Test Article


And a 777 nearing completion


And many, many more. After the time in the factory, we headed to the flightline for a tour around all the aircraft in pre-delivery. A great cheer was let out when this was announced. We saw all of the "completed" 747-8fs waiting for certification and engines, lots of 777s and a few 787s.

Then, sadly, the tour had to end. If you've ever been on the tour, you'll remember their parting comment about "what we say here, it's it's not Boeing.. I'm not going". This was no different.

My wife and I spent the night at one of the local hotels (really great rates compared to downtown Seattle!) before heading down to Federal Way, WA. I dropped her off, and then headed back to the Museum of Flight, at KBFI. While Boeing has a factory (or two or three..) there, there are no tours, but the Museum is still well worth a visit. It was a rainy PNW day, so no photos from that visit of the airpark, with the first 747, first 737, A Super Constellation and a former Air Force One KC-135, but I did get to see a 787 flight test flight arriving in..



Sadly I mis-judged where it would land/taxi, so didn't have my long lens on at the time.

It was a great trip!

This is us standing in front of the mighty GE-90 of Boeing 777 Line Number 903 for Turkish Airlines. I'm just behind the right-most person of the front row