2005-08-01: Java and Kerberos
Today, I removed the temporary multihoming of our KDCs, thus completing an
IP address change for all of the Stanford KDCs. Shortly thereafter, many
of our Java webapps stopped being able to authenticate with Kerberos. A
restart cleared up the problem.
Want to bet that Java caches the IP addresses of the Kerberos servers
rather than requerying DNS or honoring the DNS TTL?
Even worse, the systems were multihomed and now they're on just one of
those two IP addresses. Which means that if Java had cached all of the IP
addresses and fallen back as it should, it would have worked fine. Even
more, one of the servers didn't change and has had the same IP address for
a couple of weeks. So they should have had at least that server to fall
back on.
Methinks something is deeply broken here.
Takeaway lesson: changing the IP addresses of Kerberos servers is to be
avoided when possible, unfortunately, even though everything should be
using DNS to find them.
2005-08-03: mmm-mode
Continuing both my Debian New Maintainer application work and following up
on a QA thread a while back, I've finished a new package of mmm-mode that
updates the package to the latest upstream version and closes six bugs.
I've also closed another three bugs that are no longer relevant for one
reason or another.
It's currently waiting on my Application Manager to look over (and then
probably upload).
I don't actually use mmm-mode (which lets you use two major modes at the
same time in the same file), but there are a few problems that it might be
able to solve. I might start in the future. If I do, I'll probably adopt
it; it looks like a fairly straightforward package to maintain.
No time at the moment to do the other two packages I found in my first scan
through orphaned packages (htp and nasm-mode), but hopefully I'll get to
those a little bit later. First I have to finish the new proxy template
and do the first proxy upgrade, and then I need to start working on a
prioritized roadmap for where we're going next with campus infrastructure
services.
2005-08-04: Too many meetings
I am really looking forward to vacation. Only seven days to go now.
Part of why is that I'm in far too many meetings at the moment. They're
worthwhile meetings, meetings in which things really get done or at least
planning really happens. They're meetings designed to improve my work
environment going forward, or to get us more money, or to get us more staff
(and possibly thereby manage to employ friends of mine).
However, meetings just really hurt my work flow. The interruption throws
me badly, makes it hard for me to concentrate and get things done, and
breaks my day up into unproductive chunks where I mostly zone out reading
my e-mail. Which in turn makes me depressed and makes me feel behind, and
starts a bad cycle.
There isn't much I can do right now other than just hang in there, since a
lot of the meetings are addressing short-term problems that will go away in
the near future (hopefully). And each individual meeting isn't so bad.
But I'm starting to feel cranky, swamped, and unfocused, and I've learned
by now through experiment and observation that, even if I think I'm
enjoying them, meetings do this to me.
(You get a whine instead of a book review tonight because, well, I was busy
playing ping pong and now need to do some more work for my Debian
maintainer application and then go to bed.)
2005-08-05: Rochambeau
Better known as rock, paper, scissors. This came up because someone
recently told me that there was a Canadian varient called bear, cowboy,
ninja (not actually true -- there is such a varient, but it doesn't appear
to be particularly Canadian). Anyway, this led to poking about on the web
out of curiosity and discovering that RPS is rather more widely used and
analyzed than I thought.
For instance, there is a World RPS Society that organizes tournaments.
An idea that made little senes to me until I realized that, at the
competitive level, it's a reduced, pure form of psychological game like
poker.
The advanced RPS page is rather interesting reading.
2005-08-07: To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Review: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Philip José Farmer
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 1971
Pages: 222
The problem with finishing the remaining Hugo winners I've not read is that
there is generally some reason why I've not already read them. With
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, it was just a bad feeling. Often those
feelings are wrong. This time, it wasn't.
This is the first book of the Riverworld series, which is one of those
great, memorable ideas that people talk about and refer to when reading
other books. Everyone who has ever lived is resurrected on the banks of a
huge river, all at the same time, naked and with their own personal magic
devices that give them food and other basic necessities. It's a great
hook, giving the author a chance to not only play with historic figures but
look at culture clashes (and strange alliances) between human cultures that
otherwise never could have met.
Farmer sucks all of the sense of wonder out of the idea in the first twenty
pages and then uses the setting for an obnoxious, pointless, unemotional
adventure story with no ending. Add to that clunky writing, halting
narrative flow, rampant sexism, and an overly-simplified world, and you get
one of the worst Hugo winners I've dragged myself through.
I'm not particularly fond of the pulp writing style, but I can still get
pulled into the story if it's told with enough emotional energy and enough
action. Farmer, though, falls quickly into the trap of describing
everything in great detail, whether the reader cares about its exact
appearance or not, while giving short shrift to character development and
treating emotions as scientific observations. It's a horrible example of
telling rather than showing. By the time he finished boring me with the
world introduction, describing the construction of a settlement, walking
through the investigations of the few artifacts around, and getting the
characters into a position to do something, half the book was gone and I no
longer cared about anyone in it.
The main protagonist is adventurer Richard Burton, a British explorer who,
despite having a real history to use as material, rarely manages to be more
than the uber-competent warrior and natural leader who features in so much
pulp SF of this type. Alice Liddell, of Alice in Wonderland fame,
is introduced as the Victorian prude and love interest (thankfully fully
grown), one of several places where I decided I wasn't going to think
deeply about authorial motives. The men, of course, do all the adventuring
and exploring; the women are just there to be conversational companions and
sex toys, the latter aided at first by the general lack of clothing. Throw
in widespread rape and abuse, particularly early on, that the protagonists
only rarely bother decrying, and the world starts feeling more creepy and
disgusting than intriguing. Farmer doesn't have a high opinion of
humanity, and while he may be right, I wish he'd pick better examples at
least for his protagonists.
The world itself, after its initial splash, is simplistic and
uninteresting. There are no insects or animals other than fish, only a few
types of plants, only one type of artifact that does nothing but fill their
magic provision buckets, and essentially no landscape besides the river.
Even if they wanted to explore, all of the characters are kept next to the
river since the provision artifacts are only found there and there is no
other way to get food. The protagonists predictably end up exploring along
the river, since there's nowhere else for them to go. For all his detailed
descriptions, Farmer either didn't have the imagination or didn't have the
interest in building a full world, only the barely necessary backdrop to
support people. As a result, the world can't save the story from the
lifeless characters.
Farmer does avoid making everyone encountered someone famous, thankfully,
but the villains of the piece (once we finally get around to meeting them)
are Nazis. I really wouldn't mind if I never saw transplanted famous Nazis
as villains again. It's just too easy and too simple, and the built-in
reader reactions and expectations are so strong that the author has little
to work with. Farmer also constantly talks about Jews, never lets the
character forget which characters are Jewish, and seems oddly fascinated by
them, even before the Nazis show up. It's not anti-Semitic, at least that
I noticed, but the tone was again rather odd. The other characters are
remarkably unmemorable; I finished this book only a few days ago, and the
only other ones I remember are Farmer's self-insertion character
(thankfully not too annoying), a caveman who is taught idiomatic English
rather too easily, and an alien who was almost interesting until his
horribly simple story was told.
The best part of the book are the occasional hints at what might really be
going on, hints at the motives of the creators of this world and their
abilities. If the whole story had dealt with this, the book might have
been salvagable. But, of course, this is only book one of an ongoing
series, so there's no resolution and no believable explanation of the
frustrating clues. One is left with a completely pointless story.
There is apparently a much tighter and more satisfying novella entitled
"Riverworld" that's better than this mess. If you care about the original
idea, you might want to read that. The only reason to read this book is to
be completist, and it's probably the last Farmer novel that I'll ever read.
Rating: 2 out of 10
2005-08-07: 2005 Hugos
Emerald City has all of the
winners.
I'm a little disappointed by the best novel winner, but not surprised.
This was my tentative prediction. Jonathan Strange & Mr.
Norrell got far and away the most publicity of any book on the short list
and was well-known to the US voters who still constituted a majority. I
don't think it's the best book -- I've been in the process of reading it
for a while and it's dreadfully slow, if well-written -- but it has a lot
of advantages in a vote.
River of Gods is probably the best book overall (although I'll be
reading all of the nominees and coming to my own conclusion there), but it
and The Algebraist aren't even published in the US yet. For
River of Gods to finish second given that is amazing. Iron
Council isn't the book that Miéville is going to win with, no
matter how good, since it's too political for US voters. That leaves
Iron Sunrise, which didn't finish as high as I expected given the
hard SF vote.
I also guessed The Incredibles, which is the most popular of the
movies even though Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is probably
the better movie.
Nice to see Stross pick up a Hugo for the novella, though. The short story
category was, as commonly reported, very weak.
I have on order, will be ordering, have sitting around, or am currently
reading all of the best novel winners, the novella winner, and the
novelette winner, so I'll end up reading significantly more of the field
this year than in most Hugos past.
2005-08-09: Video gameage
I'm sure that you are aware of those expensive but brightly-colored DVD
cases that one can purchase, the ones that are far more expensive than
movies and contain small plastic disks of scintillating design. What you
perhaps did not know, and which I have recently discovered, is that in
combination with the attractive black box I had formerly thought existed
only to maintain the steady flow of electricity in its mysterious "stand
buy" mode, these small disks can make images appear on heretofore
unexplored television stations! Those images move in attractive and
fascinating patterns, and some of them you can even control!
And here I had believed that the attraction of this consumer product was
purely for the possession of it, the aesthetically appealing shelf filled
with expensive plastic and carefully designed artwork, the right to respond
to any conversational gambit with the suave statement "oh, yes, I own
that."
Who knew there was so much more?
It strains believability that I would be able to find any time to devote to
this strange new pasttime, as occupied as I am already with arguing about
politics on mailing lists and feeling guilty about eating too much. Yet,
in some strange twist of fate, I have managed several hours of this
entertainment in the past couple of days. I am certain that this cannot
last. Still, the future is not for us to know.
Also, Everquest: Champions of Norrath combines exactly the correct mixture
of aggressive button pressing, dress-up dolls, and scratch-off fantasy maps
to form delicious, addictive crack. And remember, I can kill you with my
thumb. (For values of "you" equal to inch-high computer-animated skeletons
at the moment, but I'm in training and I have great hopes for improvement.)
2005-08-09: Subversion nits
I'm moving more and more of my repositories from CVS to Subversion, and for
the most part I love it. It's great to be able to use svk to do off-line
development whenever I want, it's a lot easier to maintain commit hooks,
it's generally faster, and I like the branching and tagging mechanism so
much better than the one in CVS.
There are just a few annoyances, none major.
First, svn export doesn't do the "permanent" expansion of keywords, and as
near as I can tell, there's no option to make it do so. This is weird. I
really do prefer to expand all keywords and lose the $$ markers for
distributions, mostly so that if someone else imports my code into a CVS
repository, I don't lose all the ID markers.
Second, having another copy of each file in the .svn directories is a real
pain for recursive grep and similar recursive operations. There must be
some way to tell grep to skip those directories, but I've not figured out
what it is yet. I should poke at that some. Piping through grep -v .svn
isn't the right solution.
Third, and this isn't really a problem with Subversion, rsync -C is just
incredibly useful and is what I used to make distribution tarballs under
CVS. Alas, not only does rsync not have a Subversion equivalent, but that
wouldn't be useful since I build distribution tarballs from an exported
tree where svn propget no longer works. So I'm still maintaining
.cvsignore files in the repository and just duplicating the information in
the svn:ignore property into them so that I can keep using rsync -C.
2005-08-10: kstart 2.8
Navid Golpayegani sent me patches to allow k4start and k5start to
background themselves as daemons and write their PIDs to a file, letting
them be managed by Debian's start-stop-server. I reworked the patches some
(by using the daemon() function if available, for instance) and included
them in a new release.
The Debian package will also go into unstable when my sponsor gets a
chance. I also found a bug in lintian causing it to throw errors on
non-standard architectures (like amd64) in arch-specific build
dependencies, so bug #322291 has been filed against lintian with a patch.
You can get the latest version from the
kstart distribution
page.
2005-08-18: Vacation haul
Always have to go to the used bookstore.
Kelley Armstrong -- Stolen (sff)
Isaac Asimov -- Forward the Foundation (sff)
Arthur C. Clarke -- The City and the Stars (sff)
William Gibson -- Mona Lisa Overdrive (sff)
Malcolm Gladwell -- Blink (nf)
Carol Kendall -- The Firelings (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin -- Worlds of Exile and Illusion (sff)
Kim Stanley Robinson -- Pacific Edge (sff)
Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones (sff)
Tad Williams -- The War of the Flowers (sff)
Still buying books faster than I'm reading them, of course.
2005-08-20: debarchiver and signed archives
A while back, Debian added signature verification to apt. One generates a
Release file that contains MD5 and SHA-1 checksums of all of the individual
Packages files, which in turn contain checksums of all of the individual
packages, and then one signs the Release file. Of course, now that this
has been added, apt-get and friends produce warnings and ask for
confirmation when installing packages out of unsigned archives.
I use debarchiver to handle indexing for my personal Debian archive, so I
wanted to add support to it to take care of all of this for me other than
entering my GnuPG passphrase. So I took some time this morning and wrote
and tested a patch to implement that.
(And then messed up submitting it to an existing bug and accidentally
created a new bug that I had to merge. Oh well.)
The annoying part is getting apt-ftparchive to generate the Release file
properly, since my patch to make
Release generation easier still hasn't been accepted into apt itself.
Wow, there are a lot of apt bugs in the BTS.
2005-08-20: Cetaganda
Review: Cetaganda, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: October 1996
ISBN: 0-671-87744-5
Pages: 302
This book is somewhat more independent of what's come before, since it
doesn't involve the Dendarii Mercenaries. There are a few references to
the previous books and the general patterns of Miles's life, but you could
probably get away with reading this one without reading any of the previous
books.
By now, to regular readers of the series, this tune is looking familiar.
Miles is sent on a mission, this time diplomatic to the nearby empire of
Cetaganda, under the command of another officer. He then stumbles across a
situation that gets increasingly complex, decides that it's better to go
his own way rather than handing it over to his superiors, and ends up
saving the day single-handedly while dodging questions from his own side.
You know, essentially the same as the previous two books.
50 pages into this book, I was expecting it to be mediocre. It's basically
the same plot again, it's set in what looked like a pseudo-feudal empire
complete with women in opaque force screens in public, and Miles falls
hopelessly in love with a beautiful woman and wants to do anything for her.
Nothing like a romantic sub-plot predicated on the main character acting
stupid to drive me away from a book.
Surprisingly, though, Bujold pulled it out. The romantic sub-plot remained
mostly stupid through the whole book, but it stayed unimportant. The
society turned out to be much more complex than it first appeared, complex
in ways that weren't horribly realistic but which were still intriguing.
The female haut (the ruling class of the Cetagandans) aren't the
stereotyped harem women at all, and there are two sides to the absolute
privacy of force screens, which lets the political intrigue which drives
the story get entertainingly twisty.
The best feature of Bujold's Vorkosigan books are the elaborate plots,
featuring bits of guesswork, investigation, lots of intrigue, many
factions, and lots of Miles thinking quickly on his feet. They're not that
realistically complex, in that coincidences and authorial manipulation show
through the plot from time to time and Miles is always a bit smarter than
everyone around him. But they are satisfying, for fun, well-paced books in
which something is always happening or about to happen. I was never bored.
This entry in the series has a weaker start but a more interesting world.
Cetaganda is a nice bit of light world-building, and while (like the other
books in this series), Cetaganda is almost a young-adult novel in
terms of characterization complexity, I still recommend this one as
undemanding political space opera.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2005-08-21: Term::ANSIColor 1.10
It's amazing, given how small this module is and how stable, that there are
still bugs in it. James Bowlin found a bug with $EACHLINE support where
the colored() function wouldn't color a line consisting solely of "0".
Long-time Perl programmers will immediately recognize the problem of using
the variable's true/false value in a place where it shouldn't be used, and
the test has now been rewritten to use length instead.
Also included in this version are a couple of test files from Joe Smith to
try out various VT100 escape sequences.
You can get the latest version from the
Term::ANSIColor
distribution page, and of course it will be included in Perl core in the
due course of time.
2005-08-21: openafs-doc packaged
Earlier this week, I finally got around to creating an openafs-doc package
for Debian. This is a little weird, since we have the OpenAFS manuals and
protocol documents only in their output form (HTML and PDF respectively),
since somehow IBM and/or Transarc apparently managed to lose the original
source. They would have released the source if they had it, I'm fairly
sure, but no one has been able to find it.
My original plan was to modify the get-orig-source target of the regular
openafs package to pull in the doc tarball as well and build the new doc
package as part of the openafs source package, but because of the licensing
weirdness, it seemed like a better idea to keep the docs in a separate
source package so that they don't hold up the main package. That's now
been done, and the package has now been accepted into unstable; ftp-master
didn't even have questions, which was a nice surprise. I guess my
explanation in the copyright file was thorough enough.
(Work is underway to convert at least the HTML documentation to something
like DocBook, so eventually we should be in a better situation. I'm also
planning on getting man pages into OpenAFS after the 1.4.0 release.)
2005-08-23: kftgt 1.9
I'm slowly moving our locally maintained Kerberos programs over to
Subversion, one at a time. The project for tonight was kftgt, since I
needed to release a new Debian package anyway to fix some bugs I ran
across. The only changes in the package besides removing some obsolete
porting documentation were changes to the version handling of klogin and
krsh, since with Subversion I can't use CVS revision IDs to version the
scripts.
You can get the latest version from the
kftgt distribution
page.
New Debian packages will be available shortly, fixing the addition of
Stanford-specific paths to the search path of klogin and krsh before the
user's PATH and cleaning up the lintian errors.
2005-08-27: Post-vacation productivity
You'd think from my journal that I haven't been doing anything interesting,
but it's more that I've been so busy I've not been writing anything down.
I got back from vacation on Monday night and immediately dove into a work
project that was having a minor crisis. That's now resolved, although it
means that I didn't make progress on some of the other things I was going
to work on last week.
OpenAFS 1.4.0-rc1 packages are now in sid (although are of course blocked
on the glibc transition just like everything else). They feature a new
document on how to set up a new cell, significant improvements to the
afs-newcell and afs-rootvol scripts, and many other tweaks. The OpenAFS
package is now down to 10 bugs, and I'm hoping to get that down to around 5
with a few more uploads.
I've also been doing some Debian QA work. I have a new tleds package
available that should fix the RC bug (as well as a bunch of other bugs) and
let it migrate back into testing. It's a rather neat package that blinks
the keyboard LEDs to indicate network traffic. I'm not interested in it
enough to adopt it, but I'd like to see it stay in the archives.
This weekend is probably also going to be mostly Debian work. I have more
QA work to do as part of my new maintainer application, I want to get
started on packaging MIT Kerberos v5 1.4.2 (a bit overdue at this point),
and I think I'm finally going to take some time to work on packaging the
chatserver that I use to talk to friends.
Unfortunately, all this productivity also means that I've not been reading,
so I've not finished the book that I mostly read on the train (and also
haven't been walking lately, although that should change soon). I expect
I'll get back to reading next week.
2005-08-27: Small book haul
I have several significant book orders that are either waiting for books to
be published or are currently making their way to me through the mail, but
the first few things have started to trickle in.
Jacqueline Carey -- Godslayer (sff)
Mark Clifton & Frank Riley -- The Forever Machine
(sff)
Jon Courtenay Grimwood -- Stamping Butterflies (sff)
Karl Schroeder -- The Engine of Recall (sff)
Unfortunately, due to a shipping or packing mistake, Schroeder's Lady
of Mazes didn't come with the shipment. That's the book that I plan on
reading as soon as I get through my current stack. The Engine of
Recall is his short story collection.
I've heard wonderful things about Stamping Butterflies.
2005-08-30: Looting
I really do understand why looting upsets people so much. For one, it's a
sign of a complete breakdown of social order, since property ownership is
pretty much at the core of a US conception of what social order is all
about. (I have some other issues with that, but they're just theoretical
and I don't really debate the basic point.) For another, it really feels
like adding insult to injury at first glance. Bad enough for the place to
be utterly devastated, but don't make it worse afterwards.
The more I think about it, though, the less that it bothers me, or rather
the less that certain types of looting bothers me.
First of all, if people are taking things that would be ruined anyway, more
power to them. If you're in the storm zone, electricity is cut off, and
contact with the outside world is cut off, and you can get to food in
refrigerators and freezers without doing more damage, hell, use it! Keep
yourself alive and fed. It's not going to do anyone else any good.
For the other things, mostly it's just stupid (what are you going to do
with a television?), but many of the neighborhoods that were hit are very
poor and people have just lost everything they owned. I'm not saying that
looting is the right thing to do, but I'll also say directly that the party
I'm going to be feeling sympathy for in this situation is not Wal*Mart.
Looting other people's houses, neighborhood stores, etc. is pretty low.
Looting chain stores owned by huge corporations who are just going to write
everything off to insurance? I'm not saying it's right, necessarily, but
I'm feeling a complete lack of moral outrage about that.
Of course, like a lot of mass behavior, the more disturbing aspect is that
once looting starts, it no longer draws those sorts of fine distinctions.
Organized looting of grocery stores and clothing stores for essentials
would be fine and, really, even admirable (the organization part
particularly). Complete chaos of people breaking into any structure and
taking everything that isn't nailed down is mob behavior, and all forms of
mob behavior are deeply frightening.
The part that annoys me the most is that the above fifteen minutes of
thought and five paragraphs of text is an order of magnitude more analysis
of the issue than CNN has shown in a day and a half of coverage.
2005-08-30: They need our prayers
Er, what? God maybe didn't notice that a giant hurricane hit New Orleans?
He needs people to yell at him so that he'll wake up and get off the couch
and do something about it? Or perhaps he was hoping someone else would
take care of it, and we all have to pray so that he realizes that he has to
handle it himself?
Sheesh.
If the US president and the other people who were saying this believed in a
religion where prayers had personal magical power and the act of praying
involved exerting one's own psychic and emotional energy towards making the
problem less severe, I'd understand this comment. Given the tenets of the
Christian religion, it's just moronic.
2005-08-30: Speaking of looting
Jon Lennox pointed out this entry at
Making
Light in a comment, and it's very much worth reading.
One of the bigger pictures in this hurricane situation is that many of the
most seriously affected areas in New Orleans are also some of the poorest.
I realize that Mississippi is very badly off, but I do wonder a little if
one of the reasons why we're seeing so much coverage of the damage that's
already happened in Mississippi and so little about the flooding that is
currently happening in New Orleans is because of that difference.
That's probably a bit too cynical, though; a better explanation is that CNN
is just incompetent. (They've done a horrible job at covering this. I was
finding information on blogs on-line 30 minutes or more before CNN
mentioned it on the air, if they ever actually did. Often they didn't.)
Maybe now that the scope of the levee failure has become more apparent the
coverage has shifted; I've not been watching during the day.
2005-08-30: More on prayer, other news
Brooks made the very good point in a comment on my last post that yes,
there is a tradition in the Christian religion that prayer helps
those being prayed for directly in at least an emotional, supportive, and
calming way. Given that, the comment makes somewhat more sense, although I
still get very frustrated by the wording. But, mea culpa; it was too
strong of a negative reaction.
I'm really picking the wrong time to pick this fight, since, well, it's a
disaster and people can't figure out what to say. Certainly praying isn't
a bad thing to be doing regardless of one's beliefs about the
efficacy of prayer, although donating is even more important (something I'm
going to go do, fairly substantially, right after I finish writing this).
The "they need our prayers" comment is more of a general thing that bothers
me intensely every time someone says it. It's full of assumptions that I
think are downright offensive: it's a guilt trip on listeners to pray even
if they don't believe in prayer, it's injection of religion into the
discussion by a political figure not themselves directly affected, it makes
the assumption that the people involved even want people praying for them,
and it makes a concrete statement about reality ("need") without any
respect given to other people's beliefs.
If someone in the middle of the disaster talks about prayer, God, or
anything else that is personal or important to them, more power to them.
I'll give them all sorts of understanding no matter whether I agree with
their beliefs or not. But the president, sitting fat and pretty on his
political trip in Arizona and California, mentioning a disaster in a
condescending and faux-fatherly speech inbetween pushing his
bait-and-switch health care policy and his mismanaged war, simply pisses me
off when he says this sort of thing. I think he should shut the hell up
about what he thinks people need and talk about how he's going to
help with the things he can actually do something about. And when he has
hours to prepare a speech, respecting other people's views would be nice
too.
In other news, New Orleans is just a mess, and it's going to be a very
difficult mess to figure out what to do with. There is a huge natural
desire to rebuild the city again in the same spot, to spite nature and show
defiance. There are also, as I understand it, some very sound practical
reasons why New Orleans is where it is. On the other hand, the technology
required to effectively protect the city from this sort of event, which is
likely to remain more frequent and more risky for at least the next ten
years as I understand the hurricane cycle, is hideously expensive. Is
there any way that New Orleans could be rebuilt, well, somewhere else?
Somewhere where a complex and vulnerable system of levees and pumps isn't
required to keep the city from turning into a lake and causing this sort of
massive destruction and loss of property and life?
Also, do they have to make looting the lead story? Is it really the right
thing, in the middle of a tale of human tragedy of unimaginable
proportions, to tap people's natural eagerness to find someone to blame and
get angry at? One can't blame nature, and for the first day or so the news
coverage was nicely devoid of targets, but now looters are being set up as
the enemy and the people to hate. Did we actually need to add people to
hate to this story?
I realize that it's news, and they do have to cover it, but I really wish
they wouldn't give it this much emphasis and add a bit more analysis and
perspective.
2005-08-30: Why not evacuate?
One more post on this for the night.
I'm seeing various people wonder why anyone would have not evacuated given
the situation and would have risked getting caught by this sort of
hurricane. Well, some of it probably was stupidity, and a lot of people
did say that they thought they'd be okay because their structure survived
Camille. However, in New Orleans in particular, it's important to realize
the situation.
New Orleans was a city with excellent mass transit, one of the cities in
which it was entirely practical to live without a car. In fact, 100,000 of
the inhabitants of New Orleans did not have cars, in the statistics that
I've heard. On top of that, the mayor's evacuation order was desperately
late (and that was widely commented on at the time, before the storm
struck).
Or, as an example is worth a thousand words sometimes, see
scyllacat's LJ, which
someone on a private mailing list just pointed people at. There's a person
who didn't evacuate. She could have gone to the Superdome, but from what
I'm hearing about the Superdome (30,000 people, no air conditioning, no
working plumbing, 100 degree weather, and no clear evacuation plan from
it), I'm not sure that I'd be willing to go there rather than risking
riding out the storm.
Also, I've lived through a natural disaster (forest fire rather than
hurricane, but some of the principles are similar), and I can tell you from
first-hand experience that "just evacuate" isn't anywhere near as easy as
it sounds when you're actually in the middle of it. Even if there are no
logistical challenges, it is desperately hard to just leave
everything and go.
Moral of the story: Not everyone has the same opportunities, not everyone
has the same transportation choices, and sometimes it just isn't as simple
as it sounds.
2005-08-31: More on evacuating
By way of jwz and Making Light, here's
another really good
posting about why some people didn't evacuate.
The news coverage so far is demonstrating a complete lack of understanding
of what it's like to be poor, both in the coverage of evacuations and
economic consequences and in the coverage of the looting. It's not that
everything they're saying is wrong; it's that they're very clearly not
looking at things outside of their own perspectives, and simply do not
understand what it's like to be part of the working class poor. It gives
so much of what they're saying a surreal bias, and explains in part why
there's so much focus on gas prices and looting.
Intentionally or not, cynically or not, it's clear that the evacuation
plans for the city simply abandoned 20% of the population. The evacuation
system in place relied on private transportation and private funds, and so
far as I've heard, there was no concerted effort to turn the city's mass
transit infrastructure towards evacuation. This should have political
consequences in any sane world. I hope it does.
Thanks to Paul Walker also for the link.
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