Categories
notes from JK

Old Royal Alex Buildings saved!

Jason in front of the old Royal Alex hospital

Yesterday was a good day for local democracy. Local residents and historical societies agreed that the main building (“Lainson building”) at least should be saved and that the proposed scheme, which depended on demolition, was nowhere near good enough. Thankfully councillors on the planning committee agreed and overruled the officer recommendations to refuse permission to demolish or build.

TaylorWimpey, the developer behind the scheme, have not conducted themselves particularly well throughout this process. For example at the committee hearing yesterday they claimed there were 150 letters in support of their proposals. In fact not a single letter was received in support, but many were received in favour of the doctors’ surgery finding a new home, which TaylorWimpey proposed to be in their scheme. They have continually tried to use the issue of the surgery as a fig leaf to cover all the many other failings of their schemes (I’ve lost track of how many revisions we’ve been through, this is the second refusal at committee).

You can read the letter I helped draft in opposition to the scheme (PDF) on which I based my comments when I spoke to the committee. You can also see the whole committee meeting in video online too. I’m delighted the Alex lives on and I hope we can now see a scheme worthy of the site.

UPDATE: My press release on this has now been posted, and The Argus has quoted a great comment my Green colleague Cllr Paul Steedman made at the meeting.

Categories
technology

Backup strategy: Drobo, JungleDisk & Time Machine

Back in March this year our home was burgled. They took lots of stuff including my iMac and week old MacBook Air. Thankfully they left behind an old iBook and all my external backup disks even though they had all been in the same room as the computers they took.

Still, getting back up to speed in my work and homelife was a slow process. Thanks to an ad-hoc strategy (when I remembered basically), my backups were a week old so I did lose some work however relying on server-based IMAP mail meant email was ok.

Whilst waiting for the replacements to come (and I have to say the insurers were great in getting everything) I put some thought into a better backup strategy. I already had two 1TB LaCie external Firewire hard disks that were mirrored using software RAID. My first step was to schedule SuperDuper to backup a full system image to the LaCies every other night.

I got a third, smaller, LaCie drive also on FW800 so that I could use Time Machine as a more fine-grained incremental backup, but of my home folder only. This wouldn't let me do a full restore but could recover from file corruption and deletions in error.

Finally, to cover the scenario of fire, flooding or another burglary I set up JungleDisk as a remote backup system of my home folder (less music and movies). This uses Amazon S3 as a low cost reliable online storage system 'in the cloud'. The Mac client was a bit flakey originally but now is superb and I can highly recommend it though I have turned off encryption to prevent lock-in improve speed. The initial backup took an extremely long time, days, but now nightly backups only upload changes. This plus a move to 20MB broadband has made JungleDisk completely practical.

Back to those LaCie drives… Unfortunately, while the 800MB connection was fast, the many drives and RAID software meant initial access after they had gone to sleep or on a reboot was painfully slow… minutes in fact. I also found the software RAID to not be particularly reliable if one of the disks experienced problems. This may have been compounded by each LaCie 1TB disk actually having two hard drives inside it. Throw in the cables and three power adaptors involved and I wasn't happy about the setup or its power consumption.

Enter the Drobo, a clever drive system which uses RAID-like features to store your data across up to 4 drives which are removable and upgradeable. Even better this was all handled on the Drobo, no software was needed on the computers accessing it. I had been watching this for a while, aware of my growing storage requirements however on launch it had been USB 2 only and I knew only Firewire 800 would meet my needs.

Lo and behold they released an updated version with FW800 and I was tempted. When one of my LaCie drives started to have trouble I quickly resolved to buy the Drobo. To be fair to LaCie I've used many external drives and I personally have found LaCie drives to be excellent, quiet and fast. They also come with all the cables you need which I find to be a very decent touch, especially when there are three or four types they include for all the possible connectors. Yet drives do die and comparing the cost of a new LaCie, or the wait on warranty, versus getting a new 1TB drive for the Drobo only further makes the case for Drobo. I bought the very quiet and low energy Western Digital Caviar Green Power 1TB drives. The price on Amazon seems to keep dropping giving an excellent cost per GB.

The Drobo and Green Power drives were extremely easy to set up. The Drobo was nicely presented in a Mac-like fashion. The only minor quibble was that the provided software didn't alert me to new versions being available despite saying it had checked. A manual download from Drobo resolved this and now I'm delighted with how fast, quiet and painless using the Drobo has been. With two 1TB disks formatted as a single Drobo partition I have SuperDuper backing up to a sparse image every other night. I also have Time Machine continually backing up to a sparse disk image thanks to Erik Barzeski's investigations' which I came to via the always excellent Jon Gruber.

One thing worth noting that I didn't see mentioned on Erik's post is that you can't restore from your Drobo Time Machine backup via the swishy star warp interface (for want of a better name!). You need to manually mount the disk image and use the Finder to copy over the files you need. Not as cute but I've tested it and it works fine.

So now I have one local gadget, the Drobo, and JungleDisk in the cloud for all my backup needs. Less cables, less power adaptors and less hassle. I certainly don't want to see any more burlars but I'm glad I rethought my backups. Please have a look at what you're doing to protect your data too.

UPDATE 23/1/09: Paul Owen points me to a comment on Erk's Drobo post which shows that the 'warp interface' can still be used in fact:

When you want to restore a file from a sparse bundle, mount the sparse bundle manually. Then option-click the TM icon in the menu bar. You'll notice that the “Enter Time Machine” entry has changed to “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”. Use this option, navigate to your sparse bundle and — lo and behold — all your backups are there.

I have also decided to keep using a single LaCie disk as another offsite backup, I update it with SuperDuper every month or so and store it at my parents' house. It's painfree and just adds another level of comfort in case my Drobo is stolen/destroyed and restore from JungleDisk is problematic.

Categories
current affairs

Overdue Links 20-11-08

Too many things, too little time… apologies for the slow rate of posting recently. I have lots of blog post ideas, just no time to do them justice, I have been Twittering though. Here are some links I've been sitting on for ages which are still well worth a read:

  • If They're Too Big To Fail, They're Too Big Period
    Robert Reich makes the point I've been continuously making to anyone who's interested… Merging huge companies into bigger ones makes no sense if they're all “too big to fail”. It only makes the problems much bigger and much worse. There should be consequences to errors and boundless greed. His blog is packed with excellent comment on US fiscal policy.

  • My farewell plea to MPs: defend liberty
    Simon Jenkins' valedictory column for the Sunday Times was an absolute corker, ripping through the heart of this government's ever more intrusive surveillance plans. He finishes by attacking the spinelessness of elected representatives in the UK when compared to judges, peers or even journalists. I agree, which is why Greens so urgently need to get into Parliament. For example I've been speaking out on issues like ID cards and privatisation of the NHS in the face of silence from the other parties.

  • Food waste on a staggering scale
    This dates back to May but still shocks me… The average UK household throws away 18% of all food bought, families with children throw away 27%. 60% of food thrown away is 'untouched' (which I assume means unopened or unused). We urgently need to change people's attitudes to food, to understand that it is precious but also so that anything which does need disposal (e.g. peels, apple cores) gets composted and not burnt or stuck in landfill.

Categories
voting

Pre-Nov 4th e-voting roundup

Comment and speculation around the US voting system is quickly reaching fever pitch. I really fear for election day, I hope we don't see any disasters which undermine the result or even prevent it being declared. However I fear that is what we will indeed see. Regardless everyone needs to work in a spirit of openness to make sure all problems are understood and resolved in the fairest way possible. Such an attitude isn't on show in my first link…

  • Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone, the producers/directors of “Hacking Democracy” have produced an excellent new, short documentary highlighing some more of the serious problems in the US electoral system, particularly in Florida. For the first time they show how any election administrator can manually alter the vote in the Premier (aka Diebold) GEMS system. Part 1 and Part 2 are on YouTube. I believe a Hacking Democracy DVD is now available too.

  • There is now an iPhone application 'Twitter VoteReport' to help you report problems on polling day. It's a great idea to increase the number and consistency of reports. via TUAW

  • I recently participated in a short radio interview for PRI's “The World” on e-voting around the world. You can listen online here

  • I've found Barack Obama's online campaigning insprirational, though I certainly don't agree with all of his politics, there's plenty to admire. His story is a remarkable one, as is his campaign's purchase of air time for a 30 minute television programme on the major US networks. Unimaginable for us Europeans really. You can watch what the money went on via YouTube.

  • It wasn't a surprise, but Michael Wills MP has confirmed that there wil be no e-voting in the UK next year. My TheyWorkForYou alerts flagged this up as effectively as ever, and ORG have blogged it.

Categories
notes from JK

Nuclear: No kind of solution

Nuclear Power Station

This week I was delighted to read a new argument against an expansion in the use of nuclear powe. I've long opposed nuclear power and certainly am very much against the so called 'pragmatism' of expanding atomic energy to help meet climate change targets. The arguments against have always been clear-cut in my mind:

  • Nuclear power is hugely expensive, and is usually subsidised at eye watering tax-payer expense. Even with such subsidies there is debate whether it is truly price competitive if one factors in all the costs of extracting, transporting, processing and disposing of the uranium used in nuclear power stations.

  • Nuclear waste is an unsolved problem, most countries are using temporary facilities whilst a laborious process of trying to find a place to leave the waste long enough to let it stop being dangerously radioactive. This is a growing problem that will hang over generations to come. Why create such a risk for our children's children?

  • Nuclear power as a whole is a safety and health risk to workers and us, the public. Furthermore continued development and production of nuclear power technologies only serve to further the chances of a proliferation in nuclear weapons.

  • Nuclear power stations take a long time to build and come online. They perpetuate the centralised, long distance transmission model of electrical grids which waste huge amounts of energy through transport. They are the wrong type of approach to solve our clean energy needs and we could never get enough online in time to significantly reduce global emissions anyway.

  • Uranium is not a renewable fuel. It's dug out of the ground… Why depend on a fuel like that when the sun, wind and waves are free and never ending?

Nuclear danger icon

Further to this final point, Daniel Botkin wrote “The limits of nuclear power” a comment piece in the International Herald Tribune. In it he argues that if we could build enough nuclear power stations to replace all fossil fuels then on known available uranium reserves we would run out in less than five years. Including all known sources of uranium, even those deemed not viable for mining, Botkin says we would run out in 29 years.

To a more realistic scenario, increasing nuclear energy yearly so that by 2050 50% of world energy was nuclear. Botkin calculates that uranium would run out in 2019 (using available reserves figure) or 2038 (all known uranium).

He also notes that 'breeder' reactors, which generate more fuel than they use, are not viable yet and are dangerous.

So even if we run headlong to nuclear power it barely gives us any breathing room. And there are carbon costs in the construction of these behemoth stations. Much better to stick to renewables which can generate local electricity without the costs and inefficiences of distribution.

Nuclear power still isn't, and never has been, any kind of answer.

Categories
voting

E-voting update, October 08

  • I recently had the priviledge of being invited to participate in PressTV's Cinepolitics programme reviewing the US e-voting film, 'Uncounted'. The film struggles to make the pieces fit together, though there are some strong moments. If you haven't seen it then I would hands-down recommend 'Hacking Democracy' over 'Uncounted'. You can view the episode of Cinepolitics below:

Categories
notes from JK

Wrong bins in the wrong way

Jason by an overflowing communal bin

I believe the proposal for communal bins that Brighton & Hove’s Tory Administration waved through at their Cabinet Meeting last night is the wrong proposal being put forward in the wrong way. I’m not against communal bins on principle – but these ones in this way are not what our city needs.

Their introduction follows a flawed consultation process which did not meet the Cabinet Office’s code of practice for consultations — which applies to local authorities as much as it does to ministers. The consultation was run for barely a month when the minimum time set down by the code is 12 weeks. The code requires consultations to be provided online but this one wasn’t. A number of my constituents never received the consultation or saw only one for a building with multiple households. Allowing online responses could have helped remedy this.

More fundamentally however the Conservative communal bins do not deal with the key challenges waste and street tidyness pose for our city. Of course I want to see cleaner streets – who doesn’t? But I keep seeing and keep receiving photos of existing communal bins attracting mess, fly tipping, dumping and graffiti.

Binvelopes (the foldable containers to protect bin bags from attack by foxes and seagulls) were ruled out as being only a short term measure yet just a few weeks ago the use of binvelopes was expanded in the Hanover part of our city. How can they make sense there but not in Regency ward?

The nub of the matter lies with recycling however. There is already a problem with the existing communal bins — whenever I pass and look in I see lots of recyclables amidst the bin bags: cardboard, paper, glass, plastics. Surely it’s human nature to go for the path of least resistance. If people don’t have space to store rubbish in their flats then the same applies for recyclables. Yet the council expects residents to sit on recyclables for a week but chuck rubbish whenever they like into the big communal bins which are emptied six days a week.

A 2004 University of Brighton study commissioned by the council examined the waste in the communal bins trial. The study found that 42% of the waste in the bins was recyclable (under the current, quite limited recycling scheme available) and a further 21% was food based waste. This was in an areas where weekly kerbside recycling was already in operation.

So we know that 63% of the waste in the bins could be dealt with in alternative ways. We are told a new waste strategy is being developed to bolster our weak recycling levels. We have expanded recycling facilities coming online shortly that will be able to process a wider range of materials than ever before. So why rush the bins in before all this and risk taxpayer money on increasing landfill charges as recyclables are chucked out?

I also feel that the administration have not been sensitive in locating these bins. I have had correspondence from some residents extremely distressed by the thought of having smelly, noisy bins outside their homes possibly blocking their natural light. We have many streets in beautiful conservation areas that house a low density population which are clearly opposed to having these bins. The council’s conservation policy and local plan both clearly put a duty on the council to ‘preserve or enhance the character or appearance’ of our conservation areas and so we should allow opt-outs for the sake of our most beautiful streets and when residents clearly won’t support the scheme.

In summary, we have a proposal that is based on:

  • A flawed consultation,
  • doesn’t deal with mess but attracts it,
  • isn’t sensitive to conservation areas and won’t allow opt-outs,
  • and rips the heart out of our recycling programme — 63% of the waste in the communal bins could have been dealt with by recycling and composting.

I would like to see a new plan which isn’t rushed ahead of the waste strategy — who heard of implementation before the strategy is written? Show me a plan which properly considers the human, conservation and environmental impacts of its proposals and I’ll happily support it.

Cllr Theobald claimed that his plans would have ‘No negative impact on recycling’ and so there would be no additional landfill tax liability. This flies in the face of the council’s own studies.

Yes, we need cleaner streets. But we urgently need to recycle far more than we do today – this was the wrong proposal in the wrong way.

Categories
current affairs

Free at the point of access?

At first glance, there's a sense of justice in the Scottish Government's decision to eliminate parking charges at NHS Hospitals in Scotland. Yes, there are exceptions for privately financed car parks, once again PFI narrowing government choices in favour of private profit.

But does removing parking charges really make health care free at the point of access? No, of course not. Cars have running costs: fuel, insurance, maintenance and so on — parking is just the most obvious cost drivers encounter. Bus users have tickets to pay for, as do those on the train. Cycling is close to free as bike maintenance costs are extremely low – but if you're ill you probably don't feel like biking in to hospital. Walking is truly cost-free but again not likely to be an option for many patients.

So eliminating parking costs has a number of consequences that I can see: It reduces but doesn't eliminate the cost of car travel to hospitals, it reduces the annual costs for employees that drive to work, plus free parking for visitors and local residents has now been provided.

Opening up parking facilities in this way could have significant and unintended negative consequences to local traffic and parking. I know it would in Brighton & Hove.

If you are rushing to hospital paying for parking is the last thing you need to worry about. But why shouldn't others in non urgent situations, visitors and staff, pay for the cost of parking if they choose to take a car when other options are available to them?

Categories
current affairs

The Kingsnorth Trial

I am astounded and delighted by the result of the Kingsnorth Trial as reported in The Guardian. Six Greenpeace activists have been cleared of causing criminal damage by successfully arguing that they were trying to protect us from the greater damage that climate change will cause.

Among the arguments fielded by Greenpeace:

The jury was told that Kingsnorth emits the same amount of CO2 as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined…

This is astonishing and embarassing. We have the technology and skills to eliminate the need for this carbon monster, yet the government want to build another coal-fired station next door. It's a completely unjustified and frankly reckless proposal that not only jeopardises our emissions targets but also undermines our ability to argue for strong action on the global stage.

Greenpeace have pulled off a real coup with this successful protest and court action – I'm sure a huge amount of hard work went into this so congratulations!

Categories
current affairs

A new era in Green Politics

The moment the leadership result was declared

This past weekend's Green Party conference in central London marked a significant turning point in the party's fortunes. We now have a leader after years of noble but ultimately flawed attempts to support a number of alternative structures for presenting the public face of the party, most recently with the two gender-balanced Principle Spokespeople.

Caroline Lucas MEP was overwhelmingly elected as the Green Party of England & Wale's first leader with Cllr Adrian Ramsay her deputy. They have been elected to positions unlike any other leadership posts in British politics: They must be re-elected every two years, with a limit of five terms and are subject to a recall procedure by members. Leaders, yes, but not in the overbearing way of the other parties.

From the moment of the leadership election result being declared on the Friday evening of conference we could see the electrifying impact of the change. Media coverage of the party was much higher with Caroline and Adrian getting significant space on TV, radio and print media. Furthermore an impressive array of candidates, committed to working for the success of the new streamlined party structures, stood for the national party executive.

A rising cost of living, energy costs continually in the news, an unstable climate, broken government commitments to reducing our carbon emissions and increasing concern about the health impact our 'modern' lifestyles are making the Green Party's unique perspective relevant to a rapidly growing number of people.

I hope that this will signal a surge in Green support in the coming couple of years. I'll remember that London, Autumn 2008 was when it took off. You'll be able to keep track of our progress on the re-launched national party website and on the new Green Home blogging centre for Green bloggers both launched at conference.