Of course one of our concerns is making sure that we don’t lose any data in the case of the failure of our web host. This is unlikely, but it does happen, and we don’t want to run into a situation where we try to log in to our cloud-based file storage / sharing service and find that months’ worth of research is gone forever.

For a few weeks, the following was more-or-less my workflow for making backups:

1. Log in to phpMyAdmin
2. Make a dump file of the WP database (choose database > Export > Save as file … )
3. Make a dump file of the ownCloud database
4. Save to computer and label with appropriate date
5. Log in to web server using FTP
6. Copy contents of WP’s /wp-content/ to a date-labelled folder on my computer
7. Copy contents of ownCloud’s /data/ to a date-labelled folder on my computer

This worked pretty well, except that it was a pain for me to have to do this every day, and I know that if I ever forgot to do it, that would be when something terrible happened. Fortunately for me, my boss mentioned that he had an old but still serviceable iMac sitting in his office that he wanted to put to some good purpose.

I decided to make a fully automatic setup that would make backups of our remotely hosted data and save it locally without any input on my part, so I can just forget about it. I made it with cron jobs.

Server side cron jobs

First, I set up some cron jobs on the server side. The first one waits until midnight every day, then dumps all the MySQL databases into a gzipped file on my web host, then zips up the WordPress /wp-content/ and ownCloud /data/ folders and puts them in the backup folder as well. The second server-side cron job empties the backup folder every day at 23h00.

• 0 0 * * * PREFIX=`date +%y-%m-%d`; mysqldump -u USERNAME -h HOSTNAME -pPASSWORD –all-databases | gzip > /path/to/backup/folder/${PREFIX}-DBNAME-db.sql.gz; zip -r /path/to/backup/folder/${PREFIX}-wordpress-files.zip /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/; zip -r /path/to/backup/folder/${PREFIX}-owncloud-files.zip /path/to/owncloud/data/;
• 0 23 * * * rm -r /path/to/backup/folder/*

A few notes for someone trying to copy this set-up

• Your web host might be in a different time zone, so you might need to keep that in mind when coordinating cron jobs on your web host with ones on a local machine.
• My web host provided a cron job editor that automatically escapes special characters like %, but you might have to add back-slashes to make yours work if you’re manually editing with crontab -e.
• You might want to put a .htaccess file in your backup directory with the following in it: “Options -Indexes” (remove the quotes of course). This stops other people from going to your backup directory in a browser and helping themselves to your files. You could also name your backup directory with a random hash of letters and numbers if you wanted to make it difficult for people to steal your backed-up data.

Local cron job

Then on the local machine, the old iMac, I set up the following cron job. It downloads the files and saves them to a folder on an external hard disc every day at 6h00.

• 0 6 * * * PREFIX=`date +%y-%m-%d`; curl http://www.your-web-site.com/back-up/${PREFIX}-DBNAME-db.sql.gz > /Volumes/External HD/Back-ups/${PREFIX}-DBNAME-db.sql.gz; curl http://www.your-web-site.com/back-up/${PREFIX}-wordpress-files.zip > /Volumes/External HD/Back-ups/${PREFIX}-wordpress-files.zip; curl http://www.your-web-site.com/back-up/${PREFIX}-owncloud-files.zip > /Volumes/External HD/Back-ups/${PREFIX}-owncloud-files.zip;

If you were super-paranoid about losing data, you could install this on multiple local machines, or you change the timing so that the cron jobs run twice a day, or as often as you liked, really. As long as they’re always turned on, connected to the internet and they have access to the folder where the backups will go, they should work fine.

Stoop-n-scoop

This isn’t a super-secure way to back up your files, but then we’re more worried about losing data accidentally than having it stolen maliciously. I don’t think the world of medical ethics is cut-throat enough that our academic rivals would stoop to stealing our data in an effort to scoop our papers before we can publish them. That said, I’m not about to give away the exact URL where our backups are stored, either.

The practical upshot of all this is that now we have at least three copies of any file we’re working on. There’s one on the computer being used to edit the document, there’s one stored remotely on our web host, and there’s a copy of all our files backed up once a day on the old iMac at the Medical Ethics Unit.

Chess Problem Example

My grandfather taught me how to play chess when I was very young. He made a huge, beautiful chess set out of wood in his basement, and over the course of my childhood, he gave me books with little mathematical puzzles and chess problems in them. Later on in life he denied having taught me how to play, and I don’t know if it was because of modesty or Alzheimer’s.

This past weekend, I found a book of public domain chess problems (download the PDF, not the epub, if you’re interested). It reminds me of Grandpa Searles. I’ve been working through them for pleasure. They are surprisingly challenging, and doubly so if you’re tired. I probably spent a solid two hours trying to figure out #4 on Sunday afternoon, without success. I must have been tired though—Monday morning on the metro, it took less than 5 minutes. In fact, the solution turned out to be one that I considered multiple times on Sunday. Go figure.

What are “chess problems?”

A chess problem is a puzzle, somewhat akin to a Sudoku. You are given a chess board illustrating a game already in progress—nearly done, even. You are told which side you are playing and you are told how many moves to checkmate. See the image attached at the beginning of this post for an example of a very difficult five-mover chess problem.

Why I like chess problems, but I’m not that good at chess

In a chess game, there is no easy way for you to tell how many moves you are away from checkmate. The only way to know is to think through all the possibilities. In some cases there will be constraints on the number of possible moves by a player which make it easier to calculate. In most cases, there will be a staggering number of possible moves, and depending on the other player’s actions, you might be further away from or closer to checkmate.

Why I am bad at chess

So faced with a complex problem with this, my brain usually resorts to the strategy as illustrated in the image attached to this paragraph. I probably use such a simplistic algorithm because for almost every move, the likelihood that I will notice that there is a way to force a checkmate more than one move in advance is vanishingly small, and so I focus on intermediate goals instead. I’m sure a real chess player has the goal of checkmate in mind from the first move. I don’t think about forcing a checkmate until it’s already inevitable.

This is why I suck at real chess games: My estimation of the value of forethought is outweighed by my pessimism regarding how much effort it would actually take to get anything meaningful out of it.

In a chess problem, on the other hand, I know there’s a solution to be had in a certain number of moves (unless there’s a typo or something), and so I will take the time to work through all the possibilities. It’s something both frustrating and satisfying. It is immensely gratifying when you find the solution, and the more frustrating it is to find it, the better it is when you write down the solution and get to smugly declare, “checkmate.”

When you “beat” a chess problem, it’s much better than beating a human opponent, because you know that the chess problem is not “having an off-day,” and it can’t say after the fact, “I let you win” or anything like that. I also like chess problems because you can feel really good about solving one. In a chess game, you have to be careful about taking too much pleasure in winning, or you come across as a jerk.

Solutions to some two-mover problems

As promised, here are some solutions to the problems in the book, Chess Problems, by W T Pierce and J Pierce. I’m not going to list all the solutions. That would ruin the fun for you! Also, I haven’t finished them all yet. I may or may not post more solutions when I have them. I’m pretty sure that these ones are correct, although when I copied #1 from my notebook to my blog, I noticed that it wasn’t correct. (I have since fixed it, I believe.)

1. Ng3+ Kxe6; Bc8#
2. Nc4+ Kxc6; b5#
3. d3+ Kxd4; Rb3#

Let me know if you find problems with these solutions (very possible), or if you want to add your own solutions to later problems. Do you have other public domain collections of chess problems to share?

Mark-3-quidditch-hoop-base

This morning, I brought two brand new Mark 3 quidditch hoop bases to campus via the métro. The McGill Quidditch Team now has a full set of 6 freestanding quidditch hoops! They are reasonably easy to carry and just the right weight to prevent tipping. They are also made of ABS pipes, joints and couplings, and so they look awfully suspicious.

I’m still working on updating the construction manual so that it reflects the most up-to-date version of the base.

I got off the métro at station Peel and crossed the path of two uniformed police officers. They looked at me, they looked at the mess of ABS pipes in my hands, and they looked up at me again. Although they didn’t say anything, I could tell from their expression that they were thinking something like, “If this guy wasn’t blond with blue eyes, we would totally preemptively arrest him under the brave new anti-terrorism legislation that just passed.”

I just tried to look casual.

Here’s how it works:

1. Players 1–4 go to a separate room where they can’t see or hear the audience members talking.
2. The audience members choose a scene to be acted out silently by the players.
   • The instructions for the scene to be acted out should be simple—aim for 1 sentence.
   • The scene should lend itself easily to physical movement and interpretation.
   • The scene must be something that can be acted out silently.
   • Examples include: “washing the dishes,” “an otter in its natural habitat,” “a day in the life of a …”
3. Player 1 comes back to the room with the audience, where he is told the scene to be acted out. He is given 10 seconds to think about what exactly he will do.
4. Player 2 comes into the room and watches player 1 silently act out the scene given to him. The scene should be about 30 seconds long, tops. To be clear: no one tells players 2–4 what the scene is until after the game is finished.
5. Player 3 enters and player 2 acts out the scene from memory, not knowing the instructions that were given to player 1.
6. Player 4 enters and player 3 acts out the scene from memory.
7. Player 4 acts out the scene as best he can from memory, narrating what it is she thinks she is acting out.
8. Player 3 corrects player 4.
9. Player 2 corrects player 3.
10. Player 1 reveals the instructions she was given in the first place.

This sort of game only works with certain kinds of people in the right sort of mood, but when you have the right combination of people with the right sort of energy all together in the same place, it can be hilarious.

I hate Instagram too, but arresting someone for using it is ridiculous

It’s hard to trust the police in Montréal these days. “Officer 728″ is a household name, known for her abuse of power, which was caught on video. There was also a famous CCTV video of a prostrate man being brutally kicked repeatedly by the Montréal police. This problem isn’t restricted to Montréal either. Recently a police officer in Vancouver was caught on video punching a cyclist in the face while putting him in handcuffs.

Technology and the abuse of police power

I used to largely dismiss reports of police abuses of power. When I saw graffiti saying, “eff the police” or something to that effect, I used to chalk it up to conspiracy theorists and delinquent youths. Now that it’s all on Youtube, it’s harder to ignore the problem.

(I also used to dismiss those who spray-painted “burn the banks” in a number of parts of Montréal as conspiracy theorists, but since 2008, I can kind of see where they’re coming from.)

We’re entering into an age when abuses of power by police are being caught on tape more and more often. I don’t think that police abusing their power is a new thing, or even that the rates have changed recently. I’m of the position that it might just be more visible because of the recent development that nearly everyone is carrying around a camera in their pocket that can instantly upload video of police brutality to Youtube. The Google Glass project (and the clones that are sure to follow) may make this even more common.

This is unsettling to me, partly because it might mean that a lot of the times I dismissed claims of police abuse, I was in the wrong.

We should all be legitimately outraged by this

More importantly though, this should make us all angry because this is not how justice works in Canada. Even if the robbery suspect was completely guilty of every crime the police suspected, we don’t allow individual police officers to dole out their own personal vengeance in the form of physical beatings. We certainly don’t allow groups of police officers to do so against suspected criminals as they lie helpless in the snow, and most emphatically, there is no place in Canadian justice for criminals to be punished in this way (or any other) without due process or without even having been formally charged with a crime.

A police officer punching a restrained person is much worse than a regular citizen punching another citizen. This is because the police are, so to speak, the final guarantee that the government has power over its citizens and that there is the rule of law in a country. The most basic reason for others not to steal your stuff is that if they do, there’s a good chance that the police will come and take away their freedom in such a way that it’s not worth it for most people to engage in that behaviour. All laws largely work on the same principle. Sure, there’s other sanctions that a government can use, like taxation, but even that is underwritten by the threat of police coming and putting you in prison if you break the tax laws.

So, when a police officer physically abuses a citizen, he shakes our faith in the proper functioning of the machinery of government. This makes the issue not just one of bad PR for a particular police department, but one of general faith in our country to work in a just and equitable way. Further, if the police are vigilantes and there is no recourse, it legitimizes vigilante justice by the people against the police.

This means that when a police officer abuses his power, there must be some recourse that is transparent, timely and just. There can’t even be the appearance that the police are above the law, otherwise what you will see is ordinary citizens taking the law into their own hands to bring the police to justice, which is a very scary prospect.

Ordinary citizens are taking the law into their own hands to bring the police to justice

In response to the issues I have described above, as well as a number of much less famous examples of abuse of police power during the protests in Montréal, there has been a movement toward the use of social media to identify the police who are abusing their power. This is being done by citizens who believe that there has been abuse of power by police in Montréal, and that the normal channels of addressing these abuses have been of no avail.

They are collecting photos, videos, identification numbers, names and addresses of police officers, cataloguing their transgressions and calling for retribution.

The police are calling this “intimidation.” They are calling for it to be taken down. They’re (rightly) complaining that there is no way for a police officer who is wrongly accused in this way to clear his name, and that the police, and even some non-police are being put in danger because of this.

What needs to happen

I have not been involved in the student protests in Montréal. I have never been beaten by the police. I generally believe that if I call 911, it will be the “good guys” who show up at my door. That said, I can understand why someone who was abused by a police officer might be tempted to post this information out of frustration at the ineffectiveness of the official recourse against such abuse.

In some ways, the police have been implicitly training us to use these methods if we want anything to get done: Likely the police officer from Vancouver would have gotten away with punching the cyclist in the face if the cyclist’s friend hadn’t caught it on video and posted it to Youtube.

If the police want us to use official channels to address police abuses, they have to give us reason to think that it’s better to do that than to just appeal to the Internet for justice. Politically-motivated arrests of people for posting “intimidating” things online won’t cut it.

I think we will only see a real change in public attitudes toward police brutality given the following three conditions.

1. The official channels must be transparent. It must be clear to everyone that something is being done, and we have to see that officers who abuse their power are appropriately punished. Confidence in the relationship between the state and its citizens is what’s at stake, and so the solution must be one that publicly restores confidence.
2. Official channels must be timely. The old adage, “justice delayed is justice denied” applies here. If citizens get impatient waiting for justice to be applied, they may be tempted to take it into their own hands.
3. Finally, official recourse against police abuse must be just. This is where an official means of recourse against police brutality could actually outdo Internet vigilantes. Internet vigilante justice will always be faster and more transparent than anything official could ever be, but an official channel can enforce punishments fitting to the crime, and can claim legitimacy in a way that vigilantes never can.

If a police officer publicly faced criminal charges, rather than just a “paid leave of absence” followed by “counselling” and this happened in short order after an accusation of abuse, this would do a lot to restore faith in official channels. The people of Montréal might even learn that the legitimate checks and balances are preferable to pursuing vigilante justice through social media.

Everyone loves cloud computing. Users love it, tech blogs love it, and tech companies are all trying their hand at it—even ones who have no concept of how to provide a half-decent web service. And yes, I’m talking about Apple’s iTools. I mean, dot-Mac. Oh sorry, it’s called iCloud now. Whatever it’s called, it’s still terrible.

More interesting to me than the corporate offerings of cloud-based services (and in some cases withdrawals of those offerings, e.g. Google Reader) is all the new open-source cloud-based software available for anyone to install on their own web host of choice. To clarify, I’m talking about pieces of software that are more like WordPress than Microsoft Word—this is software that you install on a web server, and that you access through a browser, not software that you install on your own home computer. I will refer to this type of software as “personal” cloud software.

Here are a few examples of different categories of software, and rough equivalents for conventional computing, corporate cloud offerings and “personal” cloud alternatives. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of such services, just a list of examples. Also, the examples given here aren’t meant to be endorsements of the services either.

Usually the debate is framed as being between conventional computing and corporate cloud computing. Sometimes a very nuanced look into these different services will compare different corporate cloud-based services, but rarely does anyone compare the pros and cons of conventional vs corporate cloud vs “personal” cloud services. So, as far I see them, the following are the major issues to consider. Depending on your own level of technical expertise, your priorities, budget and the level of importance that you assign to a particular task that you wish to perform, you may weight these differently. For simplicity, I assigned each category a value of +1 (this is good), -1 (this is bad) or 0 (this isn’t very good or very bad).

If you aren’t scared off by MySQL databases or PHP, the “level of technical expertise” row might be scored differently, or if you doubt your own ability to keep your files secure, you might think that your work’s security depending on Google is a good thing. Haggling over the pros and cons aside, it’s a kind of an interesting result of this exercise that unless you’re really scared of losing work, or unless multi-user collaboration is very important to you, you might be better off avoiding cloud services entirely.

Another interesting result: if it comes down to a choice between a corporate cloud service and a “personal” cloud service, it looks like the “personal” cloud is the way to go—it beats the corporate cloud on every category except price and ease of installation. (And also possibly security.)

Edit (2013 Apr 6): I have added a row for “accessing content across multiple devices.” (Thanks Morty!)

• The End of Wall Street (2010), by Roger Lowenstein
• The Psychopath Test (2011), by Jon Ronson
• Harperland (2010), by Lawrence Martin
• Inside Wikileaks (2011), by Daniel Domscheit-Berg
• Denialism (2009), by Michael Specter

Fair warning about Inside Wikileaks: after reading this book (and partly due to things like this in the news) I started putting passwords on my phone / computer / hard drives. I know this is irrational. I haven’t murdered anyone and I don’t possess any files that the government would find interesting. Paranoia is contagious, I guess.

Come to think of it, in the aftermath of my dad’s release from the hospital on extremely sketchy terms, even the more mentally stable members of my family noticed that we were thinking the sorts of things that crazy people think: “Did dad put a bug in the house?” That sort of thing. That said, it wouldn’t be the first time dad has tried planting a listening device somewhere.

Anyway, I commend these books to you. They’re all excellent, short, and relatively light reading.

Also, I realised that for technical reasons, the Twitter bots don’t tweet every single time a vote is missed. For example, Twitter doesn’t allow two tweets of the same thing in a row. So, I made a simple little counter page that will keep track of the actual numbers of missed votes. The Twitter bots are still fun, though. :)

À Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet MP,

Le 9 février 2013, j’ai créé deux bots Twitter—le premier fait un tweet chaque fois que Stephen Harper manque un vote dans le Chambre des communes (@absenteeharper), et l’autre fait un tweet chaque fois que Thomas Mulcair manque un vote dans le Chambre des communes (@absenteemulcair). Pendant le mois de février, ils marchaient parfaitement, mais le 7 mars 2013, j’ai reçu un message qui dit, «Votre compte Twitter, @absenteemulcair, est suspendu.»

J’avais peur que Harper demanderait que je ferme mon bot Twitter, mais je n’aurais jamais pensé que ça serait le bot pour Mulcair qui serait fermé.

J’ai coopéré avec Twitter, et j’ai fait tous les changes qu’ils m’ont demandés et malgré les changements je ne peux toujours pas réactiver mon compte.

Je sais que mes bots Twitter ne sont très importants dans le monde de la politique Canadienne, mais quand même, je pense que c’est une expression valide de mes droits dans un pays démocratique comme le Canada. Les tweets publie de l’information publique, obtenue par les chemins publique, et ils sont au sujet d’un représentant du parlement en sa capacité officielle comme représentant du parlement.

Je crois d’ailleurs que ma démarche est tout à fait légitime.

Ma question est, Qui a demandé que mon bot Twitter soit suspendu? Si c’était un membre de l’NPD, je demande que vous ayez le courage de l’admettre.

Dans l’attente de votre réponse,
Benjamin Carlisle

1. We all experienced the initial shock and denial. (“What? There is no way they’re shutting Google Reader down.”)
2. Anger followed.
3. Then the bargaining.
4. Next people will get sad about it. They probably won’t blog sad things about Google Reader, though, out of fear of looking pathetic.
5. As far as acceptance goes, lots of people are now trying to profit from this, by selling their own alternatives to Google Reader. Digg has decided to make building a new aggregator a priority. Users are largely scrambling to find another reader.

My solution to the Google Reader problem

I used to use Newsfire before I switched to Google Reader, but in the time that has elapsed since then, they started charging $5 for it. That’s not a lot, but then I was getting Google Reader for free, so I kept looking. Besides, Newsfire is a newsreader that’s all stored locally on my computer, and my ideal solution would be cloud-based.

I looked around at the currently-available web offerings, and I couldn’t find any that were very appealing. I nearly despaired myself, when I found an open-source web-based solution.

This won’t work for everyone, but it will work for anyone who already has access to a web server with the following capabilities:

• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• Cron jobs

I installed a copy of the open-source RSS reader, selfoss on my web server, and I have been using it instead of Google Reader. I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve had to make a few changes already, but it seems like a good solution to the problem. Here are the advantages, as I see it:

• Web-based, so it will work on all my devices
• It’s hosted on my own server, so it will work as long as I keep paying my hosting bill
• The software won’t be “updated” (read: altered arbitrarily) unless I want it to be
• No one will decide later that there needs to be ads on my news reader

Good luck in finding a solution to your Google Reader problem!