Planet Koalabs

2 years ago, I felt on my chin and got stitches. I paid $265 for a 20 minutes visit, and a 10 minutes visit to remove the stitches a week later. Lately I had to do a medical check to become a permanent resident of Canada. I paid $120 for a bit of paperwork filling by a clerk, and for a —less than 3 minutes long— medical examination. I guess that most of the money was for the physician.

Last December I twisted my ankle and had 4 sessions of physiotherapy. Each session was between 30 and 50 minutes long. During those sessions, 15 to 30 minutes were with the physiotherapist. Each session costed $55. Totaling $220 for 2 hours and 30 minutes of therapy, including 1 hour and 15 minutes with the physiotherapist.

Physiotherapists aren’t necessarily as qualified as doctors. They’re nonetheless skilled professionals. According to Wikipedia:

In Canada, entry-level physiotherapy education is offered at 13 universities. Some of these university programs are at the Master's level, meaning that applicants must have already completed an undergraduate degree prior to applying; all of them are slated to be at the Master's level by 2010.

Both professions require many years of training. So why was the physician so much more expensive on an hourly basis than the physiotherapist?

Physician

$265 × 30 minutes = $530 / hour

Physiotherapist

$55 × 20 minutes = $165 / hour

The Canadian and French health care systems are similar: they are publicly funded, and the service is mostly provided by the private sector. A simple visit to a physician in Paris costs 40 euro —less than $60. In Vancouver it’s twice as much: $120. Why such difference? One reason is the lack of physicians. Canada has one of the lowest rate of physician per capita of the OCED. It wasn’t always like that. In the early 90’s there were too many physicians in Canada. Provincial governments set limits on the number of new physicians to save money. In 1993 the number of physicians peaked. As population grew and health care demand increased, the surplus of physicians turned into a shortage.

This situation shows the main limit of publicly health care. Fixed policies aren’t able to adapt to the changing reality. Without proper competition, and price signal it’s hard to get everything right. It looks that France managed its supply of physicians better, but it could very well experiences similar problems. A bad political decision regarding health care can have decades long consequences.

Health care costs for 2009 were between 8% and 11% in most developer countries —with the notable exception of the US at 16%. No country can afford to have one tenth of its economy running inefficiently. It’s important to have the right set of rules. Rules that give us a good health care at the right price.

I recommend 2 articles from the New Yorker, and one from the Economist on the subject:

• The Cost Conundrum, What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
• Testing, Testing, The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?
• Clear diagnosis, uncertain remedy, Governments are increasingly turning to private insurance in order to widen access to health care and make it more efficient. Are they expecting too much?

I’ve recently re-read The IPv6 mess by D. J. Bernstein. The essay was probably written in 2002 or 2003. It predicted remarkably well the current state of IPv6. IPv6 can’t access an IPv4 network. Because all the good stuffs are on IPv4, nobody uses IPv6 and everybody sticks to the old protocol. There are tunnel mechanisms to bridge the two, but they are extensions; not part of the core protocol.

The pool of available IPv4 addresses is shrinking and will probably be exhausted by 2012. Without any IPv4 addresses left will the world starts using IPv6? I suspect this will not happen. The problem with IPv4 is the exhaustion of public addresses, but most people don’t need a public address. They are using Internet to read their mails and surf on the web. They don’t want to have their own server at home.

Consider the following scenario: Late 2012, the pool of IPv4 addresses was exhausted a few weeks ago. You’re an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Internet is still mostly IPv4. New clients want to have access to Internet, all of it; not just the part that was migrated to IPv6.

You could get more IPv4 addresses nonetheless. It would be relatively simple to do: pay more. When demand for a resource is high and supply is short, prices go up. In 2010, hosting providers charge around $1 per month for an additional IPv4 address. Assuming it’s about the same price for an ISP; $1 when clients are paying $20 or more each month is reasonable. But as Internet keeps growing, the price will be driven further up and eventually we’ll have to find another solution.

IPv6 proponents argue that it will be the time when the new protocol will take off, and all our problems will be solved. But IPv6 is not an easy or cheap solution. You need to change or update network gear, older software might not be compatible. And many people will have to be re-trained.

Oh no! NAT to the rescue!

NAT used at a large scale would be cheaper and easier. Instead of giving all clients a public address, multiple clients share one public address.

Suppose an ISP is charging $20 per month, and the price of an IPv4 address went up to $5 per month. If it uses 1 address for 10 clients That’s a saving of $45 over a revenue of $200 each month: almost a quarter of it.

NAT is not free, routers will have to be beefed up and reconfigured. But overall it is cheaper and easier than IPv6:

• You don’t need to upgrade all you infrastructure. You can gradually switch your clients to NAT; freeing up IPv4 addresses for new clients. The cost can be spread over a long period of time and the benefit is immediate. With IPv6 you have to pay the full price upfront for a distant benefit.

• NAT is already widely used. Almost all system administrators had to setup a NAT at some point. The cost of re-training them will be lower.

I’m not arguing that using NAT is better than switching to IPv6. NAT is not a good solution, it’s a bad short-term solution aggravating the problem in the long run. NAT is like the fast food restaurant around the corner and IPv6 is the healthy meal you cook at home. You know you should go for the healthy meal, but you’ll go to the fast food, because it’s cheap and easy. You’ll feel bad, but forget about it quickly, because it doesn’t have immediate consequences.

Like the OSI model, IPv6’s technical brilliance wont make it successful. Regular Internet users want to surf the web and read emails. They don’t care about how things work, as long as it works. If IPv6 could communicate natively with IPv4, it would have been widely deployed and used today.

In the future we will drive IPv6 connected flying cars on Mars

That’s what —I think— will happen:

• 2012 or later, no more IPv4 address left
• ISP’s start using NAT for their cheaper plan
• After a while they supply clients who need a public address —typically BitTorrent users— with IPv6 addresses, but keep using NAT for regular v4 access
• IPv6 gains momentum in some area, like gaming or file-sharing. But other domains like the web —HTTP— or email —SMTP, POP, and IMAP— stick to the old IP protocol because it’s good enough

I don’t know if there will be a complete switch to IPv6 one day but I am sure nobody will switch overnight just because there is no IPv4 addresses left.

Weblog 2.5 was relesed. It fixes bugs and add support for reStructuredText:

• Correct Atom feed id (regression from 2.3)
• Don’t rewrite anchors (Fix #11)
• Add support for reStructuredText, contributed by Sridhar Ratnakumar (Fix #12)
• markdown2 is now an optional dependency

Get it on the download page.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions or request support in the mailing list. Report any bugs and problems on the bugs & issues tracker.

Weblog 2.4 was released. It’s probably the last release of the 2.x series. I’m currently working on version 3, a major redesign of how Weblog works.

This new version fixes 2 bugs:

• Crash when a post contains a / or \\ character in its title
• Dates in the Atom feed now use the correct timezone

This version also improves speed. Weblog 2.4 only generate targets if their sources change.

Get it on the download page.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions or request support in the mailing list. Report any bugs and problems on the bugs & issues tracker.

Last week I tested Chromium. The Unix version of Google’s browser uses GConf. I prefer Chromium to Firefox, but I wont switch until GConf becomes an optional dependency or is completely removed. What’s the problem?

Without GConf:

Configuration file → Application

With GConf:

Configuration file → GConf → DBus → Application

I hate software that adds complexity for no real benefit.

If the place where you work is nice, you may be out of touch.

From the book Parkinson’s law, and other studies in administration:

During a time of exiting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection we know is finality, and finality is death.

Recently in The Economist:

As a rule in the European Union, the grandeur of somebody’s office is inversely related to the sexiness of their work.

This seems to be true in the world of business too. Andrew Warner wrote how a new office in Manhattan cost him millions for almost nothing, and Steve Blank explained how a new building wasn’t only a waste of money but also impeded the company’s productivity and destroyed its culture.

In 2005, I was interviewed by Altran, a consulting firm, in a gorgeous building on the bank of the Seine river. The firm was famous for its excesses during the Internet bubble of the 90’s. They spent lavishly on office space in the most expensive parts of Paris. When I was interviewed in 2005 Altran was the only big French consulting company to lose money.

Mailing lists, and forums work well with few participants. As the number of participants go up: noise increases, and it becomes harder to follow conversations. Some people post lengthy unedited texts, which are hard to read and to understand. Others reply without even reading the original post, adding nothing to the conversation and creating confusion.

As far as I know, the only reliable way to keep the noise level low is moderation. A few moderators accept, edit, or reject posts from other members. It works well, but require lots of effort from the moderators.

Automatic means of limiting the noise are increasingly popular today. Many public websites use voting systems. Different algorithms were developed, some limit the noise up to a certain point. But those systems are vulnerable to the tyranny of the majority. Overall voting systems don’t work as well as classic moderation.

Limiting the noise by limiting the source of the noise

Another solution would be to limit the number of characters participants can use. For example everybody could be limited to 1000 characters a day on a high traffic mailing list. People would be clearer, as they try to make their point in fewer words.

Of course the most prolific contributors would also be impeded by this system. But it could turn a good contributors into a great contributor. Shortening a text usually makes it clearer.

I think limiting the number of characters subscribers can use each day, week, or month would have the following effect:

• Good contributors would be more concise
• Trolls and clueless subscribers would not be able to generate as much noise
• Part of the noise would turn into useful information as some people start to think or read other’s posts before posting

I’ve never seen such system in action. I’d like to see how it turns out in practice.

I usually turn to Google to find information about a Unix command or function. But there’s a faster and easier way to find what you’re looking for: apropos(1).

If you are looking for a way to turn a string into hexadecimal numbers:

$ apropos hex
ascii (7) - octal, hexadecimal and decimal ASCII character sets
hexdump (1) - ascii, decimal, hexadecimal, octal dump
od (1) - octal, decimal, hex, ascii dump
xxd (1) - make a hexdump or do the reverse.

“A simple rule is that if you want to know where the next crisis will be, then look at where the leverage is being created today,” says Martin Barnes of Bank Credit Analyst, a research firm. “The answer is in the government.”

From The repercussions of Dubai, The Economist December 3rd 2009.

I am glad to live in Canada, a country which started solving its fiscal problems during the past decade. Canadian politicians are aware of the problem that a mounting debt creates for the economy. Canada’s debt is raising again because of the financial crisis, but the outlook is better than all other G7 countries. There are plans to return to fiscal equilibrium in a few years.

France’s fiscal outlook is grimmer. Its annual deficit will be 8.2% of GDP in 2009, and 8.5% in 2010. The total deficit reaching more the 84% of GDP in 2010. Servicing such debt will impact negatively the economy, which in turn will make repaying the debt even harder.

Government bonds are considered safe, but during the past decade real estate was considered safe too. Argentina defaulted on its public debt in late 2001. After this crisis its GDP was divided by 3, and in October 2002 nearly 60% of argentinians lived under the poverty line. It took 6 years for the country to recover.

I have no idea how the world would react if a developed country defaulted. A crisis of confidence in government bonds could have dramatic effects on the world. Nobody can bail out the government.