BlakeBlog

Traffic Cameras: All About Revenue, Not Safety

MSNBC has a nice article about Dallas turning off quite a few traffic cameras because they were too effective. It turns out that motorists were obeying the red lights at the camera'd intersections in enough numbers that the cameras couldn't generate enough revenue to even pay for themselves. You'd think that that would be a good thing, as the stated justification for installing the cameras was to reduce the red light running.

You'd be wrong.

It turns out that the Dallas Police, like most traffic departments, treat motorists as rolling revenue opportunities. If they can't make money enforcing a particular traffic law they aren't going to bother enforcing it, even if it makes the roads safer.

(h/t to schneier)

Yeah, Good Luck with That, Larry

From today's San Jose Mercury News (annoying free registration required):

Members of Congress and candidates will be asked [by Lawrence Lessig's new "Change Congress Project"] to support four goals: reject contributions from lobbyists and political action committees; ban spending on pet projects known as earmarks; work for public financing of campaigns; and back transparency for the work of Congress.

What a farce. While I support stamping out earmarks, money is power and the only thing that concerns politicians is power: How much do they have, and how can they get more. They spend most of their time trying to raise money, even if they don't need it for their own campaigns, so that they can donate it to other campaigns for political favor. You also can't Constitutionally prevent the people from spending money to promote their own interests, as that is a restriction of the most vital of all free speech (McCain-Feingold be damned).

Good luck with that, Larry.

Alsoft Finally Ships Leopard Updater for DiskWarrior

Back in early January Michelle's laptop started working very slowly, especially if she tried to use Mozilla, so she handed it over to me to fix it. Putting my ear next to the hard drive, I gave her the "uh oh" look—the drive was constantly seeking, like it had encountered a bunch of bad blocks. This is usually the sign of a dying hard drive, and of course Michelle didn't have any backups.

So, the first task was to try and read as much off the hard drive as possible, and for that I turned to Alsoft's venerable DiskWarrior. A quick trip to an Apple store (as you can only get the bootable CD when you buy the retail version) and an hour later DiskWarrior had managed to fix what I thought was hardware problem. It turns out that some rogue process corrupted a bunch of the directory structure information. Fortunately, the only data she lost was her iCal calendars. Now, this wasn't an insignificant loss, but it paled in comparison to all her schoolwork from the last four years. Suitably frightened and chastised, she promised to buy whatever she needed to start making regular backups.

(Alas, I'm still waiting to see that happen.)

Pleasantly happy with the job DiskWarrior did on Michelle's laptop, I decided I'd also boot from the CD and give my Mac mini a preventative clean-up. Now, I'm running Leopard (OS X 10.5) on my mini, whereas Michelle is stuck in the Dark Ages of 10.3, and with Leopard being fairly new I made sure to read the Read Me file, plus the information on the Alsoft website support pages. Both resources made it clear that you shouldn't boot from an earlier version of the OS and then try to repair permissions. No problem—I'm booting from the DiskWarrior CD!

Repair permissions, scan the directory structures, find and fix a few small errors, and then reboot with a happy grin on my face. Launch Address Book to update the email address of a friend. Hmmm, can't edit any of the entries in the Address Book.

(Right about here is where you should be forming the mental image of Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff and hanging in the air for a few seconds as he begins to realize the terrible mistake that he's made.)

Go back, re-read the Read Me and website, then fire off an email to Alsoft Support. "Umm, you guys wouldn't have 'an earlier version' of OS X on your Leopard-compatible CD, would you?" "Why, yes, yes we do." The only known solution? Archive and install the OS again.

(Now Wile starts falling.)

A few days later Alsoft updates their website saying that "very soon now" you'll be able to download an updater that will fix that problem.

Fast-forward two months to today, and Alsoft finally releases the updater. In all fairness, it's a pretty slick little updater that reads your original CD, applies the patches, and burns you a new bootable CD that promises not to sin again. But, boy, I sure wish that my customers would let me get away with defining "very soon now" as nearly two months.

So, yes, I'm a little bitter, and once bitten, twice shy—I still haven't worked up the courage to try running the updated version against my newly rebuilt OS. I do have Time Machine running smoothly, and worst case I guess that another problem would simply give me a chance to try the nifty work-around for bootable, full-volume restores from Time Machine. But for now I have too many other things going on, and not enough booze in my blood, to attempt it.