Ben Hughes

5 Feb 2012

The Transition Movement

A friend asked me what I thought of the Transition movement
(http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/great-transition), this was
my response.

I've only read the exec summary, but here are my initial thoughts.
>
> One major issue is that they seem to play down or ignore the general
> problems of government. For example, regulations and policies with
> unintended consequences were large contributing factors to the GFC.
> Fannie and Freddie were essentially told by the govt to take on
> sub-prime mortgages to increase the number of home owners.
>
> Throughout they seem to assume that it's possible for government to
> set appropriate price levels that include social costs. In principle I
> agree that we often don't include social costs, but the answer isn't
> central price setting. I don't think there's a single historical
> example where that's worked out well.
>
> Basically I think they base their entire implementation on the ability
> and independence of government. I don't think governments are
> (generally) malicious: they believe that their actions are helpful.
> But regulatory capture, campaign funding and the incestuous
> relationship between industry and regulatory heads makes it hard for
> impossible for govt to make truly independent decisions. I don't think
> that we can rely on govt to "save" us.
>
> Possibly the biggest problem I have is with the 2nd last paragraph:
>
> "...but also to finally rid the world of the scourge of poverty and
> inequality. Business as usual has also failed in this regard. Just as
> within countries, trickle down approaches at global level have brought
> us to the brink of environmental disaster, while also increasing
> inequalities and entrenching grinding poverty in many parts of the
> world"
>
> That's demonstrably false. The 200 years has taken the West from
> $5/day and a life expectancy of 40 to $100/day and a life expectancy
> of 75. It has taken the Chinese from $5/day to $30/day, and in two
> generations they'll have caught up with the west. I can't take
> seriously any proposal that ignores the single largest improvement in
> human living conditions ever known.
>
> It's not all bad though: their tax policies are solid. Progressive
> consumption tax has a lot of nice side-effects (encourages saving,
> discourages debt) and taxing socially harmful activity, while a bit on
> the authoritarian side, is probably a the best way to combat
> undesirable behaviour. It has to be done carefully though (do you
> think the alcopops tax had any impact on teen binge drinking?)
>
> I liked what they were saying about moving decision making to the
> lowest level possible, but that seems in conflict with their desire to
> centrally plan things like prices and the size of industries.
>
> Resilience (in individuals, communities, businesses, society) is A
> Good Thing. I'm not entirely sure how we should encourage it, but we
> should aim for it.
>
> Although it also has a bunch of things that bug me, I think The New
> Capitalist Manifesto does a better job of addressing the ways in which
> the current Western corporatist states are failing.
>
> Anyway, that's my 2c.

30 Jan 2012

Lessons from my first open source project

Todotxt.net is my first real open source project. I’ve written and shared some dodgy PHP scripts in the past and thrown some code up on google code, but this is the first time I’ve engaged with the OSS community. And I’ve learnt a couple of things.

Open standards are better than open source

The thing that drew me to using Todo.txt in the first place was that at its heart is a plain text file that you can hack in whatever editior, on whichever platform, you choose. It turns out that that also makes it a very attractive thing to develop for.

No matter how open Gina’s source was, if I had to dick around with some proprietary storage format I wouldn’t have even looked at creating a Windows client for it. In fact, I didn’t look at any of the existing source code when writing todotxt.net – I just wrote to the standard.

Open source is awesome

I was pretty blown away when people started downloading my little app and even taking the time to report bugs. After all, it was at v0.1 and appropriately hacky and buggy. But then something awesome happened.

I woke up one morning and saw that someone had submitted a bug report. As I started to reply I noticed that I had a github pull request fixing the same bug. While I was sleeping, someone reported a bug in my app and someone else fixed it.

Inexpressibly awesome.

Have an upgrade mechanism in place. Always

At version 0.8 things were humming along nicely – a couple of dozen people had downloaded the app and a couple of people were contributing code. Then Gina blogged about it and Lifehacker picked it up. Suddenly I was getting 600 downloads a day.

The only problem was, v0.8 had the new intellisense functionality which turned out to be pretty buggy. I got a fix out quickly, but had no way to tell the 600 people who had already downloaded the buggy version. I’m sure more than a few people were put off by the random crashing and probably never looked back to see if there was an update.

A couple of point releases later I added in an upgrade notification. It’s terribly basic, but it works. In future projects I’m going to have update notifications in some from in before I release even an early alpha.

Git’s not scary, and github is awesome

I’d hackily played with Git a couple of times, thinking my Mercurial knowlege would let me wing it. It didn’t. Because I wanted to use github (it’s what all the cool kids are doing) I figured I should put some time into finding my way around the basics. To my releif and surprise, it’s not as forboding as it intially seems.

And github, well, you can see why it’s become the defacto OSS repository. The cool kids are using it becuase it’s frakking fantastic. It’s just so easy to share code, track changes, accept patches, manage issues. It’s really pretty special.

29 Jan 2012

Managing my asthma

It’s taken me 15 years to feel like I have some control over my asthma. This is how I do it – maybe it will be useful for someone.

Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, I have no experience other than my own. Asthma affects people differently – trying something like this could literally kill you. If you choose to do it, be careful, and make sure you always have your inhaler with you

Step 0: Get as cardio fit as possible

When I first met my wife I was in the best shape of my life – not too much body fat, and a decent amount of muscle. I ate well and lifted weights a lot. But I did almost no cardio and my asthma, although much better than when I was fat and inactive, still wasn’t great.

A few years later (after I’d let marriage, kids and work eat into my gym time ;)) I had little muscle or cardio fitness. My asthma was quite bad. I started the Couch to 5K program and felt like I was going to die. But by the time I could run 5km (combined with the steps below), my asthma was almost non-existent. I could go months at a time without using a preventative or an inhaler.

(For a whole swag of reason I’ve slackened off on my cardio over the past few months and am paying for it now. Step 0 is as much a reminder to myself as anything else).

So get fit. It makes everything else work a whole lot better.

Step 1: Exhale

Although asthma seems to effect everyone differently, the most common advice you’ll find is to ensure you exhale fully. I’ve read scientific stuff about excess carbon dioxide exacerbating the restriction of your airways, but the why doesn’t really matter.

I can almost on-demand give myself an attack by intentionally not exhaling properly.

If I can stay calm (see step 2) I can usually control an asthma attack by forcing myself to breath slowly, shallowly and exhaling as much as possible. Breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth is a handy way to help do this.

Step 2: Stay calm

This is the hardest part. I don’t know about you, but I freak as soon as I feel an attack starting. I’m minutely conscious of my breath, my heart rate rises and I just want to gulp air in as fast as possible. All of which just makes things worse.

You have to train yourself to not freak out. In part I do that by not taking Ventolin straight away. I get it out, take the cap off, then sit with it in my hand and try and relax myself. But my brain is already in panic mode so it’s pretty hard to control.

You’d be surprised how far you can go. I admit to being kinda stupid on a few occaisions, taking it to the point of being dangerous. When I was running I would get furious at being held back by asthma attacks, so I decided to run through them. I really wouldn’t recommend this – getting light-headed and seeing stars and still running is pretty stupid. But in a way finding out how far I could push myself was quite valuable.

Ideally though, you want to practice building your resiliance without putting yourself in (as much) danger. Which brings us to …

Step 3: Stop breathing

To control the fear, you need to expose yourself to the trigger, preferably in a controlled, relatively safe way. Ever since I’ve had asthma holding my breath for more than a couple of seconds kicks my “OMFG I’m going to die” reflex into action. So that’s what I practice doing.

The best way I’ve found to practice is kneeling on all fours, exhaling as much as possible, sucking my stomach as hard as possible towards my spine, and holding it for as long as I can. With your stomach sucked in it’s very hard to sneak in accidental cheat breaths.

I usually last around 10 seconds. By the 5th rep I’m clawing the floor and praying for the end. By the 10th I’m usually somewhat calm, though the end can never come quick enough.

Messing with your breathing can bring on an attack so make sure you have your meds with you if you do something like this.

You can also try swimming, although I’m not sure if that’s more or less disturbing. The combination of exercise, water, and controlled breathing has certainly been enough to scare the shit out of me. The nice thing is, if you can relax into it you can gradually increase the strokes between breaths (or just reduce the stroke rate). You can’t cheat-breath when your head’s under water.

And then…

So long as I keep practicing holding my breath, I am usually able to stay calm when I do have an asthma attack. That lets me properly concentrate on my breathing. 95% of the time (when I’m fit, probably 75% when I’m not) I can control the attack without medication, breathing my way through it until it passes.

I’m not sure if it’s causal or coincidental, but not using meds seems to drastically reduce the number of attacks I have. The more quickly I reach for the Ventolin, the more regular the attacks.

Doctors

Doctors have told me that it’s best to take Ventolin as soon as you feel the attack starting. I’m sure they’re completly correct. You’re not going to die from having Ventolin a little earlier than you needed it.

But it’s a shitty way to live, especially when I can control and reduce the attacks without a huge amount of effort.