A few weeks ago I completed an upgrade from OpenSER 1.2 to Kamailio1.5. Overall it's been working quite well and actually was not nearly as hard as I feared it might be. Now that I've got this new version with a ton of new bells and whistles, I thought I'd try out a few of them. One of the most exciting is shared memory hashtables.

First a quick primer on hashtables. Currently whenever the proxy needs a value from the database it simply queries the database and gets the value. Straightforward, right? But as the system grows, the database can be greatly put under strain. In my Kamailio cluster the single biggest CPU user is in fact the MySQL database by a large margin. And since the database changes pretty infrequently it would be nice if we could cache those values.

The problem is that Kamailio is a multi-process daemon, so what's cached in one isn't going to be cached in another. Enter shared memory hashtables. The same cache is shared among all the processes. Usage is pretty simple. Here's an example:

# IP based authentication
if ($sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) == null){
	if (is_user_in("From", "ipauth")){
		$sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) = "yes";
	}
	else{
		$sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) = "no";
	}
	$var(ipauth) = $sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth);
}
else{
	$var(ipauth) = $sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth);
}

if ($var(ipauth) == "yes"){
	# do whatever...
}

Don't worry too much about the nitty-gritty. First we check to see if the value is cached (($sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) == null)). If it's set, we just use the cached value and continue. If not, we have to ask the database (is_user_in("From", "ipauth")) and then save the result in the cache. It actually is that easy.

But the $64,000 question, has it helped? Luckily I thought ahead and got some data before I made the change. I grabbed the query log for a day before and after the change. I made sure to select two days where the call usage was the similar (1% difference). Overall there was a 20% reduction in SQL queries.

I only put in the one change as a proof of concept. Since it sure seems to have panned out I'll continue wrapping all my database calls with hashtable caches. One thing I still need to work out is how to invalidate the cache when I make a change through my provisioning system. And once I'm able to upgrade to Kamailio 3.0 I'll switch over to memcached, which has all the benefits of a shared memory hashtable but it's also clustered. Ooh, I'm so excited!

A while back I did an energy audit in my house. Fortunately for me I do live in an area served by cheap hydroelectric and coal energy. Well, fortunately for my pocketbook anyway. Regardless, I'm ever attempting to reduce my energy needs for both personal and altruistic reasons, hence the audit.

I surveyed all the lights in my home, noted their location, type, wattage, etc. When we moved in, most of the lights were old school incandescents. Altogether they added to 2918 watts of lighting. By swapping in a few compact fluorescents I've reduced that total to 1778. That's a savings of 40%. Impressive, but not so fast. Are all those lights used the same amount? Definitely not. The garage lights are on for probably only 10 minutes per day, on average. So clearly we need to factor actual usage into the equation.

So I also estimated the average usage of each bulb. Yes it was as fun as you think. What I found is that our 2918 watts account for about 4950 watt hours of actual usage per day. After my upgrades that dropped to 3274 watt hours, for a savings of 34%. If you notice that's less than the 40% we calculated earlier you get a brownie point. Indeed some of the lights we use the most are ones that I cannot reduce any further.

Even more interesting is something I've recently come to understand as I make a concerted, although to many unquestionably bizarre, attempt at understanding statistics. Quite often a very small number of things will often account for most of your results. A good example is the US federal budget. While McCain notably complained about earmarks in bills (which may be undesirable for many reasons) they account for a very small fraction of the money spent. If you want to make any reasonable dent in the outlays your best bet is defense, social security and medicare/medicaid which account by themselves for 65% of our expenditures.

Getting back to the original point (and hopefully avoiding a political tangent), I found that just a few of the lights in the house account for the majority of the electrical usage. In fact, the two sets of fluorescent lights in the family room account for nearly 60% of the total electricity. Even if I were to upgrade the rest my bulbs to compact fluorescents, it would only decrease my current usage by another 15%. I'm pretty much bound by those two sets of lights.

The exercise was a useful one. I'm on a slow quest to analyze all the electrical usage in the house. The light bulbs were the easiest to tackle. Some time I'll move on to the appliances and computers. The latter I'm rather apprehensive about. I might rather be ignorant.

My data files:
OpenOffice.org format
CSV format

I've been following a blog for a while by Jeremy Robb. He's a Linux nerd which is how I came upon him, but turns out he's also the dad of an autistic son. He's chronicled the experience of learning to adapt to his son's condition and it's a great resource for anyone in a similar boat. His most recent post is an excellent story and would be a nice place to start from.

I'm really not sure why I'm so interested in autism. Something about it just strikes me. Maybe it's the fact that when I was in first grade my teacher thought I was autistic. Who knows, maybe I am. At this point in my life I doubt it's really worth investigating. It just really concerns me that lately so much bad information about autism has been going around, and I'd really like to get the word out so that people who are truly autistic can get the correct help and understanding.

This is an article which is a long time coming. Unless you've had your head in the ground, you can't have missed the discussion on health care going on lately. I've had plenty of chance to muse over the issues myself, both on my own, with my wife and with a number of my friends. I've heard a lot of good ideas, but also some misunderstandings and I'd like a chance to lay things out as I see them.

Background

In my time as a working adult I've had the opportunity to experience pretty much the whole range of health care options. I started at the top, working for a large company who had quite a few options. We picked the one that matched our coverage needs the best, based on the fact that we were planning to start a family. When that momentous occasion came, we ended up payed very little out of pocket. It was quite nice, in fact. And for all that, the cost was very reasonable, my share of the cost, anyway.

Many Americans are in this boat and I think for them, their perspective is clouded. They see a decent system, payed for by the economy of scale of a large company, which gives them good options at decent rates. But such is not the case for everyone.

Jump forward just a few months. The tech bubble burst and I ended up out of a job. For over a year we squeaked by without any insurance. It was rather scary actually. Our new son needed shots, of course, but they were $70 a pop at the doctor. He recommended we go to the county health department instead where the shots where subsidized down to about $10. We had a few things come up. Our son had some breathing trouble early on, something that delightfully has disappeared, and every time he'd have trouble we'd be stuck with a hefty doctor's bill. We would panic if he started having trouble on a weekend and generally we'd (well, he would) suffer through until Monday morning when a doctor's office visit was much cheaper.

I would not wish that experience on anyone, but it's something 40 million Americans experience every day.

After suffering for a while I finally landed a decent job at a small company. The drawback was they didn't offer any benefits, but compared to slogging extended warranties or worse, it was a huge step up. Once we'd saved up a small amount, managed to move out of the in-laws' house, we looked to our options for health care. We came away somewhat depressed. In the end we found a plan on the open market which gave us basically what we needed for basically what we could afford.

Since we were coming in without a current health plan they were very emphatic about not covering preexisting conditions, especially pregnancy. In fact, to cover pregnancy at all required a separate rider, a separate waiting period, and a separate deductible. That was the time of our lives so we shelled out the extra cash and put our family on hold for a bit. Things worked out OK, but I would rate that experience somewhat lower than our first insurance scenario.

Eventually we moved on to a new company, where I'm still working in fact, and they had some pretty good plans. The deductible was higher than we would have liked, and it didn't quite cover as much as we wanted, but it worked and it wasn't outrageously expensive either. But nothing stays the same, and this was no different. Every year our premium went up by $40 a month. Every month some small aspect of the plan was reduced or dropped. Vision care, gone. Dental care, optional. Coverage amounts were lowered but somehow we kept paying more.

The current situation is that we're now on a high deductible health plan coupled with a health savings account. There are some benefits and some drawbacks, the primary one being that every expense is now out-of-pocket making for a strong disincentive to seek necessary care. I'm not yet certain how I feel about this plan but so far (it's been just 3 months) I'm not convinced.

My Options

So hypothetically speaking, if I'm dissatisfied with my situation, what can I do? Well, I do have a few options.

1. Drop my health care. Obviously that's not a reasonable solution, not with the costs of health care in this country. Just about anything is preferable to that.
2. Seek out a health care on the open market. For all the people working for small companies, or who own their own business, that's their only choice. The costs are high, the benefits not all that great, and the selection is limited. Consider the amount of leverage a single customer has and you can see it's not really in the company's interests to be competitive.
3. Get a new job. In this economy that's often easier said than done, and the simple fact is I like my job. I like where I work and what I do. And even more importantly, why should that have anything to do with my health insurance? Does my employer choose my car insurance? My home insurance? My grocery store? The simple fact is that it's rather ludicrous for a health care plan to be tied to employment at all. It's merely a historical happenstance that it occurred that way at all and now we're stuck with it. Life would be much simpler, for both me and my employer, if the two were separated completely.
4. Or just stick with the one plan that's offered me.

Socialism

Let me switch topics just a bit and address a point which I think is entirely overblown by far too many people: the term "socialism". In some circles even mentioning the word is like preaching vi usage to an emacs mailing list. Too geeky for you? How about wearing a Yankees jersey to Fenway Park? You get the idea I hope. Many people have made "socialism" a religious issue when it needn't be so.

I put the word in quotes above because it's a very mis-understood word and used completely out of context. Consider for a moment a few very socialist institutions: your local police force, the school system and the Forest Service. If we were to take a strictly capitalist approach to those organizations we would have private armies, private schools and private forests. Well, we do. We have both, so don't let anybody convince you that one cannot exist in the presence of the other.

But just looking at the police for a minute, I think we can see that a capitalist police force would be much less efficient. Those with money to hire guards would be able to protect themselves. Those without, well they'd have to fend for themselves. That in turn would encourage more crime by those more destitute which would lead to a pretty miserable feedback loop I fear. So it's in everybody's self-interest to provide for a common police force. And in this country I would argue we've done a good job of it. There's the occasional account of corruption or pandering, but far and away most cops are good folks doing a good job.

We've established that some scenarios just play out better with a socialist scheme, and I would also argue that many scenarios work better with capitalist setups. And many more are a mix because dogmas rarely work perfectly in the real world. The task we face is to select the one that is the best fit. We shouldn't let ourselves be driven by blind ideology or clever witticisms about liberty or freedom. Never let yourself be so vain to think that your ideals are without fault.

Possibilities

Well then, where does that leave us? First and foremost, before you make any choices you need to go watch Frontline: Sick Around The World from PBS. It's the most honest, unbiased collection of the facts of health care around the world that I've ever seen. I reserve the right not to debate anyone who has not watched it. Yes, it's that good.

Next, take a glance at two good Washington Post articles about our current system and the proposed changes.

Now that you've done that (I'm very patient, aren't I?) I can suggest to you what I would prefer. I would like health care to be divorced from employment. I would like minimum health insurance standards to be enforced on insurance providers and required of citizens, with subsidies for low income levels. I would like the option to buy up to better insurance if I felt it would benefit me.

Speaking to a few specific points, I would like to have the public option merely for the fact that it fills a needed gap and provides a certain incentive for private companies to stay competitive. I'm not convinced yet that co-ops would fill that role, but I'm not opposed to those either.

I'm also not against a single payer system (aka the Canada system) in principle. The devil is always in the details but I don't believe we should exclude it just because it's "socialist" or because the moose people do it.

The biggest stumbling block I see to coming to consensus on health care, to bringing affordable insurance to all Americans, to reducing the nightmare that is our heath system, is that people aren't willing to listen to each other any more. I see too much hate. Too many ideologues. Far too much 24 hours cable news. We have to forget our biases and start acting civilly again. If we do, I think we all stand to benefit from the results.

Lately I've put a bit of thought into the state of drug policy in our nation. It's really not in dispute that illegal drugs are a major problem which doesn't seem to be on the road to solution. It's been over 20 years since Reagan declared a War on Drugs. The war has been rather successful in much the same way the War on Terror has, it's built up our police force and ruined the lives of countless people but really hasn't reduced the amount of drug usage.

Now before we get all into this, I guess I should lay down my stance on drug usage. Generally speaking I'm against usage of mind altering substances. There are exceptions of course, such as doctor prescribed or over the counter medicines (although I do try to avoid those whenever possible). I generally steer clear from even caffeine because a) it has never affected me much, b) I don't care much for the typical caffeine conveyances (soda) and c) I would prefer to not get addicted.

I did find it rather interesting in Michael Pollan's book, Botany of Desire, that nearly every (or maybe he did say every) culture on Earth has some sort of mind altering substance which it condones. So in once sense it's rather hypocritical of us to deny one person his drugs just because his choice differs from our own. But of course the details do matter and meth is different from pot is different from caffeine, so we can't simply lump them together.

It's only natural that we would choose to legislate something with such potentially harmful side effects, and it's human nature to want to punish those who can't follow the rules. But we have to be realistic about the results. While it may feel good to put those no-good pot smoking hippies in jail, what we really have to judge in our approach is whether we're decreasing the amount of crime and violence associated with drug abuse and whether those hippies are actually any better off. That's really the direction I'm coming at this from.

As a recent report from the CATO Institute found, when Portugal decriminalized (which is not the same as legalized) all drugs they actually saw a very positive outcome. John Tierney recently wrote on that topic as well. And Freakonomics a few months ago had a very enlightening debate about legalization.

To sum up, I'm not encouraging drug usage but I don't believe our current prohibitionist laws are doing anybody any good, from the law abiding citizen spending tax money to house criminals to the addict himself who might very much like to get sober. It's the ethical and economical thing to do.