The Truth about Finnish Factory Farming

Oikeutta Eläimille, the Finnish animal rights organization, unveiled their new campaign “Julma totuus” yesterday. And what a beautifully executed campaign it is! They have documented the state of things on 101 Finnish farms in videos and photographs, and made it all available online.

The TV magazine news show A-Studio picked up on the matter and broadcast some of the material. They also had some talking heads in to discuss the material. Jaana Husu-Kallio, the director of The Finnish Food Safety Authority failed to put up a convincing argument, and instead alluded to these being “isolated incidents” and made some vague references to “scientific advances” that are supposed to alleviate the suffering of these animals.

They also had Elisa Aaltola (a prominent animal ethics expert) in, and boy, did she make her case like Noam fucking Chomsky! While successfully linking the broader issue of our twisted relationship to animals to the discussion, she also had her facts straight, where Husu-Kallio didn’t: When asked about what the EU regulations say about the crowdedness of broiler chicken buildings, she did not have a number. Aaltola did: They are allowed to stock up to 38 kilograms of chickens per square metre.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out. I’m not getting my hopes up though. (Then again the Facebook group has gone up to 360 members in one day…) Certainly most of the information here is nothing new, and so far it has mostly been stifled by the power of denial. But if there is one person in the country who, because of this material, starts to question the origins of their food, and that results in their consumption of animals going down, then, well, there’s that much less suffering in the world. It’s a nice thought.

It feels good to see an issue so important to me get some media attention. The animal rights movement has been so effectively marginalized that it rarely gets this kind of coverage, whereas this arse dribble is funded by the state. Go figure.

Battles & Body Riddles

This weekend I was quite vividly reminded of why Warp Records was one of the most important sources of music for me during my teenage years. This happened in the form of two albums I hadn’t heard (of) before:

Mirrored by Battles, released earlier this year blew my socks off, and is quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.

Body Riddle by (Chris) Clark is.. well.. classic Warp. It’s been out for about a year now, and seems to be heavily influenced by RDJ et al. Lovely.

Taking the next step after a year of vegetarianism

It’s been about a year now since I stopped eating animals. As the reasons I did this were mainly ethical, becoming a proper vegan has been the goal ever since. To commemorate this “anniversary”, I think this is as good a time as ever to stop fucking around and take it to the next level.

There are a few main areas I still need to concentrate on before I’m able to call myself a vegan:

Food

For the past year I’ve pretty much been a lacto-ovo vegetarian, meaning that although I haven’t eaten animal body parts, I’ve continued consuming eggs and dairy in situations where it would have been somehow inconvenient to decline them.

For my eating habits at home it isn’t a very big step to drop eggs and dairy, as I very seldom buy them anyway and never use them for food I cook myself.

It does mean dropping many ready-made and half-made products though, and start cooking more often. I’m actually looking forward to this, as I like cooking and this is a good reason to spend more time on it. Living in Kallio also has the big advantage that there is a phenomenal variety of ethnic food shops and other vegan-friendly shops all within a few blocks from where I live.

The biggest change for my daily eating habits will be that for the most part I won’t be able to eat the food they serve at work, as even the vegetarian choices usually contain one form of animal secretion or another. This isn’t a big deal either, though, as I only have lunch at work occasionally, and I can always take food with me from home.

I’ll also educate my family a bit on what I’ll be able to eat. This won’t be a problem with my immediate family as my mum is very aware of these issues. Events like x-mas are a bigger challenge, but I’m confident I’ll be able to communicate my situation with a reasonable amount of explaining.

Drink

For the most part, I won’t have to change my drinking habits (thank God!), but I know they do use animal parts to make many wines and beers, so I’ll keep an eye on it.

Nutrition

I’ll start taking plant-based B12 as pills, as well as D in wintertime (although I’m aware I probably should have done that even in my carnivorous days).

Protein intake is not going to be an issue, but I’ll need to be aware of it to make sure I get enough.

Most other nutritional issues will be taken care of naturally by having enough diversity in my diet. I might try keeping a dietary calendar for a while and calculating my nutritional intake, but let’s see.

Clothing

I’ll stop buying pieces of animal carcasses to decorate myself with. This affects mostly shoes, belts, wallets, coats, and other leather goods. The apparel I already have that’s made from animals, I’ll use until they wear out naturally.

Fur is no issue, as like any sane person, I’ve always declined it.

Cosmetics

I don’t use a lot of cosmetics, but I’ll make sure the ones I do use don’t include animal parts and haven’t been tested with animals.

Medication

I don’t use a lot of medication either, apart from the occasional painkiller.

In situations where I do need medication though, I won’t decline animal-tested meds when I need them. I’m aware that there are rarely options for medication that haven’t been tested on animals. However, I will try to be aware of my options and use vegan-friendly medication where such an option exists.

Travel

This is what I think will be the hardest part of becoming a vegan. I like to travel, and I’ve been to places where vegetarian food has been difficult to find.

In most places, this is just a matter of inconvenience though. It will mean that in many places I may need to cook my own food and/or not have a very diverse diet. But this is very much an inconvenience I’m prepared to accept.

So, I still have some work to do in becoming a proper vegan. In the near future, I might write a separate post on the reasons I’m doing it. For now, I’ll just say it gives me a great peace of mind to know that I’ll no longer be directly paying for violence and murder to be inflicted on sentient beings.

Oh, and the effects on climate, global food distribution, as well as my own health are a pretty nice bonus too.

Freeform Fridays

I think Google’s well-known “20 percent time” is an absolutely brilliant idea, and we’ve been having discussions of maybe implementing something similar at EfiCode. I’m fairly sure it could end up being the best thing since sliced bread.

Here’s my take on what we could do, which I call Freeform Fridays. It consists of three key ideas: freeform work, brown bag sessions and video sessions.

The basics

Every Friday, say after 10 am, everyone is allowed to work on whatever they want. There are only two rules:

1. Whatever you do, it should not be directly related to any project you’re currently involved in at work
2. You should share with others what you’re up to

The time could be spent studying or experimenting with new technologies. It could also be used programming on some personal project. It could be contributing to an open source project, or starting a new one. It could be doing pro bono development for a non-profit organization. It could be solo work or teamwork.

If someone has an important meeting on a Friday, or if they’re just extremely busy, the free time could be rescheduled to another day.

Brown Bag Sessions

Every Friday we would provide the possibility to have take-out lunch together, and every Friday someone would do an informal presentation about some idea, technology or problem they’re working on, after which we could discuss it. We could probably schedule the sessions with a wiki page.

The Video and Pulla Sessions

We could continue the video sessions we’re already doing. They would just merge into the concept of “Freeform Fridays”.

Rumbling for EfiCode?

One of the most important things Ruby did for me was that it helped me break out of the Java ghetto. Previously, Java was the only language I really knew well, and because of that I naturally thought it was the answer to every problem in the world. I’ve since learned how severely this limited my creativity and ability to solve programming problems. Perhaps even more importantly, it actually made programming enjoyable again.

However, I still use Java professionally all the time, and don’t actually think it’s that bad. My point is that learning to program in other languages well has greatly improved my ability to think. This has made me so much better at Java as well, than I would be had I not made the leap.

So, as learning many different languages and frameworks is obviously a good idea, I’ve been thinking of possibilities to enable people to experiment with them. One idea that this severely hung over brain of mine produced today was to organize an internal “coding competition” at EfiCode. Rails Rumble was a good experience for me, and led to the thought that maybe we could do something similar.

The Gist of It

People are divided into 4-5 teams. Each team will create and deploy a web application, and they will do it in two days. The application domain can be anything, and there are no restrictions for the functionality (apart from that it must be browser-based). The only rule – and this is the interesting part – is that the application must be done in a language and framework the team has never used before. Here’s some possibilities:

• Ruby and Rails
• Smalltalk and Seaside
• Python and Django
• Erlang and Erlyweb
• Scala and Lift
• Groovy and Grails

All members of a team will be physically located in the same space. Meeting rooms would probably be ideal for this. All workspaces are equipped with network connections, a projector, whiteboards, index cards and other writing materials, and some refreshments.

Each team will get their own Subversion repository, and a fresh Linux server / VPS for deployment. All other software usage is voluntary, but access to Mingle, Trac, Campfire and a wiki will be provided.

At the end of the second day, all teams gather in the same place, and over a few beers, will in turn present their application. They’ll also be asked to discuss the peculiarities of the technology they chose, what was good about it and what wasn’t that good.

After the presentation, we’ll have a vote on whose application was best. The winners will receive some kind of prize, such as some cool gadgets.

The comp would ideally be scheduled to start on a Thursday morning and finish the following Friday evening. We could possibly do this at the time of this year’s x-mas party, so after the competition we could continue with the festivities.

I think this would be an extremely fun exercise in programming and teamwork. And who knows, maybe the beginnings of a great product or two would also come out of it.

Starting an X Virtual Framebuffer on boot

While enabling automated Selenium test runs for a project, I came across a situation where I needed to run the tests in a browser on a headless Linux (RHEL) server. I wanted to always have an X Virtual Framebuffer on to run Firefox in, so I added it to init. The following script starts Xvfb on display :2.

1. Add the following to a file called /etc/init.d/xvfb

#!/bin/sh
#
# Startup script for Xvfb
#
# chkconfig: 2345 79 21
# description: Xvfb - X virtual frame buffer
# processname: Xvfb
#
# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting Xvfb services: "
        Xvfb :2 -screen 0 800x600x8 &
        touch /var/lock/subsys/Xvfb
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping Xvfb services: "
        killproc Xvfb
        rm -f /var/lock/subsys/Xvfb
        ;;
  status)
        status Xvfb
        ;;
  restart|reload)
        $0 stop
        $0 start
        ;;
  *)
        echo "Usage: xvfb {start|stop|status|restart}"
        exit 1
esac

2. Make it runnable

chmod +x /etc/init.d/xvfb 

3. Add it to boot

/sbin/chkconfig --add xvfb
/sbin/chkconfig xvfb on