March 2015 – Simon Lyall's Blog

Parallel Importing vs The Economist

For the last few years I have subscribed to the online edition of The Economist magazine. Previously I read it via their website but for the last year or two I have used their mobile app. Both feature the full-text of each week’s magazine. Since I subscribed near 15 years ago I have paid:

Launched Jun 1997   US$ 48
Jun 1999            US$ 48
Oct 2002            US$ 69
Oct 2003            US$ 69
Dec 2006            US$ 79
Oct 2009            US$ 79
Oct 2010            US$ 95
Oct 2011            US$ 95
Mar 2014            NZ$ 400 (approx US$ 300)

You will note the steady creep for a few years followed by the huge jump in 2014.

Note: I reviewed by credit card bill for 2012 and 2013 and I didn’t see any payments, it is possible I was getting it for free for two years 🙂 . Possibly this was due to the transition between using an outside card processor (Worldpay) and doing the subscriptions in-house.

Last year I paid the bill in a bit of a rush and while I was surprised at the amount I didn’t think to hard. This year however I had a closer look. What seems to have happened is that The Economist has changed their online pricing model from “cheap online product” to “discount from the printed price”. This means that instead of online subscribers paying the same everywhere they now pay slightly less than it would cost to get the printed magazine delivered to the home.

Unfortunately the New Zealand price is very high to (I assume) cover the cost of shipping a relatively small number of magazines via air all the way from the nearest printing location.

So readers in New Zealand are now charged NZ$ 736 for a two-year digital subscription while readers in the US are now charged US$ 223 ( NZ$ 293) for the same product. Thus New Zealanders pay 2.5 times as much as Americans.

Fortunately since I am a globe-trotting member of the world elite® I was able to change my subscription address to my US office and save a bunch of cash. However for a magazine that publishes the Big Mac Index comparing prices of products around the world the huge different in prices for the same digital product seems a little weird.

LInks: WW1 Maps, Shawshank, Microservices, Dev Interviewing

40 Maps that Explain World War One – A bunch of maps from all sorts of sources that explain different aspects of the origins and path of WW1. Huge rang of stuff.
On Interviewing as a Junior Dev – Liz Rush kept a record of her hunt for a job. Lots of anecdotes, advice and data.
The Little-Known Story of How The Shawshank Redemption Became One of the Most Beloved Films of All Time – Good long article about the making of the movie with quotes from those involved.
State of the Art in Microservices by Adrian Cockcroft (video 38min) – A good intro to Microservices and an overview of what is currently happening in the area. Slides are here

Books for Sale – Part 2

I’m doing a book clean-out. The following are all for sale. Remainders will be given away to charity or something. Pickup is from either my house (Dominion Rd/Balmoral, Auckland) or my I can meet during the week near my work in Wyndham Street in the Auckland CBD.

Prices as mark, discount if you want to by more than 5 or so. Links may not match the exact edition I am selling.

If you are interested in any please contact me via email ( simon@darkmere.gen.nz ) or over twitter ( @slyall ). Sale will run to end of April or so.

See Part 1 for more books

Business

Business @ The Speed of Stupid: Building Companies after the technology Shakeout by Dan Burke – $5
Fortune Strategy by Ean Higgins & Arun Abey – $2
What Management is : How it works and why it is everyone’s business (200 edition) Joan Magretta $10
The Company of the Future – Frances Caincross – $10
The mind of the CEO – Jeffrey Garten – $5

Commentary / Opinion / Speculation / Politics

The Pentagon’s New Map – Thomas P. M. Barnett – $5
Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman – $10
Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau – $10
Super Crunches by Ian Ayres – $10
The Waste makers by Vance Packard (1963 edition) – $4
The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (1961 edition) – $4
Illiberal Education: The politics of race and Sex on Campus by Dinesh D’Souza – $10
Colossus: The rise and fall of the American Empire by Niall Ferguson $10
Antifragile: Things that gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – $10

Technical

Voices from the Sky: Previews of the coming Space age (1966) by Arthur C Clarke – $8
Flight into Space: The facts about space exploration (1957) by John Norton Leonard – $4
Teach Yourself Physics by David Bryant – $4
The Subatomic Monster: Essays on Science by Isaac Asimov – $5
Building Service Provider Networks by Howard Berkowitz – $10
Homepage Usability: 50 websites Deconstructed by Jacob Neilsen – $10
Permissions A survival Guide: Blunt talk about Art as Intellectual Property – Susan Bielstein – $20
Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American law by Susan Scafidi – $10

Travel / Misc

London Orbital : A walk around the M25 by Iain Sinclair – $10
Simon’s Cat (hardback) by Simon Tofield – $10
Hotel Babylon: Inside the Extravagance and Mayhem of a Luxury Fire-Star Hotel – Anonymous and Imogen Edward-Jones – $5
Raggle-taggle: Adventures with a fiddle in Hungary and Roumania (Hardcover 1935) – Walter Starkie – $20

Books for sale – Part 1

Prices as mark, discount if you want to by more than 5 or so. Links may not match the exact edition I am selling.

If you are interested in any please contact me via email ( simon@darkmere.gen.nz ) or over twitter ( @slyall ) Sale will run to end of April or so.

See Part 2 for more books

Science Fiction / Fantasy

Deryni Books by Katherine Kurtz, all paperbacks of used quality unless otherwise named.

Deryni Rising – $4
Deryni Checkmate – $4
High Deryni – $4
Camber of Culdi (2 copies) -$4 each
The Bishops Heir (Hardback, ripped jacket) – $4
The Quest for Saint Camber – $4
The Deryni Archives – $4

Science Fiction Short Story Collections

Apeman, Spaceman (Anthropological Science Fiction) – 1970 by Leon E. Stover (Editor), Carleton S. Coon (Foreword), Harry Harrison (Editor) – $4
Star Streak, Stories of Space Paperback – Edited Betty M. Owen – $4
Quark 1 – edited by Samuel R. Delany, Marilyn Hacker – $4
The Seventh Galaxy Reader Edited by Frederik Pohl – $4
Impossible Places– Short stories by Alan dean Foster – $4

Sci-Fi Novels

The Jesus factor By Edward Corley (poor quality paperback) – $2
Killer Pine – Lidsay Gutteridge – $4

Other Fiction

Florance of Arabia: A novel by Christopher Buckley – $10
Boomsday: A novel by Christopher Buckley (HardCover) – $10
The Third World War; The untold Story by John Hackett (Hardcover) – $5

History

The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz – $10
The Making of Modern Russia by Lionel Kochan – $4
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick – $4
The Tunnels of Cu Chi: A Harrowing Account of America’s Tunnel Rats in the Underground Battlefields of Vietnam by Tom Mangold – $10
The IRA – Tim Pat Coogan (1970 Edition) – $5
Who Dares Wins: The Story of the SAS 1950-1982 by Tony Geraghty – $10
Guardians: Strategic Reconnaissance Satellites by Curtis Peebles – $5
Empire: How Britain made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson (big hardback with lots of photos) – $15
Safety in Numbers: The Mysterious world of Swiss banking by Nicholas Faith – $10
Centenary: 100 Years of All Black Rugby – R.H Chester – $20
What’s Gnu: A history of the Crossword puzzle by Michelle Arnot – $10

Static networking in Ansible the quick and dirty way

I’m in the process of setting up a server at home to replace an old one. I’m maintaining the new one via Ansible to try and get keep as tidy as possible. Part of the setup involves setting up a bridge interface so that I can run kvm virtual machines on the box.

In order to make the box a little more stable I decided to make the ethernet settings static rather than via DHCP. Unfortunately ansible doesn’t really have a nice standard way of setting up network ports (there are a few modules around but none in the main distribution). After looking around I decided just to make a simple ansible role to handle the files.

The machine is running centos7. The networking initially looked like:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp2s0
::::::::::::::
HWADDR=9C:B6:54:07:E8:49
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NAME=enp2s0
ONBOOT=yes
#

I decided the easiest way was to just manually create and copy the files. So I created a static_networking role.

roles/static_networking/handlers/main.yml
roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-enp2s0
roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-bridge0
roles/static_networking/tasks/main.yml
roles/static_networking/tasks/setup-redhat.yml

Inside the tasks the main.yml just loads up the setup-redhat.yml which is:

---
- name: copy files if they are listed in var
  copy: src={{ ansible_hostname }}/ifcfg-{{ item }} dest=/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ owner=root mode=0644
  with_items: static_interfaces
  notify:
  - restart network

Which is fairly simple. It just goes though a list of “static_interfaces” for a host and copies these files from the local machine to the machine I am setting up. If the copy makes any changes it sends a notify.

For the machine “grey” I just create some entries in hosts_vars/grey.yml

static_interfaces:
 - enp2s0
 - bridge0

and then the files themselves:

roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-bridge0
::::::::::::::
DEVICE="bridge0"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE=Bridge
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=10.1.1.28
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=10.1.1.1
::::::::::::::
roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-enp2s0
::::::::::::::
DEVICE="enp2s0"
ONBOOT="yes"
NM_CONTROLLED="no"
BOOTPROTO="none"
BRIDGE=bridge0
HWADDR="9c:b6:54:07:e8:49"

which are the actual files to be copied. If any files are actually updated the handler will be triggered

roles/static_networking/handlers/main.yml 
---
# Called by "name" when network config files are changed
- name: restart network
  service: name=network state=restarted

Overall it seems to work and I only broke networking once (the ip on enp2s0 keep getting re-added until I forced network manager to forget about it). I wouldn’t really recommend this sort of thing for non-trivial sites though. Keeping per-site configs in roles isn’t really the best way to do things.