2012 New Year’s resolutions

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions let alone publish them but I thought I’d go for it this year. If nothing else it’ll make me feel a bit guilty not keeping to them.

1. Get weight down to 80kg – Over the last couple of years my weight has drifted up from around 85kg to 95kg. My goal for this year is to get it down to 80kg.

2. Get my learners driver license – I don’t have a drivers license at all right now. Goal for this year is to at least pass the written test and get the first stage of a full license. Hopefully I’ll actual do a bit more than this but I think the learners is a good minimum.

3. Get chess rating to 2000 (either NZCF or FIDE) – My rating is currently hovering around the 1800 level for both my New Zealand (NZCF) and International (FIDE) rating. My goal is to get this 200 points higher which will put me into New Zealand “A” grade.

4. Complete  “Learning Python the Hard way” – My programming skills are a bit weaker than I would like. The is a fairly well known book/course Learn Python the Hard way by Zed Shaw that I’d like to complete to get my skills up a bit.

I’ve tried to make the goals realistic and list things I can actually finish. The weight goal and the chess goal are probably the hardest. The weight one will require me to stick to a diet pretty much all year while the chess one will require at least a couple of hours a day of study and practise.

I’m not sure how long the programming course will take, I’m guessing 20-50 hours if I do most of the extra-credit exercises. The drivers license things should be less perhaps 20 hours of road-code study plus the test itself.

Some of the things above cost money but I feel that they are all worthwhile enough to spend a bit on. This is especially the case where I’m spending a lot of hours on something. For example there is a video version of the python course available for $US 29. It would be silly of me to invest 20-50 hours in the course but “save” $29 by not paying for the full version.

The license and programming goals are a little unambitious but with them I’m hoping to (a) have something I will actually complete and (b) be things that have obviously follow-ups.

Share

Options to change MMP

At the same time as New Zealand’s general election on November 26th 2011 it also held a referendum of the voting system. While only early results are back it looks like the vote was to keep Mixed Member Proportional ( MMP ) system and so there will be a review in 2012 of MMP. I thought I’d list many  of the possible options for changing MMP in a post for people. I’ll try to skip options that completely change the system however.

Local Electorates

  • Completely get rid of and go to a list-only system
  • Use a preferential voting system to elect members
  • Have multiple member electorates and elect MPs via STV
  • Abolish the Maori seats
  • Change the formula for decided the number of electorates ( currently 16 in the South Island and NI and Maori seats in proportion )
  • Loosen or tighten the requirements for electorates to have the same population
  • Create other  electorates for other ethnic groups, overseas NZers, electorates that anyone can “move” to.
  • electorate winners determined by Party vote ( eg if a party is entitled to 20 MPs then it’s 20 highest polling candidates are elected)
  • Otherwise disallow the election of electorate MPs that would cause an overhang.

The Lists

  • Strighter requirements for lists to be democraticly decided
  • People can be on multiple lists
  • List-only candidates not allowed
  • Changes in how list-members who leave parliament are replaced.
  • Regional lists and/or one covering the Maori Seats
  • Make any MP that forgoes their position on the list to allow a person below them into parliament ineligible to stand in the next election

The list vote

  • Threshold to be changed from current 5% ( usually reduced )
  • Removal of exception from threshold for parties that win an electorate
  • Winning a electorate reduces the threshold but doesn’t eliminate it ( eg : No Seats = 5% , 1 Seat = 4% , 2 seats = 3% 3 seats = 2% )
  • Remove/Reduce threshold for parties representing Maori interests
  • Change from Sainte-Laguë method for deciding seat allocation to another method
  • Ability of people to reorder or otherwise influence the order in which their  party lists are ordered when they vote
  • Ability to have a second choice if ones “first choice” party does not make the threshold
  • Removal from lists of candidates that stood in local electorates but failed to win or complete ban on people being allowed to be on both list and stand in electorate.
  • Only remove a losing electorate candidate from a list if they were previously the MP ( eg “thrown out by their constituents” )
  • Allow people to vote across lists . Perhaps via a STV type system of (optionally) numbering candidates from multiple parties.
  • Regional lists and/or one covering the Maori Seats
  • Threshold is 1 electorate MP , no percentage threshold
  • Electorate MPs elected for a party must exceed list MPs
  • Increase/decrease in the number of list MPs
  • Removal of separate list vote, just count electorate vote towards party-list quota.

 

Share

2011 South Island Champs

On July the 27th I went down to Christchurch for the South Island Chess Championship and and the South Island Rapid Championship at the Canterbury Chess Club. The events were 2 games a day for 4 days (Wednesday to Saturday) for the Champs and then 6 games on the Sunday for the rapid.

I flew down first thing on Wednesday for round 1 at 9:30am. It had snowed in Christchurch over the weekend and the Monday so there was a light layer of snow on the ground coming in. Since Christchurch rarely receives snow it had caused some disruption including cancelled flights earlier in the week. However my flight made it in okay and the weather was sunny although a little chilly for my stay. The club is in a light industrial area in the centre-west of Christchurch that has seen little damage from the recent earthquakes. While there were a few cracked buildings, damaged chimneys and other minor mess the area was in fact busier due to businesses from damaged areas moving their while restaurants that were open were busy due to those in the city being closed.

The Tournament had 25 entries with The top being Steven Lukey ( NZCF rating 2332, rank 11th) and John MacDonald ( Rating 2114, rank 48th) being the top ranks with me being ranked 17th in the field on 1699. Games were 90 Minutes plus 30 seconds a move and held at around 9:30 and 3pm each day.

Round 1 – White vs Ross Jackson ( 1975 )

The opening was a fairly standard c3 Sicilian with Ross making things up a little as he went so I kept a small advantage for the first 20 moves. At that point Ross made a mistake and allowed me to win the exchange ( a rook for a bishop) which solidified my advantage. However he did have 2 bishops so I did not feel my advantage was decisive especially against somebody rated 300 points higher than me so I offered a draw on move 32 which he accepted.

Rd 3- White to play 13. d5?

Round 2 – Black vs Arie Nijman ( 1895 )

Arie is an older player playing in his 55th(!) Canterbury Championship (which the SI Champs acts as). The opening was a Petroff with 5. Qe2 and white retained an advantage coming out of the opening. I started to get ahead around move 14 before blundering a pawn on move 15. I then had to defend for around 10 moves before we swapped down to a rook and a bishop each by move 29. A further swap was down to a bishop and 6 pawns (him) vs a bishop and 4 pawns (me) but we had opposite colour bishops so I though I had a chance to draw. We eventually had pawns racing down opposites of the board with him sacrificing his bishop to stop mine and me probably have to sacrifice mine soon (which probably still wouldn’t have stopped him). However he lost track of time on his clock and it ran out giving me the win.

Round 3 – White vs Dan Dolejs ( 1882 )

Dan played a Scandinavian with “2. Nf6” which I expected and had practised a little for, although he did a different variation on move 5 than I’d expected I have looked at the one he did so had a rough idea what to play. On move 9 I was the equivalent of a point ahead but I soon wandered a little as the middle game kicked in. However on move 13 I made a blunder (see diagram) which allowed a check on h2 and a strong attack from black. By the computer’s estimate I was the equivalent of 3 pawns down. However I managed to defend well and black didn’t press his advantage well until we got to the position (see diagram 2) after 24. ..Nc6. My move dxc6! wins the game since it puts me a piece up since if black tries to take my queen then I take both his rooks and queen my pawn on b8. Blacks reply ( Rxe1 26. cxb7 Kxb7 27. Qxd8 Rxa1 28. Bxa1 ) left me a bishop up and an active queen which I used to pick off black’s pawns and eventually checkmate (although I missed a few earlier mating chances).

So after day 1 I have 1.5/2 against 2 higher rated opponents and was pretty happy.

Rd 3 - Position after 24. ...Nc6

Round 4 – Black vs Hamish Gold ( 1831)

I used to play against Hamish when we were at school. I gave up chess but he kept playing and last year came 1st equal in this tournament. The opening was a fairly standard Slav with an advantage to white after a let my position get a little cramped. Around move 19 I turned the tables a little and pushed a bishop and two Knights against white’s queen nad got ahead by 2 pawns. I was however short on time and offered a draw instead of risking going for the win.

Round 5 – Black vs Quintin Johnson ( 2116 )

With 3 points out of 4 I was actually playing on board 2 for round 5, however 3rd ranked Quintin Johnson was a much harder opponent. Agsin I had a slav opening but miscalcuated a couple of moves and got myself in trouble by move 15.  White build on his lead and overpowered me with his attack.

Round 6 – White vs Edward Rains ( 1884 )

The opening was a c3 Sicilian with g6. Black had a strong bishop down g7->a1 and after he swapped his white bisop for my f3 Knight and I made some lazy moves he captured both my centre pawns. I for one back at the expense of swapping a lot of material until we had just a knight, a rook & two pawns on each side plus he had a central passed pawn. 20 moves of manoeuvring later ( a 3 refusals of my offers for a draw ) . He unexpectantly swapped off all the pieces, made an inaccurate move and gave me a winning endgame.

I was now on 4 points out of 6 which I was very happy with given then higher ratings of all my opponents.

Round 7 – Black vs Ross McKarras ( 2070 )

White unexpectedly played the Bishops opening ( 1. e4 e5 2. Nc4 ) and I played it completely wrong to leave me down a full pawn and in a cramped position my move 10. A strong attacked followed and I risigned on move 40.

Round 8 – White vs Nigel Richardson ( 1705 )

I pulled out a sideline against the Alekhine’s defense which my opponent wasn’t familar with so he was on the back foot after the opening. I didn’t managment to convert my lead but was still a little ahead before he made a mistake and I gained a pawns and an attack. I missed the best continuation however and settled for being 2 pawns up and swapping queens. Some bad play by both sides followed (in timetrouble) until I eventually won.

I ended up with 4th equal with 5 points out of 8. However since all my opponents had a higher rating than me this was much higher than my expected score of around 2 so I will gain several rating points from the tournament.

Share

July Update

I just updated this blog to wordpress 3.2 which came out this week. Only a small glitch caused by me running an old theme which wasn’t 100% compatible. WordPress itself seems to be better. I had a quick look at the Twenty Eleven theme which comes packaged with wordpress and it looks nice even via my mobile browser. I’m tempted to update from the Simplicity theme which I currently use.

I updated my hosted Linux VPS to Ubuntu 10.04 last week and took the opportunity to change the web software around when I did it. I’ve now replaced lighttpd+fastcgi with a standard apache2+mod_php setup but I’ve put Varnish 3.0 web accelerator in from of everything. Complete overkill for a bunch of small sites that I host but it gives me peace-of-mind for slashdotting type situations. Main reason for the move is that lighttpd is a little obscure these days while I use apache and varnish at work.

Last week I attended the 3 day NetHui conference in Auckland. The conference was aimed around Internet Policy for New Zealand. An interesting 3 days during which I attended (and missed) plenty of great discussion, talking to interesting people and saw a few great talks. The event was cheap to allow more people to attend and features a wide range of people including Lawyers, educationalists, techies, businessmen, civil servants and a few “interested in a private capacity” people. Great event. Here is a link to the media/blog coverage.

Later this month I’ll be in Christchurch for the South Island Chess Champs ( link to site not page since sites uses frames!!). Christchurch has been hit by 3 big earthquakes in the last year (and hundreds of small ones) and thousands of buildings have been damaged (Many have or will be demolished) so it will be interesting seeing some of this for myself (although I’ll be playing chess during most of the day). The tournament is one the other side of down from the most damaged areas however.

Also coming up this month I’ll be at Barcamp Auckland 5 , probably not speaking though.

The Call of Papers and Call for Miniconfs have also just come out for Linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat. Once again we’ll hopefully be able to run a Sysadmin Miniconf and I’m also thinking of putting in a talk proposal.

Share

Work shuffle

Work recently had a bit of a reorg and my “infrastructure” team (me and two other guys who look after the hardware, network, database,  OS and everything apart from the the actual website code) were moved from the “online” division to “Central IT” . Next week we physically move down to the basement (yes, really) to be with the rest of IT.

Note: One of my rules of seating is “always be as close to marketing as possible” . This is because marketing (usually) have a bit of clout in any organisation and will always get at least semi-decent offices with things like windows, pool tables, working lifts etc. Departments like IT, Helpdesk, accounting and security on the other hand have no pull and will get pushed into windowless dungeons whenever the reorganisations happen.

The main thing I’m worried about with my new job is that I’m not cut of from my “platform users” , we are about 2 minutes walk away (for now, potentially more later) so it’s not too far for meetings but certainly too far for unsceduled chats. So I won’t know if a major stoary is breaking (with the potential load on the system) just by watching frantic acticity any more, nor will I be able to walk a few metres to check a bug, ask somebody a questions etc.

Just last week we had a bug on the site for a few minutes that caused one article to 302 (temp redirect) to itself for about 10 minutes. I noticed the big jump in hits and was able to talk to the 2 editors in charged or the article and the head programmer right away. As of next week something similar will take much longer as I would either have to run upstairs (and be offline) or phone/skype people until I got hold of the right ones.

It’s a common situation with disjointed teams but it means that things have to get a lot more formal in order to keep the site reliable. So I’ll probably be spending the next few weeks going over rollout, escalation, ticketing and similar procedures because I’ll no longer be able to just turn around and yell to find out if somebody is running something causing a problem.

At least one good thing that’ll come out of this is that we won’t be doing the “level 1” helpdesk stuff for the dept any more, so we’ll be able to concentrate on our actual job.

Share

lca2011 – Fri Close

Apology re keynote material

Lightning talks

  • New policy on open source software in Govt, stronger, participate in community
  • Linux.conf.au in antartica. Cooler than brisbane, drier than wellington
  • other conferences by lca drupal down under, wordcampe, pycon. You run your own conf, LA may even support. Join planet LA, Join a LUG
  • Next 12 months in IP law: ACTA will happen in next 12 months. TPP might be stopped by NZers. Iinet decission very soon. DRM [cutoff]..
  • usbdoodad.info . Surface mount soldiering help, kits available
  • macbook people. not too hard these day. Get hold of reefer bookloaded. partition under OSX. Leave a gap between linux and OSX partition. testing many common distributions
  • LDAP. ldapauthmanager software
  • OSIA Open source industry australia. Join for advocacy & networking
  • Debian 6.0 released next week!
  • Donna promoting “Digitise the Dawn”
  • secan does ipv6 now says Rusty
  • Women in Open source, under-represented still. No funding. Suggested ideas if they had money. training courses. adainitiative.org – looking for funding for 2 years of full time work on women in open source.
  • SUDE studio – create virtual appliances
  • new conference in australia – oct 2011 – Sydney – php conf australia – twitter.com/phpconfau

Closeup

  • lca2012 in Ballarat
  • http://lcaunderthestars.org.au
  • 2013 bid process in next few weeks
Share

lca2011 – Fri session 5 – Open source in education

Open Source in Education – ASHS One Year On by Patrick Brennan

  • Followup to last year
  • greenfield school – flagship school – no classrooms, learning commons, 2 floors of open plan
  • 2011 enrolments 740 – 16-18 year olds
  • open for teaching 4 days per work, 5th day do “impact projects” eg work to raise money for charity, local video storage system
  • Ubuntu Desktops, teacher laptops
  • Xero for account
  • Mandriva Servers
  • Terminal servers for edge cases
  • Cloud Apps
  • Single sign on
  • Windows remains for building management
  • Education space Microsoft ffocussed
  • Heavily subsidised by the MoE and Microsoft
  • Established Norms / established design refs
  • Perception that students should train with “real world” tools
  • Free as in beer vs free as in freedom
  • Licensing costs – NZ Govt / MS Subsidised – My Opinion underhanded monopoly
  • Learning tax – expensive for software at home – leads to piracy
  • Web filtering
  • MOE funds watchdog to 10Mb/s
  • $5000 to install Cisco device supporting 100Mb/s
  • Coast to support watchdog to 1Gb/swith existing FW $0
  • “Dill” provide no installed OS on desktops
  • Teachers working out how to do with tools, sharing techniques on eduwiki with other schools
  • No learning tax yields freedom
Share

lca2011 – Fri Session 3 – Lightweight messaging

Lightweight messaging for a connected planet – Andy Piper

  • The internet of things, smart devices in our hands
  • Instrumented, interconnect, intelligent
  • MQTT = MQ telemetry transport
  • publish/subscribe paradigm.
  • Optimized for Low bandwidth, high latency, unreliable, high cost networks
  • Expect client apps to have limited processing resources
  • provide QOS where possible
  • simple semantics, minimized format ( 2 bytes minimum packet )
  • “last will and testament” to publish if client goes offline
  • what about HTTP – MQTT much simplier, message not document centric, less verbose, lightweight
  • variable QOS
  • Free Client API / libraries for most languages, various propriety products as well
  • various examples
  • IBM rsmp official client – free for personal use, various binaries for many platforms
  • http://mosquitto.org – packages for various dists, windows, Mac. Open source , python and C++ examples
  • Random stuff – file syncs, desktop notifications, digital to analogue readouts, LEGO microscope control
  • Smart meters, heathcare patient monitoring
Share

lca2011 – Friday Session 2 – & habits of PMs

The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Project Managers – Carol Smith

  • Works in summer of code office, previous network operations, enterprise software
  • 11 interviews at google to get her position
  • Habit 1 – spend more than 2 weeks in meetings with engineers, “makers schedule vs managers schedule” by Paul Graham
  • Habit 2 – Assuming all the engineers you work with are purposefully tryin g to do a bad job and sabotage the project
  • Assume competence – People want to take pride in their work and do a good job
  • Habit 3 – Keep a checklist – creates a big gant chart, bugs engineers constantly about status
  • Needs to be familiar with technology and project to understand what engineering is talking about when there are problems
  • Habit 4 – Let middle and senior level managers meddle with timeline
  • maintain credibility and managers will feel less inclined to meddle
  • Habit 5- make everything an emergency
  • Don’t cry wolf – get people to understand if you do say something has to be done today it really does
  • Habit 6 – Break down rapport with engineers whenever possible
  • cookies
  • don’t use small cookies to reward directly, use to build rapport not reward directly
  • Habit 7 – Assume that the dates engineers give you are spot on
  • engineers will try and tell you something will please you, under promise and overdeliver, take past estimates from that person into account
Share

lca2011 – Fri Session 1 – LinuxCNC

All Chips , No Salsa – Bdale Garbee

  • Got tabletop 3-axis mill 2nd hand, sloppy but got useful work
  • Bought new mill in 2006 305x765x560mm working volume + CNC conversion kit
  • EMC2 – open source machine control system
  • EMC2 – HAL between layers – very modular – real time – Linux user interface – “axis” user interface – “trivkins” control module
  • Open vs  closed loop. Closed loop tools feedback to controller to tell it result of commands issued
  • stepping vs servo motors
  • Pluto-P board – parallel port connected – source and open drivers – not open hardware but “obvious” FPGA so transparent
  • Amps boast 3.3 volt to 60-80 volts at several amps
  • Use windshield wiper motors to test before rigging up to big stuff
  • wires enclosed in clear vinyl tubing
  • http://gag.com/homeshop
  • HeeksCAD / HeeksCNC
Share