Author: simon

Update: NBR have fixed the hole

It looks like the National business review has a hole in their paywall. I don’t know if this is an intentional hole but as at the time I’m posting this it enables people to read articles that are “subscriber only content”.

A sample restricted article by Chris Keall “Did Paul Reynolds collect millions for hitting squishy targets?”  If I browse to it via http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/did-paul-reynolds-collect-millions-hitting-squishy-targets-109070 I get an error message:

However if I take the article number ( 109070 )  and access it via the URL http://www.nbr.co.nz/print/109070 I can see the whole article content:

I guess somebody made a little mistake with the way the setup things or possibly this is designed to allow search engines like google to still find and index NBR’s content.

I’ve been having a small problem on one of my server with the http daemon dying every week or two. It’s not often enough to be a huge problem or invest a lot of time in by enough of a nuisance to require a fix. So what I ended up doing was installing monit to look after things.

monit is a simple daemon that checks on server resources ( mainly services and daemons but also disk space and load ) every few minutes and sends and alert and/or restarts the service if there is a problems. So after installing the package ( apt-get install monit ) I just created a series of rules like:

check process exim4 with pidfile /var/run/exim4/exim.pid
   start program = "/etc/init.d/exim4 start"
   stop program = "/etc/init.d/exim4 stop"
   if failed host 127.0.0.1 port 25 protocol smtp then alert
   if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout

check process popa3d with pidfile /var/run/popa3d.pid
   start program  "/etc/init.d/popa3d start"
   stop program  "/etc/init.d/popa3d stop"
   if failed port 110 protocol pop then restart
   if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout

for the main processes on the machine. Sample rules are available in the config file and documentation and google is fairly safe as long as you make sure you don’t copy a 10th generation rule of a “Ruby on Rails” site ( ROR components apparently require frequent restarts). All up the whole install and configuration took me around half an hour and I’m now monitoring:

# monit summary

System 'crimson.usenet.net.nz'      running
Process 'lighttpd'                  running
Process 'sshd'                      running
Process 'named'                     running
Process 'exim4'                     running
Process 'popa3d'                    running
Process 'mysql'                     running
Process 'mailman'                   running
Device 'rootfs'                     accessible
Process 'mailman'                   running

Internetnz is the main New Zealand Internet lobby and policy organisation. More or less they take money from .nz fees and redirect it to benefit the New Zealand Internet and Internet users.

In a few days there is an election for it’s president and council. Following a post by Andy Linton to the NZNOG mailing list about the “need for a strong voice from the technical community” several technical people have put their name forward for council.

Following a discussion on the Internetnz mailing list I realised that many people are unsure of the best way to rank a list of candidates to ensure the “best” result. Looking around I was unable to find a good reference for this online so I thought I’d write a quick post here. I should give the disclaimer that I’m not an expert in this are so possibly I’ve made an error. I’m also only addressing the Council Vote note the President and Vice-President votes.

Voting System

The voting system for Internetnz is outlined here but what it simply means for the voter is that they rank the candidates from 1st to last. For each council seat the lowest polling candidates are eliminated and their votes allocated to the next preference until one has an absolute majority. For the next council seat it happens again except the ballots that had the previous round winner as first preference are eliminated from any further consideration.

You can see what happened last year here . There were 9 candidates, 6 seats and 90 voters. Rounds 1 through 7 show people being eliminated and their votes transferred around until Jamie Baddeley is elected. On Round 9 it starts again but 16 votes have been removed from the pool, these are the people who voted for Jamie as their first preference.

In rounds 9 though 15 the eliminations continue until Michael Wallmannsberger is elected. Then his 16 first preference votes are removed and it starts again until all 6 candidates are elected. The 2006 result is also online .

The interesting thing to notice is that only ballots that put an elected candidate as the 1st preference are eliminated in the first round.  So while the 16 people who voted for Jamie Baddeley helped elect him in the first round they had no influence in later rounds. On the other hand the 22 people who put Neal James, Carl Penwarden, Sam Sargent and Muchael Payne as their first preference got to participate in all 6 rounds of the election.

So what is the trick?

So out of the candidates I would characterise the following people as technical: Lenz Gschwendtner, Glen Eustace, Stewart Fleming, Andrew McMillan, Dudley Harris, Gerard Creamer, Nathan Torkington and Hamish MacEwan. This is eleven out of the 17 candidates running for the four  council seats.

Now assuming that there is a some level of support for technical candidates the worst case would be that all “technical” voters put say Nathan Torkington (to pick a well known name) as first preference. Nathan is elected as the first candidate and then the technical voters have no further influence on the other 3 councillors.

Instead we want to make sure that techie votes elect as many candidates as possible.

So what should I do?

Note: I am using the term “round” below to refer to each council seat election ( 6 in 2008, 4 in 2009 )

If you have a group of voters and a ground of candidates you have two main objectives:

1. Avoid giving a first preference to a candidate that will be elected in the early rounds so your ballot will participate in as many rounds as possible.
2. Give enough first preferences to your candidate to ensure they are not eliminated early in each round

The first idea is easy. Don’t give you first preference to a technical candidate. However this is where the second objective comes in, you need to give them enough first preference votes so that they are not eliminated early in every round.

I think the following should work:

1. Rank all the candidates in you order of preference
2. Decide how far down the list you are “happy” with the candidates (ie the 11 techies listed above)
3. Randomly (yes, really randomly) pick one of the acceptable people and put them as your first preference.

The idea now is that if say we have 40 technical people voting then each of the 11 technical candidates will end up with at least 3 or 4 first preference votes. As the lowest ranked of these is eliminated then preferences will flow to the other technical candidates (in order of most popular) . If a technical candidate is elected only around 1/10 of the technical ballots will be eliminated from later rounds so there is still a good chance of electing other candidates.

What could go wrong?

It’s possible than the random allocation of first preferences will result in a popular candidate ( eg Nathan Torkington ) randomly getting a smaller number of first preferences and being eliminated early in every round. I think this is a small risk since

1. it is likely that popular candidates will get first preferences from other voters
2. popular candidates will have a higher random chance of people put as first preference since they will be in the “acceptable” list of more techie voters
3. Even if this does happen others in the slate will still get in.

Feel free to let me know any questions ( or point out horrible errors I’ve made)

A recent thread about laptops  in the NZLUG list remind me how I’m not 100% happy with the way netbooks are evolving. The problem is that when the EEE came out the idea was that you’d buy a cheap, portable PC  which would do 90% of what people used PC for ( email, browsing, simple documents, simple video and audio).

However the problem is that the portable and cheap seems to be going out the window as the “Netbooks” now cost as much as low end laptops and are getting almost as big. So the big advantages of my existing EEE:

• Small and light enough to carry in my bag all the time and not notice.
• Cheap enough that I can not use it for 2 months but not feel like I’ve wasted money
• Cheap enough that people can give one to their kids and not worry about the kid breaking it.
• Solid state so I don’t worry about dropping it.

at sort of lost with the new netbooks. Remember how the original EEE ( nearly 2 years ago) was supposed to cost just $US199? That is the sort of price we need so people can buy them as “kids toys”, “play machines, “travel kit machines” , etc.

I’m intending to buy a replacement for my EEE in 2010 ( 3 year replacement cycle), what I’d really like to get would be:

• Case the same size as EEE70x or EEE90x series
• Display 1024×768
• 1GB RAM ( upgradeable would be nice )
• 8 or 16GB built in flash drive
• CPU fast enough to play video on full screen
• Ports: 3xUSB , Ethernet, WiFi, SD-slot, VGA, Sound/Mic , Camera
• 6+ hours battery
• Ubuntu standard
• no more than $US 300

I think having a standard Linux ( I like Ubuntu but that me ) OS that Netbook makers can just install on their machine or that targets a netbook platform would be a big win. Even better if it’s a “full status” version of Ubuntu that gets updates every 6 months or best of all it would be “standard” ubuntu and would “just work” on a smaller machine.

I’m hoping the 3rd (4th?) generation netbooks can be what I want. The 1st generation was just getting something out there ( EEE 701 ) , the second was upping the spec as people demanded more while I hope with the 3rd that the performance is now “good enough” and the cost and size can be shrunk back down again.