- The Classic Slum – an extended review and summary of the book of the same name by Robert Roberts. It is about the English slum that Roberts grew up in the early 1900s.
- IPOing in NZ – notes from the NZX and Xero presentation – Summary by Lance Wiggs of a presentation by Xero CEO Rod Drury. The slides are also linked.
- Ungridlocked – What happened when New York closed traffic in Time and Herald Squares.
- Columbia’s Last Flight – The inside story of the investigation—and the catastrophe it laid bare (2003)
Category: Misc
Misc Stuff
Links: Youporn, Cycling, Music and time
- Building a Website to 200 Million pageviews and beyond. – ( slides and video ) Very interesting talk about youporn.com migrating to a new architecture. The main link is too a summary on highscalability.com
- Why Jonny can’t ride – Why biking to school is banned at many US schools.
- Meet the New Boss, Worse than the old boss – Musician David Lowery compares economics of music now and in the past
- A ticking time-bomb – How the lack of time-synchronisation of medical devices can kill
Links: Scaling Pinterest, NYT and SF charts, Flickr
- How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – Could yahoo have grown the flickr community from 2005 and beaten out facebook.
- A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time
- Amanda Cox and countrymen chart the Facebook I.P.O – Serious cool behind the scenes on the charts in the New York Times
- Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data
Links: safecrackers, media, olympics, biography, singularity
- Interviews With People Who Have Interesting or Unusual Jobs: Ken Doyle, Safecracker
- Fungible A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead
- Dear New York Times & Wall Street Journal: How About Some Sensible Digital Subscription Pricing?
- Can London Afford the $14.5 Billion Price Tag of the Summer 2012 Olympic Games? I think Vanity Fair gets a bad rap, it has good articles and lots of pictures of pretty people
- I the multi-volume biography dead I’ll admit I have attempted the 8-part Winston Churchill biography but ran out of stream with a couple of parts to go.
- Welcome to Life « Tom Scott A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.
Links: China vs UK, glasses, unlimited flying & Online Ed.
- What My 11 Year Old’s Stanford Course Taught Me About Online Education
- Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money If nothing else I need to pay less when I get some new glasses.
- A Tale of Two Terminals comparison between the launches of Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital Airport and Heathrow Terminal 5 from the perspective of someone used to handling complex software implementations
- The frequent fliers who flew too much This reminds me a lot of Internet (especially ISP) based unlimited accounts that fail to take account of people’s usage patterns when additional usage is free
- When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed Has the death toll from the drug Vioxx been greatly underestimated?
Interesting links for May 5th 2012
- A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Overview on how early search engine Inktomi was knocked out by Google. The Hacker News discussion is quite good and includes a link to a video talk by Inktomi’s co-founder.
- Reddit interview – IAmA Part Time Hooker in New Zealand – Raw Interview or Summary of Q/A . Prostitution is legal in New Zealand so some people in other countries find it interesting how it works. NSFW obviously.
- Are Shakespeare’s Plays Encoded within Pi? – YouTube . The full text is in the text section of the page.
- Gather – Auckland BarCamp has decided to rebrand itself as “Gather”. Not sure of the point especially since they don’t even own gather.co.nz (or gathernz.com or something). Anyway it’s a pretty good unconference that happens each year. This year it is one June 30th
New Year’s Resolutions – 3 month progress report
At the start of this year I made some New Years Resolutions. I thought I’d review how I was going after 3 months.
- Weight – Unchanged. Doing a bit of work here but obviously not enough, at least it is not going up.
- Driver License – Not started yet
- Chess – Done a lot of work here, plenty of practice and I’ve scored some good results. Feel I’ve made some improvement
- Programming – Not started yet
Overall it doesn’t look so good but I’m actually pretty happy. The chess is going well and I’m intending to start the programming course later this month.
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.
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.
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.