LCA09 Day -2 – Saturday

After leaving my packing etc to the last minute I caught the plane over to Sydney and then to Hobart  during the day on Saturday. Fairly eventful (although I think people were paying a bit more attention to the safety demonstration after the crash in New York last week) except for the quick glimpse of A380 in Sydney and Qantas losing my bag  (which had me worried for the rest of the day since I just had the clothes I was in, my wallet, passport and laptop. )

Fortunately Qantas rang me on Saturday evening to say they found the bag so I won’t have to spend all day Sunday buying clothes and other random stuff in Hobart.

Landing in Hobart the airport is pretty small (no air-bridge) and a bit of a trip out of town ( $15
hotel bus ). I thought the landscape looked a slightly greener shade than other parts of Australia and the houses a bit older than average.

The Hotel I’m in for tonight is just past the casino and only 10 minutes walk from the University so not situated too badly. I went for a walk to dinner and got into the main Sandy Bay shops after around 20 minutes ( The Casino restaurants looked overpriced and not that great ).

Wandering around I ended up trying a fish-and-chip place since I hadn’t had that for a while. It was okay but at best a 6/10 . Unfortunately the nearby German bakery is closed tomorrow so I’ll have to wait till Monday to try it. The pizza place looked nice (in a cheap pizza sort of way).

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Economist plus meme

Why I love The Economist :

China could stop making aggressive gestures towards Taiwan and buy Malaysia instead. It’s already run by Chinese, so they’d hardly notice the difference. And Barack Obama, committed to uniting America, could defuse the nation’s culture wars by purchasing an alternative homeland for those of his countrymen who want more use of the death penalty, less gun control and no gay marriage. A slice of Saudia Arabia’s empty quarter would do nicely: there’s plenty of space and the new occupants would have lots in common with the locals

From O give me a home… in the Nov 13th 2008 edition.

and the Book Meme thats going around Planet Linux Australia.

  • Grab the nearest book.
  • Open it to page 56.
  • Find the fifth sentence.
  • Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  • Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

and mine is:

Black has a backward d-pawn and a weak square on d5, though it is difficult for White to exploit either – the d-pawn is well guarded, while occupation of d5 often simply results in exchanges.

From Understanding the Chess Openings by Sam Collins.

Which is I guess what you get when you insist on the nearest book.

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Election day ( NZ version )

After a bit of excitement earlier in the week with the US election today it’s New Zealand’s turn. Unlike the US where the vote takes place on a week day and most people have to fit voting in between work in NZ we have it on a Saturday in early spring ( and it is nice an sunny outside right now).

In NZ it’s also pretty easy to vote early or at any voting booth either in your electorate or outside it, so you can just pick whichever is the closest on the day ( although I have 2 places within 5 minutes walk of my house so I’ll probably go to one of them).

More about the NZ electoral system on wikipedia and elections.org.nz .

This year things are fairly interesting as it looks like there is a good chance there will be a change in government with the Centre-Left Labour Party being replaced by the Centre-Right National Party.

The government is actually ( and the new government will also probably be ) a coalition with one big party and smaller parties either formally part of the government or mostly supporting it.

In Labour’s case one of their big problems is that the New Zealand First party ( which is one of their partners) has gone beyond their previous populist position of bashing immigrants and otherwise pandering to their over 65 base to some very dubious practices including lying about donations, hiding them and then trying to give donors diplomatic posts or their industry government money. Which all might be legitimate in some countries like the US but in NZ is usually viewed as corruption.

Labour’s problem is that since it’s needs New Zealand First’s vote it has turned a blind eye to much of this and said it’s a matter for the courts etc. It’s also said it’ll probably keep the NZF leader Winston Peters in cabinet if it gets re-elected ( NZF is really the Winston Peter’s party since he founded and completely dominates it) . Labour is also perceived as a bit tired and running out of policies ( third-term-itis ) .

The opposition National Party while not looking stunning ( the leader John Key is a little bland and politically in-experienced) is at least looking a bit fresher ( I’m trying to ignore Maurice Williamson etc ) and while it probably won’t win enough votes to govern by itself it will certainly be the largest party and the big question is will it have a majority with it’s “Natural” coalition partners or will it have to reach out to more distant parties ( or failing that Labour might even be able to cobble together a wide ranging coalition) .

Personally I’ve been considering voting for National this year since I’m a generally right-wing on economic issues and liberal on social issues. The main things I dislike about National are:

  • Some knee-jerk recent policies to give welfare payments to mortgage holders who lose their jobs, I’m sorry but that is what employment insurance is for and discriminates against people like myself who rent.
  • Some ideas to change the electoral system ( not very defined beyond the don’t like the current one ) . I don’t like this because they will probably do their best to favour larger parties and also I dislike the fact that where somebody lives determines the worth of their vote. I live now and have lived previously in safe electorates where my local MP has zero chance of not being elected so my local vote doesn’t matter. On the other hand if I lived across the street ( really! ) I would be in an electorate which is competitive and my vote would matter quite a lot.
  • I generally dislike “tough on crime” policies of building more jails, longer sentences, reduced parole etc since I don’t believe they fix the problem. The things that will reduce the crime rates involve helping poor families and parents of kids that are likely to grow up to be criminals. These programmes are a lot cheaper per person ( verses $50,000 plus per year of housing a prisoner) and more effective in the long term but don’t have the headline grabbing that longer sentences does.

I also favour lower government spending in general ( except for my pet stuff like fibre networks and public transport  ) which I’m not sure National is committed to.

So I think this year I’ll be voting for Act again. I’ll admit they do push some of the anti-crime stuff I dislike but as a rule they are more liberal than National on social issues while I really like their policy of freezing government spending to the same level ( adjusted for inflation and population growth ). If National gets in then Act will be a coalition partner and I want to to have more influence over the government’s policies that it will have with more MPs.

Results from the election will be on the official website from 7pm tonight and also in the media ( eg the Herald ) . Personally I’ve got a little “Election Party” to go to at a friend’s place.

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Newspaper Links

Some links from the world on online newspapers.

The Christian Science Monitor today announced that it was going to stop publishing a daily print edition, switch to a weekly print edition and expand it’s online edition. I’ve been following a bunch of the the Monitor’s RSS feeds for a few years now and I find it’s independent voice ( it doesn’t tend to use wire feeds) interesting. See also the New York Times story on the news.

Journerdism has “10 ridiculously cheap, relatively easy, small steps you can take to change an old school newsroom culture to be more forward thinking and web friendly” . I’ve added Number ten to my todo list.

and Xark has 10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news .

Nothing much close to home although I did see Keith Locke campaining on Saturday and took a couple of photos of him for Wikipedia. I mentioned that it’s a shame that the new Green’s Website has a default ( meaing “all rights reserved” ) copyright on it unlike the old one which allowed photos of MPs and other stuff to be used. I mailed their webmaster a few weeks ago but nothign back, maybe I’ll try again in a few weeks when things calm down after the election.

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Split RSS feeds

In the past this blog has been mostly a tech orientated one with around 2/3s of the posts I make being about computers and the Internet. With the new software I’ve decided to split things a little so I can post on some other subjects. WordPress makes it fairly easy to provide alternative feeds on a per-category basis so I’ve split things as follows:

  1. Tech is anything Computer or Internet related, benchmark here is stuff that I think people on somewhere like planet.linux.org.au might be interested in. ( I’ve asked the maintainers of that planet to switch their feed to this)
  2. Chess is chess related stuff
  3. Misc is general stuff not in the above two categories like what I did last week, posts on random junk etc, the sort of stuff random family and stalkers might be interested in.
  4. Everything just covers every post andis what the old RSS feeds redirects to.

Posts ( like this one ) that cover multiple topics will be posted to multiple feeds. But I’ll guess I see how things go.

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End of July Misc post.

As usual I’m a bit behind in stuff but the excuse this time is that around 6 months
ago I started playing chess competitively again ( previously was when I was still at school) so
I’ve been spending a bit of time at it. Right now it involves going to
[the club](http://www.aucklandchesscentre.co.nz/webcontent/default.aspx) ( site being redone soon) one evening
a week, the odd tournament and some study and practice on [sites like this](http://chess.emrald.net/tProfile.php?TacID=21765) .

I’m now [ranked](http://www.poisonpawn.co.nz/nzcfratings.htm) 332nd= in the country but
I think with a bit of work I could be in the top 200 in a few months if I keep at it.

Other stuff that is happening is that a proposal for a [Sysadmin Miniconf](http://sysadmin.miniconf.org/) has been submitted
to [Linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart](http://linux.conf.au/). More details to come.

Some links:

A good paper at Usenix 2008 on [Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage](http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson_html/)
[PDF version with the diagrams](http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson.pdf) .

…and an interesting article on [How long will we be trapped in this mobile hell hole?](http://www.smstextnews.com/2008/07/how_long_will_we_be_trapped_in_this_mobile_hell_hole.html)
panders to my dislike of mobile applications.

And finally a Watchmen Trailer / Heroes Mashup video:

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Musical Interlude

I thought I’d post a little about some music for a change. I’m not really
a big music person, I’ve only been to a handful of live concerts in my life
and I find it very hard to concentrate with noise around so I don’t usually
have music playing in the background or wear a portable media player when I’m
about.

However I find that I can listen to fairly “non complicated” music when I’m on
the computer at work without getting too distracted. The main music I listen
to is a [Ambient Nights](http://www.ambient-nights.org/) compilations
by “Alex Hephaestion” ( real name unknown ). Each of the fifty or so compilations ( The full
list is on [this page](http://www.ambient-nights.org/music.php) ) is a CD worth
of about half a dozen tracks blended one after the other.

They are all free to download as high quality mp3s from the site and even come
with Cover Art etc. My favourites are [Life as it is](http://www.ambient-nights.org/an13.php) and [Ambient Nights CD5](http://www.ambient-nights.org/an05.php) but
I tend to keep a bunch on a USB key and just play them one after the other over my headphones at work ( to try on drown
out CNN which people like to leave running on a TV in the middle of
the office ). I really recommend giving them a go.

Another song I like is [Halcyon + on + on](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halcyon_%28Orbital_song%29) by
Orbital. I’ve heard it called “The Soundtrack of the Sunrise” . Here is a youtube
video of the music with the “Star Gate” sequence from the movie [2001: A Space Odyssey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_%28film%29) as
the background. It works pretty well.

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Zombies and Solaris

I’ll be upfront and say I’m not a big fan of Solaris, sure
it was cool back in the 90s but with the exception of a couple of cute
features like ZFS and perhaps Solaris Services Manager the
whole thing feels like a 1999 Slackware install with a few random multi-gigabyte Java processes using up all the RAM.

The lack of decent package management, old versions of software ( “find -mmin -10” is something I really like to use), slow booting, different device name for every version ( I don’t care what the hardware type is if it moves packets then ethN is a good enough naming convention) and of course random multi-gigabyte Java processes really put me off.

Today my bit of fun was upgrading a Solaris 10 box that needed zfs but had an early version of Solaris 10 that didn’t have it built in. So with Linux I’d just put the box at a server somewhere and “apt-get update” or “yum update” or something. However with Solaris I get to plug in a DVD, boot via it and go half way towards reinstalling the server before I get to the “actually I just want to upgrade some packages” option. Unfortunately at this point I get a little stuck because the installer seems to think that 4 Gigabytes spare on / and 3G spare on each of /var and /usr isn’t enough to upgrade 1G worth of packages. I’ll look at it tomorrow but I’m not impressed with wasting several hours adding and deleting packages ( With a crappy clone of dselect ) in order to try and make it work.

I think Sun’s big problem is that the only people who buy their hardware are either people with large storage requirements who really need ZFS or large companies and government bodies
who have been running Sun Boxes for 20 years and like their support for 20 year old apps.

The first market buy the boxes *despite* the legacy junk that the second group insist on. So Solaris boxes tend to come in two flavours, either they are “vendor shipped” with no Gnutools, no pretty editors and the CDE desktop or they are heavily modified with all of these thing to stop the Linux admins going insane for lack of bash. My last job was close to the first with old Solaris 8 and 9 machines while the current job is closer to the second with Solaris 10 everywhere.

The problem Sun has is that as soon as the feature the first group is after matures enough in Linux then they will drop Sun like a shot and switch over the Linux. With the second group well they aren’t going to Linux as fast but they are like newspaper readers, getting older and not being replaced as fast as they a dieing.

On to more conventional Zombies, here is the Australian short film “I love Sarah Jane

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