thinktime

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you irrefutable evidence of global warming.

See this map of the world, created prior to global warming, Greenland and Antarctica are huge!

Now I present this more modern map, both Greenland and Antarctica have melted away to remnants of their former glory.

For the future of Greenland and Antarctica, please, do your part to stop global warming.

Brandon Keepers at JSDay:

JavaScript is no longer a toy language. Many of our applications can’t function without it. If we are going to use JavaScript to do real things, we need to treat it like a real language, adopting the same practices we use with real languages.

I’ll admit that I still write a lot of JavaScript in toy-like style. Brandon’s presentation is both motivating and informative for anyone wanting to improve their use of JavaScript.

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A reminder for folks planning to submit proposals for the upcoming Linux Security Summit in San Diego — the CFP closes on the 23rd of May, a week from now.

LSS is one of eight co-located developer events at LinuxCon this year, including the Kernel Summit and Plumbers. It’s shaping up to be an epic event!

Looks like my EVGA GTX570 video card just died. Cannot play anything game wise without it producing lots of artifacts.

Updated my RMA request with EVGA, as I submitted one 10 days ago. Have performed what they requested and it’s gotten worse, now just can’t use it on gaming at all.

Guess no Battlefield3 for now until they respond and confirm where/how to RMA it.

The LA mirror subcommittee has decided its time to change how we work... Now that there are plenty of good ISP mirrors for distributions, we intend to get out of the business of mirroring Ubuntu and Debian, and instead focus on being the seed mirror for things which are unique to LA and Australia in general. These include LCA and other conference videos, LUG videos, and member projects that would benefit from high capacity hosting.

We keep y'all informed as we progress that plan, but we're mostly planning the transition at the moment.

For subcommittee:  Mirror Team

linux.conf.au 2013 organization is chugging along nicely, with the ghosts meeting being held a little over a week ago and the zookeepr hackfest scheduled for early June. We've signed our first venue contract, and have identified venues for most of the social functions. We'll be talking more about these once they're locked in stone.

The most tangible progress for LA members is that we're very close to opening the call for proposals. That will happen at the start of June, so if you're intending to submit a proposal this year, you should put on your thinking cap now.

Cheers,

Michael Still

For subcommittee:  linux.conf.au

The parking meter was rebooting. I guess we're supposed to walk to the other end of the garage and find one that's working.

We're seeing digital awareness coming to just about everything. In this case, it was the parking meter near the library. Of course, it's not really a parking meter, it's a centralized fee collection system that saves the town a lot of money. It's easier to collect from, certainly, it doesn't waste the time of meter readers (who get alerted as to what spaces aren't paid for, as opposed to checking them all) plus it doesn't let a new parker enjoy a few minutes of the last person's payment.

I understand how the incremental sale of this device was easier to maket to the town and to the community. It's just like what we have now, but better.

The problem, of course, is that it's not as better as it could be. Just about every traditional non-digital solution is bounded by the limits of mechanics. Once we start connecting (and the connection revolution won't rest until it's all connected) then the problem can be reset--we can find the best solution, not a better way to solve it the old way.

Why do I have to guess how long I'm going to be parking? Why pay a penalty if I underguess, or waste community resources on patrolling for compliance?

Of course, I don't care much about parking meters. I care a lot about using digital shadows of real world devices because we don't have the imagination to reinvent them.

In this particular case: why bother have a meter at all? After all, the state knows my license plate, the state has a billing relationship with me, the state can (and does) collect money for my driving behaviors (like EZ Pass). So why not drive into the space and have the space just take care of all the paperwork and billing? No tickets, no meter readers. If you don't want local merchants to park in the good spaces, no need to spend a lot of time searching them out...

Instinctually, we want to maintain the hunter/prey relationship of the independent citizen who isn't being snooped on. But you know what? You're already being snooped on, ceaselessly. A parking meter isn't your problem.

Obviously, parking meters aren't the important device here. The connection revolution is going to upend the way we understand the where, who, how much and when of everything around us.

Whilst the Modules system is awesome in making life easy to maintain multiple versions of packages and their dependencies (and is heavily used in HPC centres like VLSCI) it can have some annoyances (and seems to be fairly half-heartedly maintained looking at the bugtracker on SourceForge). One thing that’s bitten us from time to time is that you can’t really use its “set-alias” functionality as the bash shell does not expand aliases in non-interactive shells and that includes jobs that are launched from an HPC queuing system like Torque, PBSPro, etc.

It does have the compile time option “--disable-shell-alias” but annoyingly the condition is only applied when your shell is “sh“, not “bash“, so I’ve ended up having to patch Modules to make this work for bash as well. This patch is against 3.2.9c:

--- utility.c.orig 2011-11-29 08:27:13.000000000 +1100 +++ utility.c 2012-05-16 15:08:34.012038000 +1000 @@ -1422,7 +1422,7 @@ ** Shells supporting extended bourne shell syntax .... **/ if( (!strcmp( shell_name, "sh") && bourne_alias) - || !strcmp( shell_name, "bash") + || ( !strcmp( shell_name, "bash") && bourne_alias ) || !strcmp( shell_name, "zsh" ) || !strcmp( shell_name, "ksh")) { /** @@ -1471,7 +1471,7 @@ fprintf( aliasfile, "'%c", alias_separator); - } else if( !strcmp( shell_name, "sh") + } else if( ( !strcmp( shell_name, "sh") || !strcmp( shell_name, "bash") ) && bourne_funcs) { /**

Hopefully this patch will be of use to people..

This item originally posted here:



Patch for Modules to use shell functions with BASH, not aliases

Finally, an alcoholic Ginger Beer that actually tastes like it has ginger in it!

At least here in Australia there is this drink called LOL. I saw much LOL on the shelves in the supermarket the other day. I’ve been trying to save this picture up to send to someone… but there hasn’t (yet) been the opportunity.

1. Interviews With People Who Have Interesting or Unusual Jobs: Ken Doyle, Safecracker
2. Fungible A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead
3. Dear New York Times & Wall Street Journal: How About Some Sensible Digital Subscription Pricing?
4. 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
5. 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.
6. Welcome to Life « Tom Scott A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.

I don't think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it's not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

It's not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.

Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.

Intelligence is the combination of knowing a lot about a little while you also know a little about a lot.

Deep domain understanding helps you create analyses. Your ability to understand how a particular system (no matter how small) works allows you apply a confident analysis to new systems you encounter. Once you know everything there is to know about nuclear physics, soccer or the praying mantis, it makes it easier to understand new systems.

At the same time, it's impossible to be smart without also being aware of the wider world. That's because it's the random interactions and the surprising coincidences that help us navigate our daily lives.

The challenge of the net is that it made the large world a whole lot larger. There are the personal lives of your 1000 closest friends, on display, every day. Here is the news of the world, the whole world, not just what used to fit in the newspaper. And over there is every book ever published, every scientific discovery, every fringe political candidate.

Suddenly, it's a lot more difficult to know a little about a lot. It's tempting to spend ever more time pursuing that goal. That doesn't mean, I think, that you should give up knowing a lot about a little in order to devote ever more time to the noisy mosaic that's on your doorstep, nor does it mean you ought to give up and dive back into your hole. We've redefined worldly, but being an expert remains just as tough and important as it used to be.

If you insist that they are wrong, they stop being your customer* (if given half a chance).

People spend their time and attention and money in places that make them feel valued.

*There's nothing wrong with asking customers who are wrong to leave. Just be sure you do it on purpose.

In my youth I ran a BBS, and I had a shareware cd that contained thousands of samples of different things. Quotes from movies, sounds of various things. Thought it was great, however must of lost it a long time ago.

Meanwhile, looks like a site was set up to make such things available to the general public under an open source license.

Check out FreeSound, as posted by Cool Tools website (which is where I seen it posted).

to Mr. Adam Bandt, MP for Melbourne

Thank-you for your great work as the Greens MP for Melbourne.  You must be happy to have achieved such a great victory for the Greens, by getting elected to the so-called “house of representatives”.

I want to complain about the electoral system, and I’m going to use some strong language, which is in no way directed to your good self.

If 40% of all people in each electorate vote Labour, and 51% vote Liberal/National, for the “house of representatives”, then Liberal/National would win 100% of the seats, and no one else would win any seats.

This is FUCKING CORRUPT, if I may get angry. Is it “REPRESENTATIVE” that minority parties such as the Greens are almost totally unrepresented, due to a moronic system of election?

As you know, this is a big problem not just in theory – the Greens won 11.76% of vote in the 2010 elections, which should entitle them to 18 seats out of 150 in the ‘lower house’, but they have only one seat which is yours.  I’m proud to live in Melbourne where the Greens appear to be the majority party, but where the hell are our other 17 seats?

Can we do something about this?  I suppose a referendum would be needed, but with a decent public exposee, it could hardly fail.

It would even be better to forget about the electorates entirely, and say Greens won 13% = 20 seats, Labour won 50 seats, liberal won 50 seats, now please figure out amicably which of the seats you would prefer to have, guided by which seats had the highest number of votes for each party.

I am going to contact several online petition orgs to raise this issue, it really makes me furious.

Any mathematician would laugh or cry at the stupidity of the electoral system for our house of representatives.  I’m ignorant, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most other countries have equally idiotic systems for electing their government leaders.

Thank your sir for reading my rant.  I will also send it to your email for your convenience, if you wish to respond by email!

Sam Watkins

Melbourne Australia.

Looks like the Open Media Vault appliance I had running via the HP N40L Microserver had some issues.

I left it overnight to copy 400+Gb of files and woke to find it had failed half way. Host was up, but networking wasn’t working quite so well. Rebooted and immediately saw the root file system failed to mount and caused the usual panic.

I suspect the USB key I had the OS installed on has corrupted. Which means my data should be okay, although hasn’t impressed me much.

Think I will go back to my Debian install and just do everything via it. So it’s not an appliance, but at least I know it will work day in and day out when ran from the hard drive.

 

• Spent afternoon at friends 80th birthday party, great time. No need to eat for a while! http://t.co/aTYgcl9J #
• #archaeology wrap up blog about dig at St Lythan's burial chamber in South #Wales http://t.co/1SrGACK8 #
• Performing summon $COURIER spell, making a pot of tea thereby ensuring being called to a different building for delivery #
• http://t.co/P5iJVm9R MT @sijoe I can replace my ridiculously complex Apache log parser logic with a single Regex … WOOT!!! #
• Summon $COURIER spell worked, though they (again) ignored the instruction to phone 15 mins before getting here.. #
• Interesting to see that the European Synchrotron is migrating from RHEL/Centos to @debian #Linux https://t.co/7eIITu4p #
• Anyone know how to get updatenode in #xCAT to copy dangling symlinks to managed nodes? It uses rsync under the covers.. #
• .@MobiCity friend of mine has ordered a pair of GN's from you last night because you're firmware flash friendly, well done! #
• #Melbourne urban sunset from a @metrotrains train http://t.co/p9v6VlRS #
• Channelling query from #lwloc developers, has "inline" always been a part of C++? Need good source to confirm/refute. #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-13

• Spent afternoon at friends 80th birthday party, great time. No need to eat for a while! http://t.co/aTYgcl9J #
• #archaeology wrap up blog about dig at St Lythan's burial chamber in South #Wales http://t.co/1SrGACK8 #
• Performing summon $COURIER spell, making a pot of tea thereby ensuring being called to a different building for delivery #
• http://t.co/P5iJVm9R MT @sijoe I can replace my ridiculously complex Apache log parser logic with a single Regex … WOOT!!! #
• Summon $COURIER spell worked, though they (again) ignored the instruction to phone 15 mins before getting here.. #
• Interesting to see that the European Synchrotron is migrating from RHEL/Centos to @debian #Linux https://t.co/7eIITu4p #
• Anyone know how to get updatenode in #xCAT to copy dangling symlinks to managed nodes? It uses rsync under the covers.. #
• .@MobiCity friend of mine has ordered a pair of GN's from you last night because you're firmware flash friendly, well done! #
• #Melbourne urban sunset from a @metrotrains train http://t.co/p9v6VlRS #
• Channelling query from #lwloc developers, has "inline" always been a part of C++? Need good source to confirm/refute. #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-13

• Aww, thx! #
• .@John_Hanna Hmmm, not really that I know of. Was international list. Most people in the industry are great, men & women alike. A few tools #
• .@williamparry don't hate, then the terrorists win #
• . @John_Hanna The argument devolves too quickly into one about free speech. I want to understand why anyone would think this way & address. #
• Wow, amazing that some ppl actually speak & think this way. A minority but a loud minority. http://t.co/nkBxqqKe #womenhaters #
• "i find out who I am when I'm climbing the mountains of mars" http://t.co/kEWY8Xze /cc @kelisha @swearyanthony #
• Check out these guys, they do "literal trailers" for movies.and games. Much lols. #ac3 For @swearyanthony http://t.co/KcT6ND2C #
• "If it bleeds we can kill it". So much lols. http://t.co/KG7vEY06 #
• Ohcrap, thx @Wittylama RT Klout http://t.co/lHJGzhPi #
• OK, I'm really at the end of my tether, anyone in the Canberra area able to loan me a fast laptop for a week or two? Just need web browsers. #
• Some #govhack media, thanks for the coverage @jamie_kirk http://t.co/CqCOKYK6 & a kinda-shout-out from @stilgherrian http://t.co/nKnAQ85U #
• HAH! Your mum must be proud RT @FakePaulKeating: @piawaugh pfft. Lightweight. http://t.co/uaGZLifw "Facepalm central" #
• MWAH hahaha! Thanks @akshatj_96 & @purserj for Klouchebag lulz. My score is 27, or 'mostly alright', hah! http://t.co/9WPFx619 #
• Wow, just joined @Klout. Fascinating! Wish it included Soundcloud "According to @klout, my Klout score is 45." http://t.co/qtrphA1x #
• An awesome song to start work to. Enjoy http://t.co/3TK8YN8s #music #
• "Where to ebooks go when you do?" Great article, tackles the major challenge of digital culture wrapped up in DRM http://t.co/fyu0i3pV #
• It's funny how we feel most safe in motion, but only when still are we able to really see what's around us. Kung Fu thought for the day. #fb #
• Dammit! RT @ACTwonkdrinks: Not enough interest for a Budget Edition of #actwonkdrinks Why kind of wonks are you lot? #fail #
• Have had to limit the size of Sydney #GovHack due to venue, so get in quick before we hit capacity! http://t.co/YS5Zwh26 28 seats left atm #
• Right, thanks all, looks like CC-BY is on individual #budget papers, but not on copyright page http://t.co/lqwgNZn0 Be good to fix that #
• What happened to the CC-BY for the Budget papers? http://t.co/9ZHNJThm That's quite unfortunate, seems a backwards step. #
• Went to write democracy and typo'd demoncracy. I think there's something in that for all of us. #
• Kudos to the Adobe http://t.co/EZzCyBnH tool. It''s a bit slow but works really nicely #
• I lie, it works in IE6 and IE9, but not well in IE8 and not at all in IE7. Wonderful. #
• Internet Explorer, the bane of web developers everywhere. How could it work in IE6, 7 & 9, but not 8. FFS. #backtodrawingboard #
• cool, done #
• Nice, now over 100 ppl registered for #govhack Hoping for 300 so go register (Sydney or Canberra). Will be awesome http://t.co/aXgjAzLL #
• . @gavintapp Shiny, but seriously, promoting a "developers" laptop and then saying "key tools and utilities (emacs, Vim, Chromium etc)" #
• Funny. I get so much spam on Google+. Facebook and Twitter are wonderful by comparison. #
• Wow, the @SensisAPI zombie app challenge is teh awesome! http://t.co/LjdrcZT8 #gov2au #
• Putting together a #GovHack team to compete 1-3 June? Check out some previous mashups/hacks on http://t.co/ab5WZIGh http://t.co/p04DDIz4 #
• Interesting RT @wtfsheep: @parisba I thought this was an awesome open data mashup: http://t.co/YWFaporR #CHI2012 #govhack #
• So, going to see Smashing Pumpkins and Tea Party in July, all I need is Tool, Kyuss, Stabbing Westward, NIN, Lamb and I'd be in heaven #
• I know, crazy hey, but I tweeted a new song of theirs earlier today which was surprisingly good. So am excited #
• WOW! I am now also going to Smashing Pumpkins with @alexmyoug, looks like July will be #relivemyyouth month! SOOOOO EXCITED! #music #
• Just received the Tea Party tickets in the post!!! Hey @alexmyoung, I can't wait! #
• Fascinating RT @OZloop: APS - The perfect storm. Cutbacks, culture and abuse http://t.co/ZKJitFQS #gov2au #opengov #innovationweek #govcamp #
• . @1159 Heh Saw Tool in '97, still one of my favourite gigs ever. They covered Hurt too, double perfect! #
• "See my shadow changing, stretching up and over me. Soften this old armour, hoping I can clear the way". Tool is helping me work today #
• I love Linux. Some useful ffmpeg for converting and manipulating video/audio without having to open video editing suite http://t.co/uBGQ8dUn #
• Have you registered for #GovHack yet? Over $30k in prize funding for awesome apps, mashups & datavis, so come get some! http://t.co/aXgjAzLL #
• Wow. New Smashing Pumpkins, and surprisingly awesome. http://t.co/gHWBu29J #music #