Lev Lafayette's journal

Went to a Novell and Attachmate breakfast presentation on Tuesday at Vue du Monde. The view was pleasant (at level 55 of the Rialto building), but the actual talks were too high level (haha, see what I did there?). It was orientated towards suits, and didn't really provide enough technical details. Absolutely floored when one representative started talking about the new products which allow secure connection to Linux/UNIX systems. Reminded later that in the MS-Windows world people actually sell SSH, SFTP, and NFS clients (all of which are free and open source). On related subjects, have written a brief how-to for installing Linux with OEM MS-Windows installs, and this morning a discussion on file creation time for Linux which I used an supplementary discussion for Wen Lin's presentation at Linux Users of Victoria beginners workshop on introducting the Linux command line.

On a related subject work has been quite interesting this week with regards to project management, both in the actual delivery and the development of new policy and procedures. Increasingly it becomes apparent that projects fall into a mess when procedures are not followed. Trying to run complex tasks without a framework simply doesn't work. Now whilst PRINCE2 is sometimes criticised for not providing much in terms of reporting metrics (unlike PMBoK, which does provide very sophisticate metrics for analysis), it is more about governance rather than delivery as such, and notably PMBoK doesn't provide much for governance! Despite how useful analysis is, the governance is also necessary to ensure communication within a team. As a result, in addition to simple statement of governance developed a fortnight ago, a simple checklist and graphic representation of flowchart has been put together.

As a strange aside, recently encountered two examples of cyborg sex, one deliberate and one not so much. Firstly, a man admits to having sex with over 700 cars (and even an attack helicopter). I think of The Normal's Warm Leatherette; Bryce D. reminds me of Grace Jones' Pull Up to the Bumper. All hat-tip to reddragdiva, who also does the right thing by referencing the late and great J.G. Ballard. Meanwhile Nigel S., has gone into surgury for hip replacement, which is pretty cyborg too. The 'Information Booklet on Your Total Hip Joint Replacement' booklet he received includes the lines "You can discuss returning to sexual activity with your surgeon at your follow up appointment". As he says, "One interpretation of this would not, I suspect, go down too well with the Australian Medical Association's ethics committee."

Three days this week was pretty much taken up by conducting Linux, HPC, and MPI training courses for a number of postgrads, almost all from RMIT. Another good class who started with zero background in the subjects and who by the third day were working their way through MPI programming. Of some note was the attendance of the first economist in the three years or so that I've been running these courses. I've had a longstanding desire (and it really wouldn't be that hard) to compare local economic development with different council rating systems as a time series - not really requiring HPC but certainly does require a geospatial person, a valuer, an economist, and a programmer to be on the same project.

On another significant IT-related issue is Heartbleed which, hopefully, most people have heard of by now. From a technical perspective a failure in the bounds-checking by some versions of OpenSSL to malformed heartbeat requests allows for an attack vector on server memory of affected systems. From a user's perspective it means that passwords on many major sites have been compromised over the past two years. Whilst Filippo Valsorda has produced a useful tool to check whether a site is currently affected, there is no easy way to check if a certificate have been re-keyed. What can be provided is a handy list of many sites that were compromised last Tuesday, a day after the bug was made public.

Recently a study has been released claiming that the dingo is a separate species. Whilst it looks serious enough the university press release on a certain date, made me think that this could be an "poisson d'avril" as the proposition is so counterintuitive. Certainly species is a complex subject with some interesting edge cases (e.g., hybrids, ring species), but the general principle of species representing a population of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring is true. The paper argues - through morphological analysis of museum examples, not genetics - that the dingo was a separate species some five thousand years ago and is now being threatened by extensive hybrid speciation. Personally, I find their claim highly dubious. Not only is there significant evidence that the dingo's arrival was somewhat earlier, mitochondrial DNA analysis indicates that the dingo has much less differences with the domestic dog than wolves. So whilst morphological analysis is useful for a quick rule of thumb, genetic analysis is a much better determinant.

When I was a teenaged Marxist, my favourite badge was a quote from the Manifesto: The working men have no country. The appeal was very much towards international worker's solidarity and against racist prejudice. Unfortunately, working people are as much - if not more so - swayed by nationalistic loyalties than other classes. In the Australian context however we are led to believe that January 26 is to be celebrated. Celebrate what? It marks the proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of Australia. In other words, Invasion Day. Whilst some deny it the question is raised in what way wasn't it an invasion? Tell me what has happened to the diversity of indigenous cultures, now driven to extinction, and whose surviving members still suffer the entrenched structural effects of discrimination. Yet, there is outrage over the graffiti on a fake cottage. This is the effects of reified nationalism; being upset over graffiti over a building, whilst remaining silent and ignorant at the death and destruction of real people.

But of course, it was a long weekend and that does mean the opportunity to spend time with friends and loved ones. On said weekend itself we were visited by ser_pounce and hathhalla where we engaged in an afternoon of food, drink, and merrymaking - including a visit to the local bat colony by the river and a most inspired session of Cards Against Humanity. For our continuing quest to complete the cheeses of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch, I made liptauer as a contribution. We're down to about the last half-dozen, which includes those which are not actually cheeses at all (e.g., Ilchester, Caithness, Perle de Champagne) plus those which are somewhat difficult to acquire in Australia (Fynbo, Abertam). I have, as recently posted, made a request to the Adelaide zoological gardens for that rarest of produce, the Venezuelan Beaver Cheese.

It's been confirmed that at the end of next month I'll be visiting New Zealand to be the MC at Multicore World, which will then follow up with the workshop for Computing for the Square Kilometre Array, the world's most impressive radio telescope project (in my considered opinion). On a related topic, next Tuesday is the monthly Linux Users of Victoria meeting where Les will be speaking on Linux on non-Intel architectures , and I'll be putting together a "best of" compilation from LCA2014. This is also dovetailing with another round of three days teaching high performance computing and Linux to postgraduate researchers.

A couple of days ago I started playing Ingress which has a nice alternative reality backstory involving the Higgs boson experiments and alien mind control (or enhancement, if you joined the good guys) with a global bi-factional conflict. Actual play, unlike many computer or 'phone games, requires one to go outside and even better still, locate (by foot usually) various sites of public interest or artistic merit. At its core it's a simple experience point and level advance system, but that's not really the important part of the game. At the moment I'm playing a bit "lone wolf", as I imagine a lot of starting players do, but it's quite clear that a significant degree of social coordination is required at higher levels.

On Saturday we rescued an injured common blackbird and took it to Lort Smith, just prior to dropping off caseopaya's mother at the airport. A few hours later her brother and nephew arrived, en route from New Zealand. We dined a La Notte followed by drinks at the Queensberry. Visited some Unitarian friends on Sunday for a post-xmas gathering, followed by another group for a game of Shanghai Trader, an enjoyable historical game of extortion and exploitation, albeit a little random in its mechanics. Afterwards visited Brendan E., for dinner and conversation, and watched another episode of the increasingly disappointing Walking Dead television series; it seems that only the first season is worth watching.

Next Saturday I'm off to Linux Conf AU 2014 in Perth, where I'll be attending in the role of "Diversity Officer", which basically means I keep an eye out to ensure that everyone (regardless of colour, creed, or kink) has "quiet enjoyment" of the conference. Not only will probably be an enjoyable and informative conference (at least based on the several I have been to since 2006), it is also great to have an excuse to visit Perth again, which I have not done so for several years. Between now and then I must organise an evening with some select friends as I will only be over for a week, and most of that will be conference work.

Was very neglectful of posting here last week, even if I did read and post on other journals. The first three days were almost entirely taken up with conducting training courses for HPC and Linux. Two of the students in the three-day class were doctoral candidates in computer science, and one had their PhD, so there was some expectation that the material may have been a little below their level. If this was the case, they certainly didn't suggest so on their feedback, which was extremely positive. It's usually very good, but this was close to perfect throughout. I've also written a short article on The Quest for Demoggifying Continues after being slightly horrified by some poor advice on a tech 'blog.

As a crossover issue from the first to second subject items, have written about some recent experience of anti-religious prejudice in the free software movement. Also, have recently discovered that The Freethinker published my letter expressing concerns of the Sunday Assembly, who responded, and which I have further replied to. Finally, Andrew Bolt condemns the Uniting Church for having practical Christianity whilst ignoring their actual mission statement. Pity about the Melbourne Science Ficton Club being in one of the churches slated for sale.

As per the last post, I've had a bit of a revival of interest in the past few months with Karl Popper from the perspective of critical theory. It like revisiting Positivismusstreit, but with some recent interesting additions by Hilary Putnam on the fact-value distinction. To aid this revival I've been working my way through Popper's Objective Knowledge, Conjectures and Refutations (which I actually have never read), and Habermas' Between Facts and Norms. Also sorely tempted to put together the fifty pages or so of notes that I compiled from The Theory of Communicative Action which I hand-wrote in the mid-nineties.

The week of gaming has also been good. Played Eclipse Phase on Thursday and Fantasy Craft Middle Earth on Sunday. Still putting the spring edition of RPG Review which has the taster article The Representation of Computers in Roleplaying Games, which will have a twin article, The Representation of Roleplaying in Computer Games. Also waiting for some interview questions from the developers at PC Gen.

Last Tuesday night was the Linux Users of Victoria meeting which looked at two ends of development; Martin Paulo gave another excellent talk on the OpenStack free software cloud project, this time in a more tutorial framework, followed by Aryan Ameri (G+) on Ubuntu phones - more on how they don't quite work yet, but do show a roadmap of where they're going. The meeting also formally announed our Librarything, for our Library of LUV (LoL). Next Saturday I'll be presenting at the Beginners Workshop, An Introduction to Supercomputing. Further, as I've been working on another training manual I've had the opportunity to develop a few interesting scripts and posts over the past week; Backups and Synchronisations, Deleting Many Files, and Searching for Emails.

Earlier this week started writing about the decline of the socialist left in Japan. I am hoping that knowledgable people (e.g., aske) might suggest a few reasons. A pleasant surprise was the discovery that Matt Bush and I had been published in the latest issue of The Freethinker for our article on Islamofascism: A Real Term for A Real Problem, which argues that Islamic fascism really does exist and that the principles of secularism must be universalised. Finally, next Saturday the Isocracy Network is hosting a meeting (FB events) with Louis Byrne from West Papua Melbourne speaking. It remains an interesting question why West Papuan solidarity has never reached the mass appeal to that of East Timor, when both are of equal importance.

A big event for the week: Trifid, the almost-super computer which I have done most of the project management and application installs on, is now available for general use from RMIT and La Trobe researchers et al. Also went to MLUG on Wednesday, interested a controversially entitled presentation "Why C is not faster than Python". The title was, unsurprisingly, not entirely true, but the meeting was saved by an excellent presentation by Mark Atwood on OpenStack. Also impressed by the venue, although the website is horribly overdone. This week, I'm off to Canberra for Linux Conf AU, which has an impressive schedule. Looking forward to meeting Tim Berners-Lee, inventor the world-wide web.

What is officially called "Australia Day", and more accurately called "Invasion Day", is upon us. Pleased to see that Tom Uren has received recognition, horrified that the would-war war criminal Alexander Downer is also in the honours. Letters to the SMH remind us of our history as boat people and how we treat our current migrants. With recent discoveries of potential oil wealth, it is probably about time we started sharing more of that with our community; original, settled, and recent.

Day Three (part II). denise and mark from Dreamwidth spoke on how they encouraged development of their service through encouraging participation and taking their user requests seriously. Had a chat with them afterwards about the adoption of DW/LJ for the research community. Then went to the second half of Richard Jone's game programming using Python and Pyglet, specifically recreating the classic arcade game Asteriods (source). Theodore Tso gave an excellent presentation the ext4 filesystem and was followed by claudine_c speaking on the user of various open-source software in a convict history project she's involved in. The final sessions of the day that I attended were Andrew Tridgell speaking on teaching FOSS at universities, ANU's Masters programme in particular and the ever-entertaining Paul Fenwick on the world's worst inventions.

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Right, having done computing it's time to head off to KapCon and do some gaming. caseopaya is off to the Linux Conf open day (now that's a hardcore nerd) Tomorrow get to head off to Napier, perhaps the finest art deco town in the world.

Organised Theo de Raadt to speak at VPAC at the conclusion of the OpenBSD hackathon. Apart from discussing the work that the various developers did at the network hackathon, there was also discussion on the OpenBSD approach ("we don't care what people use it for... but I hear some people are using OpenSSH"), various forks and divergence in the BSD code. It has also led me to spend some thinking about the difference between various copyleft licenses (of which GPL is the exemplar) and permissive licenses (such as the BSD license). The latter, I believe, can be appropriated by proprietary licenses, whereas the former ensure the same freedoms are preserved in derivative works.

Since the OpenBSD conf have taken the silver bird to Wellington, where I certainly hope to catch up with a number of people of that fair town. Purchased four bottles of Moet & Chandon, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, a bottle of Talisker, two bottles of NZ vodka, a bottle of Disarro, a bottle of Chambord, and some Frangelico at New Zealand's very generous duty free. Staying at the former Waterloo Hotel, with its dilapidated deco style. Have made it to Linux Conf (where I am typing this) and where I'll be spending the following week. Interested in the game programming miniconf. Have discovered that KapCon is on as well next weekend, so will take the opportunity to go to that as well.

Last Sunday gave my presentation at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on A Unitarian-Universalist Perspective on the Economic Crisis; I got a bit ranty at the end, but it was suitable. Sent a revised copy of my ASCP paper on Lying in Politics Revisited to Parrhesia. Have also just sent off a review to Ticonderoga a review of Firmin, a sorrowful tale about a literate existentialist rat by a doctor of philosophy from Yale.

I have been spending the past few days at linux.conf.au in Hobart and have followed a fairly hectic timetable starting from Tuesday where I attended the "Free as In Freedom" and "Open Source Databases" miniconferences. From the latter I attended Monty Taylor's presentation on DRDB followed by arjen_lentz's presentation on MySQL server coding and patching. From the former, Liam Wyatt's summary of a history honours thesis on "Gratis & Libre" was excellent, and I also listened in on Jessica Coates on lobbying politicians and the powers that be to accept open access content and, at the end of the day, Rusty Russell's "Free As In Market Property and Liberty", where he compared intellectual property with the characteristics of physical property.

The twentieth (apart from Barak Obama's inauguration - nice speech, and a day after Martin Luther King Day), as I was duly reminded, my birthday and caseopaya (who is here on the conference partner's program, lucky gal) and my former Vice-Chancellor from Murdoch University, the Emeritus Professor Peter Boyce took me out to a very fine local restaurant. Was also surprised and pleased to receive a number of comments on Facebook, via email etc wishing me the best for the day. Thank you all!

With the start of the conference proper, have attended the two keynotes by Tom Limoncelli and Angela Beasley, on IT views of scarcity vs abundance and developments in Wikipedia respectively. Keith Packard spoke on developments for the Linux desktop which included some impressive eye-candy (but of little interest to me). James Turnball spoke on Puppet configuration, which is truly useful in our environment, and after that I attended a tutorial by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on an introduction to Django, which I have had some limited experience with. Stewart Smith entertained with a presentation on how to get efficient, fast, safe and portable file I/O (haha), and Chris Willing spoke on the Optiportal and Access Grid. Today I've attended Bob Edwards's presentation on using authentication and access control on websites to a database managed system and Timothy Terriberry on the development of a low-latency high-quality audio codec which looks very useful.