Lev Lafayette's journal

Victoria has a public holiday today for the holy religion of Australian Rules Football. Haven't a moderate interest at best in the game, I took the opportunity to finish some studies, specifically a course on Noongar Language and Culture run by Curtin University. It seemed appropriate that having spent so much of my youth in Perth that I should at least learn something of the indigenous language and being the International Year of Indigenous Languages. I received a near-perfect score, 98%, with one error relating to getting a contemporary hip-hop artist's song title incorrect. Overall, it wasn't bad, a little light on the language component, a little heavy on the history, and absolutely harrowing when it dealt with 20th-century history. Did you that Western Australia had a eugenicist in charge of indigenous people who deliberately wanted to breed out their "blackness" and that aboriginal people were banned from entering the Perth CBD from 1927 to 1954?

Also, today attended a virtual meeting at Otago University which dealt with building an educational philosophy portfolio and later in the day another virtual meeting with Pawsey and CSIRO on the International HPC Certification Forum; hopefully some people from CSIRO will become at least a little bit involved. On-topic, caught up with former workmate Laszlo K., who has shifted from CSIRO to WEHI, but still in the role of HPC systems architect, and also had a work meeting with a number of people from Altair, including their managing directory for the ASEAN region, Srirangam S. Alas, there wasn't much we could offer them because (a) we have very minimal problems with our current Slurm-based scheduling system and (b) if they do have anything we want, we'd be interested in that one component, not the entire ensemble, an issue I have raised before in the context of help-desk systems. Actually, it is rapidly becoming the focus of my MSc thesis, the relationship between business processes and rent-seeking, over engineering processes and FOSS toolkit development.

Most of my thesis will be written whilst in Zurich during the MSc residency, and whilst we're away nephew Luke will be looking after the place. He came over on Wednesday and we treated him to dog food for dinner. Not joking; the Aldi catalogue recently had a list of dog-treat recipes, using their normal human-grade products, I must quickly add and they were simply too good to refuse; rice, mince, and parsley., oat-meal, salmon, and tumeric., peanut butter, oatmeal, and coconut oil. What's not to like? This is how middle-upper income Australian dogs live, apparently. Woof. Finally, for one other major social activity for the week played Megatraveller on Thursday night, with the alternate and parallel character group. EDIT: Almost forgot to add, witnessed the effects of a remarkable "pole position" accidental driving stunt around the corner from home.

Despite not being funded to attend, I've taken a couple of days leave so I can present my paper on Friday at the Challenges in High Performance Computing conference at ANU. My flights are booked for tomorrow, a hotel quite close to the university has been located, and all I have to do is to finish the talk on unums (universal numbers, which in many ways will be an update to a presentation I gave to Linux Users of Victoria a couple of years ago. A little annoyed at the university not funding this trip, but I'll make of that what I can. Also will be presenting at an ARDC tech-talk on Friday on the International HPC Certification Forum and various AU-NZ contributions - the third time in the past month or so that I've presented on this matter.

I have also been struck down with a short-term lurgy which has left me feeling terrible for the past two days. Even as late as last night I was groaning in pain and drinking what felt like gallons of water. Today I felt mostly recovered now. I rather suspect I've been pushing myself a little too hard in recent weeks and my old body is beginning to punish me for being unkind to it. Sickness didn't prevent me from running a game of Eclipse Phase on Sunday, although I did feel a little out-of-sorts. Apropos, my review of an old classic, Lace and Steel, has been published on rpg.net. Running off to Canberra also means that I'll be missing our regular Megatraveller session for two weeks in a row.

Last journal post I expressed a rather full agenda for the following few days. I am pleased that most of the items on that list have come together quite nicely, albeit with a couple of inevitable hiccups. The most notable was the Isocracy meeting on Saturday night to discuss truth in political advertising and the 2019 election. In this case, the guest speaker Oliver Yates, an independent liberal candidate for Kooyong, simply forgot to turn up. I received a very embarrassed call the following afternoon, and we have decided to reconvene in the future. At least those who attended had a delicious dinner and fine conversation.

Apart from that most things have gone without a hitch. There was a fair turnout to my address to the Unitarian Church on behalf of the Victorian Secular Lobby, on Religious Freedom and Religious Charities, which has sparked some interest on the meaning of the title of section 116 of the Australian Constitution (I can be a simple man and I believe that "no law" means "no law"). I've also completed the necessary revision of my second and final assignment for HEDU501, Critical Reflection on Higher Education and have submitted that, along with my presentation this week for the HPC-AI advisory council conference in Perth (which is an elaboration of the presentation I gave at ARDC in Sydney last month). Following a similar line of topics, the two days of workshops for Parallel Processing with OpenMPI and MPI and GPU Programming with OpenACC and CUDA both went very well. The smaller workshop room works well with the more intensive class, and my addition of new content helped as well.

It's been a long day already as my flight to Perth was changed and I've spent a couple of hours at Adelaide airport, which at least let me get some work done. Apart from the HPC-AI conference, I have a dinner planned in East Perth (hearty Italian comfort food) which, after a flurry of contacts last night, suddenly found itself being quite a sizeable event. I might end up with around 20 people in attendance. Plus there will be a dinner with Arnold and Cathy around Fremantle tonight. The brief trip to Perth has a full, but rather enjoyable agenda.

The past couple of days have been busy times within the Isocracy Network. Firstly, there is the submission to the ALP's national executive reviewing the 2019 election. Isocracy has made a submission as an "interested party" with an orientation around statistical analysis of the results and an interpretation that stronger legislation to ensure honest election campaigning is required. Appropriately we're having a meeting (Facebook) in a fortnight on this very subject with Oliver Yates, the independent liberal candidate who is challenging the Treasurer on the basis of deceptive campaigning. Finally, we're just about to set up a branch in Indonesia, courtesy of an active contributor in that part of the world. On a related note, briefly attended (by accident, initially) a protest at the University of Melbourne against a meeting of the 'Victorian Women's Guild', a TERF group. Was in conservation with a young protestor about the event and she mentioned various TERF/SWERF essentialists who were behind the event and mentioned a certain UniMelb professor. I mentioned that I had crossed swords with them some twenty years prior on similar issues. It wasn't until well after that I realised that they were probably barely over twenty themselves.

Spent a good part of yesterday editing the increasingly late issue of RPG Review, based on cosmology and time-travel. I have several reviews in place for the upcoming issue. I think I would have had it close to finishing (still awaiting the magic of strangedave's article of Glorantha cosmology) but lost a few hours due to a migraine. Nevertheless, awoke in time to venture to The Astor to see Peter Strickland's comedy-horror-melancholy, In Fabric, part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, and which was introduced by the cinematographer, Ari Wegner. It was quite a clever film, somewhat in the style of the original Suspiria and probably with the same budget as well. In related RPG news, our regular Megatraveller game was canceled with a couple of people unavailable, so we played Hacker instead, a fun game with useful insights into hacker culture, although technologically placed in the pre-mass Internet days. It appropriately followed an amusing day at work where I installed FreePascal on the HPC on request from a user, and followed it up with GnuCOBOL, for aesthetic reasons (along with a multitude of sample short test scripts, based on a workshop-talk I gave at Linux Users of Victoria a few years back). Actually, GnuCOBOL may be very appropriate for experimentation as it's a transpiler, which means in theory one construct multi-threaded and message-passing applications with relative ease.

With two double-sized workshops next week, I've made the first cut at a summative exam which is still very much a work-in-progress. It will certainly serve as a handy template when extended to other courses as well. Of interest in the HPC space (and I completely neglected to mention the last post) is Spartan, the once-tiny experimental cluster (which ended up at the equivalent of c200 in the Top500) passed 10,000,000 jobs last week. Apropos, was pleased to see one of the researchers whom I taught a few weeks ago made their way into the papers with their research on the Buruli ulcer. I thought it was a very good advertisement for the serious importance of HPC, and then the same day I receive a video from the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre which shows an interesting correlation between earthquakes and sex; well, I suppose that will at least attract a bit of attention.

Yesterday Ingress went offline for a day, or rather, the traditional Ingress scanner was down for "routine maintenance" (which has never happened before). I tried using Ingress Prime, not for the first time, but the experience was, again, extremely unsatisfactory. I started to think about why Niantic is so determined about introducing an interface which the overwhelming majority of players don't want, and I ended up with a 1500 word essay, How Niantic is Killing Ingress on the relationship between the game, the business, and data collection. The end of September will be a sad day when the traditional scanner comes to an end and the game will be largely abandoned.

On the topic of games visited Andrew D., on Thursday for our regular gaming session and we decided to have a one-off game of Dog Eat Dog, a narrativist game of colonial occupation in the Pacific (or elsewhere for that matter). We ended up with an amalgamation of Islander cultures colonised by the Republic of Deseret (like Dogs in the Vineyard, see what I did there?). Following up on more social activities the evening prior had a visit form nephew Luke, who picked up his Cure t-shirt as he looked after our place during our recent jaunt to Sydney to see said band. Of interest is his planned trip to Borneo. Finally, today had a visit from work colleague Martin P., and his daughter Tessa. The latter will be staying at our place during October whilst we are taking a trip to Europe, and a post-lunch tour of the estate was provided.

A good portion of this week was taken up teaching Introduction to Linux and HPC and Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting for HPC. They were a good class and quite switched on, even for people who were coming in with a relative lack of familiarity. It's a steep learning curve, but on the basis of the questions they asked (I tend to run classes more of an "interactive workshop") they were well on their way. Next week I have a repeat of the classes for immunologists at the Peter Doherty Institute. In my copious spare time at work, I've slipped in another conference presentation abstract and have continued work on my planned course for regular expressions, which I have been somewhat remiss in finalising - plenty of additions on speeding up grep added today.

In other teaching-related activities have expressed my displeasure at the intellectual laziness of the HPC Certification Forum in their continuing suggestions to use multiple-choice questions as summative assessment for the certification. I have argued, with backing in education theory, that they should be using actual practise on a real HPC system as a test of HPC system competency. For what it's worth my MHEd supervisor at Otago University agrees with the approach that I'm suggesting. Meanwhile I am making some progress with the last unit of my MSc at RKC/Salford for the dissertation, however, it seems that they have stuffed up my residency enrolment in Zurich; just as well I hadn't booked the tickets. For people teaching a postgraduate degree in information systems they're not very good at it.

All this aside, did manage to go out during the week, specifically for the Twilight Zone Movie at The Astor (and also an opportunity to visit Duke The Cat). The film was basically in the style of four of the old-style TV episodes, so it wasn't exactly all guns blazing, but it did have some nice plots with a dash of the macabre - and especially so given that people died in its production. Regardless of what is on at the Astor for me it is very much an opportunity to spend some time in front of a classic large single screen cinema and absorb the trappings of an old and slightly frayed deco beauty; after home and work it's probably the third most likely place one is to find me. The following night was science fiction adventures of a different fashion, with a session of Megatraveller, which involved dealing with the treasures of the Sindalian Empire - which turned out to be bacterial and nuclear weapons; whoops. I get the feeling that the ante of this story is arcing up and the poor ol' PCs are going to be on the receiving end of everything going wrong.

Major activity over the past few days has been putting together a HPC course for life sciences for next week, which mashes together my two standard courses with two bioinformatics courses by Software Carpentry. It has also provided me the opportunity to build some sample scripts for several applications, as well as fix up a weird error in the classic sample R job that I have in the common user directory - it looks like someone had edited half the script. Anyway, all better now, along with some twenty plus netCDF applications and dependencies installed for a user who started off with one question, then kept on building on the same ticket. Normally I tell people to submit a new ticket when they do that, but I was feeling generous.

Played Megatraveller on Thursday night; quite a good session involving some underwater exploration. Also have written up the last two sessions (The Sunscreen Factor and Mercury Poisoning) of Eclipse Phase in preparation for tomorrow's game. Have also spent some time working on the very late issue of RPG Review 42 with the dreaful realisation of how much more work is still required.

Main political activity of the past few days was going to Nina Taylor's Electorate Office opening. The smoking and cleansing ceremony by David Tournier of the Boonwurrung foundation was particularly good. Had a chat with several state MPs, including a chat with Jill Hennessy, the state attorney-general, hoping to get her to address a meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby to discuss the tax-free status of commercial organisations owned by religious bodies. The event was a very enthusiastic and crowded meeting of Labor supporters, a far cry from perhaps dire expectations following Saturday's shock loss. Over the next few days, I should also have some Isocracy activity planned as well.

Apart from that, there's been some preparation for a short holiday in Sydney to see The Cure and Underworld, which should mean more Rocknerd reviews. Nephew-in-common-law Luke came over today as he'll be doing the house sitting and we feasted on what was pretty decent cleanskin red with a gnocchi with sweet potato and sun-dried tomato along with a freshly made tomato and herb infused bread. Nobody leaves my place hungry, it's a house rule. Even Sabre the psycho cat was curiously well-behaved for most of the day with only a couple of malicious hisses and one blood-drawing swipe.

Last night I gave a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria on Easybuild: Building Software with Ease, which had a surprising number of people turn up (around 40) on what I thought was a relatively obscure and deep part of the IT world, relevant mainly to the people who are in the HPC space. As I was the only speaker for the night (normally there's two, which also make the attendance surprising), I gave a longer than usual presentation and was able to cover the basics of why compiled software is more efficient than packaged, basics and advanced aspects of easybuild configs, easyblocks, and various elaborations. Whilst not exclusive, Easybuild was built with HPC systems in mind and it is in that context that I use it pretty much several times a day at least.

On another HPC-related matter, there is movement going around on the International HPC Certification Forum. Myself and a representative at Pawsey are fishing around with the Australian Research Data Commons to see if there is some coin available to fund development of HPC training, including developing examination questions for the International HPC Certification. Further, I had my first formal meeting for my other Otago University paper, Learning Theory and Practice in Higher Education, which has a stronger autonomous and research orientation - my project is implementing the International HPC Certification Exam, and the provision of a well-developed PRINCE2-style project plan seemed to impress, with some interesting discussion on the collection of metrics from history files to survey development of learners. I may try that next week when I run two days of coursework.

One aspect that my supervisor did raise was about encouraging intrinsic motivation in this space. I have ranted and raved about many times, but I was astounding lucky to have my hands-on computing experience in 80s with the CLI. Since then we've had around 30 years of the GUI by default and whilst it has lowered the bar for doing simple things, it has removed people from understanding the environment, caused a loss of performance, and, of course, hides the incredible power that one has with the CLI. Part of this came to the fore on Monday night, when I took the opportunity to write up Praise-Singing Popper Utilities. These are a suite of commands which allows one to manipulate and extract information from PDFs from the command-line. I mentioned them in a talk I gave last year on Linux and PDFs and the opportunity arose to give a practical example after some people at RK College were having issues with assignment submission. The system is only able to accept one file per assignment and some students had a multi-part assignment; some apparently overwrote their submission instead of exporting to a common file format and concatenating.

The Victorian state election delivered a thumping victory to Daniel Andrews and the governing Labor Party. Whilst as the prepolls are coming in the margin of victory is not nearly the same as it was on the night, it is still pretty incredible that some of the safest Liberal seats in the state are now marginal and the rusted-on National party seats in rural Victoria are being taken by independents. Yet, it is as it should be. The Labor Party, whilst far from perfect, delivered what it promised to do, showed a genuine commitment to infrastructure development, made some principled socially progressive decisions, and promised to do more of the same in health, education, and transport. The opposition campaign, almost always negative, focussed on ill-conceived "law and order" policies and religious appeals, simply couldn't carry in either what were the marginal "sandbelt" seats or even their supposed core supporters of Deakinite-liberals in the eastern suburbs. I shall write more about this on the Isocracy Network website in coming days, especially the attempt by conservatives who, incredibly, argue that the opposition's campaign was not right-wing enough.

Two IT events of note have occurred in the past few days. The first was on election day when I went to a farewell lunch for Chris Samuel who is leaving the country and is on his way to NERSC. I thank Chris for putting me on my career path of high-performance computing and for offering many words of wisdom along the way. An unfazeable fatalist, Chris has exactly the right demeanor for a profession that is often somewhere between the extremely challenging and almost incredulous; and that's just the users. The other event was the Victorian Directors of IT Forum which was held today. I'm not a Director, but I get invited along anyway and whilst a lot of it is at a very high-level, I was particularly interested in the presentation by Trish McCluskey and David Day from Victoria University on the "block curriculum" approach.

Ran a session of Eclipse Phase on Sunday where the Sentinels made their necessary resleevings as part of their journey to Antarctica, specifically the beautiful Halley Research Station (Youtube). Next week we're taking a break (shock!) from our regular gaming agenda, which would have been RuneQuest. I get the idea that some people are a bit RuneQuest-ed out, if such a thing could happen. It is perhaps just as well; next Sunday, December 2, I'm giving an address at the Unitarian Church on "The End is Nigh: Poor Stewardship of Planet Earth", where I compare some of the crazy apocalyptic fantasties of religious metaphysics to crazy probabilities of anthropogenic climate change of secular reality.

The HPC Advisory Council conference went well. It is small and relatively specialist, but the content and location was excellent. My own paper Exploring Issues in Event-Based HPC Cloudbursting was apparently well received at least according to people who told me so afterwards. Not all research comes to a thoroughly positive conclusion and sometimes it is handy for a research group to discover blockers on the way so others can avoid them in advance. I was particularly happy with Brian Skjerven's presentation on Hands-on HPC Containers and being pointed to XALT, a software usage metrics tool, as an extension to LMOD. Something to sink my teeth into next week when I'm back at the coal-face.

Just before leaving Perth I had a visit to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to seek confirmation on the sale of Rick's apartment. That was all confirmed without too much fuss and the following week visited his financial advisors to sign an agreement to implement their plan. Next step will be to clean out his apartment (and the mountain of books) and put the place on the market. At the same time Rick's relatives - Janet, Eileen, and Steve - are visiting for his birthday and we all had dinner with Rick's former neighbour Mel at the positively beautiful Abbotsford Convent, which is next door to where Rick is now housed. There is recognition that he's probably not destined for much longer on this earth so there was some discussion about what to do after the event. The sort of thing we should prepare for of course.

The plane trips to and from Perth provided the opportunity to watch a few movies, most of which were not great. The exception was Selma a historical drama about Martin Luther King Jnr and the famous march. There are some historical inaccuracies (such as the treatment of Johnson), but it is still very worthwhile viewing. Less successful was the Johnny Cash biography, Walk the Line which concentrated (quite well, it must be said) on his various home and tour dramas, but almost completely neglected the latter part of his life and his political views. Way down on the bottom of the pile was Guardians of the Tomb, a Chinese-Australia science fiction action film, which had all the potential (what's not to love with a quest for the elixer of life and pack-hunting funnel-web spiders?) and none of the execution (kudos to Shane Jacobson however whose wit was the film's only redeeming feature). On return to Melbourne went to see Jabberwocky at The Astor with caseopaya and Rodney B. It is aged quite well, and gives a fairly accurate portrayal of medieval life (even with a couple of anachronisms), and skirts a difficult line between being amusing and grim.

Among all this, I have come down with a chest cold, which has delightfully included hemoptysis. It is almost certainly bronchitis, but if I'm not better by Monday it's off to the doctor for me. The first inklings were on the morning of the departure from Perth, but it really kicked on Friday. Hefty doses of cough mixture and pills have allowed me for some semblance of normality on for low-level activities (such as listed), but there's no way I'm for anything too active. I have cancelled one dinner planned for tonight, and the Eclipse Phase session planned for Sunday. I will, however, go The Philosophy Forum to give my presentation on The Philosophy of Technology which I already know quite well and have already written the presentation.