Lev Lafayette's journal

It's been a very busy week for Linux and HPC courses with pretty much all of Monday and Tuesday teaching classes almost entirely made up of RMIT researchers. Once again received excellent feedback; I always feel a little embarrassed and proud at the same time when the class applauds at the end of the training sessions. This coming Monday I fly out to the Australian Institute for Marine Science to spend two days teaching some of their researchers on such topics and training their sysadmins on cluster management and various scientific software installations. Spent the better part of Thursday and Friday writing up the documentation for this. In the meantime I have also submitted a paper for eResearch Australasia on Vocational Engineering with High Performance Computing : A Necessity for a Productive Knowledge Economy. The practical import of this paper is recognising that industrial processes have an optimal degree of complexity, and as traditional industrial employment transfers to developing countries, new processes (and employment) will come from HPC engineering applications - as distinct to new research discoveries which also are coming from HPC data processing. Tangentially related was a very pleasing request for republication from a Linux advocate in Indonesia who had taken the effort to translate a previous presentation of mine (An Introduction to Slackare) into Bahasa-Indonesian.

Two regular gaming sessions this week have gone very well; last Sunday's 7th Sea Freiburg went well, with an mission into the catacombs of the city's cathedral to recover a key that opens a chamber to great (yet destructively unbalancing) riches. Of course there was a particularly hostile ghost there which didn't agree with anything being taken away. Then there was the gargoyles which made escape rather difficult. Although being a somewhat more heroic game, the PCs did somewhat better than Thursday night's Masks of Nyarlathotep team, who are completing the final chapter of story in central Australia. Half the investigators are incapacitated following an encounter with armed cultists followed shortly afterwards with a flying polyp; their friendliest encounter has been with mimi, and they're not always so friendly. It is, in many ways, heading towards a typically conclusion of a Call of Cthulhu story as a tiny group half-dead and half-mad individuals struggle their way through an ancient alien underground maze far from civilisation seeking to prevent the the destruction of the planet.

The double issue of RPG Review 23-24 has been released with the final article, a top-twenty of RPG game worlds concluded. Still working on the web version, as opposed to the PDF, up-to-date, but that should occur soon. Also have had two reviews published on rpg.net, Never Unprepared, for session preparation and Odyssey for campaign management. Thursday night was an enjoyable session of Masks of Masks of Nyarlathotep, with two investigators deciding to take a general plot to seek a sanatorium on Cyprus, rather than continuing their journey to Kenya. They arrived just after Cyprus has become a Crown Colony, and sought assistance from new player-investigator, Constantin von Economo. This afternoon was a session of GURPS Middle-Earth, which ran well.

The LNP Federal government continues to their utmost to destroy any notion of the Commonwealth of Australia, with demands that the unemployed make at least forty job applications per month. Some have shown that this can achieved easily, albeit at a processing cost for business. This clearly ties-in with their work-for-the-dole programme, which is shown to reduce one's chance of finding employment. The practical upshot of all this is that a number of us are plotting a job search agency that automates the application process with relevant positions. Watch this space for further developments in Zardoz Employment Services.

Also in the realm of practical politics is the Isocracy Annual General Meeting (FB link) for August 16th at Trades Hall. Guest speaker is Sol Salbe from the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, and we're hoping to have a speaker from Australians for Palestine, all due to recent events in Gaza. The Network has already made its position quite clear (Apartheid and Zionism, A Zero State Solution; a secular, democratic, liberal, socialist Palestine that is a Jewish homeland. Impossible? In the realm of political change, you start with the ideal and work backwards on how you're going to achieve it.

Wore my The Clash hoodie into work on Friday, causing a flurry of activity and discussion on musical tastes. I had previously discussed my recent acquisition of the Rob Jo Star Band, a very obscure 1975 French version of Hawkwind (or at least that my reading of them). Later that day spent a small fortune to buy two VIP tickets to see the new Pop Will Eat Itself. Ever since my mid-teens my musical tastes have been generally eclectic with an emphasis on the alternative contemporary styles, matching with other aesthetic choices. From the early and mid-70s, there's a tendency towards the amalgam of progressive, psychedelic, art-rock and proto-punk (Hawkwind, Brian Eno, Yes), are my preferences. From the late 70s to late-80s strong punk, gothic, and post-punk influences (The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, Bauhaus, Joy Division/New Order, The Chameleons, Shriekback, The Cure). The late-80s to the mid-2000s my preferred sounds are mainly in the industrial, electronic body music, and other electronica styles (Front 242, Skinny Puppy. Pop Will Eat Itself, Leftfield, Nine Inch Nails). Don't ask me about post-2005 I'm still thinking about it!

Fighting against misattributions is actually a rewarding task, despite their prevalence. Recently I had the opportunity to correct page an alleged quote from Linus Torvalds that "the future is open source everything" - a comment which appears, erroneously, in numerous books. This is, in a sense, a social bug fix. Inspired by this, I am composing a somewhat longer piece which was originally intended as part of a presentation to the Philosophy Forum, but has been brought forward having discovered that I too have been misquoted! The article will address misquotations, poor use of qualifiers, quantitative research, arguments from authority, all as components to qualitative citations.

Next week I'll be in New Zealand; initially to MC Multicore World, and then to give a presentation to computer science staff at the University of Otago in Dunedin, and to visit my secret South Pacific base. The meeting with the computer science staff will be in part inspired by a meeting this week with Greg Wilson and his software carpentry project, designed to provide scientists the minimum tools for the computation side of their research. It is similar in concept, but different in content, to the training courses I run for high performance computing. Whilst in Dunedin, we'll be staying at Larnach Castle which is surprisingly affordable, and the history of a Scottish gothic-horror-romance novel.

Thursday night was the second-last episode of Horror on the Orient Express, which includes the famous transformation of said locomotive into a living monster and the appearance of a cathedral car attached to the runaway steam monstrosity. Having literally crashed into Paris, one character decided enough was enough and booked themselves into the local asylum. Another catatonic character is in the care of another, and a third is secreted in a Romanian asylum in the Carpathians where they call for Ithaqua each evening.

Earlier in the week doomydoombear and partner visited and we provided a tour of Willsmere. Tomorrow is LUV-Beginners, with Daniel Jitnah giving a talk on an introduction to PHP. On Sunday there's a chance I'll be attending the All Tomorrow's Parties festival, although the circumstances of the ticket are not the best - imajica_lj, you are in our thoughts.