Lev Lafayette's journal

I understand that many people like things. They provide pleasure, a sense of homely belonging, memories, security etc. And, I must confess, have a particular appreciation of finely crafted items, "brown wood" furnishings, and a deep love of written word on paper. But the path I am taking in life commands more minimalism, in part from döstädning (Swedish for "death cleaning"!). I grok the approach of Marie Kondo's apparently Shinto-inspired advocacy to only keep those things which "spark joy", although the fact they have an online shop and their partner is a sales consultant leads me to question how genuine they are. What makes good empirical sense is that less clutter in one's life reduces entropy, reduces anxiety and stress, improves diet, reduces cognitive overload and improves productivity. etc. As for my friends who love cultural artifacts, a well-organised book, music, or video collection does not really constitute clutter even if it consists of many visual things. Does anyone really consider a library, "cluttered"? A poorly organised file system however does, even if it is just one system unit!

Which a very round-about way of saying that I've been decluttering and simplifying the objects, real and virtual, in my life. The past couple of days I've spent some time working through about eight old desktop computers that I've had under the desk in the games library, one of which (my old VPAC desktop, Slackware Linux) hadn't been turned on for around five years. Some of the others haven't been turned on for ten years, and one machine (which I'm currently working on) dates back from 2001! There is, among all this some old data that I'd like to recover, mostly of a similar vintage if not older - I've done this a few time in the past and it's worthwhile documenting - it's not that hard! So that careful process of data recovery, often by making use of old Linux live CDs and mounting even older IDE drives, is underway. It will take a few days overall, I suspect, but lost data is irreplaceable. There is at least one drive which I know will have to go to a specialist service (I have recommended Payam Data Recover for a number of years now).

Just as one cannot have everything (where would you put it?) nor can one know everything. Many years ago I was introduced to the notion of "epistemophilia", by my honours examiner, Dr. Zoe Sofoulis. It is expressed as the desire and even the paraphilia when the quest for knowledge becomes irrational. The sanest expression of this is seeking understanding and communication; the worst is secret knowledge for manipulation. One could make a point about where our social system fits in this regarding so-called intellectual property rights, let alone direct political censorship of factual content. On a personal level, I consider myself a bit of a late bloomer in my love of languages, but in the past week, I powered through a number of Duolingo stories in French, German, Spanish and found myself on top of the Diamond League, the highest possible level. It only required two days of obsessiveness, but obsessiveness nonetheless. At least I can justify it by saying I have, and will, use those languages in real practise. I would like to get my teeth into some SE Asian languages again at some stage with travels in mind, once this damn virus is done with. It's been a long time, for example, since I've been to the Malay archipelago, and my time in Thailand has been woefully short. Idle speculation at this point of course, but something on mind.

Firstly, I was deeply touched by the condolences sent regarding our departed Gremory rabbit, which ends a long-line of lagomorphs and rodents as companion animals. We've made a start on collecting his worldly possessions (food, hay, toys) to find a fellow creature that may benefit from them. I shall also ensure that Gremory (along with all his fellows, Dantalion, Murmur, and Astaroth) receive character write-ups when I start on the Australian supplement for the edition of Bunnies & Burrows next month.

Apropos, much time in the last few days was spent at Arcanacon and related events. It really all started with a group of us heading out to the deco Sun Theatre in Yarraville to see a special screening of The Call of Cthulhu for ser_pounce. The screening included additional "making of" footage and a questions and answers session with the producer and co-writer. It was really quite enjoyable and merged well with the following night's launch of the Australian Role Playing Industry Awards at the Water Rat in South Melbourne. This was a great opportunity to catch up in-person with Sarah Newton a fellow game-designer whom I've known for quite a while via social media.

After this was Arcanacon at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, making a return after several years. There was probably close to 275 people attending all up, with the RPG Review Cooperative managing the second-hand games stall and running games of Papers & Paychecks. Only a couple of sessions of the latter ended up happening, but those who participated had a great time and even bought copies of the game. As for the stall, we had several contributors of stock which helped make it one of the most popular places to visit during the Con. Accolades are due to Andrew McPh, Andrew D., and Karl B., in particular for helping out at the stall. Karl also chaired a panel on GMing at the Con. I suppose the next step after this is the Easter convention, CONquest.

In other activities, I've been working away on my Regular Expressions course and have organised for three HPC courses early next month before heading to New Zeland for a couple of weeks to go to Multicore World. Today I put in a poster submission to the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference in Zurich in the middle of this year on public revenue modelling. In the next couple of days I'll also make a tutorial submission for an IEEE conference in Prague on cloud engineering.

Managed to catch up with lunch (Fremantle) and dinner (Perth) on the 28th with a number of old friends, including darklion, strangedave, thefon, ariaflame, fred_mouse, grailchaser, Murray W., Andrei N., Bruce T., Jason F., and Michael J., Brian G, (and I'm sure I've missed someone...). The gathering was at two Italian restaurants which meant good food and in the latter case allowed me to attempt a few mangled phrases in their native tongue. The day also saw the collection of the last boxes and history of the MARS library for the RPG Review Cooperative, another 60kg of games. The last day in Perth included a visit to the Fremantle cemetery for the solemn moment to inurn Maria H's ashes. The last two days back at home have been spent formatting Supercomputing with Linux for the printers.

New Year's Evening was a quiet one at home, with a clink of glasses at midnight and that's about it. Inevitably the New Year brings into reflections of the ever-optimistic plans of the previous year. Whilst my natural tendency is to beat myself up over not achieving everything on the list, I should feel some degree of satisfaction with completing a good portion and few other things besides. After all the year has seen my get two books in production, including "a thirty-year joke" in Papers & Paychecks, attending no less than eight conferences (and presented at half at them), many international and interstate trips (finally I visit Paris), and some modest improvements in the various associations that I have responsibility for. Attending three funerals and having a friend develop rapid dementia were significant challenges in the year. As I get older it is inevitable this will be more common. I will, of course, engage in a more thorough review of 2017 and plans for 2018 in the next few days, but already I am planning not to do so much new, rather complete outstanding items.

As per the previous post, on Saturday gave a presentation to Linux Users of Victoria on An Overview of SSH. Most SSH-users, like myself, are probably used to using SSH as a tool. Once you start digging deeper you discover a whole new world of various fascinating tricks, some of which I explored. I think it went pretty well although it was somewhat longer than a number of my other presentations. As part of continuing development of the curriculum that I run at UniMelb, next week I will be at the National Compute Infrastructure centre in Canberra, going over their spring training session. At the same time, and for the same reason, I have started the PRACE/University of Edinburgh online HPC MOOC.

A couple of days this week has been spent with medical matters for Rick. A had a meeting with the social worker at St Georges. Even as a person now with memory impairment, I certainly got the impression that he's going a bit stir-crazy. The following day went to the Uniting Care Carnworth Centre for a tour, which is nearby and includes a special ward for the memory impaired. My application to become financial power of attorney has been submitted to VCAT, and I'll be visiting his flat tomorrow to see if I can discover any paperwork which may lend some knowledge to his financial state.

On lighter matters, on Sunday played a new scenario and playtested new rules for the rather silly 1980s RPG, Hunter Planet, using a scenario almost entirely based (but from the alien's perspective) of Bad Taste, which is one of my favourite splatterpunk films of all time. I have also spent a fair bit of time working on a release of RPG Review (increasingly late), as well as the Monsters section for Papers & Paychecks (also late). As continuing evidence that truth is stranger than fiction, a new source item has just been provided, courtesy of a Reddit thread on the most ridiculous workplace rules. In a civilised country, most of these would be illegal.

Gave introductory Linux and HPC day-courses at University of Melbourne last Thursday and Friday, followed by a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria the following day on Compiling from Source in Linux. The former courses had a particularly high-ratio of staff, rather than the usual collection of postgraduate researchers. Regardless the feedback was equally positive. The presentation to LUV was quite challenging, as I quickly realised however the single talk could easily be several, and as a result I touched upon several items (compilation options, makefiles, autotools and other autobuild systems, environment modules, etc). Nevertheless the post-presentation discussion was excellent; Rodney B., asked whether I had used material from other courses. When I revealed I had not he described the presentation as "embarrassingly good" - which I suppose is positive. At times like these I can have the conceit that I might actually be reasonably good at this HPC Training racket.

After LUV attended the monthly RPG Review movie night at The Astor. It was a monster-themed double with Kong: Skull Island, followed by the 1970 Hammer film, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth. The former was fairly good, a rather fun combination of King Kong and Apocalypse Now. The latter was absolutely terrible, with the one redeeming feature of the film being carried out in a constructed language. On related popular culture matters played GURPS Middle-Earth the following day and our party of do-gooders successfully defeated the evil sapient trees built by a mad druid. Apropos had some pretty regular sales from the RPG Review in the past couple of weeks, and am reminded that both the RPG Review journal is due, along with Papers & Paychecks.

Apparently I enjoy a challenge as I look at the mountain of tasks that I've set myself for the year, which has little room for any additional activities. Certainly, I am going to be looking harder and increasingly so at individuals who may be interested in co-collaboration in sharing the workload. Of course, so much of this is of my own creation - caseopaya does remind me that nearly all of the non-work demands that I have are entirely the result of my own volition. It is true: If you live your dreams, you can remake the world was a telling line in rather charming surrealist novel The Dream Years that was influential in my honours year. The following year I had emblazoned on my diary in large letters - back when paper diaries were still functional - a quote from Paul Valéry, What are you going to do TODAY?.

So how was that weekend? Saturday was the Annual Penguin Picnic for Linux Users of Victoria, which has a smaller turnout than last year (many were at LCA in Hobart), but was nevertheless very enjoyable. In other Linux-related issues, have compiled The Provision of HPC Resources to Top Universities and added a few notes on Keeping The Build Directory in EasyBuild and Paraview Plugins. I've also been investigating various aspects of data centre management will be posted very soon.

As a small mountain of people main on various social media contacted me with birthday wishes (sometimes I get this ridiculous notion that there are people out there who respect and maybe even like me), a psychologist friend made some very good anonymous comments on the Melbourne car attack, which had to go on the Isocracy Network website as there are are important issues of crime, prevention, and punishment being addressed. Just added yesterday was a contribution from some Syrian refugees, Amina's Story, which is the first part of a wider compilation. There is even another post forthcoming from the ever insightful Steve S., but that's going to be delayed for a day or two for spacing purposes.

There have been several gaming events over the past few days as well. The weekend saw two games of Eclipse Phase, one being an introduction to a variant of Think Before Asking (I have actually played in this scenario once before and have run it another time - but I can keep mum as necessary). Sunday's session was a variant of Lurking In Every Flower, which is like Philip K. Dick meets Vurt - Anders Sandberg's work is getting some solid activity. Finally, several of the reviews that I've provided to RPG.net have now been published, including Alternity Player's Handbook, Alternity Game Master's Guide, Gangbusters, Basic Fantasy, and OSRIC.

Tuesday night attended the Linux Users of Victoria meeting to hear Russell Coker present on M.2 expansion cards, and Rodney Brown on cyclic redundancy checks. The following day had the first of a new class at University of Melbourne on advanced (on a user level) Linux commands and shell scripting. Detailed slides in MD format are available on Github. That evening, with but a couple of days notice, journeyed to Moorabbin to the MelbPC Users Group to address a group of around 60 on Supercomputers: Current Status and Future Trends.

As there is no peace for the wicked, on Sunday I am also presenting at The Philosophy Forum, on "Race conditions for the Human Species : A Global Perspective", and then on Tuesday I'll be presenting at the Atheist Society on "Is Pantheism and Atheism?". The day after that I have another several hours of Linux HPC teaching - and so they cycle goes. Actually I am hoping for a little of a break from such things so I least have the chance to finish up some writing projects that I have had sitting on the backburner for a while.

The majority of this week was conducting Linux and HPC courses for researchers from RMIT and the University of Melbourne; next week will be La Trobe. After doing the twenty or so hours of teaching over three days (I'm amazed that people put up with me for that long) and with even better than usual feedback, I gave a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria on parallel programming. Alas at the same time my Nexus 7 tablet ended up in a loop on the login screen and that took some investigation to solve. The dinner after the LUV meeting at Maria's had some interesting conversation about the BBC bypassing the sockets API for video streaming (fascinating stuff for those who are into such things).

Managed to get something akin to a break on Thursday night for a game of Cats Against Cthulhu, our Australian-country town scenario that combines The Secrets of Cats with Lovecraftian horrors. Impressed to discover that (finally) an English-language edition of Aquelarre is coming out after some thirty years. Currently working on a review of All Flesh Must Be Eaten, hoping to complete in a day or so.

Ahh, that old joke. Having started Duolingo just a couple of weeks ago I have dived right in (see what I did there?) and am now taking seven languages, albeit having only just started a couple of them. I am finding Dutch to be the most horrid despite previous assurances of its supposed ease. If I ever had the chance to develop a language I would get rid of definite and indefinite articles, gendered nouns, conjugations of verbs, and forced attempts at euphony (I'm looking at you French) - oh wait, Tetun does all that already. It's still the best second language I have ever encountered, even moreso than Esperanto.

Yet another round of HPC and Linux courses conducted this week, three solid days of raising a small group of researchers from basic command line knowledge through to submitting PBS scripts of increasing complexity and finishing with MPI programming. In several days, another set of courses will be conducted, this time for the RMIT SPACE research centre. On a related topic, next Tuesday will be the Annual General Meeting for Linux Users Victoria with an interesting talk on cross-compiling for the web also featured.

Provided another submission to the Victorian Parliamentary committee this week on end-of-life choices, this time on behalf of the Isocracy Network. Also received two confirmations to be a speaker in October, one from the Open Source Developers' Conference where I will be presenting on vocational Linux education, and a short presentation to the Victorian Secular Conference on The Political Imperative of Secularism. Sunday week I am giving the address at the Unitarian Church on The Modernisation of Buddhist Karma.

Social media in Melbourne has raised the ante quite significantly in the past twenty-four hours with the announcement then sudden cancellation of Operation Fortitude. After the Federal government reconstructed Australia's immigration service into a paramilitary Border Force, this Friday they were supposed to engage in a search for illegal immigrants on the streets of Melbourne. With Melbournians reacting that they didn't particularly want a "do you have your papers?" policing, it was cancelled, with an almighty cock-up of a media release.

There is much I love about my workplace. High performance computing provides the computational infrastructure which allows scientists to make discoveries quicker and make life better for all of us. Just this week, I am thrilled to see my old work colleague Dr. Mike Kuiper once again finds himself making great discoveries that will save lives, ably assisted by HPC systems. It is very important to me that the workplace is a non-profit company (even if we have a separate commercial arm). I know that we don't have the same sort of resources as the commercial sector. That is why when travelling on the company's dime I fly the cheaper lines, stay at the cheaper accommodation, and typically eat in rather than dine out on a expense account. I like the fact that we're a registered research agency, and that the work being conducted here is (or should be) for the public good. That is part of the reason why I document much of the technical work of what I do (pretty pleased with my work on GAMESS in the past few days) - so other sysadmins around the world in similar institutions may get some understanding in the complex world of optimised compilations of scientific applications.

Which makes it all harder when the axe comes down and staff have to be "let go" to use the euphemism, which is what happened to several staff on Friday. It's almost Victorian in it's politeness isn't it? "We're giving you an opportunity for a new beginning". I imagine it doesn't feel that way to those on the chopping block. Certainly there were a couple whom I think weren't quite pulling their weight and there were others "let go" which quite surprised me. The reason for the axe falling was quite reminiscent of the last time; cash flow. In addition this time there was what I consider a serious structural issue which also contributed significantly to these matters. Senior management and the board carry responsibility for this - and they should know it; "the possession of great power necessarily implies great responsibility" - and that means responsibility in failure as well as success. I cannot help but think of Marx's comments on The Civil War in France when looking at the pay scales of the Commune - representatives should receive never more than the average worker. Management is a privilege as well as a responsibility.

The good soldier however continues their work from the trenches. Many of us have worked ourselves as if possessed by demons in the past year which has generated extraordinary uptime and usage for our clusters along and despite the devastating news we will continue to do so. However sometimes I wonder whether these efforts and the resulting research receives due consideration in a world where soporific entertainment is more worthy than great art and groundbreaking science, where political policy is determined by majoritarian opinions regadless of veracity, and where bureaucracy is more worthy than real work. Half a league, Half a league, Half a league onward ... Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why. To the good soldiers who have a fallen, I salute you: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.