Lev Lafayette's journal

Last Tuesday night gave a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria on The Innovation Patent Review and Free Software. The recent recommendation that "no method, process or system shall be patentable" in innovation patents needs to be implemented by parliament and extended to cover standard patents as well. LUV's planned miniconference and installfest in the La Trobe Valley is going well too, with good expressions of interest by locals and support from Linux Australia. Tuesday was also the day of running the one-day course in Octave and R; the feedback is good, but I feel particularly exhausted after this one as their is so much material. I am considering redesigning it for a more efficient presentation.

Masks of Nyarlathotep was cancelled on Thursday night, so we played Chez Cthulhu and Trailer Park Gods, which were appropriate lightweight alternatives. Sunday was GURPS Middle Earth where we made it through the first dungeon crawl of the campaign (an old Dwarven barrow). In the online HeroQuest Glorantha game, I've pushed the narrative with (entirely safe-for-work) a trollkin orgy. The only other major social activity of the week was Julie A's fortieth birthday drinks which was a pleasurable gathering. I think I've known Julie for about twenty five years or thereabouts?

On Sunday gave the address at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on Small Gods on the Pale Blue Dot which combined both the perspectives of Terry Pratchett and Carl Sagan, especially the themes of religious sincerity, reverence, and literal perspective. It was a very well-attended meeting, that followed up with a great roundtable discussion at The Philosophy Forum on Language and Meaning (notes pending), which covered different types of communication, the continuum of language within and between species, and an interesting (and unexpected) interest in extreme rhetoric and deceptive uses of language.

It was a small but thoroughly interesting meeting with Dr. Rodney Syme from Dying With Dignity Victoria. As jokingly mentioned, it's not often you get to meet with someone who has been investigated nine times for assisting in the death of others. He made a very good case for the introduction of palliative voluntary euthanasia, despite the inability of politicians and especially some religious leaders, to engage in the very basic human right of letting people themselves decide when the time is right. I took some notes from the meeting that are of interest. Of particular interest was the presence of a Anabaptist who argued emphatically for the separation of church and secular governance. On other matters relating to the Victorian Secular Lobby, have also managed to get the website up-to-date in terms of news items of import; most recently, despite Exodus International apologising for the harm they've caused, Australia groups still persist.

Sunday's game was Twilight 2000 with another episode of the battle for Warsaw, which saw the local militia push the mercenaries and marauders of the self-styled "Black Baron" away from their defensive perimeter. In other end-of-the-world scenarios, RPG.net have published my reviews of Aftermath!, and The Apocalypse Stone. Still working through a review of Horror on the Orient Express, as well as material for RPG Review 20's themed "Monsters and Aliens", including overviews of the GURPS Aliens and Humanx, AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual, Call of Cthulhu's Malleus Monstrorum, White Wolf's Hunter: The Reckoning, and a variety of RuneQuest material. Part of the challenge will be taking into account the tension between the grotesque weirdness associated with the monster alien and the sense of sympathy with the other. Material has also been provided by tzunder, specifically some classic D&D creatures for OpenQuest (RuneQuest etc).

Today completed another session of Introductory HPC With Linux, which went exceptionally well especially considering the complete lack of familiarity members of the class had with Linux and HPC. Nevertheless they were nearly all doctoral candidates and some of them had done extensive Fortran programming (on MS-Windows for goodness sake; I didn't even know that such beast existed). Received extremely good feedback from course attendees, and will be initiating a longer-term mentoring program with this group. Tomorrow and Wednesday will be the intermediate and advanced courses, the former including scripting, regular expressions, job arrays, dependencies, and interactive jobs, and the latter including even more on scripting, but mostly on MPI programming. Have suggested new courses for 2013-2014 including Tools for Researchers (SQL, Version Control, Make for projects), Mathematical Programming (R and Octave), and Scientific Programming (Python, C and Fortran). On the related subject of my studies in Tertiary and Adult Eduction, still haven't received the final mark, but did receive excellent feedback on my suggestions of changes to the way the course is assessed, with significantly more emphasis on continuous summative assessment for formative purposes.

Spent most of today putting some near-final touches on RPG Review #19, the apocalypse issue which, unsurprisingly, has a Review of Apocalypse Games, which particularly takes issue with some interesting pathological orientations among some games nominally part of the genre. Appropriately tomorrow we'll be playing a session of Twilight 2000, using a more plausible background to what could have been nuclear war in the 1990s. In my search for material I have unfortunately encountered an addictive little text game, Radioactive Shelter, which must be less than a hundred lines of code at best. Also appropriately played in another session of Eclipse Phase on Thursday night. It is interesting how that particular setting manages to combine several genres successfully, including being both post-apocalyptic and current apocalyptic, a fairly interesting combination.

In other apocalyptic portents, conspiracy theorist billionaire, Clive Palmer has announced the formation of a new political party. This is the gut who thinks the CIA is funding Australian environmental groups to reduce our supposed competitive advantage in such industries. Palmer is obviously anti-carbon pricing, against the mining tax, and against vested political interests that aren't his. The impending conflict in Queensland between his United Australia Party (shades of yesteryear), Bob Katter's Australia Party (protectionist, social conservative) and the dregs that remain of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, should be quite strange and even possibly entertaining, as they all compete against the merged and currently dominating Liberal National Party of Queensland. In related news, the Kooyong/Higgins FEAs of the Labor Party are holding a Quiz Night on May 2nd. Had an excellent dinner and conversation with two longstanding friends in the movement (Jenne and Katrina) on Friday night; alas both will miss this particular event.

Work next week will include a second run of training courses for this month. Over a late lunch with the CEO on Friday I mentioned that when I arrived at VPAC we we running one course every quarter; now we run two every two months with a plan for a third. Revived the idea of developing this courses into accredited postgraduate certificates or similar and introducing them as an online platform (perhaps using something like Moodle, as I admit not being very fond of Blackboard). With regards to continuing studies in Adult and Higher Education, the drop-off in participation is quite noticeable, as the last week's for withdrawals has just past. Have made a start on my thematic paper and the major project on multicultural teaching in higher education, specifically for the courses that I conduct.

Had the opportunity to attend a one-day Matlab conference for release 2012b last Thursday, held at the lovely Melbourne Rendezvous Hotel; great location, rather average talks. On Sunday went to the OpenDay of the Australian Synchrotron; very surprised to see a little bit of my indirect work making an appearance in the introductory lecture. Whilst synchrotrons are more famous for the recreation of the first nanoseconds of the universe and those related sub-atomic particles (which is awesome enough), the Australian sync does somewhat more practical work in the health and material sciences.

On a somewhat related topic, we now have nearly all of the hardware for our new cluster installed; there's still not much public information that can be released on the matter except to say that it can reach a fairly impressive 45.9 teraflops, which makes it "somewhat better" than our Operton cluster, which is a little bit long in the tooth. As the project manager for our deliverables, I'm getting a little nervous about schedules, especially with so few tasks available in parallel (there is a unintentional double-barrelled pun there that only HPC project managers - a very rare breed - would get).

XCKD once famously remarked on the relationship between science and politics, and as such the good ddstory has provided an excellent contribution to the subject (telemann's response is beautiful anmd then there's a GOP senator who wants to cut science funding 'cause those dang researchers read too much). More locally, for all the nay-sayers (which included myself under some circumstances), Australia's carbon price is reducing emissions, and with potential decline in consumer prices on the way.

A few days ago we noticed that Calamity the rat had acquired quite a sizeable tumour. So we book the local awesome vet to have his operation and he comes out fine, albeit a bit dopey. He's had a nibble at his stitches, but with the application of a sock over the affected area he should be fine. One last check at midnight before I go to bed and ... he's slipped out of the sock, and chewed out all his stiches - revealing a gaping wound and a little too much of his stomach muscles to the world. (On a tangent, it is interesting seeing such things how much skin is just a bag for a second layer of muscle, then internal organs). So we rush the "little nutter" (hat-tip to mickmercer for such a description of rats) to the emergency vet, who dope up the rat (again), staple up the incision, coat in film and send him on his way.

With the upcoming debate on the Australian Senate, I have written an article for the Isocracy Network which argues that all politicians are unrepresentative swill. On a similar note, a presentation I gave at the Melbourne Atheist Society last year has made its way to YouTube (part one, follow for others, original text).

Have recently completed two large work projects; an introductory training manual for Linux and HPC computing (16,000 plus words), and a review of the company website (xhtml and css standards compliance, accessibility compliance, design and features, content, and Flesch readibility. Currently working on a marketing plan (as we don't have a dedicated marketing person). Also have the misfortune of having to review MS-Windows HPC as a software package apparently requires it; I lean to proposals that it will be better for everyone's state of mind to port the code instead. Finally, more kudos to VPAC's summer students who did an excellent review of their work last week on porting parts of the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit to be used on Graphics Processing Units. The advantage of medical imaging in medical sciences (brain surgey was cited!) from hours and days to minutes will be enormous.

Half my time at VPAC is seconded to ARCS. Two days ago, ARCS management decided that they wouldn't be renewing that contribution at the end of the year with various mealy-mouthed excuses (different skill-set needed, VPAC is over-funded, want to end 50/50 splits). VPAC is currently crunching the numbers and working out whether they can find the money to make up the extra time and money required, which I imagine they can do.

But at the same time there is a very nice ICT consultant position at a local university that is right up my alley. It would mean a 20% pay rise and a 90% increase in superannuation, managing a small team of technical support staff. It would mean greater responsibility and more hours, but I think I would really enjoy it. The other option is agreeing to a 50% reduction in hours and pay at VPAC.. which wouldn't be so bad either. I would be poorer but very far from impoverished (such are the quirks of marginal tax rates) and I would have more time, which would be an absolute joy. Or I could push hard for VPAC to keep me on in a full-time position, which would be stable, fairly well-paid.

Time or stability or money and responsibility. Those are the choices I'm confronting with. And making a decision on these is eluding me.

Spoke on Wednesday night at the St. Kilda branch of the ALP; primary emphasis of my presentation was on socialisation of land rents and how their private collection contributed significantly to the global financial crisis. Also speaking on the night was Dr. Nicholas Gruen of Lateral Economics who was advocating a state-owned Internet banking service for transactions and for superannuation. On Sunday I gave an address at the Melbourne Unitarian Church entitled "Sympathy for the Devil", where gave an outline of this poor misrepresented spirit, discussed some contemporary organisations that claim some allegiance and concluded that trumping prosaic versions of moral judgment with supernatural versions and excuses ("the devil made me do it"), should be utterly abandoned. Sunday week I'll be giving part II of the "Philosophy of Economics" study with an emphasis on positive economics. A few days beforehand will be the forum on public transport; should it be returned to public management? should it be free?

Last week the Federal budget was announced; ARCS received a massive increase of funding; some $97 million over the four financial years 2009-2013, whereas previously we had $22 million; this is truly awesome especially given the modest number of staff we have (did they read my preceding journal post?). On the other half of my working world, my installation of a CUDA instance of NAMD has seen some excellent results (plus I found a bug). Attempts to install Desmond have been less successful. Have conducted another review of our training course and in my own studies for the Cert IV in Workplace Training and Assesment picked up two more High Distinctions.

On Thursday night finished off our Dragon Warriors campaign with an explosive conclusion; on Sunday ran the first session of GURPS Krononauts which involved an intervention in the time of the fall of the Aztec Empire, a fascinating and tragic period of history. In the HeroQuest pbem, the Crimson Bat has been destroyed by a Rubble Runner with a Dwarven grenade. Now accepting articles for the fourth edition of RPG Review which will include interviews with Dennis Sustare and (apparently) Ken St. Andre!

Last Sunday Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage & Ministry, Star King Ministry, gave his a presentation on "That Confusing Word Called 'Love'". He made an extension to what is commonly called "the Unitarian-Universalist trinity" of freedom, reason and tolerance - by extending it to 'honesty' and 'compassion' which he considered to the key features of the notion of love. After the service, I led the discussion for the Unitarian Philosophy Forum which had an excellent turnout for a discussion on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and particularly its relationship to the scientific method. We made good use of the BBC programme Most of our Universe is Missing. I have since started writing a paper on the issue and discussion, but find myself sidetracked by holographic principle.

Life at VPAC hasn't been fun for our users of late with three hardware failures on one of our storage nodes in a two-week period. Having 14 drives fail due to a faulty LSI card in the space of six minutes can be sort of scary, especially when we have to restore over twenty million files and almost 8 terabytes of data. It has meant an extended outage on our supercomputers, however users have been most understanding. On a work related topic from some years ago, the proposal that Martin McGuire of ConnectIE and I put together to convert East Timor's ccTLD into a revenue-raising international telephone directory has been taken up; but for a commercial interest and not for East Timor.

When Ticonderoga Online restarted at the very end of last year a number of my book reviews were included; The Last Witchfinder (historical fiction, entertaining, well-written, informative), Hidden Empire and A Forest of Stars (plain-vanilla space opera, somewhat unimaginative) and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (typical Phillip K. Dick - which is good). Still have a small mountain of other books I've promised to review.