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Unfucking ZFS after moving disks

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 06:50:00 +1300

OpenZFS, it turns out, can react very poorly to a reshuffling of the disks. In one zpool I had six disks, arranged as 3 mirrored VDEVs, physically arranged in two external enclosures. One of the enclosure has 4 slots, the other 2. Two of the VDEVs were in one enclosure, the third in the second. This isn’t ideal: one enclosure failure will offline the whole zpool. To fix this, I got ahold of another 4 slot enclosure to spread the VDEVs around. That’s when things went a little fucky.

Kiwicon 11 Day 2 Afternoon

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 09:30:46 +1300

Tracking the Watchers: Practical Tooling Paul McMillan We are going to build a map of radio systems in your city - this is a work in progress, so if you want to use this you’ll need to do some work yourself as well. The systems Paul are working on are P25 radios, which are trunking systems wth centrally controlled channels and frequencies. Intercept nodes, scattered around the city, are: BladeRD 2.

Kiwicon 11 Day 2 Morning

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 13:00:46 +1300

Last night was rounded out nicely by a visit to (thelibrary.co.nz/)[the Library], which offered a civilised volume, a nice mocktail, and some delicious cheeses. What more could a man ask for? Well, I guess I can think of several things, starting with the winning Lotto numbers, but they’re not on offer. After trundling off to bed at a sensible hour, I’m ready to leap once more into the breach, dear friends.

The day commences with a reading from Machines of Loving Grace and some administrivia, including mentioning the sponsors. Which metl probably should have done yesterday.

Kiwicon 11 Day 1 Afternoon

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 22:15:46 +1300

After a nice lunch at Husk (dirty fries and a very nice chocolate malt stout, in case you’re wondering), we’re back into it.

Kiwicon 11 Day 1 Morning

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 13:00:46 +1300

After a much-deserved rest, the good folks of the Crüe return for the 11th Kiwicon, styled Kiwicon 2038AD and with a nifty cyberpunk/Blade Runner theme. We have gloomy colour schemes and mirror shades. We’re returning to the Michael Fowler Centre so as to allow a couple of thousand of us to show up and learn more about the terrors of the what happens when thinking rocks go wrong.

SOHO Gluster for Great Reliability

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 08:00:00 +1200

I was inspired by attending Angus Lees’ garage Kubernetes at linux.conf.au 2018; not in the direct way of setting up Kube at home (although that’s on my to-do list); rather, to solve what Angus mentioned in passing as the biggest pain point for lab/SOHO environments: storage. Storage is still a SPOF¹ for most SOHO-type environments.

There’s a good reason for that: distributed systems are hard. Distributed storage is the hardest part of that problem. But it’s also the most worthwhile problem to solve; if you can have reliable distributed storage, you’ll never wake up to find a note from your 5 year old bemoaning that she can’t watch TV again.

NZIFF Tranche 1

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 21:20:00 +1300

Another fine start to the Alliance Français French Film Festival. Last year I binged on perhaps two dozen movies and, really, it was far too many. This year I’ve paired back a bit, which will no doubt mean I miss some good ones, but equally will mean I’m not too overloaded to even think about them properly.

The only sour note is that, as last year, the change in director in 2017 seems to have largely trashed the children’s film selection. Historically a bit of a highlight, it’s become desperately mediocre.

Le bâtiment

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 20:15:00 +1300

Anouk a gagné. Elle a gagné beaucoup d’argent, mais ell n’a rien dit à personne. Pourqoui? C’est difficile à expliquer. Toute sa vie, sa famille a été pauvre. Sa vie a été gâché par la pauvrité: ses écoles étaient les écoles pauvres, sa nourriture, ses passions, ses vêtemenets, etc. La pauvrité a tout façonné. Mais elle a plus de chance que les autres de sa banlieue: elle a un boulot solide.

Le bâtiment

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:30:00 +1300

Un exercice inspire par «La vie de mode d’emploi»

LCA 2018 Day 5

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 08:50:00 +1100

Another hot, sticky day in Sydney. The climate is my least favourite thing about the place.

Surprising amounts of the city apparently close for “the public holiday”, as the organisers are referring to it, in an effort to maintain neutrality on the local arguments around whether the current form of celebrating the European colonisation of Australia is the right one.

As an aside, mentioning I’m staying in Redfern elicits the odd interesting response from people who think this is basically equivalent to checking into a hotel in a war zone; I was told there would be riots here on Friday, which doesn’t in fact seem to be the case. While the locals are not exactly Abbot voters, the only dire predictions of danger that appear to be accurate are Sydneysiders warning of aggressive gentrification.

LCA 2018 Day 4

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 07:20:00 +1100

Sydney may have a lot of things going for it, but the climate is definitely amongst of them. Still, in spite of the hot, sticky weather, I’m enjoying wending my way through the streets of Redfern every morning; with it’s tiny old row houses and narrow alleys it would seem to be more what you’d find in the heart of an old European city like York; then I exit onto some of the stunningly designed newer buildings provides a sharp and delightful contrast.

I have no idea how anyone affords to live here, though.

LCA 2018 Day 3

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 07:50:00 +1100

Another balmy day in Sydney. This is… not my ideal climate, shall we say. But hey, I saw a big ol’ bat flying around in the wild, which was cool for me and probably completely uninteresting to the locals.

LCA 2018 Day 2

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 06:20:00 +1000

I’m putting myself off-side with general sentiment in Sydney, but I find bin chickens adorable.

LCA 2018 Day 1

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 06:20:00 +1000

This year LCA comes to Sydney, marking the first time I’ve been here since I was maybe 8 or 9. The locals are shocked; apparently the idea one has not come to Sydney is inconceivable. So far I’ve been enjoying the well-integrated public transport with fast, quiet high-speed trains (20 minutes from the airport to Redfern), been freaked out by the cost of rent (Redfern, a location where there are signs asking people not to shoot up in front of children, has apartments renting north of $1200 a week), and oppressed by the weather. Sydney is vast, full of Things and Stuff, and I doubt I’ll see more than the tiniest fraction of it this week.

This year I’m offering many thanks to OSS for sponsoring my ticket.

B-Sides Wellington Day 2

Sat, 25 Nov 2017 11:25:46 +1300

Another sunny day in Wellington for B-Sides. Not that this is anything exceptional about this, the weather is alwys like this why do you ask? Someone won the badge challenge already! Influencing Meat Puppets through Memes Simon “bogan” Howard There are some Kiwicon traditions that have been carried across to B-Sides, and splendid headwear is one of those things: Simon prowls the stage is a blinged out admirals hat whose magnificence cannot be described with mere words.

B-Sides Wellington Day 1

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 21:00:46 +1300

At the end of Kiwicon 10 the Crue decided they needed a break from organising the beast - a multimedia extravanganza that catered to a couple of thousand people. In light of that much-deserved rest, some public-spirited folks stepped up to organise B-Sides Wellington to give us a security conference in Wellington. (Things they, and hence I, learned: apparently it’s easy to get permission to fly a drone aroud parliament.

NZIFF Tranche 1

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 21:30:00 +1300

Every year there are two film festivals I make a point of seeing: the French Film Festival, and the International.

The Witches

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 21:30:46 +1300

The Salem witch trials are a modern touchstone for US culture and, by extension, anywhere influenced by it. The stuff of notable allegories it is as easy to reach for as 1984 or Animal Farm when seeking to sum up something one does not like; one of the main things that I learned from Schiff’s excellent book, though, is how little I know about what actually went on.

The King in the North

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 09:30:46 +1300

The King in the North is an opportunistic title, riffing on a certain popular TV series to sell the subhead: The life and times of Oswald of Northumbria. The northern king at the centre of the book is presented as a pivot in the history of Dark Age Britain, as it moved from a post-Roman, largely post-Christian¹ place of small, warring factions, with limited continuity of leadership, to one where standard, Catholic Christianity became the norm, the monastic institutions took root, and the idea of governance beyond the whims and lives of individual kings could take hold.

LCA 2017 Day 5

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 21:00:00 +1300

A turn to the wet weather in Hobart today, with rain that reminded me firmly of home.

LCA 2017 Day 4

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 23:15:00 +1000

Fresh from a nice dinner last night and a run along the waterfront and through the bush this morning, I’m ready to tackle another day. The number of little bush walkways and river cuttings in this part of Hobart makes for some very pleasant mornings.

I am living in the future; while there’s a lack of jetpacks, while I was running down the hill from the University accommodation I took a video call from Ada and Rosa as they drove into town, in another country.

(Slightly less awesome: dropping my room key while I took my phone out. Happily the University dorm staff were delightfully friendly about replacing it.)

LCA 2017 Day 3

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 22:00:00 +1000

A good start to the day with the announcement of the commutation of the bulk of Chelsea Manning’s sentance, which is a nicely positive story from the States. It’s been a few days of having good luck photographing wildlife.

LCA 2016 Day 2

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 23:25:00 +1000

Another lovely morning in Hobart, with a delightful sunrise, blue-winged green parrots flying past my window, and fucking crows cawing at 5 in the morning. But that’s OK, because I’d already been awake for hours, because I couldn’t stop thinking about ideas from some of yesterday’s talks. Yes, speakers, your content gave me insomnia. For good reasons.

LCA 2017 Day 1

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 12:20:00 +1000

Continuing on from the theme of “visiting parts of Australia I probably wouldn’t otherwise see”, this year LCA has come to Hobart the second time Hobart has hosted an LCA.

Call of Heroes

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 21:15:00 +1100

If you like Terry Pratchett’s watch novels, wuxia, and The Seven Samurai, there’s a good chance you’ll love this.

Some Thoughts on Rogue One

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 21:30:00 +1300

Rogue One, as numerous reviewers have noted, opens in a way which is disconcerting to fans of the Star Wars universe; there is no opening crawl to set the scene - reviewers cleverer than me are quick to make the point that this is perhaps because Rogue One is the opening Crawl from A New Hope - and the music is quite different (and, to be honest, not really as good). But that is merely the beginning of the divergence.

Reverting a Lightroom Library to RAW

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 15:12:00 +1300

After some hemming and hawing, I came to a decision: converting my RAW files to DNG was not The Right Thing to do, for a number of reasons:

DNG is actually a pain in the arse, compatibility wise. For better or worse - arguable worse - it’s never really had the uptake as a kind of universal RAW TIFF replacement. It’s actually easier to run different tools across RAW + sidecar files than DNG.
On a related note, going to DNG locks you off from the manufacturer’s native tools. Which often aren’t great, but sometimes do a much better job of producing display and print files.
While Lightroom is a great jack-of-all trades, the Adobe Camera Raw engine isn’t necessarily the best RAW converter out there. I’d like more freedom to work with (or at least trial) others, which can get better results; the fact the DNG format, while an open spec, is built around storing data in a form which assumes you’ve got the ACR/Lightroom pipeline as your internal representation only makes that worse.
DNGs really slow everything down. They’re slower to browse in Explorer, they’re slower to import, they’re just slow.

So for those reasons, pulling my library back into RAWs seems like the way to go. Problem is, it ain’t as easy as you’d hope.

(But it is possible.)

Kiwicon 10 Day 2 Afternoon

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 18:02:46 +1300

Lunchtime walking in the sun; Wellington is offering Kiwicon visitors the full experience. Yesterday would have left a large number of visitors wondering “Why would anyone live in this hell-hole?”, while today is posing the question “Why would you live anywhere else?” metl promises a mind-expanding afternoon. Let’s do the Timewarp Again Karit @nzkarit Starts with the Crue and friends performing the Timewarp on stage. The theme is GPS spoofing on the cheap, and the correspondance thereof.

Kiwicon 10 Day 2 Morning

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:05:46 +1300

A friendly reminder New Zealand is part of the Five Eyes team. And a montage of the ridiculousness of, well, everything about the Five Eyes nations. Trump. Colin Craig. Farage. Gumboot throwing.

Kiwicon 10 Day 1 Afternoon

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 19:02:46 +1300

A delayed start - apparently the AV started acting wonky once a bunch of radiation sources were unpacked next to it. More time for lunch to digest.

Kiwicon 10 Day 1 Morning

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 12:45:46 +1300

Kiwicon X has an X Filesish theme this year that leaves me feeling like I should be wearing a suit, Agency-style. But I probably won’t.

Anyhoo, Kiwicon continues to grow and grow apace. This year north of 2000 souls will shuffle, slumps, and/or glide their way into a Wellington which has been hit by natural disasters (“Welcome to Wellington. Here are your complimentary earthquakes and floods; if you look to the left, you’ll see a flock of trampolines passing us by”). Which is a pretty remarkable accomplishment; I hope we all remember that one of the things that makes Kiwicon so awesome is how stupendously nice everyone is, as a rule.

Also: if your conference doesn’t have a warning sign above the door saying “Pyro and lasers in use”, your conference needs to lift its game. Just remember not to point your fancy imaging device at the last show unless you enjoy losing pixels.

Kiwicon 9 Day 2 Morning

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 20:00:52 +1000

Another glorious day in the Cyber Corps! A day in the Cyber Corps is like a day on the server farm. Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Cyber Corps!

Kiwicon 9 Day 2 Afternoon

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 21:21:52 +1300

So my notes got a bit sparse here, partly because of a really nice lunch with maaaaaybe one too many espressotinis, but also because apparently taking notes upset someone behind me with a laser pointer. Which, you know, too bad, but it didn’t help. Also, I’m publishing these less than a week before Kiwicon X, which says a lot about how bad I was at editing the second day’s material.

NZIFF Tranche 2

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 20:38:00 +1200

My second week of the festival was all about movies I could see with Ada.

NZIFF Tranche 1

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 20:45:00 +1200

It’s another year, so it must be time to roll through another New Zealand International Film Festival. Unfortunately I can’t justify taking weeks off work to catch them all (or the bill that would generate, for that matter), so as with every film festival, it’s a balancing act around family, cost, work, and the sometimes infuriating scheduling choices of the organisers as to which I get to see.

Hand Fooding

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 21:33:00 +1200

Tigers. Hand-fooding them is not ok. But we can throw them food, like ducks. But different food from ducks. Tigers eat meat. We have meat, so tigers eat us. One of the best bits of parenting is watching small people reason about the world from first principles.

San Francisco 2016

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 21:30:00 +1200

Red Hat Summit was in San Francisco this year; it was my first time in San Francisco; my first impression? BART mocks any airport to CBD run in New Zealand. I cannot imagine what someone used to the BART would make of the shambles that is transit from the Auckland airport to the city, but the thought gives me shame. And while the Pride parade was the day I flew in, by the time I worked through customs and whatnot, it was all over, alas.

Frida Kahlo - Her Photos

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:43:00 +1300

The title of this exhibition, hosted at the generally excellent Te Manawa museum of Palmerston North, is more than a touch misleading: it might have you think there will be rather a lot of photographs by Frida Kahlo; instead, it is a collection of photographs owned by Kahlo, and a mere handful (literally; you don’t need more than the fingers on one hand to count them) which she herself took.

This disparity was only one of the things that left me feeling, in spite of some interesting points, rather disappointed in the exhibition overall.

mdadm and the Tyranny of Documentation Lag

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 12:30:00 +1200

So you’re building mdadm arrays the modern way (avoiding RAID 5 because of the write hole and RAID 5 rebuild problems with modern large disks); that would incline you to build a RAID 10 layout. Great! Until the day you need to grow your array. You read the Internet, you check your manpages, and you discover, to your growing horror that you’re screwed! You can’t add any more disks and do a reshape - you’re going to have to dump your filesystems to a backup, rebuild the arrays and filesystems from scratch, and then do a restore.

What is this, 1999? ZFS?

But you’re wrong. It’s not your fault, though. You’ve been mislead by documentation lag.

We Have Cameras

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 21:35:00 +1200

Not long after her fourth birthday I got Ada a camera, a little Samsung. It was a wonderful thing; while the camera itself was about what you’d expect for a camera you’d feel sane giving a four year old, the output was remarkable; not technically (although there were several photos that were actually genuinely interesting in and of themselves), but because of the view they gave into what Ada considered important. It’s a fascinating window into the mind of a four year old.

Sentences, Complexity, and Arbitary Numbers

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 21:23:00 +1200

One of the things Ada used to say was “when I’m four”; this designated a point in time when, in her mind, she might stretch her abilities beyond a certain point. She would, for example, count to 120 (in English) or 20 (in French) and, in spite of being quite capable of going further, explain, “not now, when I am four”. Rosa has never vocalised the same idea, but having turned four, she suddenly seems to have decided to switch on a bunch of things: an interest in learning to read, colouring in the lines, writing her name, and, in the last week, a dramatic increase in the complexity of her sentences - previously, she had good but terse use of the language, getting her point across in a fairly direct fashion.

Redhat Summit 2016 Day 3

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 07:30:00 +1000

The final day of the Summit, which for me had the fewest formal sessions and the most one-on-ones with Red Hat folks.

Redhat Summit 2016 Day 2

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 06:30:00 +1200

A bunch of attendees opened the day with a 5K run in the morning; a nice route cutting down to the waterfront, past the baseball stadium, under the bridge to Oakland, and back up third street; the misty morning gave nice views of the bridge as we ran, and I may have been the third person home. Which arguably speaks to the general fitness level of the people at the conference, rather than my running prowess.

Redhat Summit 2016 Day 1

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 21:00:00 +1200

The first day of the Summit proper. I am glad I registered yesterday - there are long queues of desperate people waiting for their tags as the keynote is about to kick off, which is definitely a rookie error.

The Moscone convention centre is vast - it sprawls across multiple city blocks, and the room used for the keynote would comfortably house whole conventions in Australia or New Zealand; 5,000 people didn’t even touch the sides.

In the corporate extravagence stakes there is a harp on the stage, presumably for some sort of performance.

(There is a store to buy corporate merchandise. Who pays for stuff like this?)

Red Hat Summit 2016 Day 0

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 20:17:00 +1200

The first day is a bit of a wash for me agenda-wise: it’s POWER TRAINING day, and since I’m not POWER TRAINING, that doesn’t leave me a lot to do other than wander around San Francisco and check out the developer aanouncements (neither of which are techinally part of RHS). Two that are quite relevant to my interests: The release of a new GC policy for the OpenJDK. It’s interesting partly because new GC for managed languages are always interesting (at least if you care about them running better, anyway), and partly because it’s the first time I can think of where OpenJDK community have made such a major change independent of Sun/Oracle.

Red Hat Summit 2018 OpenShift Commons

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 20:17:00 +1200

Today is the OpenShift Commons day - a bunch of information, mostly from CoreOS Brandon Philips and Clayton Coleman “We wanted to bring the smartest Kubernetes developers together.” Said tongue and cheek. “Developers and people who understand how the Internet work are horribly outnumbered. New users are joining the Internet user base faster than developers and ops people to support them. CoreOS is about how we make it as easy as possible to manage that, because we can’t train our way out of that.

Red Hat Summit 2018 Summit Day 1

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 20:17:00 +1200

Today’s culture shock was breakfast, which included cinammon sugar donuts, which I do not think of as a traditional breakfast food. It was not as good as the OpenShift breakfast, let me tell you. Also, the pre-keynote DJ was good, I guess, but my ears hurt after the first quarter hour or so.

Red Hat Summit 2018 Summit Day 2

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 20:17:00 +1200

Breakfast was, again, a bit of an interesting experience. And by interesting I mean sugar-laden. Everything tastes very sweet to my palette, but I guess this is the norm in the States.

Shame

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 22:08:00 +1300

This week we reached a milestone: I took Ada to school earlier than normal, and walked down to keep her company, at least until the official “you may leave your children here” time kicked in. As we started down the driveway to school, though, she announced that I could not come down: parents are not allowed to come to school with their children, they need to stop at the road.

When Agile Runs Aground on Accounting

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 21:30:00 +1300

So I got exposed to the old Extreme Programming ideas at the start of last decade and really liked them; they focused heavily on the idea of negotiating time/cost/features really sharply and more realisitically than older metholdologies and it seemed really flash, but it suffered from a flaw that it wasn’t really end-to-end - it focused on how a programmer and a client rep could do things more realisitically; it was IMO really only effective with small company/client combos, working on straighfoward, standalone projects.

Agile has the great advantage that it’s more designed to work with more complex businesses: delivery contracts representing the web of dependencies prjects can have across the organisation, making project sponsors responsible for more of the operational costs so they aren’t tempted to skimp to get over the line, and so on. It bundles up a lot of principles of ongoing, negotiated deliverables that XP had, and has a lot of broader business smarts.

But there are problems.

Un Paradis Fiscal

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 21:00:00 +1200

Nouvelle zealand est vraiment un paradis fiscal. Malheureusment il n’est pas un paradis fiscal comme Monaco ou Suiss; au contraire nous sommes un paradis bas de gamme. Hontesse la prix de la réputation de notre pays est simplement vingt ou trente millions par an; mais les avocats ne polluent pas les fleuves; au moins ils ne sont pas les vaches sales.

Wellington in 2015

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 08:37:00 +1300

Go First Impressions

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 10:00:00 +1300

I knocked up a little project this weekend to help extract blog entries from a serendipity blog and format them up to work with the Hugo blogging engine. Partly because I’ve gotten sick of battling making python work smoothly on Windows, partly because Hugo is written in Go, and partly because I’ve been looking for an excuse to write something in Go, I decided to write it in, well Go. And because I love having Opinions, I jotted down my thoughts about Go based on a first aquaintance.

The Plantagenets

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 14:10:46 +1300

The Plantagenets title perfectly describes its scope: an narrative history of the Plantagenet dynasty from its inception to its end, divided into one chapter per ruler.

It’s a hefty, well-written, and enjoyable tome. Jones has a background as an academic historian and (or perhaps but remains) an engaging writer. He strikes a good balance between the obvious breadth of his goal with a reasonable level of depth on each king, keeping a sense of continuity and explaining how the successes and failures of each member of the dynastry fed into the personality, problems, and political context his sucessors had to operate in.

H is for Hawk

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 11:10:46 +1300

To describe H is for Hawk as a memoir of the period when Helen Macdonald had to come to terms with the death of her father sells it short. It is many other things, built around the scaffolding of Macdonald’s loss and recovery; it is also about nature, hawking, and T H White, and it is a very good book indeed.

The Guest Cat

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 09:15:46 +1300

An affecting novel with a simple form and story: a tale told in the first person of a man and his wife who come to love a cat, only to lose it.

Lou Reed: The Life

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 08:46:46 +1300

Lou Reed: The Life, by Mick Wall, is a book I found by turns frustrating and interesting.

About the first quarter of the book is a furious hagiography; furious because the author appears to feel Reed is in some way under-recognised and under-appreciated (an idea which seems absurd), and because Wall appears to have taken every slight Reed ever suffered as personally as though it were levelled at him. While this part of the book has some interesting insights and biographical information about Reed, it’s hard to get over the fact that Wall’s writing is the equivalent of a slightly drunk, very impassioned, and perhaps dangerously angry fan cornering you at a party to yell at you about their hero. It’s not just tiring, it’s tiresome.

Awkward Dad Moments

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 22:05:00 +1300

At a three year old’s birthday party: “Ada, can I share your daddy? I don’t have a daddy any more.” At pre-school: “Why do you come to see Ada at lunch times? I don’t see my daddy, he doesn’t live with us any more.” Talking about weekend plans with the front-of-house in my favourite kebab shop: “Man, you sound like you like to spend time with you kids. I wish my father had been like that.

Fathers, Sons, and Stereotypes

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 21:45:00 +1300

So I have two little (well, in one case, getting not-so-little) daughters, who are made of awesome and win, and life is good.

But it’s not all good. It’s specifically not all good when we come to the topic of sons, or my lack thereof.

Hair Chalk By Example

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 21:23:00 +1300

So a while ago Rosa had been interested in hair colours, especially the unnatural ones she’d sometimes see around town; I followed the only course of action open to me: buying a box of hair chalk for her and Ada to play with. That would be nearly a year ago, and the chalk has seen no child-related action.

Maire has availed herself of it, but the girls have reacted as through they’d expressed an interest in Greek mythology and I’d deposited a nest of live asps in the bathroom and told them to get braiding.

All this changed in the weekend.

About Me

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 19:12:58 +0000

Hi, I’m Rodger and I like to talk. My main preoccupation is running around after my kids. In the vanishingly small amount of time that leaves, j’apprend fran�ais, I take photos, I read, and sometimes I watch movies. I work with technology, although these days I spend less time hands-on and more time working out how to bridge the gap between “what people want to be able to do” and “what the technology can do”.

The 90 Percent

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 22:07:52 +1300

So here’s the thing: I find myself gravitating more and more towards doing my day-to-day computing on Windows machines. Because, frankly, life has gotten too short for me to battle whatever atrocity some desktop developer has decided to impose on me this week in the name of “better usability.” The fact I can do things like “do a day’s note-taking at LCA on a cheap Windows tablet with a full GNU toolchain and a bluetooth keyboard” is an extra bonus, and something I certainly can’t do (without a lot of pain) in the Linux world.

Presentations

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 19:12:58 +1300

Hi, I’m Rodger and I like to talk. You can see me speak at linux.conf.au: At lca2012 I spoke at the sysadmin miniconf about Stress and Performance Testing in Virtual Environments with my colleague, Aneel Hay. At lca2014 I spoke about my journey from hating systemd to being rather fond of it in a talk called The Six Stages of systemd. You can also find other presentation notes, although they may make less sense without the presentation itself:

The Wait/L'Attente/L'atessa

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 20:57:00 +1300

This film is, simply, the finest art film I have seen in years, and one of the finest I have ever seen. The performance of the principal three actors, especially Binoche and Giorgio Colangeli, is a master class in the use of every facet of the actors’ toolbox - face, body, voice - to communicate. Slow, weighty, measured, it is perfectly, agonisingly paced.

If you have any love of films as high art, you must see The Wait.

You Are An IT Shop. You're Just Bad At It.

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 17:00:00 +1300

When a cluster of British banks fucked up and fucked up bad they were left with their customers unable to be paid. Or to pay their bills. Or withdraw cash, because the bank didn’t know how much money they had any more. Because money is digital. It has been since some time in the 60s, when banks started moving from ledger books to computers. Sure, we print it out and people sometimes use that instead, but money has been data for a while now.

Out of that monumental screw-up came a wonderful quote from David Chan, of the City University of London:

“A senior banking technologist has said to me: ‘A retail bank is nothing but an IT company with a banking licence’”

This is a really important point, but it’s one that’s not just relevant to banking.

Lolo

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 14:00:00 +1300

There are a number of things that are unfamiliar to me in this film. For one, I am not in the habit of thinking of Julie Delpy in comedy roles (which probably says more about how well I’ve kept track of Delpy’s work than anything else).

For another, while Dany Boon is a headliner in this film, his role is somewhat on the periphery. Yes, he has plenty of screen time, and yes, his abilities as a comedian are used well; the thing is, though, that his character, Jean-René, is essentially a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to Delpy’s Violette.

Finally, while the film is billed as a comedy - and it is very funny indeed - it comes from a place of white-hot rage. It is hilarious, but it is also furious.

April and the Extraordinary World/Avril et le Monde truqué

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 16:00:00 +1300

The movie opens by explaining the alternative world in which it is set: a world which differs in two key ways from the one we know; the great scientists of the 19th century disappear in unexplained circumstances, leaving us stuck in the age of steam. Electricity is no better understood than in the time of the Greeks.

The second great difference concerns the Franco-Prussian war. On the eve of the war, the French Emperor visits a scientist who is working on a project to produce super-beasts, and ultimately super-soldiers. When seeing the scientist has instead produced intelligent, articulate salamanders, his rage results in the destruction of the lab - and his own death as it explodes. His son signs a peace treaty with the Germans, and, war averted, France and Germany live alongside one another competing instead in their overseas territories.

Elle L'Adore

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 08:06:00 +1300

Do you like your comedy black? Really black? If you mean really, really black, this is the film for you; in fact, the first half of the film is essentially a noir-ish thriller will fairly slim comedic pickings. And then it evolves into absolutely surreal hilarity; I loved it, but I can understand how elements of the plot would render it firmly in the “not for everyone” category.

Macadam Stories/Asphalte

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 21:00:00 +1300

Asphalte (Macadam Stories) begins as an orthodox comedy: opening in the lounge of a decaying apartment block, the residents have squeezed in to vote on replacing the dysfunctional lift out of their own pockets, since the disinterested landlord would rather leave it (and them) to rot.

Everyone agrees… except one man, who insists that, living on the second story of the building, he sees no reason to contribute. With the instincts of an ACT voter he declares, “You can’t make me”. The others huddle in a bedroom to discuss the matter and come to an agreement: they will pay the increased amount, but the dissenter may never use the elevator again, terms to which he agrees (so perhaps not an ACT voter after all).

Shortly thereafter, he injures himself in an amusing fashion and is confined to a wheelchair. Then an astronaut lands on the roof.

Fixing Pharmacies

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 22:30:00 +1200

Chemists made the news in a rather negative way in the last week, with a report that the disease, which many Kiwis might imagine to be an American one, of medical professionals refusing women (it’s almost always women on the recieving end of this sort of thing) contraceptives because of their religious feelings, is popping up here.

Bruising though this is in a city like Wellington, it’s pretty easy to work around with a trip to another pharmacy, and a pharmacist who hasn’t confused their government-given control over dispensing medicines with a government mandate to victimise others based on their religious views.

In small towns, though, it can have vastly more serious consequences, since another chemist is not necessarily down the road, and legistlation in New Zealand limits pharmacies to owner-operator situations¹. It’s as though supermarkets weren’t allowed to sell meat, and the only butcher in town refused to provide bacon because he’s a Muslim. Only with vastly more serious consequences.

LCA 2016 Day 5

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 10:00:00 +1000

Jesus, people, how hard is it to get to the keynote by 9? And why would you spend all that time and money on coming to a conference only to bail on the sessions? Still, more chances for the rest of us to win the spot prizes.

LCA 2016 Day 4

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 10:00:00 +1000

An overcast, damp day in Ballarat. It’s like being at home!

LCA 2016 Day 3

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 09:00:00 +1000

Day three kicked off with a great keynote, of the “unexpected pleasure” variety, nearly as good as my introduction to Biella Coleman back in 2010. From “who is this person” to “OMG HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS PERSON” in an hour.

LCA 2016 Day 2

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 09:00:00 +1000

The second day of miniconfs, moving on to spending most of the day at the sysadmin miniconf.

LCA 2016 Day 1

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 12:30:00 +1000

One of the nice things about the rotation of LCA around various cities in Australia (and New Zealand) is that I end up visiting parts of Australia I wouldn’t otherwise see - Canberra, Ballarat, and now Geelong.

Geelong First Impressions

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 21:30:00 +1100

My first impressions of Geelong: passing an orange-red brick schoolhouse; it evoked a powerful, negative reaction: partly because it looked like a Victorian prison, and partly because, as a Wellingtonian, I can’t think of any more disturbing place for children than a multi-story brick building.

Star Wars VII: The Girls Awaken

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 15:00:00 +1300

For original fans it’s easy to forget that the prequels didn’t destroy Star Wars in popular culture. Middle-aged blokes like me may have clung to the originals and ignored everything since, once it became clear how dreadful it was (or disappeared into the maze of mediocre Expanded Universe material), but Star Wars is as much a cultural touchstone as it’s ever been. Many of the boys in my daughter’s class are Star Wars fanatics.

Image Stablisers are Magic

Sat, 26 Dec 2015 08:37:00 +1300

One of the simple pleasures of the Olympus camera bodies is having good built-in image stablisation: having come from Canon where (as with most traditional SLR makers) stablisation is an in-lens option (which often pushes you into a signficant price hike), it’s nice having that facility available with any lens.

Kiwicon 9 Day 1 Afternoon

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 20:16:46 +1300

After a lunch of churros, main course not needed because it turned out the Food for the People bacon and egg butty that had for morning tea rendered a savoury lunch meal unnecessary, the afternoon session kicked off. The churros at Mexico were good, but the service was incredibly slow. Slow enough that said churros took so long to deliver that I was late back to the first afternoon session.

Kiwicon 9 Day 1 Morning

Sun, 13 Dec 2015 22:02:46 +1300

So another year, and I’m back for another Kiwicon. If I have any misgivings about Kiwicon, it’s that I didn’t start going earlier in its existence. How, one might ask, will they top the previous two years: a metal band opening Kiwicon 7, and a Delorean on stage for Kiwicon 8?

Some Notes on btrfs

Sun, 13 Dec 2015 08:00:00 +1300

Over the past couple of years I’ve been playing with btrfs off and on. I converted my home server over to it last year, trusting it with my most important data (i.e. mine); this entry represents some notes around the strengths and weaknesses I’ve found with btrfs.

AI - The True Horror

Sat, 12 Dec 2015 22:20:00 +1300

What if the real reason rich people like Elon Musk are afraid of AI isn’t because they’re worried about the Grim Terminator Future, but because they’re worried a powerful AI will notice how many of our problems as a species come down to artificial scarcity and fix the problem by force? The horror, the horror.

Being Kind to Speakers

Sat, 12 Dec 2015 20:17:00 +1300

The first time I did an LCA talk I spent the week before having chest pains to the point I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was nervously scratching my forehead so much I developed weeping sores along my hairline.

La Dune

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 21:25:00 +1300

I was a little mislead by the synopsis for La Dune; it sounded like a slightly unorthodox police proceedural. Which, in the narrowest possible sense it is, but that’s like handing someone a copy of Dune the novel and telling them it’s got something to do with desert ecology. The film opened with me wondering if my ear for French had gone completely skew-wiff. I couldn’t understand a word. Imagine my relief when I realised the film had opened in Israel and the characters were speaking in Hebrew.

Kiwicon 8 Day 2

Wed, 17 Dec 2014 12:30:46 +1300

Opening Pyro and metlstorm dancing. Kiwicon delivers on entertaining openings. metl was clearly gleeful at “spending your money on smoke machines and fire.” Root Causes: Complex System Failures and Security Incident Response @hypatiaca and @hashocothorpe talking about bridging the ops/security divide at Heroku. Failures Why do things fail? Things fail because you fuck with them. (I only wish this was true. I deal with way too much stuff that fails when no-one has fucked with it enough.

Kiwicon 8 Day 1

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 20:30:46 +1300

The registration was pretty smooth considering the sheer number of people (over 1000!) attending. And thank you to the people who were circling the registration queue with food. And the merch was awesome: the designer outdid herself with the 80s design, and I got a goddamn audio cassette for my tag. Speakers got a betamax cassette, which is even better, of course. It wasn’t really the first day, since I’d had a couple of training days beforehand, but this was the opening of the conference proper.

IBM University 2014 Day 4

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 06:30:00 +1300

Another happy day in Vegas. At least I can buy pseudoephedrine over the counter here to make my nose start working again.

IBM University 2014 Day 3

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 05:30:00 +1300

Great timing, illness. I really appreciate losing a day to sweating, fatigue, and general unable-to-get-out-of-bedness.

IBM University 2014 Day 2

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 06:30:00 +1300

Another 8 am start. Not so many people at this one. Guess the first night in Vegas took its toll.

IBM University 2014 Day 1

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 06:30:00 +1300

Who the fuck starts a conference with a 6:30 am breakfast and an 8 am keynote? Still, an opening rendition of Chasing Twisters by Delta Rae was pretty cool. Good live act - good ability to reproduce their vocals live.

WLG to LAS

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 03:50:00 +1300

Things to note: The old domestic 737s Air New Zealand operate from Wellington to Auckland still have more leg room than many airlines’ Economy Plus or whatever they call it. I can stow my pack and have inches of knee room and space for my feet. And I am not a small man. The Air New Zealand 777-300s are very nicely appointed. USB, a refular hotpoint for my laptop, good range of movies, all the mod cons.

Aberdeen

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 20:06:00 +1300

Named not for the Scottish city, but rather the region of Hong Kong; this story of a Hong Kong family: a Taoist priest, long-widowed now with his nightclub-owning girlfriend; their sad, lonely daughter whose life is blighted by memories of her mother’s contempt, and whose doctor husband is having an affair with a nurse; a hyper-competitive son who compulsively collects Star Wars memoriabilia and his aging model wife. The son, Tao, loves his daugher, but his love is filtered through his ruthless, hyper-competitive view of life in Hong Kong: his casual use of “Fatty” as a nickname contrasts with the tender look at a sleeping daughter, making a game of changing lights with a shoulder ride is undercut by his harsh insistence to her mother that she stop deluding herself about her daughter’s chances of making a good marriage: she must learn to change light bulbs because no-one will do it for her.

What We Do In The Shadows

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 08:25:00 +1300

“It’s just a big homoerotic dick-biting circle.” OK, so having inveighed against vampire movies I’ve watched two on this flight. What We Do In The Shadows is rather a different kettle of fish: from the Flight of the Conchords team it is a mockumentary following a set of vampires in a Wellington flat and is pretty funny. The jokes are pretty consistently good, and it does a great job of juxtaposing the vampire jokes and the comedy of mundane life.

Jumper

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 06:00:00 +1300

The great thing about not being a film critic is that when I get 30 minutes into a film, hate the protagonist, antagonist, and find it unbearably tedious I can just switch the fucking thing off.

Sexy Beast

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 04:25:00 +1300

A monster arrives in your home. The monster blusters. The monster threatens. The monster beats you. The monster threatens you. But you stay strong. The monster leaves. But then it returns. And you slay it and do the thing the monster wanted you to anyway, the thing you never wanted to do again because the monster is sent by other monsters. Staccato brutality set to film.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 03:25:00 +1300

Vampires. Zombies. Fucking vampires. Fucking zombies. Fucking undead in general. I am fed to the back teeth with allegedly novel and actually uninteresting variations on things that go bump in the night. Run, do not walk, to see this vampire movie. It is brilliant and bizarre and actually interesting. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are wonderful as an ancient married couple. The movie is long, and slow-paced as their lives.

Flight

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 20:30:00 +1300

The topic of flying is mostly an endless litany of complaint: seat space, food quality, security proceedures, and all the rest. But I sat, tonight, and watched out my window at the intake of a jet engine, a device which can move something the size of an office block simply by sucking air in and spitting it out, dragging hundreds of people through the air by nothing more than applying heat to air.

Experiments on Children

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 19:30:00 +1300

So one of the interesting things about parenting is the ability to experiment on your children. Not in a big, serious, inappropriate way, I hasten to add. I’m not trying to raise the Red Eye here. In this case the experiment was musical in nature. Our old Camry’s engine let go a few weeks ago, which was enormously inconvenient and, due to the age and value of the car, meant that buying a new(er) car was a better option than fixing it.

Moving Towards Licensed Journalists?

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 21:49:00 +1300

With the court injunction against Rawshark, but not against news organisations who have his material I find myself increasingly disturbed by a trend in New Zealand’s courts around journalism: specifically, the degree to which it is being legally the domain of employees of large organisations. This is not a new thing; it was notable that when Nicky Hager was involved in a lawsuit over a previous book that the courts ruled he was not a journalist.

Parenting Influences

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 22:23:00 +1300

Robin Williams is dead. I was one of the Mork generation of Williams’ audience. I didn’t become a huge fan, but there were a couple of bits of his later work that I loved: Awakenings was one, which attacked the normal Hollywood narrative around miracle cures and preferred an air of reality to the Magic Negro trope it set itself up to deliver, and A Night at the Met. A Night at the Met was, in retrospect, profoundly important to me.

Maximum Politeness

Sat, 19 Jul 2014 21:08:00 +1300

One of the things about having more than one child is that you have the chance to get a better feel for the rhythms and patterns of childhood the second time around. It takes, for example, a few times through the growth spurt cycle1 to realise what’s going on; the first time it happens with child #2, on the other hand, you know what’s happening immediately2. Rosa is currently in a phase that is at once delightful and tinged with a certain shadow in the distance.

When Life Is A Musical

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 19:08:00 +1300

A common criticism of musicals is the disconnect created by the spectacle of people bursting into song and dance in the middle of doing, well, whatever it is they’re doing. “Preposterous!” cries the critic. One of the things I’ve noticed with kids is that children inhabit the reality of the musical. The notion of being properly publicly undemonstrative is a foreign territory; at the drop of a hat I can end up with a two and seven year old narrating or simply enlivening their world with song.

Kaikoura Diversion

Sun, 13 Jul 2014 19:08:00 +1300

I had dim memories of the limestone caves of Kaikoura from perhaps 30 years previously; since then I had meant to stop there time and time again, but the tour times never quite lined up with ferry arrivals or departures. This time I took special care to add a day for the visit. The caves - under limestone cliff known as Maori Leap - aren’t heavily advertised. There’s a seemingly pointless cafe in the middle of nowhere1

South of the Border, West of the Sun

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 08:50:46 +1300

As more and more purchasing moves online I have already lost one pleasure: browsing record stores looking for music I’ve never heard of. I would rifle through LPs and CDs, reading lyric sheets and listening to a track or two in the shop; I was completely outside of the usual circut of reading Rip It Up or imports of NME to decide what I might like. It introduced me to a fair bit of the music I love, albeit in haphazard fashion, but also allowed my taste to develop largely unhindered by what music was appropriate to whatever pose I was supposed to want to strike.

Monty Python and the Life of Brianna

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 07:15:00 +1300

In various online communities I hang out in there will always be, sooner or later, someone making a comment (or meme, for that matter) with a common message: “As a woman I find those feminists annoying and strident.” There are bonus points for being a woman engineer, programmer, or what have you. Now, while it’s certainly true that there are people marching under the feminist banner who are, shall we say, imperfect by a variety of measures (such as, for example, Germaine Greer’s sexualised images of children) this always puts me in mind of a certain famous skit from The Life of Brian.

A Thought From the French Film Festival

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 20:06:46 +1300

Last Monday we opened French class with a discussion of this year’s French Film Festival. One of the questions my teacher asked was what difference we noticed between French and American (read: Hollywood) movies. There were a number of suggestions, but for me the answer was all around us: the classroom is covered in posters, and they show one of the most salient differences: women. More specifically, women of all ages.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 19:30:00 +1300

I’m pretty late to the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon party, to put it mildly, but I’m glad I chose to backfill with this one; it’s fairly uncharted territory for me, given that my main exposure to Ang Lee is his Sense and Sensibility, and that my exposure to wuxia is minimal - in fact, reading Kylie Chan’s Dark Heavens series is my only real exposure to anything close to the genre.

Honesty

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 21:15:00 +1300

“Rosa, it’s cold outside. You need to wear something with long sleeves when we go outside in the cold. Look, even Daddy is wearing a hoodie today. Will you wear your hoodie when we go outside?” /rosa nods. “OK, will you be helpful and not fight and scream when we put it on?” /rosa shakes her head “Can’t do that, Daddy.”

The Gap in Kids' Books

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 21:15:00 +1300

As Ada has gotten older, I’ve had more reason to think about how childrens’ books are written and organised. Kids’ fiction is a big market, after all: as well as the newly socially acceptable crossover market, where it’s no longer particularly a stigma to read the likes of Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, children are expected to read more, particularly more fiction, than most adults will. Consider than any primary school aged child in New Zealand will be asked to work through multiple short stories or a book a week, and after their first few years to be able to offer some introspection about it, and there’s going to be a huge demand.

Chrysalis

Sat, 22 Mar 2014 20:10:00 +1300

«Chrysalis» est le prémier film du réalisateur Julien Leclercq, avec Albert Dupontel et Marthe Keller et Mélanie Thierry. C’est un film de science-fiction sourd et sombre. Le film commence par deux scènes de décès: dans la premiére une femme et sa fille conduisent et parlent des affaires de la femme. Soudainement un camion rendre dan leur voiture. La deuxième scne: deux policiers chassent un homme sous la ville. Un flic a été assassiné par l’homme qui s’échappe avec son camarade.

Power Plant

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 21:25:00 +1300

Power Plant is part of the 2014 Festival of the Arts and consists of converting a large chunk of the Wellington Botanic Gardens into a piece of installation art. Ada and I went to see it on Friday, starting our walk at the 9:20 pm slot; it made it a bit of a late night for a 7 year old, given we finished up at 11, but Ada enjoyed it thoroughly and was a box of fluffy ducks the next day.

Blue Dragon

Sun, 09 Mar 2014 22:33:46 +1300

Blue Dragon is the third novel in the Dark Heavens series, a contemporary fantasy series set in Hong Kong and based around Chinese mythology; it follows on from White Tiger and Red Phoenix In my comments on the previous books I’d noted the unbearable Mary Sueness that slathered parts of them; over the course of the second novel things improved with a bit richer character development; there’s further improvement in characterisation/story balance, but still… the lead adds “part-demon” to her “part something terrifying to the shen” hidden personalities, but the force of her love and goodness means this doesn’t matter.

Red Phoenix

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 22:33:46 +1300

Red Phoenix is the second novel in the Dark Heavens series, a contemporary fantasy series set in Hong Kong and based around Chinese mythology; it follows on from White Tiger. The primary criticism I offered with White Tiger was that I felt myself drowning in the syrupy embrace of the Mary Sue character. As the novel went on she became more fantastic, wonderful, and perfect, adored by all around her. The start of Phoenix was bad news: it starts on a cloying plateau, then climbs a mountain.

White Tiger

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 22:33:46 +1300

White Tiger is the first novel in the Dark Heavens series, a contemporary fantasy series set in Hong Kong and based around Chinese mythology. The protagonist is an Australian nanny who cares for the daughter of a wealthy local. My feelings about it are… mixed. Profoundly mixed. I’m trying to write more nice things about books and movies. There are a number of reasons; for one, I actually enjoy the bulk of what I read and watch.

Learning

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 11:46:00 +1300

Yesterday Rosa lay on the bed with me scrutinising my hand carefully. Then she reached out one little hand, and very gently tugged my little finger between her index finger and thumb. “Finger.” Then she moved to the ring finger. “Finger.” And so on until she reached my thumb. “Baby finger.” “Almost,” I replied, “thumb.” So she went back to the start. “Thumb?” she ask, pulling at my little finger again.

Snuff

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:33:46 +1300

Snuff was the annual Pratchett novel last year; I enjoy most of Pratchett’s voluminous body of work, and after some wobbles with Thud I had been feeling like he was back in fine form with The Truth, Going Postal, and Making Money1. I really enjoyed Unseen Academicals despite it enjoying only an ambivalent welcome from some fans. So on the whole I was pleased that I got given Snuff. Unfortunately it turned out to be one of my less favourite Discworld novels.

New Shoes

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 20:08:00 +1300

Rosa has her first new pair of shoes; that is to say, the first pair of shoes which haven’t been hand-me-downs from her sister. We went to Gubb’s Shoes and picked over the various options; Rosa ended up selecting red Bobux mary janes with small flowers on them. While there was a certain regret she couldn’t make a pair of candy-stripe sandals fit (her inability to run in the gave the lie to exclamations of “comfy!

Simple systemd Tricks

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 21:15:00 +1300

Per my earlier post I’ve been learning and using systemd more and more last year. I presented a couple of examples in my talk, but I thought I’d throw up some more; one rich source of writing-my-own-service-files has been Debian 7 boxes I’ve moved over to systemd. Since there are very few service files out of the box, there’s plenty of scope to roll my own to solve simple problems.

Friends Don't Let Friends Use eSATA

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 21:15:00 +1300

Over the last year I have come to a simple conclusion: friends don’t let friends use eSATA. First, a bit of background: my disk needs aren’t that excessive, but I generally want at least 3 main types of partition for a SOHO server build: a system partition (mirrored with LVM), an encrypted data partition, and an unencrypted data partition. That’s an easy 4 - 8 drives, depending on size, speed, and so on; for my personal server it’s currently 4.

Strange Weather in Tokyo

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 21:08:00 +1300

Strange Weather in Tokyo was written in 2001, but this translation (by Allison Powell) is more recent, being published in 2012. I hadn’t encountered Kawakami before, but if this is any guide the I hope to read more of her work; moreover, along with Murakami, I find myself thinking I should be chasing up more contemporary literature. The mention of Murakami is not coincidental, because Strange Weather shares certain elements which I enjoy; a certain languid pace and attention to the things of ordinary life.

Tired Is...

Sun, 26 Jan 2014 19:08:00 +1300

…when you go to sit with the toddler while she drops off for the night… …and wake up in a puddle of your own drool an hour later.

UI Stability (As A Product)

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 14:10:00 +1300

Over the last few years I’ve watched interminable wrangling over sweeping UI changes to GNOME, Windows 8, or ongoing churn around the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and the Plusification of Google. I’ve also watched people adopt MATE, Cinnamon, third-party Twitter apps, and so on, all as a way of mitigating this disruption. In the Linux world we’re familiar with the idea of lower-level stability: RHEL and SUSE’s business models are essentially built around two factors:

The Human Trust

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 21:49:00 +1300

The Human Trust is one of the oddest films I’ve watched in quite some time. I couldn’t easily sum it up, and certainly not with a “good” or “bad”. The Human Trust is a Japanese film, and it opens with scenes set in the dying days of World War II, as an Imperial Army officer explains why he’s making off with a secret gold reserve. So far, so good, but the hint we’re in for something unusual is when he begins explaining fiat currency and shadowy market manipulators like the buggiest of gold bugs.

LCA 2014

Mon, 13 Jan 2014 18:30:00 +1300

This is my fourth LCA, and the third on the trot, thanks in large part to my employer being prepared to stump up funds to send me, which is jolly nice of them.

Six Stages of systemd

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 15:17:00 +1300

This year I had the pleasure of presenting at the Sysadmin Miniconf for linux.conf.au 2014 in Perth; you can see the presentation in all its glory here; it’s a rumination on how I moved from being rather hostile to systemd to being rather enthusiastic about it, which was quite a turn-around for me.

Postgresql's array_agg()

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 10:00:00 +1300

A common problem when pulling data out of databases is flattening rows into columns, or even into a single field. Sometimes the Right Thing to do is a pivot table, but this isn’t always true.

New Year, New Blog

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 13:49:00 +1300

So I thought I’d try a static blogging setup. The freedom from relying on editors and dynamic software stacks and whatnot seems interesting, and the state-of-the-art has advanced considerably from the days of HTML pre-processors. This does have a couple of disadvantages, one of which is that the whole thing is in a different place to my old blog (which is more a choice) and the other is that options such as commenting and suchlike don’t really exist.

Vite, vite!

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:03:25 +1300

A dimanche j’ai fait le course de le «Around the Bays». C’a été un grand success: j’ai complet le course en 33 minutes, 3 minutes plus vite que l’année denier. Je suis très satisfait des mon progrès.

Investigating Finger

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 06:10:56 +1300

There’s a theory that shark bites are caused, not by the desire of sharks to eat delicious human, but rather by sharks’ combination of an inquisitive nature and a lack of hands or facsimilies thereof. The theory goes that the reason so many shark bites involve the shark biting a chunk out of a swimmer and then trundling off into the distance is that the shark has only one part of their body, the mouth, which can has the sensitivity and control to find out what something is.

Six Years

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 22:36:01 +1300

Amazing. Ho did I get so lucky as to have such a wonderful kid?

Un voyage

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 21:45:29 +1300

Ada, Lias, et moi sommes allez à «Southwards Car Museum». Les enfants ont fascine par la voiture de le ganster, la grande Rolls Royce, et la Cadillac de Marlenne Dietrich. Ada a pensé cést unjust que le chauffer s’asseoit dans un petit place, mais les passages s’asseoissent dans le grands places.

So the Star Wars sold to Disney News...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:07:49 +1300

On the one hand, I am suitably amused by the observations this de facto makes Leia a Disney Princesses. On the other hand, the people sperging over the idea of putting Lassiter and Bird in charge of future Star Wars movies? Just fuck off. Per my daughter’s observation, Star Wars is already bad enough on gender balance, and putting Pixar in charge of it will only make it even more of a boyzone.

Le Premier Pony

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 21:17:32 +1200

Ce weekend Ada est allé la fête d’anniversaire de s’ami, Arabella. Elle a été tres heureux; le temps a été incroyable. On a pensé c’est été, pas printemps.

It's Not The Methodology, Stupid

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:48:50 +1200

One of the more incredulous spit-takes I’ve done recently was the claim that developers use Agile because they want to avoid doing documentation.

The Bad Old Days

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 22:03:00 +1200

In 2009 I had a real “Living in the Future” moment; at a conference in Brisbane, I ducked out of the last presentation a few minutes early, found a quiet spot in the lobby connecting the hotel’s conference rooms, popped open my laptop, and videoconferenced with my daughter in Wellington to say good night to her. It hit me afterwards that this felt like such a “golden sci-fi moment”.

The Wierdness of Hardware, or Why the Whole Stack Matters

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 07:53:19 +1200

Over the last wee while I’ve been testing JBoss apps virtualised under RHEV, and this week I had a bizarre experience: my team-mates and I had been puzzling over the high standard deviations (and hence eccentric behaviour) of our web app, which wasn’t even using all the available JVM heap or virtual processors assigned to it. While I was off in meetings, the rest of the team doubled the number of vCPUs, and the SD improved significantly, but more importantly, the utilisation of each vCPU improved. This was odd, and, on the face of it, inexplicable. If you’re only half-to-three-quarters utilising 4 vCPUs, why would you get better utilisation when you doubled that number? And if you weren’t CPU-bound before, why would increasing the amount of virtual processors improve matters?

Speaking for the first time at linux.conf.au

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:12:29 +1300

I wasn’t a keynoter. Or even a regular presenter. I was just doing a talk at a miniconf. It was still an un-nerving enough experience that I went to see my doctor on the Thursday before I flew to Tullamarine to make sure the chest pains I was having weren’t the onset of a heart attack. It almost would have been a relief if they had been.

A (Mostly) Gentle Introduction to Computer Security

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:09:44 +1300

Security needs to be a first-class design concern.
You don’t need to fix all the bugs, you just need to be better than the other guy.
Code is growing in complexity (11 million+ lines in the kernel) and more people using tools (750,000+ Android devices activate per day).
Security is an arms race, where good guys and bad guys compete.

Torturing OpenSSL

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:50:55 +1300

Valeria Bertacco

Valeria has a talk, and a demo, but of course the hardware isn’t co-operating.
Cryptography is pervasive. It’s also big business. The direct value of companies like RSA and Verisign is tens of billions. The value of ecommerce companies is hundreds of billions.
Asymmetric cryptography, RSA keys, rely on two large primes, with which ou perform clever maths.
Cryptanalysis: poking the cryptography with a stick.
2009 we proved you could brute-force 768-bit keys, but it required computation-years to do reliably.
Side-channel attacks: you measure the time required to encrypt, and guess the key form that. We no pad encryption to avoid this.
Fault-based: a faulty CPU may leak information in the form of errors.
Attacks via Transient Faults: when transistors give the wrong values intermittently.
These are normal events, but normally last <1 clock cycle, but in bad cases will propogate up the stack to the software.
The probability is very low. But they can be triggered by solar particles (alpha particles, which is dependent on altitude), and are non-predictable.
As transistors have shrunk, they have become more susceptible to this sort of fault, because they’ve become more fragile.
As we get smaller we may even get to the point where a single alpha particle can flip many transistors.

The Samba tour of scripting languages

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:11:26 +1300

Andrew Bartlett and Amitay Isaacs Samba has hardcore portability requirements. m4, sh, and other bare-bones tools. autoconf gone mad: 4,000 lines of m4 code. Scripting language of the month club: Python, then TCL, then Lua were all put in and pulled out. None of them were loved or portable enough. Then Perl went in. Became used for all manner of build and testing tasks. awk was then used to try and develop an IDL to autogenerate code to spec.

Package Change Impact

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:17:08 +1300

Kate Stewart

There are now 7,000+ packages in the Ubuntu main distro and over 19,000 in universe.
There’s a tremendous rate of change.
This isn’t a solution - it’s a description of an interesting problem space.
Many projects feed into Debian, who Ubuntu feed from, and then Ubuntu release multiple images to the world at large.
Stabilising this is hard, especially since Debian is a time-based release.

I Can't Believe This is Butter! A tour of btrfs.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:50:08 +1300

Avi Miller Some key points (having lost many notes due to Firefox being fucking useless). There’s a bunch of stuff still working badly or not, and optimisations. e.g. metadata is stuck at a 4K blocksize, and that hurts performance. This is being fixed. RAID is block redundency across disks. So a RAID-1 mirror with 5 different-sized disks will simply make sure that blocks are duped somewhere in the array.

Where is Your Data Cached and Where Should It Be Cached?

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:39:26 +1300

Sarah Novotny Origin of the talk was when a customer rang with a complaint that a site was wrong, but Sarah couldn’t find a problem, and this provoked her into thinking about where data can and should be cached. <-!more–> Why Cache? We want to move data as close to the end used, while retaining ACID-style guarantees. The abandonment rate after 7 seconds is huge. We need reliable speed.

Mistakes Were Made

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:20:11 +1300

Selena Deckelmann Slides at: Slideshare. “Success Engineering” - that clearly will work, then. Plan for the worst. Minimise risk. Fail. Recover, gracefully. “You can’t eliminate risk.” alt.sysadmin.recovery shoutout. Failure is an option. Admit it. The open source world has failure and recovery as a core competency, but perhaps not systematically enough. Dr. Jerker Denrell publishes fantastic papers on the topic from a business perspective. “Predicting the Next Big Thing: Success as a Signal of Poor Judgement.

Chef in 20 Minutes

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:23:18 +1300

Sarah Novotny

Cloud disrupted traditional systems administration - a focus on hardware, and a lot of control; great flexibility; but cloud is harder to manage.
Infrastructure as code.
Deploy, manage environments through code, so you can manage with many of the same techniques you use to manage code.
knife is the command line API tool.
Build, configure.
Golden images are not the answer.
Aiming for thousands of machines per admin.
Programmatically provision and configure.
Treat as a codebase. Check in/check out/roll back/roll forward.
Reconstruct from bare metal on up.
And sometimes you need to. Fires. Floods. Plagues of serpents.

You can't spell KABOOM without OOM

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:59:58 +1300

A real-world debugging problem.

Koji - the build system used inside Red Hat and by Fedora.
DB (postgresql) for build metadata; Hub for the XMLRPC interface; Web GUI; workers (mock, rpmbuild) to do the builds.

Using Performance Co-Pilot to Monitor SNMP Devices

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:05:01 +1300

Origins of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP): Frustration with SNMP.
Started by SGI.
Top does not scale.
Open source toolkit for system level performance analysis: live and historical data, extensible, distribted.
Many agents talking to a master daemon; many clients then talk to the daemon.
One common protocol for real-time and historical data.
Real time conditional learning via a little language.
Log analysis - some nice tools that will e.g. let you compare points in time.
GUIs. Everyone loves GUIs.
Alerting functionality.

Storage Replication in High-Performance High-Availability Environments

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:30:36 +1300

by Florian Haas.

Almost everyone has done HA.
About half of the people have worked with replicated storage.
A few people had heard of FlashCache.
Two people in the audience actually running it on a server.

Sony-Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:57:17 +1300

I’ve had this phone for a few months now, an upgrade from my S-E X10 Mini Pro; it’s a phenominal improvement on the previous version… so much so I’m a little lost as to where to begin with it. Perhaps I should start with it’s magical and wonderful design…

Fatherhood

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:23:40 +1300

Over on ask.mefi I threw together some random thoughts on the first bits of being a Dad; I wanted to capture them here, too:

Some thoughts on Age of Empires Online

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:02:45 +1200

I can only mention my disappointment at the route they’ve gone down with this incarnation of AoE. I thought AoE II was an upgrade on AoE I, but the Age of Mythology was a bit of a detour - sure, the graphics were gorgeous, but they seemed to go further down the route of a cheating AI, which I detest, and it seemed too easy to end up with no-loss or no-win minimax options compared to AoE II; I did appreciate more diversity in armies, though; it bugged me in AoE II that you’d have this diversity in special units and bonuses and backstories, but 90% of the units were identical.

Limbo

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:44:35 +1200

So I grabbed Limbo on impulse, and I have to say it’s… pretty great, actually. The minimalist graphics, sound, and music create the spooky sense of atmosphere that I’ve read about. It has lots of neat puzzles, mostly with few genuine “ha-ha, you’re dead” moments.

Off the Piss

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 22:06:01 +1200

The better part of a decade back I was chatting to a bike mechanic about the way Yamaha and Subaru’s use of security dot systems - which spray scannable microdots into the undercoats that cover almost every metal part of a car or motobike - had apparently reduced the rate of theft in their newer model bikes and cars from “most stolen” to “barely ever”; he explained to me that this was simply that most thefts are by professional thieves; he could tell you off the top of the head which wreckers were fencing, in whole or in part, parts from stolen cars and bikes, and that’s where the money was. If you worked in the industry any length of time, apparently, you got a good feel for how many “second hand” spares had more to do with five-finger discounts.

Ironic Enjoyment

Sun, 22 May 2011 21:56:51 +1200

Not only is it to the arts what the mob at Alexandria was to classic literature, it proceeds from a cowardly unwillingness to acknowledge that what we enjoy is not always great art, and great art is not always what we enjoy.

Le chat malade

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:36:35 +1200

C’est un quinzaine très difficile; mon chat Jaques a été tres malade. Ses pattes derrière a arrêté deux semaine prochaine. Il a visité trois véténaires; il a diagnostiqué hypertesion grave. Il a été un mobilisation d’un thrombus et un retina detaché. Ce n’est pas toute mal; il a médication a ses hypertension.

Interviews

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:35:29 +1300

It seems like sooner or later everyone ends up writing about interviewing. “My favourite questions” are one of those topics that pop up again and again, but I am so often bemused by what those questions are.

Take a recent StackOverflow query; “What are your favourite questions for a senior Unix admin?”. The responses elicited were almost entirely of the “swallow the man pages” or “trick questions I know” or worse yet “simple stuff I can Google” variety.

Disks Suck

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:13:40 +1300

I’m currently dealing with an irritating problem in a skunkworks DB I’ve been building and maintaining for the last month or two; over the past week or so it’s hit a tipping point in terms of performance; queries that used to run in seconds take minutes, COPYs into the DB that used to take minutes take hours.

This sucks.

Dated By Words

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 21:23:23 +1300

“I’ll dial in when I get home from work.” My first encounter with a modem was an old acoustic coupler my Dad would bring home in the early 80s as part of a briefcase-sized, wood-enclosed apparatus containing the modem and a terminal. Cutting edge; while I got a modem of my own in the early 90s, I didn’t really ever dial into a workplace (although I supported journos who did); I leapt straight to VPNs over cable modems instead.

Blurgh

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:05:49 +1200

A la semaine prochaine j’appris un nouveau lancer en judo; cette semaine ne pas venir à cause des gobelins du morve.

Fantasies

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:48:39 +1200

Ada started working on the concept of a will recently; while she’s had the book Down The Back of the Chair for a while now, she’s clearly been mentally eliding the reference until she focused suddenly on it in the weekend. What is this “long-lost will of Uncle Bill”? How does it relieve the problem of not being able to afford to fix the errant car? After some explanation (“When people die, they don’t need their money any more, and they sometimes leave it to people”) the principle was firmly grasped.

Not Chattels

Tue, 25 May 2010 16:40:41 +1200

One of the more annoying arguments that I have noticed creeping into the arguments of vaccine deniers, as their arguments based on the fraudulent junk science produced by a shill for a law firm are being more widely understood as disreputable nonsense, is the notion of choice; choice is, apparently, an irrefutable, unassailable right; one may not over-ride the choices of parents who wish to expose their children to disease.

Fixing a K850i BROD

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:18:15 +1300

So I became acquainted with the “Blue Ring of Death” on my old (and Maire’s current) K850i; the phone doesn’t power on, with the screen staying black, the blue ring on the camera coming hard on, and the keyboard lighting up.

Not a thrilling sight.

In Which I Raise a Ruthless Realist

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:26:30 +1300

Ada: “I am going to make this a chicken sandwich. Chicken is going in the sandwich. He is in my big car.” Rodger: “Does chicken want to be eaten?” Ada: “Nooooo.” Rodger: “Then perhaps chicken shouldn’t go in the sandwich.” Ada: “Chicken has to go in the sandwich, because it’s a chicken sandwich.” Ada then stuffs the toy chicken - the same toy chicken, I note that went to hospital with her when she was seriously ill at 7 months - into the cushions making up the sandwich, ordering him to “push your head in!

The Arthur Trilogy

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +1300

Historical romances are an area that tend to be considered under the general rubric of writing for women, not least because of the association with bodice rippers; it’s an association that does the genre no favours, since it becomes synonymous with “crap” (the association with bodice rippers, not women).

It’s a rather unfair reputation on two fronts; any genre will be rich in rivers of crap, and it seems a little unfair for fans of one genre to look down their noses at fans of other genres based on the lower echelons of the works in said genre. Moreover, there are no shortage of men who worked in it, including Arthur Conan Doyle (whose White Company and short stories set in post-Roman Britain dovetail neatly with chunks of Cornwall’s work).

Anyway, I’ve had bits of Cornwall’s Arthur series lying around the house since, well, since I got the second on in the series from a reviewer who was clearing out the newspaper’s unwanted review copies in, oh, 1999. So I guess it was time to get around to reading them.

Huh

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:42:59 +1300

So, the Chromium Fedora repo has vanished. That’s… odd. These packages have been temporarily removed, due to legal concerns with some of the included code. I wonder what the “legal concerns” are? RHEL’s lawyers, or Something Naughty in Chromium itself?

Overloading

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:30:29 +1300

Probably the thing that stood out most from my first French lesson is the overloading of ça va; apparently there’s nothing it can’t do. Of course, trying to get this right in a room full of people where meaning can’t reliably be inferred as a result of the use of the rising inflection. Although that seems likely to be the least of my accent related crimes against the French language.

Little Trooper

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:18:57 +1300

Today was the last (formal) day of linuxconf 2010, and since I was a “professional” delegate I went to the dinner, and took Maire and Ada along, too. It was a pretty decent night out, with a kapa haka group, a chance to catch up with gnat after way too many years, sitting with Tridge at our table (do coding skills, like celebrity, osmose through proximity? If so, I should be able to do the best work of my life after bathing in his aura), and having Liz give Ada a ride in her wheelchair (which was the coolest thing of the evening, I reckon).

Tonight

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:57:35 +1300

I discovered that I’ve forgotten large chunks of Ka Mate. The shame.

Survey of Open Source Database

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:59:54 +1300

Selena Deckelmann

“Which Databases Solve My Problem?”

Talking about the right open-source tool for the job.

Seven Challenges for the Kernel Community

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:21:47 +1300

aka The Kernel Report LCA2010

Jonathan Corbet from LWN

Organised in terms of challenges, because this will help spell out where we’ll have to do.

FTW

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:19:26 +1300

Getting to tell Gabriella about In Praise of Idleness, which she hadn’t encountered before on her “thinking about scarcity” track.

Antifeatures

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:34:06 +1300

Opened with the video of speakers learning Ka Mate. There is no god.

Yesterday’s prize went to about the 6th or 7th person. People are obviously learning.

Now to Mako Hill’s speech. Intro sez: he’s stuck between Media Lab and management school. He works on numerous free software projects including Debian, Ubuntu, identi.ca, and unhappyborthday.com, which lets you report violations of the copyright on Happy Birthday, such as everyone singing Rusty happy birthday.

Apparently last of these generates copious hate mail, not least from people who get neither satire or sarcasm.

Examine the percieved dichotomy between the pragmatic and political tracks of free software, and dicuss antifeatures, which is one way he’s worked up to discuss the practical benefits of free software, referencing the problems of non-free software.

Insomnia Sucks

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:06:04 +1300

It’s like I was out to 2 in the morning with the cool kids yesterday, but I didn’t actually get to, you know, go out. Clearly I should have gone out on the piss with the Google Wave mob and at least got the fun out of it.

Morning Great, Afternoon...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:52:32 +1300

…not so much. The presenters have been very solid or impressive this morning, but things have dropped off a bunch this afternoon. Too much generality, too little hard content from quite a few. The other lesson I’ve picked up is the need to be prepared for potentially hostile questions - a few people have been all at sea when any remotely curly questions, much less challenged outright. I ended up not blogging one session because it was just too mediocre.

Building Your Own Dropbox

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:50:06 +1300

Ben Balbo

MySQL replication presentation ran grossly over. This did not make me happy. Organisers should have a yanking tool. Anyhoo:

DropBox is pretty cool. Why am I doing this?

You install a client, and shunt your files into the S3 cloud via DropBox’s client, and quietly syncs out to all your other clients. This is very cool, up to a point.

Ben works in a media agency. They aren’t file server savvy. They use local copies and IM them about. There was a collective SWEET JESUS NO at this point.

Tried subversion, they said, “Too Hard.”

“Let’s use Dropbox!”

Monitoring with cucumber-nagios

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:17:39 +1300

I’m afraid the notes here are a bit sparse, mostly because my brain was full at this point, and partly because I’m not the ideal audience for a lot of what’s cool here - a lot of this is capabilities in the big bloated monitoring tools I get foisted on me, so there’s not much to play with for me. If you have ultra basic (or no) monitoring tools, or no brain fade, you should check this out.

Being Lazy With Wikis

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:18:14 +1300

Mark Suter. Mark works for Unisys in Aus, and as well as general documentation problems, they have a boatload of compliance to deal with as a result of having Government clients.

This is the Perl sense of lazy.

Mark kicked off by checking everyone knew what a Wiki was, and noting most of us have them or have had them. They started with a small group, all in physical proximity. Change was easy, easy to communicate, easy to create buy-in. Now they’ve pushed out they need to be mindful of natural resistence to change.

Samba4 AD Replication

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:07:10 +1300

Andrew Bartlett - 9 Years Samba development.

This talked focused on Samba4’s Domain Controller features, and the moves closer to becoming a first-class AD server with the addition of AD Replication; there were some more general Samba questions at the end. Although unfortunately this talk seemed to bring out a couple of dickish questions from people wanting to fish for the speaker to say bad things about Microsoft.

Relational vs Non-Relational DBs

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:21:09 +1300

First, a word: Josh is a neat speaker. He comes across as Good People. Nice, clear, concise, tell-it-like-it-is style, and great audience interaction, answers at his fingertips. Another on my list of “see this person if you get the chance.” Also, he’s really generous with chat time outside of presentations and very approachable.

On with Josh’s talk…

There’s been a lot of activity in the nonrelational world, with it being hard to keep track of; this talk is about how to choose relational vs nonrelational, understanding some of the things that matter, some that don’t.

Sheepdog

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:44:59 +1300

I want to have these guys’ babies. Incredibly cool stuff from NTT, who also bought us NilFS.

(As an aside: it’s sad that there’s this whole deep geek culture in Japan that throws up stuff like Ruby or company sponsored stuff like NTT’s contributions that just gets horribly underexposed to the English-speaking world).

Weta Digital - Challenges in Data Centre Growth

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:16:51 +1300

…or “You need how many processors to finish the movie???”

Paul Gunn

Paul’s been at Weta 9 and a half years. Focusing on the machine rooms.

Weta Digital are a visual effects house specialising in movie effects. Founded in 1993—Heavenly Creates, Contact, etc, done on proprietary systems, no render walls.

Paul covers 2000 onwards, moving towards generic hardware, Linux on the desktop, Linux render wall: LoTR, Eragon, District 9, Avatar, etc, etc.

Free Software's Contributions to IP Law

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:07:55 +1300

Gabriella Coleman

(This transcription loses flavr without the lolcats and goggies.)

tl;dr summary: See Gabriella speak if you get the chance.

Overview of Anthropology

First exposure during undergraduate years; a friend salivating over a Slackware CD. “How can a CD cause such joy?” Why was he into this CD? She didn’t ask any questions, but two years later she was studying patents and medicine; the friend explained the Copyleft and Gabriella was awestruck by the idea of an alternative to the existing infrastructure.

Became clear that if she ever wanted to finish her PhD she’d move away from religious feeling in Guyana and into the Interenet. Average time to complete in her department: 12 years.

Fieldwork: Total Cultural Immersion. Full participation in the community being studied.

Showed up at an intallfest; technical jargon was impenetrable. Over time, less intimidating.

Running Joke of the Conf

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:11:15 +1300

“Is Keith here yet?” Used every time laptop<->projector tantrums occur.

Wave-y Extensions

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:43:23 +1300

This was Pamela Fox’s braindump on how to do Wave extensions in an idiomatic kind of way; this is my braindump of her braindump. Gadgets Highlighting info correctly can reduce confusion. You can check current viewer in the API so you can have a change display adaptively. Anything to make it clearer that things are happening concurrently and who’s doing what. Wave is modal; you can have view or edit mode wave.

Integrating External Apps with Wave

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:23:14 +1300

PlonieBot is in the early stages of development Can pull content from Plone nets, but can’t yet put it back. This, obviously, is the most obvious weakness of the tool. Code will be open sourced. Python based. Python is allegedly the easiest way. Wave IDs are hard, which is why two-way stuff isn’t working so well yet. User creates a wave and adds ploniebot@appnet.com to the wave; this acts as the gateway.

SVG - 'DieFlashDie'

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:15:16 +1300

Gordon is a Flash interpreter written in JavaScript that renders to SVG. Very cool. Some confusion in the crowd as to whether this is a crawling horror or very cool. It’s very cool, of course. It’s your migration path-cum-compatibility layer for browsers that don’t get SVG. Embedd iframe in SVG gives the ability to do horribly complex/flashy web pages portlet-style. Inkscape’s ability to ooze out SVG will make it easier for designers to go from mockups to functional web pages if you only care about SVG-supporting browsers.

Deja vu

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:24:38 +1300

There’s something slightly odd about the sensation of watching the British Labour party overseeing strike-breaking. Part of that’s obvious: a Labour Lord egging on the attempts to crush unionised labour is the sort of thing that could provoke not merely spinning in graves, but the rising of the dead. At what point, one wonders, does continuing to retain the Labour moniker become an act of gross dishonesty so barefaced that present generations of UK Labour pollies feels sufficiently embarrassed as to rename themselves?

Antithesis

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:07:48 +1200

So, Ada loves Bob the Builder. She loves trucks and screwdrivers and the like. So you’d think that the Bob merchandise would be a slam-dunk for our household. Nuh-uh. The problem is that most everything I’ve seen of it is poorly-made shit. Not only does this violate my general thoughts about acceptable toys (they should be tolerably well-made), but it seems to me to be a deep and fundamental betrayal of the series itself, which is, after all, about doing a job properly and minimising waste.

District 9

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:45:40 +1200

OK, so I have a couple of reservations about it. One is that I need to see it a few more times before I start calling it a classic in the mode of Aliens, because I thought Gladiator was a classic on the first watching, but after a few more times around it looked less and less impressive every time.

But beyond that: see it! See it now! I’d certainly put it up there with Aliens or Robocop as a very good sci-fi actioneer with a bunch of smart social commentary. Beyond that recommendation, I’m going to tuck a bunch of spoilers and overthinking away below…

Learning Machine Redux

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:16:00 +1200

The weekend before last Ada started walking unassisted. On Wednesday I picked her up from creche. They noted she had been walking, and were amused that she applauded herself when she succeeded at it. They were amused and delighted - as was I - that when another non-walker gave it a go, she applauded him, too. This weekend she was starting to yell “run, run” and accelerate around the house for her own entertainment.

Surreal Television

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:35:00 +1300

I watched Lipstick on Your Collar when it was on TV; I think it may be the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen on TV. Time has, if anything, made it even more so, especially given where the actors have popped up since then. I would not believe Baz Luhrmann hadn’t seen the first of these clips before doing his version of Like a Virgin.

Big Noise

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:48:00 +1300

“Why Maiden?” says Payal Rameesh, gnawing corn-on-the-cob before making his way through the corrugated iron ticket barrier. “Because they sing about things that matter, serious things. Because they sing about what is happening in the world, like war and famine, not ‘I love you, baby’. And because it is a big noise.” Iron Maiden in India

GRUB sucks dead donkey dicks

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:29:00 +1300

That is all. Actually, that is not all. What a painful, over-engineered non-solution to a variety of, for the most part, non-problems. And those responsible for the religious crusade of texinfo can go to hell. That is all.

Happy

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:29:00 +1300

I got home today, climbed off my bike, started down the stairs… to find a very determined daughter accelerating up the stairs as fast as her hands and knees would allow. When we met up in the middle, she promptly demanded to be picked up and announced, “Happy. Happy. Happyhappyhappy.” Yeah, kid. Me too.

Poor Bella went mad

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:59:00 +1300

Recently, I found a series of notebooks filled with cramped, pencilled handwriting - the diaries of Bella’s husband, Major General John Ludlow. The diaries were in the attic, proper quarters of fictional mad wives, but as I read I found that, far from hiding Bella away, the General did his best to keep her at the heart of family life. The diaries gave me an unbearably poignant account of her illness.

When Tabletop Gamers Design Garden Tools

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 20:00:00 +1300

Today I bought a new, and very handy, garden tool: a four and a half metre pole with a battery on one end and a small chainsaw on the other. A pole with a chainsaw. I swear, the kids that grew up on Warhammer 40K are designing garden implements now.

Childcare, revistited

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:55:00 +1300

The Thing in the Crib.

Trapped by Your Past, or, Grow The Fuck Up

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:58:00 +1300

One of the common themes I’ve seen from a portion of Kiwis gloating about the All Blacks being ejected from the Rugby World Cup earlier than most people expected goes something along the lines of:

“When I was at school there were the thugby idiots who were bullying arseholes and I’m happy when the All Blacks lose because it upsets people like that.”

Now, I know this particular scenario because I, too, suffered from arseholes at high school. But within a year of leaving high school I realised a few things.

Growth

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:57:00 +1300

Why my next bike won't be a Suzuki

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:19:00 +1300

I may not be able to avoid buying shit made in China, unless I want to, say, never wear clothing again. But since Suzuki manufacture in Burma, this is why ny next motorbike won’t be a Suzuki.

Nom nom nom

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:55:00 +1200

The problem with having accepted the first (unbearable cute!) efforts to feed Daddy is that I now have to look like proferred broccolli and pumpkin are the most delicious foods, nom nom nom!, that I’ve ever eaten. We are now moving on to “I wish to clean you after dinner!”

The Best Parenting Advice I Got

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:48:00 +1200

I posted this somewhere else in a discussion thread; I place it here for posterity: The best bit of parenting advice we got—from numerous sources—that turned out to be completely correct was to enjoy the now. People would explain how often they, themselves had been impatient for the “next stage”, only to discover they missed the last one, and felt they hadn’t enjoyed themselves enough during it.< I was delighted when my daughter was old enough to greet me with paroxyms of joy when I got home from work - but I also miss the time during the first couple of months of her life when the most magical thing in her little life was Daddy’s big, strong, safe chest.

Link-o-rama

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:55:00 +1200

”…there, in a small cage, was a gorgeous little lion cub. We were shocked. We looked at each other and said something’s got to be done about that.” Harrods, it turned out, was also quite keen to be rid of Christian, who had escaped one night, sneaked into the neighbouring carpet department - then in the throes of a sale of goatskin rugs - and wreaked havoc. The store, which had acquired the cub from Ilfracombe zoo, happily agreed to part with him for 250 guineas.

Illiteracy and Spam

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:35:00 +1200

Sure, they go together, but how often do they appear in mayoral candidates. Pride in one’s stupidity is a contemptible trait.

There's stupid, and there's stupid...

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 19:51:00 +1200

More than a quarter of babies born in Britain have at least one foreign-born parent, it emerged this week, up from just over a fifth in 2000. It is a striking statistic that in some quarters, predictably, provoked alarm. “Many people simply don’t understand how this could have happened without anyone being consulted,” Sir Andrew Green, chair of the rightwing anti-immigration group Migration Watch - source What, so if I were to be mad enough to move to the UK and have kids, I should ask around the local Daily Torygraph readers, BNP, and other assorted groups of racists, and see whether I’m allowed to have them?

Who will eat who?

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 22:52:00 +1200

And how did I miss this until today?

The Complete Chronicles of Conan

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:35:00 +1200

A bunch of writers I like have always spoken highly of Robert E Howard; adjectives like “muscular” and “gripping” tend to be bandied about his Conan stories, usually alongside notes that much of the Conan-related material—other authors working in the Conan canon, movies, and so on—aren’t even a pale shadow of Howard’s writing, so when I happened across this substantial paperback in Unity, I decided to take a punt on it.

Ladyhawke

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:27:00 +1200

One of those classics of the Eighties I never got around to see at the time, I whipped this out for the semi-regular dinner-and-a-movie-with-Amy. First impression: the muzak is awful. Really, really awful. Getting Alan Parsons to do the soundtrack may have seemed like a good idea in 1985, but it wasn’t. Once I got over that, I liked it. Granted, I couldn’t resist making fun of the bit where Rutger Hauer takes out Michelle Pfeiffer’s dress and is nuzzling it, because at that point, if I was Matthew Broderick, I’d be thinking worried thoughts about how the knight who saved me might be into a whole world of swapping black leather for nice silks and being known as Rutgina, but anyway…

Genius

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:16:00 +1200

OK, it fades a little after a strong start, but I still love 300 getting the treatment it begs for. Thanks to Pearl

Public Service Announcement

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:28:00 +1200

Ada can now grab lip rings. You may wish to evaluate her hand-to-facial-piercing distance carefully.

Hmm...

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:07:00 +1200

So, if I’m reading this silly legislation correctly, can I have everyone who spent a portion of last year alleging that Peter Davis is gay, and his marriage to Helen Clark is a sham, fined $200? Things No Right Turn probably didn’t mean me to think about.

Learning Machines

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:49:00 +1200

“Dada, “Mama”, “Burl”, “Zhak”. “Daddy, did you know you have teeth?” “Daddy, did you know I have opposable thumbs? And I can use them like pincers? And that I can get my own food into my own mouth? Did I mention I can do it on my own?”

Fuck Whitcoulls

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:31:00 +1200

They can http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives/undercover/014948.html?page=fullpage. Good thing Unity and Dymocks are closer to me, anyway. From Stephen.

Nifty

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:08:00 +1200

Pageless scrolling for web apps.

1921 in NZ

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:40:00 +1200

McMullen sewed the head back onto the neck with baling twine, so as to hold it rigid. My cousin those days had a yellow Maxwell five-seater car, and the back seat was taken by the corpse, while three of us sat in the front for the six-mile journey to Mangamahu. When we arrived at the hotel, the constable pulled the corpse out of the car, got it on his shoulder and carried it over to the pub, where he leaned it against the wall near the bar entrance while we went for a few spots.

No Chance to See

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:21:00 +1200

I read Douglas Adams’ excellent Last Chance to See soon after it was published; I found the section on the Kakapo particularly moving. Alas, however, the book is rendered forever outdated: there is no lst chance to see one of its subjects, the Yangtze Dolphin. It is gone.

Baby Music

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:23:00 +1200

The 1812 Overture. Especially the end bit. Is there anything happier than a baby being tossed into the air in time to cannon blasts?

Java 6 made my life easier

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 07:17:00 +1200

A client has upgraded a server app (standalone, not in a container) from a 1.4 JRE to 6.1. It’s like day and night. Particular highlights: Memory use Normal memory use under 1.4 was around 300 - 400 MB. Now it’s 200 - 300MB. Granted, on modern systems that’s nothing, but if the system doubles in use (as predicted), that will be handy; more importantly, since adding more memory to a JVM doesn’t always work well (aggravating GC thrashing when you do run low on memory), it’s good to use less.

Unnecessarily Painful

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:43:00 +1200

So, the new hotness is running Rails apps (typo, in my case) on a mongrel server, with Apache acting as a reverse proxy in front (prefereably serving the static files from there, rather than mongrel). This is a good idea (well, better than FastCGI), and not particularly challenging to implement. Unless you have a tilde in the path of the URI for your app. As I do for typo. The comes the dreaded NOT FOUND.

If I Were An Evil Overlord

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:51:00 +1200

A collection of 14 fantasy and sci fi stories based around the simple premise: what if the evil overlord actually read one of those huge lists of things they should and shouldn’t do. Sounds good, right? Scope for funnies, perhaps even more. Well, let’s just say there’s a reason this was only fifteen bucks at Unity. Yes, there are a couple of good, interesting stories (“Daddy’s Little Girl”, “A Woman’s Work…”, “Art Therapy”, “Ensuring the Sucession”, and “Geordie Culligan vs.

The Modern World

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:20:00 +1200

I have a generalisation about science fiction and fantasy genre fiction; the former tends to be written by people who have interesting ideas but indifferent abilities to develop characters, to tell stories, to engage the reader. One often slogs through pages of mediocre prose in order to enjoy the little gems of speculation therein.

Fantasy, on the other hand, is afflicted by legions of writers who are perfectly capable of sketching an interesting character, of encouraging a reader to keep turning pages, but devoid of anything resembling an original idea, preferring to crib from the few giants of the genre, wrap their characters in silly names, churn out trilogy after trilogy, and get very rich indeed.

Steph Swainston is a fantasy writer. She is also producing the best, most interesting, and most importantly, original fantasy I have read in the 20-odd years since I started with Lord of the Rings. Since then I have read a reasonable chunk of fantasy, and Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy is the only work even in the same ballpark; The Modern World is the third book in a series.

Penguins Stopped Play

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:59:00 +1200

This paen to cricket opens with a scene worthy of Douglas Adams: a scratched-together cricket team on the Ross Shelf, observed by Leopard Seals, with players fighting the attentions of Skuas and penguins - and, as the title says, losing to the last.

It doesn’t hurt that the tale is told by someone who could stack up to Adams, either. I was giggling through page two and three, and stayed for more.

Parenting Questions

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:56:00 +1200

What proportion of my body needs to be covered in baby food before I can be considered part of one or more food groups? When this” brings tears of laughter to my eyes, is it because it’s really, really funny, or because my brain has been remapped to find it so? Actually, I’m pretty sure with lines like: Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape?

My Rapacious Testicles

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:18:00 +1200

Apparently the ability of a baby to suck nutrients from the mother is the fault of the father.

300

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 15:36:00 +1200

This was… awful. The comic was a mixed bag; Frank Millar’s love of one of the nastier societies of the ancient world (does anyone reading this really need it explained to them that the Spartans were not exactly representative of the best of ancient Greece? I mean, when your treatment of slaves is crap compared to ancient Athens, you’re pretty shit) and incredible gaffes (Athens are boylovers, hurf, durf. You can write all the defences of that line you like, Frank, but it’s monumentally stupid in the context of Spartan and ancient Greece generally) was balanced by his usual good art.

Walking with Ada

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 14:44:00 +1200

I took Ada out for a walk around Mount Vic this morning and managed a few interesting photos on the way:

The Call of Cthulhu

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:48:00 +1200

Not the short story; instead, a 2005 exercise in retro film making. This is a silent black-and-white gem of a movie. A faithful adaptation, it’s wonderfully lit, has a fine soundtrack, and was actually pretty gripping for all 47 minutes. The retro special effects are surprisingly effective; the “non-Euclidian geometry” so beloved of Lovecraft makes some novel appearances toward the end. Thoroughly recommended.

Not just Suffragettes!

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:51:00 +1200

JU-JUTSUFFRAGETTES! Clearly I need to learn more about Edith Garrud.

When your currency is worth more dead than alive

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:33:00 +1200

India has a coin shortage. Why? They’re worth more as razor blades.

Music Enthuses the Savage Beast

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 19:03:00 +1200

As I type, Ada is shaking her new maracas more-or-less in time to Dean Gray’s American Edit.

So, a question

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:31:00 +1200

Is this one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen because I’m now a parent?

An outing

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:43:00 +1200

Ada had a rough weekend. On Friday she went into A&E after feeding problems and was diagnosed with ulcers on her throat; by Saturday morning she was refusing to eat because of the pain. When she was admitted the doctor attending was making alarming noises about tube-feeding her via her nose. This was not a welcome prospect, to say the least; Maire and I managed to stave this off by using syringes to alternate squirting cold water (to numb her throat) and milk into her mouth, keeping her fluid intake up and some food going into her.

Like a flashback

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:12:00 +1200

…only not:

I hate bad science reporting

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:30:00 +1200

From this article on very cool research tracking plant and animal spreads between Polynesia and America, we get the gem: Along the way the new research finally sinks the already fragile Kon-Tiki raft which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl used in 1947 to show that Polynesians may have hailed from South America. Um, no, it doesn’t. In fact, the person interviewed says it doesn’t when asked. What sunk Heyerdahl’s theory is the genetic evidence that links Polynesians to migrations from East Asia, not South America.

Importing Tony Blair's Idiot Ideas

Wed, 30 May 2007 21:56:00 +1200

There is a bleak irony that it is Annette King, a female Labour MP, who wants to implement ASBOs in an effort to bring us back to a kind of pre-Magna Carta legal state.

Cats

Wed, 30 May 2007 20:48:00 +1200

Cats programming. Cats swimming. With videos.

Lion vs Crocodile vs Buffalo

Sun, 27 May 2007 20:28:00 +1200

Who will win?

Peter and the Wolf

Fri, 25 May 2007 14:13:00 +1200

Ahh, nostalgia. I was drawn into a record store and was browsing the classical section when I was hit with childhood memories of the Dick Weir Show and happy Sundays lying in bed listening to Bad Jelly the Witch, Benny Hill’s Ernie, and Peter and the Wolf. What, I asked myself, could be finer than passing on a little of that bliss? Unfortunately I was buggered if I could remember who composed the last of these, I rung Maire, who was able to supply the answer; Prokofiev.

Baby guffaws

Wed, 23 May 2007 13:13:00 +1200

Ada has been in fine moods in the mornings this week; positively hysterical, in fact. Everything is somewhere between merely amusing and hilarious: Daddy, you’re coming to my cot. chuckle Getting out of bed? Hilarious! Magnificant! A book for the morning? Whatever you select will, I promise you, be the wittiest tome compiled for the edification of infants. I shall cackle at the turning of each page! Getting changed into today’s outfit?

Plane Dead

Mon, 21 May 2007 17:18:00 +1200

Plane Dead is one of those movies that must have started life as a bull session. Eventually the evening got to the point where someone was giggling about how cool Airplane and the 70s airplane disaster flicks that inspired it were, someone else was ruminating on the success of Snakes on a Plane, and someone else mentioned how much they were looking forward to 28 Weeks Later. Then, as one, “Zombies on a Motherfucking Plane!

The Hideous Theme

Tue, 15 May 2007 23:02:00 +1200

Is the result of an upgrade with broke my old theme. Prettification will resume at a later date. As will working links.

Layer Cake

Mon, 07 May 2007 21:57:13 +1200

I enjoyed this. Nicely woven plot, albeit with a few overly obvious twists and turns, with a few good “surprise!” moments. This is the London of Canary Wharf and the post-Thatcher era of common-as-muck moneymakers in nice suits and old clubs; director Matthew Vaughn noted in the Q&A session added to the Region 1 disc that he wanted a step away from the lower class grubby pubs of the two Guy Ritchie films he’d produced (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), and one that would showcase a more beautiful London.

Russian Cake Art

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:17:59 +1200

Uber Cakes.

Coco

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:40:26 +1200

Toward the southern end of Cuba Street, Coco looked quite promising as a lunch venue; the menu was interesting and not unreasonably priced. There are, indeed, some strong points: the food is delicious, and reasonable for the price. My crumbed chicken and bacon burger was delicious, Maire’s fajitas likewise. But there endith the good part of the tale. First, a 45 minute wait for food on a lunch menu is clearly for people who aren’t, you know, working or anything during the day.

FLAC

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:44:32 +1200

In my quest to get my music library both more accessible and higher quality than MP3s (but slightly more storage-friendly than raw WAV files), I’ve been thinking about re-reripping stuff into FLACS (amusingly enough, so has Stephen; great minds and all). Random wrangling over at a PublicAddress discussion was my tipping point; one thing that quickly irritated me was discovering that my favourite ripper (grip) had a bunch of stupid defaults that encoded FLACs with no track or artist metadata, ID3 or otherwise.

The Prestige

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:02:32 +1200

OK, so I’m reading this after it was made into “a major motion picture”; blame Unity, my main supplier of crack^H^H^H^H^Hbooks for not having Christopher Priest’s most recent effort on the shelves until it now. I’m very fond of Priest; I started reading his early stuff like Real Time World. and Fugue for a Darkening Island; a signatue of his work is that he’s fond of presenting narratives about worlds that differ markedly from our own; they start out seemless, solid, with the reader seeking to understand the alternative universe.

Send help

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 20:48:50 +1300

Trapped in house with crazy ladies!

Pulp Fiction in type

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:15:11 +1300

Very cool. Easier to watch than explain.

Maldives and gemcutters

Fri, 05 May 2006 14:57:21 +1200

Stunning. And I couldn’t sum up my feelings about the inability of so many architects and “developers” to see a space and be unable to leave it the fuck alone.

Isn't that bankruptcy?

Thu, 04 May 2006 14:56:49 +1200

It’s good news, but it indicates how badly most countries are run. Owing more than you have in assets is, in effect, being bankrupt after all. It’s kind of disturbing that such a small minority of OECD countries are solvent. It’s even more disturbing that the last election campaign was conducted with the National Party able to avoid ridicule while positioning itself as the party that would keep us in the red, but also the party of fiscal responsibility.

Mixed News

Thu, 04 May 2006 11:18:51 +1200

So, it’s good news, bad news, and mixed news.

Good news: LLU unbundling. Maurice Williamson is against it of course, but Williamson is effectively the MP for Telecom ever since he lost the 90s portfolio of Minister for Telecom. His hysterical loyalty to failed extremist free market policies, long after they’ve been shown to fail completely in the real world show how far key members of the National Party still have to go before they can get to grips with the realities mainstream New Zealand care about.

The degree of monopoly profits telecom have been tearing out of the New Zealand economy are indicated by how panicked its shareholders are.

The Ivory and the Horn

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 11:23:50 +1200

A collection of contemporary fantasy by Charles de Lint; for the most part I really enjoyed his mixing of resurgent classic European and, to a lesser extent, North American folk mythology into a modern environment. The best stories have well-sketched characters and interesting ideas. It’s not all strong, though; de Lint does fall into clunky prose and caricature in some stories, and his fondness for writing female characters occasionally turns into a fairly simple-minded dislike of his male ones; on balace, though, I was glad I picked this up on a whim, and I’ll probably grab more of his fiction.

Cafe Bastille

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 11:17:00 +1200

Cafe Bastille won the Cuisine magazine Restaurant of the Year last year; it’s not hard to see why. The staff are attentive (bonus points for front of house staff who safely stow motorcycle helmets); the food is wonderfully done from an interesting menu (why yes, I will have the crepes in a orange and Grand Marnier sauce!).

Anansi Boys

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:39:26 +1300

I finished Anansi Boys in a few lunchtimes of reading; like American Gods, it rattles along at a decent pace, and is easy, likeable reading. Pity I didn’t enjoy it half as much.

A day in Wellington

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:56:00 +1300

Missing in Action

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:56:00 +1300

An old favourite from the motorway on-ramp on Willis street. This was on the remains of the Fat Ladies Arms for months, but is now long gone, overpainted in beige.

Sometimes the jokes write themselves

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:54:00 +1300

[…] moaning and whinging at Nutzwerk is forbidden… except when accompanied with a constructive suggestion as to how to improve the situation […] This is a lesson in how to confirm national stereotypes. At lunchtime, the workers sit together, exchanging amusing stories and cracking jokes. In the approved fashion, no doubt. What next? French hotel orders waiters to be rude to Americans? British restaurant fires chef for preparing green vegetables without first boiling them grey?

Winged wolves

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:28:00 +1300

While channel surfing I happened upon a brief piece on a hawk I’d never heard of; Harris’s Hawk, Parabuteo unicinctus. What made it especially interesting is it displayed a behaviour which is incredibly uncommon in the largely anti-social world of raptors: hunting in packs.

The stories nightmares are made of

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 13:30:00 +1300

Don’t read this if dentists scare you. Especially not if you have a visit lined up.

Mixed Feelings

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 22:37:00 +1300

When looking a little closer at the details of the situation in Fiji, I have more decidedly mixed feelings than I did before.

On the one hand I dislike the spectre of an elite, especially a millitary elite, threatening to intervene, via coup if necessary, to overturn the policies of a democratically elected government. In theory this is a supportable action; in many democracies members of the armed services will swear allegiance to a particular set of pricniples and/or an apolitical head of state, with the idea that (say) upholding the constitution takes precedence over doing the bidding of a government that violates it.

Sometimes you get the beer,

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:49:00 +1300

…sometimes the beer gets you. Some people love the stories of the 18 stone short guy who does triathalons, or the 100 year old who smokes like a chimney, because looking at outliers can be a comforting way of ignoring the normal results. Sometimes outliers are at the other end of the graph.

Chinese discovering America?

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 15:01:00 +1300

Well, it kind of seems to me that irrespective of the dubious authenticity of book and shiny new map, it seems to have eluded anyone in newsrooms to point out that the people who would become the native American tribes had already located it some time before. Five minutes with the Internet would have gotten a list of claims about subsequent discoveries ranging from the preposterious (Ancient Egypt) to the more credible (short-lived Viking colonies).

Pita Sharples making sense

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:15:00 +1300

Pita Sharples dons his “sensible voice of the Maori party” hat once again. Or perhaps he’s just saying things that appeal to me; I’m certainly underwhelmed by a bunch of self-professed arse-kickers looking to clean up Dodge. Sounds like a magnet for thugs who want a uniform. If you really want to clean up your neighbourhood and wear a nice outfit, the police are looking for 1,000 new officers. Of course, they may insist on following some rules, pesky discipline, and so on.

Really disturbing advertising

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 21:23:00 +1300

Inghams has what must be among the more disturbing threads of advertising on New Zealand TV: the collection of mutilated women. The current ad is the woman who twists her head the wrong way while doing yoga, but with the help of Inghams, she still serves dinner!

The previous ad was the woman whose arm gets sliced off by her lightsaber-wielding son; she looks at him mock-cross (it’s so adorable when they slice your arm off!), but thanks to Inghams, she trundles out a dinner for the whole family!

I don’t think you need to be overly-sensitive to find the theme of the series a little creepy.

Round up

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 19:12:00 +1300

The Worldwatch Institute’s slip is showing. Given how disproportionate the US’s resource consumption is, I don’t think the problem is developing nations (although they have the potential to become one); the problem is if the rest of the world follows US consumption patterns. Australia, for example, has thus far resisted the temptation to build equivalents of Phoenix or Las Vegas. Perhaps China and India can do the same. And what do you call it when the espionage wing of a nation murders 18 people in a nation with no declaration of war?

Wellington on a good day

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 16:35:00 +1300

Having a mostly idle day (well, actually, a day when I should be doing a bunch of taxes but never mind that for now), and not having taken my bike out of down for a while I thought I’d go for a ride and take some photos, prompted by another cat-induced early morning:

Grendel Update

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:30:00 +1300

Well, for starters, he’s no longer confined to a cage; he’s been given the run of the spare bedroom.

Granted, he mostly uses this to hide under the sofa or chair, as well as his cage, rather than sit at the window.

We don't hate sex offenders

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:29:00 +1300

Well, we don’t hate them as much as we thought.

A change to laws for who may hold a passenger endorsement that banned anyone convicted of a sex crime or murder, and selectively banned people convicted of other serious violent offenses must have seemed like a slam-dunk both in terms of policy and popularity. We don’t like kiddie-fiddlers and rapists, and it does seem a little odd that someone with a history of sexual assault might be able to spend their Friday nights offering women a taxi service.

But not so.

Fun with zombies

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:21:00 +1300

I think I need to see Fido when it’s released.

Flash Gordon

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:15:00 +1300

The Dino De Laurentiis Flash Gordon tends to attract any number of rather negative comments; like Highlander it can be rather unkindly labelled a movie length rock video for Queen. But it’s quite a bit better than such aspersions might indicate, and is enormously good fun, so long as you don’t mind the (presumably deliberate) cheesy feel pulled from the 30s comics and serial adaptions.

Not a bad start

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 10:21:00 +1300

Well, certainly a damn sight better than last year, where my first post-Christmas break resulted in a trip to hospital. This one was a great deal lighter and more enjoyable; a little light ground work followed by some kuzushi and working on combinations. Except I didn’t really work on combinations, because my basic throwing technique needs too much work to worry about that overmuch. I got very, very tired and very, very sweaty.

Cat Love 2005

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 19:41:00 +1300

Random acts of cat love from 2005. You wouldn’t know they spent the first couple of months when we first got them trying to kill each other, would you?

Wellington Dawn

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 10:00:00 +1300

Stumbling out of bed at a cat-propelled ungodly hour presented me with quite a pleasant sunrise:

Where the British motorcycle industry went

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 22:02:00 +1300

Brian Martin, the factory’s race team manager, had established a sound record of success with his small and highly efficient competition department […] Martin’s budget limit was cancelled and BSA’s senior designers formed a committee to build the best motocross machine the world had ever seen. Neither Martin nor double world champion Jeff Smith were consulted about the new world-beater… An interesting Motorcycle USA article on one of the great faux pas of the British motorcycle industry, the BSA Titanium.

MSNBC Year in Photographs

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:40:00 +1300

The MSNBC year in photographs has some stunning images; it’s interesting that the readers’ choice section seems more upbeat, or less about disaster, anyway, than the editors’ choice.

Mangroves

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 15:10:00 +1300

It’s nice when what seems like common sense is borne out by closer inspection; indeed, mangrove destruction aggravating disasters of the sea got a bit of play in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Not that I expect it to make much impact on the chronically, criminally stupid. One can but hope the motley crew are on the beach to reap the consequences of their handiwork one day. The quote of the final piece must go to “engineer” Andre Labonte, who is ripping out mangroves to improve the views of a coastal subdivision.

Feliway

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 13:35:00 +1300

While looking at ways to make Grendel, Jaques, and Isis co-exist more comfortably in our house, Kris recommended some Feliway, which has a good record, in the CPL’s experience, of helping cats stay happy under changed circumstances; it replicates some key cat pheremones and makes the place smell (to a cat) like everything has been thoroughly marked safe. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered it’s got one drawback: if, like me, you’ve got cat allergies, having Feliway gently disperses through the whole house automatically is not such a good thing.

Grendel's Progress

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 09:06:00 +1300

Maire has already detailed a bit about Grendel: he broke into the house last week, and got into a hell of a fight with our cats. Once it became apparent he was injured and appeared to be a stray-a reasonable assumption about an adult tom cat with dreadlocks growing down his back-we dropped him off with the SPCA, thinking they’d help him.

The Economist kisses fundie arse

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:10:00 +1300

This is one of the most mealy-mouth, cop-out pieces of crap I’ve ever seen in the Economist. For a publication that appeals to the notion of absolute, objective economic realities when dismissing government programs it dislikes, this piece of horseshit masquerading as journalism is one of the most malodorous pieces of hypocrisy I’ve seen recently. The UC system wishes to ensure people taking science courses understand actual science, rather than religious studies.

mod_rewrite coolness

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:10:00 +1300

This is a nifty little mod_rewrite calculator for the specific purpose of helping build allow-by-referrer lists. Neat-o.

Should I laugh or cry?

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:35:00 +1300

On the one hand, this is repulsive shit that makes me very, very angry indeed. On the other hand, “White Crusaders of the Racial Holy War”? Perhaps you ought to move out of mummy and daddy’s basement before you start your white supremecist movement.

The new Satanic ritual abuse?

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 11:05:00 +1300

So, having had a go at it beforebefore, I’m left to wonder if the newest fad in religious abuse of children in Britain is real, or yet another hysterical nonsense, mostly driven by a different stripe of religious fanatic. I am sure cases are under-reported. Spirit possession is almost certainly under-reported. Actually, I’m fairly spirit possession is, in fact, massively over reported. Now, if the good inspector meant that belief of spirit possession, and odd behaviour based upon this belief, is under reported, I might believe him.

Are you insane?

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 09:49:00 +1300

Seriously, WTF? Hopefully the judge is in the mood to administer a good hard kick up the arse, but I can’t even begin to imagine why attacking someone for speaking Chinese to their friend, on a train, would seem like a good idea.

Dutch Master

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 13:20:00 +1300

A couple of weeks ago we had a visit from Dutch 6th dan Jaap Niezen; Jaap is a specialist in the kata of judo, and tours Germany and the Netherlands to hold clinics. His sons had shouted him a trip to New Zealand for his seventieth birthday, and he visited our dojo because, as one of the sons put it, “he can’t spend 4 weeks with no Judo.”

All the better for us.

Our coffee may rock...

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 11:30:00 +1300

Russell Brown has been having a long series of posts about coffee in New Zealand and how it stacks up compared to those around the world, culminating in this monster post.

Phish, phish

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 09:30:00 +1300

The latest round of phishing scams to target New Zealand banks has arrived at National Bank; it will be interesting to see how they deal with it. Phishing is really just a subset of old social engineering hacks; people tend to get blinded by the technological aspect (ooh, the shiny IntarWeb!) and ignore the fact that it’s a user education problem; for a concrete example of this, a person claiming to be a bank customer services rep rung a friend of mine a couple of months ago and offered her credit card insurance - and wanted her credit card details so she could help her buy it.

Oily Movie

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 09:48:00 +1300

Continuing a theme, these interviews with Stephen Gaghan are doing a nice job of whetting my appetite for Syriana; I suspect, however, it will be like the fall of the Roman Empire: many peoples opinions about it will tell you more about them, than about the movie itself.

Urban planning challenge

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 09:12:00 +1300

What do you do when you’re draining water from your underground aquifers so fast your city is sinking? If you’re http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4508062.stm the answer is, apparently, not much: apparently they lose 40% of their water through cracked water mains, which presumably become worse as the city sinks further.

Mobil, making the world a better place

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:03:00 +1300

Or not. I must remember not to shop at ExxonMobil companies. It is, of course, unlikely to result in a silencing of the tiresome canard that the only reason anyone professes to be concerned about climate change is sweet, sweet, research grants, since obviously better money is on offer from the opposition. Kind of funny to read that Ford told them they’re delusional.

ACT, a pack of fuckwits

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:19:00 +1300

Tony Milne quite correctly nails Rodney Hide over ACT’s block-vote for the religious-right sponsored attempts to narrow marriage; how does the party of less government and personal choice justify the legal removal of same from a whole class of citizens? It’s deeply disturbing, though, to learn just how much influence the Bretheren are buying themselves in Parliament (so much National can’t even keep track of the money!). Given National’s involvement with them in the last election, one might ask does Don Brash better love “mainstream New Zealand”, or a few hundred religious nuts?

Fathers, go fuck yourselves

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:27:00 +1300

I guess men don’t count in raising children; Ruth Dyson’s definition of “supporting families” excludes ones with male parents involved.

Seagate no more?

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:38:00 +1300

I think I’m going to have to stop buying Seagate drives. I’ve now approaching a 100% failure rate with them over the past couple of years; it’s fortunate that I make a habit of buying in pairs and mirroring them when they go in servers, because otherwise I’d be out a lot of data.

Kata Guruma

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 10:55:00 +1300

Last night I had the pleasure of catching Dave, a brown belt (as opposed to Dave-the-blue-belt, or Dave-of-Dave-and-Alice) with kata grumua, albeit a half-arsed execution that had him rolling across my back as much as my shoulders. This made me very pleased with myself, not least because I was feinting a leg grab to try and set it up. I’m not sure Dave was actually falling for it, but it worked. Repeatedly getting thrown in tomoe nage or variants thereof while trying to make it work was a little less flash; I need to be able to drop down quicker, and also work out a useful counter for when the kata guruma doesn’t come off.

Wet, wet Wellington

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 09:27:23 +1300

The worst thing about riding in the rain isn’t getting damp, nor is it the way you suddenly become quite a bit more aware of how small your contact patch with the newly slippery surface really is: it’s the part time drivers. Every time there’s a downpour in Wellington, hordes of people take to their cars, abandoning their past habit of walking, waiting for the bus, or whatever, presumably because they don’t want to get wet.

Salt: A (Crappy) World History

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 20:00:00 +1300

Well, perhaps the title is a touch harsh. But only a touch. Mark Kurlansky, the author, is certainly an engaging writer; after reading his descriptions of the pink salt mountain of Catalonia and the great underground salt mines buried in the bayou of Lousiana I was left with a strong desire to see them myself; he provides a wide-ranging overview of the history of salt both in the West and East. There’s some neat recipies, too.

There’s just one problem: glaring errors of fact on topics I know a little about make me wonder if the whole lot is trash.

Big Black Towers of Power

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:09:00 +1300

I had the good fortune to pick up a pair of brand new Sony SSMF750 speakers on TradeMe a couple of months ago as a result of the seller having picked them up without appropriate domestic consultation. Out they had to go, and I was happy to relieve the seller’s household of the burden.

Brotherhood of the Wolf/Le Pacte des loups

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:25:00 +1300

While I was housebound by my broken arm earlier this year, Rhiannon got a rental copy of this movie out. Good choice. I liked it so much I ended up buying a copy last week.

A monster carrying off women and children, a creepy brother, wicked action sequences, sanctimonious priests, a http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001092/, dodgy gypsies, decaying rural aristocracy, the rapier wit of the hero as he attempts to seduce the daughter of the aforementioned aristocracy, Monica Belluci, and a sprinkling of politics. What’s not to love?

Sexy Bible

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 12:23:48 +1300

OK, anyone familiar with the Old Testament knows there’s plenty of racy bits in the Bible, but all things considered, doesn’t having a bunch of choirboys get their kit off for church just beg for jokes? And following in the same vein, we have the sexy german kids frollicking about naked in re-enactments of aforementioned naughty bits. Sadly, it’s impossible to tell from the http://www.bibelkalender.de/ whether this includes Ruth and Naomi.

The price of size

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:20:00 +1300

Last night we practiced naga-no-kata at judo, in prep for our visiting Dutch master tonight. It was a fairly quick whip through, probably more to prevent Alan being embarrassed by his juniors than anything else. It was a reasonably interesting overview of the formal side of judo as far as I was concerned.

The Ultimate Olympian

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:34:32 +1300

Now, this is cool. Man decides to have a go at all the Olympic sports over a hour year period.

Bloody hell

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 11:52:00 +1300

They shrunk the costumes since I last watched it fifteen years ago.

Loans aren't discrimatory?

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 11:47:25 +1300

It’ss been a common claim that student loans are especially burdensome on women, with scenarios being worked up to suggest women will have a lower repayment rate across their lifetime and never end up repaying them (as opposed to men, who will merely take decades). Data so far suggests this isn’t true in general. I wonder what that says about wage equality amongst my contemporaries.

No surprise

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:24:00 +1300

This doesn’t surprise me. I once worked at a site where the overnight security were from Armourguard, and, with one or two exceptions, the guards were not exactly on the up and up. Plenty got booted from the site for sins as diverse as using the phones to make long distance calls to family, napping when they were supposed to be doing their rounds, and so on. None of them actually got fired, though, just moved to another site.

Shiraz Sadness

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:54:00 +1300

A few years ago we visited Glover’s vinyard in the South Island. Great was my joy to discover they were making red wines, and not pinot noir. The reds I most enjoy tend to be shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, grenache shiraz, and similar strong, full reds. Finding a Kiwi setup doing something other than expensive and rather mediocre pinot was pretty pleasing. Alas, it hasn’t worked out in practice. Well, not for the 2001 vintage, anyway.

It's less good to be a guy.

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:12:00 +1300

I have been hearing for some time that men have become more interested in fashion. That’s nice for those men; I’m not one of them. I am more likely to glory in finding a particularly comfortable pair of jeans, in microfibre magic dress pants (crumple them up, stuff them in a suitcase, marvel as they then still look like they’ve been freshly pressed as soon as you shake them out) than to worry about what’s in and out in a given year.

Alas, no more.

Real Gay Cowboys

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:53:00 +1300

Inspired by Brokeback Mountain, the Guardian has an article about real gay cowboys. “All those men out there together. When I was in my late teens […] stuff would happen in the bunkhouse with older men.” […] Was he scared? “It was more scary being with a woman, which just didn’t feel natural.”

Democracy

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 10:20:00 +1300

John Hayes and Don McKinnon clearly need to have a chat about how they ended up in the same political party. In some ways, though, McKinnon’s anti-democratic outburst is hardly surprising. As an adult in the 90s and growing up in the 80s I well remember many of the politicians leading the New Right charge in New Zealand encouraging us to look to Singapore as an example of how things ought to be - although none of them would actually come out and say democracy ought to be abolished in favour of a repressive one-party state, it certainly seemed to be part of the appeal.

Typo Install Problems

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 22:30:00 +1300

So, a non-obvious problem getting typo working: my first effort at getting it running off Apache’s CGI mode was confounded my two mysterious problems: one turned out to be with the RAILS_ENV setting, and the other was with symlinks.

Both turned out to be pretty straightforward, but there was a certain amount of cursing working out what was going on, since both just gave the useless “Cannot connect to typo” error, and left nothing in either the typo or Apache error logs.

It is the ippon that lifts the judokas' soul

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 21:06:00 +1300

A couple of weeks ago I had a glorious first at judo: namely, getting a throw after a couple of attempts.

Normally I find throws a frustrating exercise; I have a hard time co-ordinating the major components (breaking my opponent’s balance, getting my grip, footwork, and body placement correct). This time I got shown a throw a couple of times, and had it working tolerably well after a couple of goes with my uke.

EastWest

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 18:20:00 +1300

Tried brunch at EastWest in Cuba street today and all was good. Started out with the fried roti and citrus butter that used to be a favourite of mine when Zico was open at the same address; having devoured that, I had tasty buttermilk pancakes with berries. Their coffee is served very hot, and is lighter than the bitter, almost burnt flavour that is common in Wellington cafes. Service was both friendly and very good, with the staff accommodating tweaks to the food and drinks.

New Dojo, New Fun

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 18:07:00 +1300

After breaking my arm at the start of the year, I had an enforced layoff from judo of 8 months, give or take. In that time I decided to look for a new dojo, motivated not least by a concern that the one I had been attending seemed to have a bit of an issue with injuries.

Perhaps it was just me, but a couple of broken arms, some missing teeth, and some knackered ribs (spread across a few students, not just to me) within a period of a couple of months seemed excessive.

Bubba Ho-Tep

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 22:42:00 +1300

The premise of Bubba Ho-Tep” is bizarre and amusing: Elvis lives. In a rest home. With a black guy who thinks he’s JFK. A mummy is stalking the corridors and, well, “ask not what your rest home can do for you, but what you can do for your rest home.”

The thing is, it’s creepy, but not like you’d expect…

French Toast

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:07:00 +1300

I’m just not that fond of french toast as it appears in most Wellington cafés. Mostly it’s done with thick bread and incredibly sweet, usually with fruit or maple syrup. I grew up with french toast being a savoury treat: egg, milk, pepper, and salt whisked together, with plain toast slice bread dunked into it and then pan-fried in butter until golden brown. Dee-licious.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Babysitter A line can be seen from The Lost Boys to here. Not particularly original or clever, but definitely tremendous fun. JCVD Wow. Bond. James Bond Quantum of Solace I don’t know why people don’t like it. No, it’s not as good as Casino Royale, perhaps, but it’s pretty flash. Skyfall Really liked it right up until the overdone “look at me, I’m the monster now!” moment. It didn’t seem to be sure from here on in whether it wanted to be Olde Bonde with overblown monster-villains and improbable scenarios or Casino Bond with realism up the wazoo.