Posts by Stephen Judd
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Meh, CentOS and VMWare would be part of the basic infrastructure of many large NZ organisations not least public sector ones. Suggesting a sinister coincidence is drawing a long bow. And I say that as someone who is convinced they *are* in cahoots.
For the non technical, CentOS is a kind of Linux operating system, VMWare is a technology for making one big grunty server behave like a lot of small servers so you can consolidate services on less hardware -- they aren't nefarious tools for doing bad.
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Many people wrote to the Minister complaining the definitions of network operator were way too broad.
She replied essentially saying we were reading the legislation wrong and that only parties covered under existing legislation were intended. No, there was no need to add clarifying language to the bill.
Quite an interesting discussion going on in the network community here:
http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2014-May/020802.html
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Some interesting race/class things lurking in this video which I don't feel competent to give a close reading of right now.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Brent Jackson,
Is that 50 according to your speedo, or 50 as measured correctly ?
I don't know. Those fancy roadside displays that tell you what your speed is and my speedo agree very well, though.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
a bunch of substitution activity that's less likely to get them a ticket - wheel spins, dangerous overtaking, bad lane discipline, general aggression and lack of consideration for others.
I see this all the time. As a regular cyclist, it's freaky how people voom up to T junctions and stop at the last possible minute, looking straight ahead the whole time, so you end up with them half-blocking the cycle lane and them all bewildered at how you appeared out of nowhere.
Christchurch in particular seems to be filled with tradesmen in utes and vans careering around in testosterone-stimulated style.
I usually drive dead on 50 kph. It irritates people. They pass in the right hand lane. Then I catch them at the lights.
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Speaker: The secret Christchurch…, in reply to Emma Hart,
There’s what Stephen describes as “ambient despair” (I think): this utter low-level but absolutely constant sense of stagnation and decline that’s an effort to push away.
“Ambient distress”, I think I have used in the past. Free-floating psychic hurt, there’s a lot of it around in this city. Especially in the areas where the damage and emptiness are all too visible still, every day. You might not have suffered from the quakes in any way – how could I, I wasn’t here – and yet still be worn down by your own daily small challenges and responding to the hurts of others.
I moved here post-quake and have nothing personal to complain of in my household circumstances. But this really speaks to my own selfish concerns:
“What we older ones realise is that a functioning metropolitan city will arise again too late for us.”
I’m 44. I fear that by the time there’s anything like a genuine *city* here again, I’ll be too old to enjoy its amenities, or at least that I won’t have many years left to me in which to do so. Gapfiller and allied phenomena are cool and provide relief, but the gaps are pretty damned big and there’s only so much filling.
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Terry Pratchett has quite a lot to say about curry in his Discworld books, in all variants from the searing Klatchian curry to the sad swede and raisin echoes. There is a recipe in Nanny Ogg's Cookbook which is classic Anglo inauthentic curry.
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Random thought: when did restauranteurs start asking "do you want Kiwi hot, or (Indian|Thai) hot?"
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Baxterabout,
Just to pull one thing out of the morass of begged questions:
internationally uncompetitive rates
Is there any evidence that there is international competition in income tax rates? As far as I know, people generally do not make good on threats to move because of tax levels, neither is quality of life correlated with low taxation.
Eg, if we look at Nordic countries vs the Anglosphere, the correlation seems to be that taxation is higher in countries with lower levels of inequality, better child health, yadda yadda…
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
I work for Catalyst IT. Koha's one of the many FOSS things we do -- we have a team that does Koha consulting, hosting, and migrations.
In NZ, Koha is popular with the specialist libraries. There's only one or two public libraries in NZ on Koha, but there are many large ones overseas, likewise not many tertiary institutions in NZ but large ones overseas. The issue in NZ is that for reasons of scale, libraries tend to form consortiums. When you consider that librarians from bitter experience hate and fear system migrations, and that support contracts usually have terms of years, you can see that most NZ libraries are locked up with expensive proprietary systems and the opportunities to convert larger libraries are fairly few. We'll be talking to a large NZ tertiary institution this week though :D
I guess I don't see Koha as being "for schools" particularly. It's a great option for a school because it's free if you can run it yourself, and there are good hosting options from multiple vendors if not. But Koha can scale way beyond that. If Koha can work for the Delhi public library, which has to do crazy things like 1 hour loans, it can work for any NZ-scale library.