2009 January » The Blog From Hell

usa_foreign_policy.sh

Jan 302009

#!/bin/bash #Simulation code for US foreign policy. #KNOWN BUGS: Do not attempt to use in the real world which is #complex and has issues with more than two sides.


source /etc/government/cabinet
function congress() {

   LEGALBRIBERY="yes"

   sleep 60

}
function senate() {

 LEGALBRIBERY="yes"

  sleep 60

}
#Previous tests suggest that running with PRESIDENT

#set to "Bush" causes system crashes across the board.

case $PRESIDENT in "Bush") for COUNTRY in /usr/share/countries/arab_region ; do if (($? > 5)) ; then /etc/init.d/war start $COUNTRY fi killall -9 economy TAXCUTS=(($TAXCUTS++)) ;; "Obama") killall -9 war renice -19 economy TAXCUTS=0 TAXES=(($TAXES++)) //Code seems to break without this HOPE=(($HOPE++)) ;; esac

Share|

Some major pieces of kongoni news

Diary No Responses »

Jan 282009

Well I have two pieces of important news about kongoni, the first is that the baseline has reached structural completeness. The story on the kongoni site has full details.

The other is that Hannes has completed the website design for us. You can see the draft here, and expect it to go live in the next few days.

Finally, thanks to John Nichols, we now have our first official mirror of the kongoni ports tree live at http://mirrors.thinlinx.com/

Share|

The biggest days I’ve lived through

Diary No Responses »

Jan 202009

There are days in history that stands out as something unique and amazing. Days you will remember for the rest of your life. The kind of days about which those who were alive when they happened will one day ask each other: “What were you doing when X happened”.

Today just happens to be one of those days – the day America swears in it’s first black president, and more importantly – it’s first president in many years to suggest anything remotely approaching intelligent solutions to the challenges his country and the world face. My personal favorite being his belief that the answer to the problem of outsourcing (from an American point of view) is not protectionism (which only distances American allies and doesn’t work anyway because the corps who cash in on it happen to pay such large chunks of campaigns) but instead: to change the system until everybody who has the ability will be able to afford a tertiary education. Wait let me get this straight: he is suggesting that he can solve the problem of foreign labor being of equal quality at a lower cost – by making his own people more competitive, rather than by trying to make others artificially less so ? Yep, genius.

Well I don’t intend to write a big blog about Obama, heck the entire blogosphere is on the topic so as far as I’m concerned, I’ve said what I wanted to say about him. I want to focus on days like this – the days which stand out in history, which ones stand out for me – and what was I actually doing when I heard about them ? Today, my day won’t be all that special, I will finish my workday, then go home and watch the inauguration on television, my wife is sick in bed so there is no option of going out.

Now, without further ado: the greatest days I’ve lived through and what I was doing when I heard about them:

1) Date: April 10, 1980
What happened: I was born
What was I doing at the time: Getting spanked.
Thoughts: Okay, so maybe not a great day for the whole world, at least not unless I manage to fit some much more legendary stuff into my life while I’m still here, but still a pretty important day in my life.

2) Date: November 9th, 1989
What happened: The fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war
What was I doing at the time: Watching the evening news with my family
Thoughts: I didn’t at the time realize the significance of the event, for starters I was just 9 years old – but it was an event that changed a large part of the world, and specifically would change a massive amount of my own life. The fall of the Berlin wall removed Russian imperialist drive into African and Russian funding to the ANC. This in turn removed the risk of an ANC government being outright communist and opened the door for the new South Africa.

3) Date: 2 February, 1990
What happened: F.W. De Klerk in his first official speech as president, unbanned the ANC, released Nelson Mandela and called for a non-racial South Africa.
What was I doing at the time: As with the previous one – I first learned of this while watching the news.
Thoughts: It’s odd what one remembers eighteen years later, I don’t remember anything of De Klerk’s speech though I do remember seeing video’s of it later. What I remember vividly is the interview the then minister of foreign affairs Pik Botha gave outside the Union Buildings after the speech. I most notably remember the following line (my translation as the interview was in Afrikaans): “When the sun set tonight, it set for the last time over the old South Africa, and tomorrow it will rise over the New South Africa”.
I could be wrong but I know that was the first time I heard the phrase “New South Africa” and it’s very possible that it was in fact coined in that interview (either that or De Klerk used it in his speech earlier the same day).

Date: 17 March 1992
What happened: A referendum, the last ever whites-only vote, in which white people had to state whether they agreed with De Klerk’s reforms and the continuing of negotiations with the ANC. The “yes” side won an overwhelming victory.
What was I doing at time: I was campaigning, I had been putting up “yes” posters for weeks and though I wasn’t of voting age I was desperately working (along with my family) to help ensure those who were, would vote for change.
Thoughts: This one is perhaps a more important memory to me as a white South African than to many other South Africans, it marked not only the first time I was politically active (at age 12) but more importantly it proved that white South Africa was not the crusty, conservative racists we were made out to be. That minority who were like that had insisted in a referendum, convinced they would easily prove that the white people were opposed to what they claimed De Klerk was doing in violation of his mandate. Instead the overwhelming result was that we wanted the talks to succeed, we accepted the possibility of a black government and we were prepared to build a future without racial discrimination. We wanted the suffering and the violence on both sides to end and we were tired of race being a determining factor in people’s lives, even as the people who had gotten the beneficial determination.

Date: 27 April, 1994
What happened: The first multiracial election in South Africa
What was I doing at the time: The day was spent with my family who were voting. That evening I was with them at a party to await the results, where I met F.W. De Klerk personally in what would end up being one of his last official appearances as president.
Thoughts: I don’t think I need to say much about this day, it was internationally watched and it was seen as the outcome of almost six years of hard negotiations to build a South Africa where everybody could have an equal chance at life. It was also the beginning of rainbowism – probably the single best philosophy ever used by a ruling party in South Africa (although, sadly one that did not last after the retirement of Nelson Mandela).

Date: April 2000
What happened: Then president Mbeki appeared at an international AIDS conference and made a speech that would begin his years of HIV denialism and lead to many needless deaths. A New York Times article in November 2008 put the number at 365 000 people. The speech made international news and the same South Africa that was recently lauded for our victory over apartheid was back in the news – this time to be ridiculed and pitied.
What was I doing at the time: Ironically, this same month marks the month myself and some friends founded PLUG, at the time only the third Linux Users Group in South Africa. On the day Mbeki made his speech, we had our inaugural meeting, in which the head of the parliamentary committee on telecommunication was the speaker. The debate between us and him I remember to this day. I had not realized until much later that this would be the day that a problem would start which would end up being much more concerning to me than the telkom monopoly I was busy arguing against.
Thoughts: Despite my being unaware of the event when it happened, I would become aware soon enough – and campaigning for better combating of HIV would become one of my personal biggest goals. While my role has been small (I am neither a politician nor a doctor, just a concerned citizen) – I believe that in problems on this scale, every little bit helps.

Date: September 11th, 2001
What happened: A number of airplanes were hijacked in the USA. Two flew into the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in New York, one hit the pentagon and the last failed to hit it’s target and crashed in Pennsylvania.
Where was I at the time: When the first plane hit, I vividly remember being at a gas station with my then girlfriend filling up the car, we were on our way to a cocktail party to celebrate the end of her final exams (she would graduate later that same year), and seeing the news on a TV set up at the gas station. We tuned in on the radio and listened on our way there. By the time the second plane hit I had left the party though and was sitting at the campus radio news office where I worked part-time as a news translator. By around 7pm South African time, as the last plane crashed, the news story going out on the radio in Afrikaans to cover the events thus far, had been written by me. It was the hardest story I had ever had to write.
Thoughts: This day changed the world, from a period of relative piece we went into a state of warfare particularly from the American side which persists to this day. Terrorism became the biggest, most successful scare-word in recent history and under it we saw the decline of global civil liberties. As the Y-generation entered the work-force, 9/11 ensured that the Z-generation would not share their passion for curiosity and exploration but would be a generation raised in tight restriction and control based on entirely irrational fear.

There are many other notable events I could name, but these stand out as the most important internationally known events I had lived through or in some cases, even played a small part in. As the future comes, perhaps some of these will fade into obscurity – dwarfed by newer, more significant events but many of them will, I believe, still have relevant lessons to teach us when I recount them to my grandchildren one day.
The point of course, is not to boast about my small little roles in them, but to remind everyone who reads this that you all have played such roles in various events which would turn out to be world-changing. Perhaps fitting on the day of Obama’s inauguration as he has built his campaign on inspiring people to believe in their power to change the world. I’m an ordinary person who has done nothing truly more noteworthy in my life than to care about other people. Everything I think I did that was really worth while was just that – caring about others. Just as I have these memories, each of you have memories like this – of times you helped do something amazing, or were inspiring by seeing something terrible. When we remember them, we can redouble our efforts and maybe even leave our children a better world than we inherited.

Share|

Another look at the violent video game debacle

Diary No Responses »

Jan 142009

With the latest news as reported by El Reg that a US congressman has proposed a ‘health warning’ to be added to video games about sexual and violent content, I ended up thinking about it (a curse I know). The article quotes him as citing “the proven links between violent video games and violent behavior”.

Why is it that there seems to be an even number researchers finding a link, and finding no evidence of one ? El Reg suggested elsewhere that perhaps it’s because the brain is a complex thing which doesn’t have any kind of single guaranteed response to a given stimulus and this is probably true, but I think it’s not all of the story.

The first is a problem that plagues psychology as a science and is one of the main reasons why it advances very slowly and all it’s results should be taken with several bags of salt (remember, it’s a slow-advancing science and just so happens to be one of the youngest sciences too). Causal relationships are among the hardest things in science to prove at the best of times.

A classic example I remember from my university philosophy class (specifically in the module on logic and critical thinking) cited a set of statistics that indicated that sexual education in US schools increased by 80% during the 50′s. In the same period the incidence of teenage sex was shown to have increased by about 45%. The original author tried to use this as proof that sex-ed encourages promiscuity.
In fact, it had made no such proof. The data shown could have one of three possible links with one another:
1) It is possible that, as the data suggested, sex-ed in general led to more teenagers having sex.
2) It is possible that other factors led to more teenagers having sex, and this led to the increase in sex-ed (in other words the causal relationship could just as easily have existed in the opposite direction)
3) The two may not have been related at all, just two things which happened at the same time and didn’t actually influence one another, possibly due to some unknown other factor.

To actually get an idea of any valid conclusions of the data, we need to know what other factors may have been present. Well the 50′s was the age when birth control was invented for one, and female education reached hitherto unknown heights. It’s widely believed that these things led to the sexual liberation of women as we know it today. It thus makes a lot of sense that promiscuity among teenagers most likely increased because the biggest risk in the activity (unplanned pregnancy) had become mitigated. It is also likely that this increase may have prompted increased sex-ed in schools (but this is by no means proven). But it does seem that the original arguers conclusions were fatally flawed and probably the least likely of the possible scenarios suggested by known data.

This is a large part of why video-game violence studies keep coming up with conflicting results, it’s almost impossible to prove causal relationships to begin with, proving them with something as varied as personality responses to stimulous borders on the impossible – people just don’t react the same way to the same things, thinking teenagers are more likely to have some standard reaction is just stupid.

But shouldn’t there be at least a trend, a marked amount of people showing at least some of the same reaction ? Well no, there doesn’t have to be. Some people are widely turned on by a simple picture of a naked person of their preferred sex, some are disgusted by it, some are completely unaroused (but may respond well to the sight of the same person in some sexual act they personally fantasize about). The site of a nicely done piece of steak will make some of us drool with hunger and others throw up in disgust. If even our most basic drives are not consistent in how they reflect into our behavior and personalities, why should high-level concepts like fictionalized violence have any consistency whatsoever ?

What is more, there is a big difference between immediate response and general personality. Immediate response is not always consistent with how a person would mostly respond to the same stimulus. I love steak and normally I would be in the ‘drool with hunger’ group, but during my recent illness the sight of food held no appeal to me and steak with it’s fat and juices would probably have made me throw up. A temporary unmeasured factor led to my response to the stimulus being completely out of sync with my normal behavior. It certainly didn’t mean that when I got better one of the first things on my list to do was no longer to “get a nice steak”.

If video games just make you feel a little aggressive while you play them… well who cares ? The question is whether this immediate response will lead to a long term change in behavior. Personally I think we see such varying results because playing games probably does increase adrenaline levels leading to a short-term immediate rise in aggression among many players, but the moment the stimulus is removed the aggression disappears and there is no reason to believe it will have any additional influence on behavior or ever return without the same stimulus being there.

Personally I think the studies that say ‘yes’ are looking at short-term response only, the ones that look for long term influence on personality find that whatever instance of it exists is so small they pretty much never get an example in their focus group.

In short – I guess the inconsistency of human behavior and the gap between stimulus response and personality development is so huge, that researchers will always find what they are looking for by just looking at what suits them.

This of course, suggests that those researchers studying the question are consistent about one thing: very bad science. A good scientist will never try to prove a theory, he tries to disprove his theory. If good science was their goal, they would take the theory, ‘video games can lead to violent behavior’ – and try to prove it is false, if they were consistently unable to succeed – that alone would give the theory any merit. We trust scientific theories not because of the experiments that seem to prove them, but because of the experiments that fail to prove them wrong. This is a basic element of the scientific method.

Sadly, in my experience, psychologists are generally not very good scientists – not least because their chosen field is one where scientific rigor can guarantee you one thing for sure, slow results. Studying human behavior is a field where the data set is so huge and varying that getting any reliable trends whatsoever out of it will never take massive amounts of effort and huge amounts of time by thousands of people working at the same single problem – and that is not the kind of science that gets grants, sadly it’s the reason why pretty much every theory in psychology when applied to any given individual has proven about as useful and accurate as astrology.

One thing I am certain of, justifying such radical measures as censorship (and yes, it is perhaps the most radical measure a government can take against it’s own citizens short of outright massacre) using a science so young while it’s faced with a challenge so huge is outright stupid – it’s an excuse for politicians to get more power, it is definitely not a case of sensible legislative response to scientific advance.

Share|

Personal freedom: no, it’s not free enough

Diary 2 Responses »

Jan 132009

Feisty Female wrote a post in which she asked if personal freedom has gone to far. She points out things in society today that appall her – and many of those things appall me as well, but ironically I do not see them as a result of too much personal freedom – in fact, I see them as a result of too little.
I don’t intend to liberally quote her so please read her post before finishing this one if you haven’t done so, and then you can make up your own mind.

What world are we really living in ?
What we have today is a world where children who are even curious or bored in class get drugged – rather than receiving the additional challenges and stimulation that their higher intellect requires.

Slashdot cannot manage a month without yet another story of an academic having to risk jailtime for publishing legitimate scientific research that somebody, somewhere doesn’t want us to know.

In most parts of the world, gay people are still legally discriminated against. Whether or not you morally agree with homosexuality is a personal choice and a freedom you most certainly should have – but nobody should have the right to enforce his morality on others – and quite frankly the state most certainly should not allow the completely unrelated morals of some to determine contract regulations (which is, from the government point of view) all that marriage is.

We live in a world of conformity, often and largely forced conformity,. Questioning the norm is frowned upon.

Feisty thinks people like Amy Winehouse becomes role models a because we are too free. I say people like Amy become famous because we’re not free enough. Whenever somebody acts outside the expected conformist norms – they stand out, they are unique… in a world where everybody is expected to look and act the same whoever acts different will get known for it, regardless of whether their chosen difference is a good one.

If we lived in a world where everybody truly felt free to be true to themselves, people doing it would not be noteworthy, and we would notice the ones whose choices uplift themselves and others, not the ones who destroy themselves.
We live in a world that celebrates mediocrity and teach our children that being average and typical are good things. Not only is that the direct opposite of freedom, it’s a good way to keep society from any kind of actual progress, to keep our problems unsolved.
Nobody has, in the entire history of the world, solved a single problem without questioning the prevailing wisdom. If the prevailing wisdom had been right – there wouldn’t have been a problem to solve.

Fundamental to our very survival will be teaching our children to become more independent, more critical and indeed more rebellious. Not to follow some or other subculture, but to become subcultures of their own – every single one of them.

I would like to suggest to FF that she reads Neil Stephenson’s excellent diamond age. If I had ever seen an author showing how learning to be true to yourself, think outside the box and ask critical questions can create a person capable of overcoming the most severe background imaginable to become a global force to be reckoned with that brought freedom from oppression and death to her multi-million strong “mouse army” of rescued orphans – that book is it.

Not that we should live our lives by any particular book – but when an author really does get it right, he is useful for illustrating an ideal.
It is worth remembering that just a few hundred years ago the global literacy level was less than 1%, the age of reason is still in it’s infancy – but the trend it has started is to ensure that with every single generation the number of people who have the potential to make a true contribution to our society has increased exponentially.

Unfortunately, the number who has done anything whatsoever to live up to that potential has not increased by very much at all – we have built the foundations of providing knowledge to many but we have yet to break down the cultural restraints of obeying authority without question (usually hidden with the euphemism ‘discipline’). We have yet to learn to stand up for our rights, when we are oppressed in small things, we accept it in the name of causes we don’t even believe in – pretending we don’t know that just by doing so we are laying the groundwork that the kind of oppression we claim to hate is built on. Conformity, discipline and obedience.

When the constitutional court recently heard the case of a young Indian girl fighting to be allowed to wear the earrings which have significant meaning to her as a young Hindu, her school argued that: since the earrings are not required by Hinduism, banning them cannot be considered an infringement on her freedom of religion.
The court in this case ruled one of the most important rulings ever. A previous case where it declared that school discipline cannot enforce hair rules on Rastafarians as their constitutionally protected freedom of religion is a higher right than the schools discipline quickly got subverted to mean that only those who have a religion requiring a certain hairstyle would be exempt.

Now the court made sure it did not make the same mistake. It declared firstly that the voluntary nature of Hindu earrings makes the girls’ right to wear them greater, not lesser as it implies they have a deeper spiritual meaning to her, and more importantly it then added that even if there had been no religious meaning at all – the right to freedom of expression as enshrined in the constitution likewise outweighs the schools non-constitutional rights to discipline.

In short, our constitutional court finally struck a blow against the consistent message hammered to us that our right to be ourselves is somehow undisciplined and evil – it is a right as fundamental as the right to breathe, and giving it to all makes society stronger, not weaker.

I doubt most schools have made any effort to comply with the ruling and scrap rules of appearance that interfere with the right to free expression, one of the most typical things about those who oppress our children in the name of discipline is a complete and utter refusal to obey the rules of discipline laid out for themselves. They enforce their rules, but do not obey the laws made for themselves.

A society without sufficient freedom, both culturally and legally is doomed (as we have seen with so many once powerful and now destroyed societies throughout history) to hypocrisy, corruption and ultimate destruction.

In short, the evidence suggest that we have nowhere near the personal freedom we think we do – and perhaps this is why we are not eager to defend it the way we need to – and the reason why we seem to think freedom is causing problems is not because there is too much, but because so few of us feel truly free that the few who do gain celebrity – regardless of whether they use their freedom for good or bad, it’s a symptom of too little – not of too much.

Share|

How the kongoni KDE ports work

Diary No Responses »

Jan 062009

This post is meant to provide an overview of how the KDE4.2 ports in Kongoni are structured, how they differ from Robbie’s original SlackBuild scripts and how they are (best) installed. Furthermore I hope that this will also provide a deeper level of insight into the overall workings of the kongoni ports tree and help others after the baseline release who wish to work on other big port collections (such as Gnome for example).

Beneath the kongoni ports tree lies a desktop directory, this directory currently contains only one subdirectory kde4 but we hope to expand it with other desktops at a later stage.

There are basically four directories below that: deps, kde, kdemore and kongoni_kde_desktop.
The last one is important because it’s in fact a port. It holds a meta package that while devoid of almost any content of it’s own (it literally just installs some basic docs like a README) depends on all the packages that make up the KDE desktop as it will ship in the release disks.

The current kongoni_kde_desktop package is versioned: 4.1.85.1 the first three numbers (4.1.85) indicating the KDE version it is built around, the final one the specific version of the kongoni kde desktop built on that. Thus if we add theme packages or fixes, only the last number needs to change to allow a user to upgrade only what has been modified.

Portpkg has no ordering for dependencies and will, lacking other information, simply install the in alphabetic order, so this by itself is not enough to ensure the ports are built in the right order, it is just enough to make sure the right ports get built. Each ports own internal dependencies come into play for determining build order and the ports have carefully constructed dependencies on each other to ensure that each builds before the ones that need it.

The simplest of the other three directories is kdemore. This directory holds those KDE ports that, while part of the official KDE release, is simply too big or too niche-use to go into the live cd. These packages cannot be built without the rest of KDE there and thus they all have a listed dependency on kongoni_kde_desktop but kongoni_kde_desktop will not make any attempt to build or install them. Those who want a particular package from this set, can easily do so with a single command: portpkg -n PACKAGENAME

The packages in kdemore are: kdeaccessibility, kdeartwork, kdepim, kdeutils
All of which are useful packages that many people use, but also packages that not everybody needs and some of which like kdeartwork take up a lot of disk space. Since we are intending to do our own theme for the final release, it makes little sense to ship all the stock artwork in the base install, but it does make sense to keep it available for those who want it. The default theme and artwork is included in kdebase anyway.

Next up is deps, everything in deps is installed by kongoni_kde_desktop, this location came from the fact that these packages were kept separate in slackware as they are not part of the default slackware distribution. However most of them should ultimately move up to the base or libs directories. Currently the only known bugs in the ports tree are in fact in this set, specifically with boost and QScintilla. The bug in question is that both these packages do things with their build processes (not in the port scripts, in their makefiles) which break when run under fakeroot. They install fine if you run the SlackBuild script as root, but currently the ports cannot finish building. These need to be fixed before we can reorganize the deps into their appropriate locations higher up in the tree.

Finally, there is the kde directory, this one holds everything our default desktop needs to have installed to function properly. It is basically the remainder of the KDE tree, we had a lot of build issues inside the ports with earlier version of KDE but the 4.1.85 packages have built brilliantly. The packages in kde are:
guidance-power-manager, kdeadmin, kdebase-runtime, kdebase-workspace, kdebase, kdebindings, kdegraphics, kdelibs, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepimlibs, kdeplasma-addons, lancelot

Some of these are of interest for further discussion. The first is guidance-power-manager which is in fact not part of the stock KDE distribution but comes from extragear. This is included in the slackware version upstream too and for good reason, it provides a solid power management suite for laptops built on… well solid. There is room for some debate about kdemultimedia and ultimately it may actually be moved to kdemore though it does contain the awesome dragon movie player and unless I were to stumble across a truly phenomenal alternative kde movie player, I am likely to keep it here (though of course it could become a case of splitting dragon out into a separate package – I’ll hash this debate out with my fellow developers after the baseline release.

You may wonder why kdepimlibs is in kde but kdepim is in kdemore. The reason is in fact a simple matter of dependencies. You need kdepimlibs to build support for PIM interaction in several other parts of the suite, even if you don’t install the PIM utilities it’s good to have the support for them in built into the desktop so that those who do, can get their full benefit.

Another possible trim-out is kdeplasma-addons, having plenty of nice plasmoids available in the live cd is a good way to make the desktop shiny, but it’s also a rather big package and the very important core plasmoids like folderview and the panel are in the kdebase-workspace anyway. So it is quite likely that ultimately this may move to kdemore, depending on how many of the plasmoids in there actually get used in the theme (again, splitting it up into smaller packages for this purpose is a future possibility).

Finally, there is lancelot. Lancelot is Ivan Kucic’s alternative menu system for KDE which I always intended to be the default on kongoni because it’s a really awesome menu system even if it’s not part of the stock KDE distribution. Right now it’s dependency has been removed from kongoni_kde_desktop however due to a version incompatibility in lancelot (the stable release can only build on 4.1 and the svn trunk release cannot build on the beta as it needs features added to trunk later). This should be a fairly simple problem to resolve in kongoni_kde_desktop 1.4.85.2 but in the meantime I did not wish to hold up the entire process.

I hope that this overview of what lies in the KDE ports give an idea of how things are structured, the thinking behind the structures and of course why it took so long to get this far. The good news is maintaining the ports from here on in will be fairly simple and this was the bulk of the effort. I would go so far as to say that getting the KDE ports working fine was the single biggest task in kongoni I would ever do (well have done by now) without help – since I could not release the baseline without it, it was impractical to get help on it but the remaining work on the baseline is very small and once it is out, many hands are waiting to help pick up the load.

Share|

Thus starts a new year in the life of /me

Diary 1 Response »

Jan 052009

Well originally I had intended this to be the first post of the year, but my airplane weapon post ended up coming in on New Years Day itself (much to my own surprise – I mean who goes looking for security exploits on NYD ?), but still I only really feel like the year has started today.
Firstly, I’m back in Cape Town as of last night, and I started the next set of builds on Kongoni this morning, to run through the day for me to verify the results tonight. Secondly, I’m back at work with what looks like quite a busy year ahead of me.

I still want to fit in my centralized configuration file repository, and I intend to put it on my goals list for the year, along with that an overhaul of a number of related procedures is in the works, and ultimately I want to bring out average server uptime over 95% in general, and over 99% if you excluded scheduled outside-of-business downtimes. To achieve that I will probably have to push the average down a lot in the near future to get a bunch of proactive measures done, but once they are in place, that is where I want the average to normalize.
In a pure Linux environment I would have insisted on nothing less than a 100% average (it is doable with virtualization and fail-over tech) but since I’m dealing with some rather obscure unix variants as well that is not realistic here.

Enough about work though, I am going to be pushing hard on kongoni’s baseline1 in the next few weeks because KDE4.2 is due later this month and I would like to be ready for it. Wife->SilentCoder is coming home on Wednesday from her holiday and that I am really looking forward to because sleeping single was roxette’s worst song ever, and I hate acting out the lyrics.

Between kongoni and spending quality time with the lady, I am not expecting to have much free time left for anything else but of course – I am an expert at making time for drinking beer with friends (this is as much a survival skill in my life as knowing how to check the free memory in Tru/64Unix :p).

While I’m not one who makes much of the New Years concept, it’s pretty much an arbitrary point in the earth’s rotation around the sun with about as much actual meaning as the GPS coordinates of a unicorn preservation center (e.g. a number attached to a purely imaginary concept) to me, and I am furthermore all too aware that the date on which it is celebrated has changed not only several hundred times in our own history but is still not a constant across cultures (almost every non-western culture that celebrates New Years does it on a different day) which really just highlights how arbitrary the idea is. Nonetheless a new year does have some meaning – if a purely attached one – banking and tax cycles follow it, promotions and increases, inflation measurements and economic forecasts. Ultimately, the year is a convenient measure of time because it does correlate to a physical event which, while it affects us all in different ways, does affect us all equally.

To use an example, while different parts of the planet have different lengths and natures to their seasons, we all have all our seasons every year. So there is a lot of practical activity that does get affected by the New Year, not because New Year itself means anything – but because society uses it as a convenient reference point – and I for one am looking forward to the remaining 360 days of 2009 – a year that promises to be full of new adventures.

PS. I bought a WII -it kicks ass.

Share|