Monthly Archives: December 2007

Ronnie. The Book.

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You wont get any deep insights from Ronnie. The autobiography of Ron Wood, the other Rolling Stones guitarist. What you will get is a stargazing jaunt through the best part of British Rock history. Youll also get plenty on the booze hes drunk, the coke hes used, and the women hes shagged.

The description he gives of his early years seems to provide an explanation for his trajectory. Growing up in working class Yiewsley. Apparently always surrounded by music, and very often this music is performed by his Dad and his booze sodden mates. Gathering at home for a party-come-singalong around the piano once The Nag s Head, the local boozer, had shut for the night. Almost every house in their street had a piano, says Ronnie, because you never could tell where a party might spontaneously erupt, but more often than not the party would be at the Woods, with his Dad and his older brothers banging away on musical instruments because Ronnies Dad was the life of the party, the street, and very often The Nags Head. Continue reading →

What The?

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Yesterday we got more than 500 hits on a Nicholas Gruen recommendation to see Knocked Up. And the search term almost all the visitors used to get there? “Elisha Gray”, currently hot right now on account of the claim Alexander Bell stole the design of the telephone from him.

The words Elisha and Gray do not appear on Nick’s recommendation. Sometimes the Internet confuses me.

Update: Solved by Don Arthur — if you look for Elisha Gray on MSN image search, apart from a page full of identical pictures of Gray there’s one juicy picture of Katherine Heigl which leads people to Troppo. To Google — don’t fret. To MSN — keep trying, guys.

Continuing Adventures in Downtime

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Not long ago I thought our outage problems might be licked. I was wrong, and it seems like the problem is not ours alone.

Currently Club Troppo runs inside a virtual machine which runs on top of our physical server. The software we use to achieve this is called Xen. It uses a clever technique called paravirtualisation to give the advantages of virtual machines with less of a performance hit.

I and my UCC colleagues migrated Club Troppo to this arrangement to ease future problems for Club Troppo. A virtual machine is easier to migrate, backup and manage without hassle. Moving to virtual machine infrastructure meant that I would be able to have features such as hot failover, or to run test-only instances of Club Troppo to preview the latest exciting stupidities on new releases of Wordpress. It also meant that we could share some of the formidable computing power our physical server has with our hosts, the University Computer Club. Even on a very busy day, our server hardly breaks a sweat.

So much for the advantages. It turns out however that we picked the wrong approach, at the wrong time. A sudden shift in the software landscape left us with a buggy, unstable combination.

The problem is this. Xen’s paravirtualisation approach requires both the host operating system and the guest operating system to be modified. So to run Club Troppo we have a Xen-aware kernel running the in the virtual machine. It is specially modified to talk to the physical server’s Xen-aware kernel.

However, the company who support Xen development — XenSource — were acquired not long ago by a company called Citrix. Citrix makes their money in selling very expensive packages designed to help Windows to catch up with stuff Unix nerds have used for 20 years. They bought XenSource as part of a push into the increasingly lucrative virtual machine market. Since they don’t care about Linux, they stopped moving their code forwards to the latest releases.

The last set of XenSource official patches for Xen target the 2.6.18 Linux kernel. The current release we use is 2.6.22, the mainline is at 2.6.23 and 2.6.24 is just around the corner.

And here’s the rub: kernel version 2.6.18 is too old to support our server’s hardware. And third parties have given up on doing the messy gruntwork required to keep porting Xen to each new kernel release. So we can have virtualisation, or hardware support, but not both. The combination which was lashed together before christmas is unstable and tends to drop offline at a whim.

Today I’ve been chatting to UCC colleagues about our options. There are quite a few, but ultimately the sensible ones boil down to two: rolling back from virtualisation or jumping sideways to a different platform. We’re still trying to work out which is the better option, but in the meantime — please bear with us.

Waterboarding and torture: An apology anyone?

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http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com/south_dakota_politics/images/2007/07/20/waterboarding.jpgAbout fourteen months ago I wrote a post called ‘An apology anyone’.  As I recall there were lots of calls for public apologies from the latte sippers by the right in triumphal mode.  I asked if anyone could point me to any – but no-one could, so perhaps I am imagining it. I made this invitation in the post.

For a while now Ive been thinking that maybe someone who called for apologies then while supporting the Bush Administrations bizarre adventure in Iraq, might like to apologise and say they were wrong. I think they should tell us what they think of the President of the most powerful nation the world has ever seen lobbying Capitol Hill for powers to torture people in secret – having already done so in any event.

Anyway, the post didn’t go over too well.  Whoeverheis started it off by asking what was the point of all that gloating.  As if I was gloating. It was, it seemed to me a plea for sanity. A plea that surely some things are beyond partisan sympathy.  Anyway the thread degenerated into a shouting match about apologies.

I offered this comment.

1) The Water Torture. Facsimile of a Woodcut in J. Damhoudère's Praxis Rerum Criminalium: in 4to, Antwerp, 1556.

I dont think much of the rights calls for apologies from the left mainly for reasons enunciated by Mark. Its usually a heavy moralising kind of bid for advantage with a strong us or them flavour.

I hope my post conveyed some of my distaste for this kind of tactic. Even so, I think to ask former communists when did you decide to give it away? is a legitimate and worthwhile question.

Was it at the time of the show trials, by which time Orwell and Koestler were rearranging any admiration they had had. Was it when Nikita Khrushchev blew the whistle on Stalin? The Invasion of Hungary? Checkoslovakia? When?

This doesnt have to be in the spirit of moralising – though I dont think a bit of moralising about the misery and deaths of millions of people is all bad. Lots of people who did support communism do feel bad about it. But aside from moralising, the answer to the question might provide a measure of how receptive to the evidence they were.

My post then goes on to suggest that the picture President Bush campaigning for torture on Capitol Hill should be a similar wake up call to his supporters – a moment when people who might identify with the right might see a reductio ad absurdam in their own position, like so many communists jumped ship at around the time of the milestones mentioned above.

In that spirit, I reproduce below the fold Ezra Klein’s post on water-boarding. Continue reading →

Government by serial veto

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govt-by-veto.gif I’ve been having a look at the PC’s recent draft Review of Australias Consumer Policy Framework which at least on the reading I’ve done has some good stuff in it.

One thing, which must have been planned well before the change of government is that the report makes it clear how bogged down our federation is when it needs to move in a unified way. If that might have been a clarion call to the previous government, a rejection of the ‘blame game’, its a salutary warning to the incoming government which harbours ambitions to harmonise regulation between states.

Harmonisation is all very well.  But that gives eight, nine or ten governments  – depending on how you do the counting – the right of veto over any and every detail.

The current  government has brought the federation to centre stage as the ‘workhorse’ of governments working for people so it will be getting sweaty palms trying to deliver.

On harmonisation the feds like the demarcation offered by the idea that harmonising the payroll tax base offers the appropriate degree of regulatory harmonisation after which the rate should be an expression not of co-operative federalism, but of competitive federalism.  That sounds fine to me and I expect, that given it’s prominence as an issue and the preparedness to disgorge some funds to buy co-operation the Commonwealth will be able to get its way.  But even that won’t be that easy. Continue reading →

The changing face of inequality

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Paul Krugman offers a spirited defence of his book against a review by the Economist. Then again when have you noticed anything from Paul Krugman that isn’t spirited? The exchange is well worth checking out, indeed a bit of a ‘must’ for anyone thinking about inequality.

For once I disagree more with Krugman than I agree with him. I agree with him about the tone of the Economist piece which is smug and self assured, yet undoubtedly written by someone who knows far less about the subject than Krugman. But the issues it raises are of great import and interest and they do highlight ways in which inequality isn’t as bad as it looks – or at least matters less than it did.

[A] peek at the numbers behind the numbers suggests that Mr Krugman has been misled: far from a new Gilded Age, America is experiencing a period of unprecedented material equality.

This is not to deny that income inequality is rising: it is. [The article then goes on to look at consumption inequality as opposed to income inequality - I score Krugman mostly a winner on points here]

But consumption numbers, too, conceal as much as they illuminate. You no longer need be a Vanderbilt to own a refrigerator or a car. Refrigerators are now all but universal in America, even though refrigerator inequality continues to grow. The Sub-Zero PRO 48, which the manufacturer calls a monument to food preservation, costs about $11,000, compared with a paltry $350 for the IKEA Energisk B18 W. The lived difference, however, is rather smaller than that between having fresh meat and milk and having none. Similarly, more than 70% of Americans under the official poverty line own at least one car. And the distance between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is well nigh undetectable compared with the difference between motoring and hiking through the muck. The vast spread of prices often distracts from a narrowing range of experience.

Then, in my book, the critique of Krugman’s starts becoming Pollianaish. Continue reading →