More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • So It’s May 6th For The UK Election

    Now that it has been announced, we can look forward to a very tedious month whilst the politicians try and grab all the headlines with variations on “look at me” (with the hope that their exhibitionism will turn into a vote). At least we know when it will be over at last.

    Of course because of the election system we suffer, most of us don’t have much in the way of a say in what the next parliament looks like and who makes up the government. Apparently around half of the current seats in parliament have not changed in terms of what party the MP represents in over 40 years! So much for democracy.

    Of course there is a form of democracy at work here – those few of us who live in marginal seats are effectively the ones who decide what bunch of politicians make up the next government. The rest of us are expected to vote according to the usual pattern and return an MP for our constituency no different to the previous one.

    Perhaps we should remember the expenses scandal, and vote for independent candidates not affiliated and obligated to the party machines.

  • Gay Rights In Danger Under Tories

    Actually make that everyone’s rights is at risk under the Tories – once you start accepting that one segment of the population has less rights than others, it is a slippery slope to everyone losing their rights.

    Apparently the Tory shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling has declared that bed and breakfast owners should be allowed to refuse entry to gay couples for being gay. However he does not feel that hotels should be allowed to do likewise ? I believe his argument is that bed and breakfasts are more “private” than hotels in that the owner frequently shares the accommodation with the guests, and so the personal beliefs of the owners should be taken into consideration.

    Rancid rhino dung. If you run a bed and breakfast, you have effectively accepted that your home is no longer a private domain, and that you have to accept that society has certain standards and beliefs that you have to abide by.

    But what amazes me is that a shadow minister is foolish enough to say such things. It would not take a genius to realise that such remarks would be pounced upon as evidence that the Tories have not changed that much since they introduced Section 28 back in the 1980s. Personally I do not believe that the important Tories are that backwards, although I dare say a few relics can be found lurking at the back of the Tory cupboard.

    What is more worrying is that someone who may be part of a future government could be stupid enough to say such things – whether in public or private.

  • News – Can We Have A Bit More Oddbox ?

    News is serious stuff – perhaps a bit too serious. I am all in favour of news – I watch and read a fair bit of it, and I like knowing what is going on in the world. But does it all have to be so serious ? We need a little more like :-

    [

    It actually would not be that hard to stick a few more “light” news items into today’s news. Usually news stories take a great deal longer to explain than is really necessary. Once we know that three people have been injured by a raging bull in Pamplona, we do not need much extra explanation – those of us capable of understanding either already know why bulls are likely to injure people in Pamplona or are quite capable of looking up the necessary information. It isn’t necessary to spoon feed us.

    Especially when making usual news reports shorter allows us to see a more balanced view of the world. Normal news shows give us the impression that nothing happens “out there” but disaster and catastrophe. There is plenty of that sure, but there is also plenty of plain old boring days happening together with the occasional oddity that could make it to the BBC’s “Odd Box”.

  • What Linux Needs …

    … is a good clone of SMIT.

    SMIT for those who have not been exposed to AIX, is a system administration tool that allows you to perform tasks through a graphical (or text-based) interface. Just like any other tool really, but the killer feature is that once you have built up a task in SMIT such as extend a logical volume by a certain amount, you can then ask it what the command-line equivalent is.

    Now all you point and drool fans out there are probably thinking “So what?”. Well perhaps this feature is not for you, but it does allow those who work at the command line to find out what command is necessary to perform a certain task. Once you know the command to perform a task you can :-

    • Use it to setup a cron job to run the task at a particular time. No need to stay up late to perform a task in a “maintenance window” after midnight.
    • Run that command on a whole rack full of servers using a tool like pssh. Much easier than repeating the same steps on a dozen computers one by one – aren’t these computers supposed to automate tedious jobs for us ?
    • Use that command to put into a script to run on certain events. For instance you could monitor the available space on all your filesystems and grow the filesystem when the available space drops below a certain trigger point. You might also want to automatically order a new hard disk when the “volume group” runs out of space 🙂

    Linux is currently undergoing a process of fragmentation where different distributions are operated in different ways much like the old commercial Unix variants went through in the 1990s. A good clone of SMIT would go a long way to allowing different distributions to go their own way in system administration commands, but allow system administrators to use a standard tool to manage any Linux distribution.

  • An ExpressCard SSD In A MacbookPro

    Apologies to those arriving here looking for information relating to U***tu and the use of this ExpressCard SSD. There is nothing relating to it here – Google has taken you on a wrong turn.

    So after a false start with the wrong product I end up with a Wintec Filemate SolidGo 48GB ExpressCard 34 Ultra SSD (which is specifically a PCI-based ExpressCard rather than a USB-based one which tend to be a lot slower). The specs on this thing claim 115MB/s read and 65MB/s write which compares to my hard disk with tested scores of 80MB/s read and 78MB/s write – so a lot quicker for reads and marginally slower for writes.

    How does this translate into how quickly the Macbook operates ?

    Well after quickly duplicating my “OSXBOOT” partition onto the new “disk” using carbon copy cloner onto the new disk (“SSDBOOT”) I can run a few benchmarks :-

    Test Result for SSD Result for Spinning Metal
    Menu -> Login 31s 27s
    Word startup 5s 16s
    du of MacPorts 34s 109s

    Well apart from the slightly surprising result of the time taken to get from the Refit menu until the login screen being actually quicker for the spinning metal disk, the SSD is approximately 3.2 times quicker! Certainly a worthwhile performance boost … and presumably a suitably chosen SATA SSD would be quicker again.