Mike Meredith

Time To Drive The Knife Deeper Into The Tory Heart

Jul 112024

A combination of Tory incompetence, mismanagement, the austerity fetish, and probably outright corruption has allowed us the electorate to drive a knife into the heart of the Tory beast. But the job is not over yet; the beast still lives if wounded.

The Tories may well thrust the knife in themselves with a variety of different groups moving the party to the right with the impression that the country is moving in the direction of ReformUK. Ignoring their traditional supporters.

But in case sanity returns by the time of the next election, we should be planning on finishing off the Tory beast. That doesn’t mean the right shouldn’t have a party – there is still a bunch who would vote for a centre-right party.

But the current Tory party itself is guilty of such atrocious mis-management that it deserves to die.

We need to demand electoral reform – getting rid of a government so miserable in performance and fractured in nature shouldn’t require tactical voting. People should be free to vote with their conscience and belief and to find the result reflects their vote in proportion to everyone else.

It is worth pointing out that the 2019 election result gave the Tories an 80 seat majority on 44% of the popular vote whereas the combination of Labour, Greens, and Liberals got 46% of the popular vote. How is giving the right-wing the government when a left-wing ‘coalition’ had a majority of the popular vote supposed to be fair?

And that was quite possibly the poorest result for the left of centre parties in recent times.

If we do not get electoral reform, we need to push tactical voting twice as hard – and drag old old stories of just how bad the Tories in government really were.

A long road to the gatehouse — Dover Castle Gateway

So Now We’re Talking About Proportional Representation

Politics No Responses »

Jul 062024

So various places are now filling up with articles whining about how if MPs were selected by the share of the vote, Labour would have gotten far fewer MPs and the minority parties (such as ReformUK whose voters seem particularly dumb) would have gotten more.

For example, Labour got 412 MPs with just 34% of the vote; if they had 34% of the MPs, they would have just 221 MPs which would require a coalition to obtain a majority. On the opposite side of the equation, ReformUK got 5 MPs (far too many!) with 14.3% of the vote which would have gotten them

But there’s two aspects to the unfairness of the results :-

We don’t have proportional representation. Labour doesn’t put that much effort into constituencies that are their safest seats or those they’ll never win. A win in a seat with a 20,000 majority is worth no more than a seat with a majority of 1. To a very great extent, sensible political parties have been practicing “tactical campaigning” for a very long time.
This election has probably seen more tactical voting than has ever been seen before – backed by a massive campaign, this has probably seen quite a few Labour voters (for example) voting for Liberal Democrats in constituencies where that makes the most sense to get rid of the Tories (and visa versa). So the share of the Labour vote is suppressed; probably a surprising amount.

That’s glossing over the fact that many supporters of smaller parties (such as the Greens) have been voting tactically for decades – I’ve often voted Labour when I’d rather vote Green.

You will see pretty pictures of what parliament would look like if MPs were allocated according to voter share – they’re all completely fictional. Voting would be quite different if we really allocated MPs according to the proportion of votes. So that kind of speculation is rather pointless.

But it does highlight the need for proportional representation.

Updating Windows Over SSH

Computing, Linux, Working Notes No Responses »

Jul 032024

Well, this is kind of a weird one. But most of the systems I run are Linux-based, and over the years I have ‘developed’ a simple script that I run from my main workstation which iterates through all of the systems applying updates.

As non-interactively as possible – it could even be scheduled to run automatically (although I don’t for no good reason).

But it had one great weakness – it didn’t update my Windows 11 virtual machine. Which wasn’t a serious problem because Windows could and did update itself. But it did result in software installed with winget getting left behind.

So I sorted it …

Install OpenSSH server on Windows: PS: Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server (this might need the version number which is best obtained using Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object Name -like ‘OpenSSH*’.
Copy your chosen ssh authentication public key into c:\users\${username}\.ssh\authorized_keys file.
Configure c:\programdata\ssh\sshd_config to permit public key authentication (“PubkeyAuthentication yes”).
Whilst in the same file, comment out the section with the line beginning “Match Group administrators” which whilst makes things less secure did at least work! The section does refer to a file: c:/ProgramData/ssh/administrators_authorized_keys but adding to this file didn’t seem to work for me.
Verify that the daemon is running: PS: get-service -name sshd
- If it shows as not running, enable with: PS: set-service -name sshd -startuptype ‘automatic’
- And either reboot, or start it manually: PS: start-service -name sshd
At this point you should be able to login with a simple ssh username@hostname command. If not you’ve either left something out, or I have!

At this point you should be able to run the relevant update commands :-

ssh username@hostname UsoClient ScanInstallWait. Operating system updates which may or may not work, so I wouldn’t disable the automatic updates at this point.
ssh username@hostname winget upgrade –all. This updates additional software (something I’ve called “layered products” in the past) installed via winget (or the Microsoft “Store”. This can sometimes stop with a mysterious error but should usually work.

No guarantees with this sort of thing!

The “Supermajority” Myth

Politics No Responses »

Jul 022024

The Tories (and occasionally others) are currently banging on about the dangers of a Labour “supermajority” without defining what it is.

Of course there is no such thing as a “supermajority” in the House of Commons – a vote passes (or fails) when it gets more votes in favour. Whether that vote gets a majority of one or 100 is irrelevant.

There is a danger with a huge majority though; a lesser danger than allowing the Tories to remain in government or even opposition. But a danger never the less.

A huge majority allows a government to pass laws with less risk than would otherwise be the case. Every so often we head of MP “rebellions” when MPs of the government’s party vote against that government’s wishes.

When a government wishes to pass a law that is on the extremes, they are more likely to encounter a rebellion. And a rebellion was more likely to succeed if the majority is slim.

Thus with an overwhelming majority, the government has a better chance of getting more extremist legislation through and into law.

Filthy Roaring Beasts Rushing Along The Scar

Why Run A Tiling Window Manager?

Computing No Responses »

Jun 302024

The funny thing is that this post is not about window tiling but about conventional tiling window managers that to a great extent are “do it yourself” window managers. That is they kind of expect you to do a lot of configuration yourself.

This is not about specific tiling window managers even though I use Awesome and Hyprland.

Tiling vs Floating

In the earliest days of gooeys, windows tended to be tiled so that they didn’t overlap; if you added a new window to the screen, the existing windows would shrink to make room for the new window.

So-called (at least in tiling window managers) “floating” windows were hailed as a brilliant new feature where windows were independent and could overlap. Cool right?

And this is certainly the way that most conventional gooeys work – from Windows, MacOS, and even Linux, they all support floating windows by default. On the other hand, tiling window managers support tiling by default (most will support floating windows as well).

So why would you want to go back to the dawn of gooeys? And it is not just us weird geeks running minimalist window managers looking at tiling – many mainstream desktop environment have tiling features.

It maximises screen real-estate by automatically sizing windows so the whole desktop is covered. I can remember carefully dragging windows to resize them to maximise their size with conventional ‘floating’ window managers. Something that now happens automatically.

Customisation

So tiling can be done with conventional desktop environments – some of which allow support for tiling. KDE has Bismouth; GNOME has the Tiling Assistant, and even Windows has options. Now a tiling window manager does treat tiling as a first class feature, that’s not really why those who prefer them like them.

No, it’s the minimalism and customisation.

Most desktop environments carry with them lots of bonus features – which is fine for most. But if you don’t need those features and/or want to do things in a different way, then a full desktop environment isn’t what you want.

And tiling window managers tend to be minimalistic; even to the extent that some do not include a status bar requiring an optional status bar to be installed. The default configuration (if any) tends to be minimalistic requiring lots of tinkering to get the most out of it.

Which is a positive feature for tinkerers if a negative feature for those who just want to be up and running. But tinkering whilst it takes time, does tend to product a more productive environment – for example my Hyprland configuration includes a custom key binding to grab IP addresses and URLs from a highlighted section of the screen (and optionally “defangs” safely specified dangerous URLs which give you a hint about what I do).

Picture of a Raven — Who Are You Looking At?

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