Iceland: “It’s All The Fault Of The Councils”

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Feb 182013
 

The boss of Iceland has come up with this.

To which the only appropriate response is “horseshit”.

His argument is that councils (or local authorities) award contracts based solely on price. Now I am not directly involved in the tendering process, and indeed not directly involved in the council tendering process, but I do have some familiarity with the process – sometimes I am one of the “quality gates” to get past in an area which works to many of the same rules as local authorities.

And nobody awards contracts based solely on price. At least not if they want to keep their jobs for longer than 10 minutes.

It is true that the public sector will award a contract based on price with all other things being equal. But if you want to supply burgers to all of the schools in the county of Rutland, you’ll probably have a huge pile of paperwork to complete which includes specifying the size of the burgers, and what’s in them.

Once all that paperwork had been sent back to the council, some poor unfortunate has to go through all the paperwork whittling down the responses to those who meet the criteria – strange as it may seem an invitation to tender for supplying 10,000 beef burgers will solicit responses from people willing to supply 50 chickens! Once the responses have been whittled down, the cheapest response is selected – if there’s no good reason to reject it.

Does this result in a downward pressure on price? Of course it does – and councils would be criticised if they did not exert downward pressure on prices. But it doesn’t encourage corrupt practices.

The Earth Is Pebble-Dashed …

 General, Politics, Science  1 Response »
Feb 162013
 

So today in addition to being subject to a near miss – the cosmic equivalent of being given a close shave by a Samurai with his (or her) Katana – we also had an unannounced visitation by an asteroid that crash-landed in Russia causing a considerable amount of property damage, and more seriously some injuries.

Now this doesn’t happen every day, but in the lifetime of the Earth it does happen pretty frequently. As is evident from our nearest neighbour which looks as though it has been bombarded in some sort of celestial war. And indeed, the evidence can be seen on Earth if you look close enough; and that list just includes the largest impacts – events such as Russia today simply don’t show up.

Now there is not a great deal we can do about this as individuals, so as individuals we may as well forget about it – the chances of being killed by a meteorite are pretty remote but as it turns out only slightly less likely than being killed by a terrorist!

As a species however, we have reached the point where we can start doing something about it. If that is, we want to invest the resources into doing so. Admittedly we have started looking but simply knowing we’re all going to be killed by a dinosaur-killer isn’t enough – we should be able to do something about it. Perhaps there isn’t much we can do about a dinosaur-killer.

But we should be able to do something about smaller dangers. If we want to.

If we told the military that they will have to change the kinds of really expensive toys they get, we can probably start some form of meteor defence programme without having a dramatic effect on the economy. After all, ultimately a large meteor is as dangerous as an all-out nuclear war.

The Horse Meat Saga & Government Regulation

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 132013
 

One of the humorous coincidences arising from the ever increasing horse meat saga, is that this would happen during the Tories reign of mis-rule. You see we often get treated to the Tories bang on about excessive government regulation and red tape, and how business could be far more effective without it.

And of course with a special venomous attack on the European bureaucrats.

Which is all very well, but the biggest lesson that can be learnt from the whole sorry saga of how horse meat got passed off as meat of another kind, is that we need government regulation to protect us from crooks pretending to be businesscritters. And honest businesscritters need that protection even more than the rest of us.

We have learnt how crooks have infiltrated horse meat into the market for cheap processed meat because it is so much cheaper than beef. This has two effects :-

  1. The crooks make money … lots of money.
  2. Honest businesscritters lose out. If it goes on long enough there won’t be any honest ones left!

There are those who say “well horse isn’t too bad … it seems to taste pretty good”, which is missing the problem(s). Not only should we be able to see what is in a product by looking at the ingredients list, but if crooks get away with putting safe horse meat into burgers, will cheaper crooks get the idea to put unsafe horse meat in ? Or rat? Or worse?

It is worth remembering this current saga when the Tories start banging on about government regulation – regulation is usually there for a reason, and the reason far too often is due to an event like this where unscrupulous crooks abused the public in order to make a bit more cash.

 

Good News! Pope Benedict To Resign!

 General  No Responses »
Feb 112013
 

Given the probable circumstances (it isn’t totally clear just yet), it seems strange to claim that it is good news that the pope is to resign. After all, it is hardly good news that anyone is having trouble with their health.

Traditionally a pope stays in office for life no matter how their health might affect their ability to do their job. And whether or not you are a catholic, you have to admit it’s an important job that needs a competent person in control. Not only does the organisation suffer from having an unhealthy head, but the person in that job suffers too – who wants to work when you’re unwell?

Which means it is good news that he is resigning – leave the job for someone else to pick up. And enjoy a well earned retirement.

 

FreeBSD: Increasing The Size Of Disks In A ZFS Pool

 Computing, Working Notes  No Responses »
Feb 112013
 

One of the obvious things to do with a ZFS storage pool is to increase the size of the disks in it – after all disks get bigger and cheaper over time. Not that it is a very difficult thing to do, but it is always worth doing a quick search to find out what others have done before setting forth. And if nobody blogs their own experience, there’s nothing for anybody to find!

So I started off with four 2Tbyte drives configured as two vdevs each of which was a mirror. And I had two 3Tbyte disks to swap in. So I was going to be swapping one of the vdevs (consisting of two 2Tbyte drives) with the 3Tbyte drives.

In the details below, I have a storage pool called zroot and the two disks being replaced are gpt/disk3 and gpt/disk2. As you will notice, I am growing the storage pool I boot off; however the disks I am using do not contain a boot partition with the boot code.

The first job was to swap out one of the 2Tbyte drives. This was done by :-

  1. Take disk to be swapped out offline: zpool offline zroot gpt/disk3
  2. Shut down the server and take the selected drive out. Swap over the disk caddy onto a new 3Tbyte drive, and swap that back in.
  3. Power on the server.
  4. Create an EFI partition table: gpart create -s gpt ada3
  5. Optionally create a swap partition: gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 4G -l swap3 ada3
  6. Create a ZFS partion: gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l disk3 ada3
  7. Replace the device: zpool replace zroot gpt/disk3

Now is the time to wait for the resilvering process to complete. Once that has finished, the steps above can be repeated for the other drive in the vdev. Once the resilvering for that replacement has finished, you may want to check the size of the pool.

If the size has not increased, you may need to do: zpool online -e zroot gpt/disk2 gpt/disk3.

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