trog's haus

Last week I stumbled across this spreadsheet, which had been put together by a bunch of Internet types. It is basically a list of all (or most) of the Australian political parties, a stack of policies, and how those parties feel about those policies.

This was something I had been wanting to compile at elections past, with a view to trying to do something useful with it. As with many things I have wanted to do, I never found time, so I was very happy to see someone else had done most of the hard work.

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how closely my personal preferences on all these topics aligned with these parties, so I threw together a little webpage which I dubbed (in a fit of originality) “Vote-o-Matic“.

Basically, you just select whether you oppose or support a particular policy, then hit the submit button, and the system simply calculates how many hits you get with each party. It is nothing fancy and people certainly shouldn’t treat it like a major feat of engineering; it was hacked together in about an hour late one night after a game of football.

It is very simple, though after sharing it around with a few people, it became clear that something like this could be a useful tool. Several people have volunteered some great ideas, and – if time permits – I hope to implement them in “version 2.0″. For example, a major flaw of the system at the moment is it gives more weight to parties that have more known positions on policies, simply because there’s a greater chance you’ll have matches with them. Having some sort of weighting would help mitigate that problem (or, alternatively, representatives of all the parties could contact the spreadsheet maintainers and get their positions listed so the data is complete).

While I hope that people don’t really use this to decide who they should vote for, I hope it helps to give people more information about our great country’s political parties. I know several people have been surprised to see how closely their preferences match one party over another (“hey, maybe I /am/ a solicalist!”).

I hope that people use this as an excuse to do some more in-depth research about who they should be voting for, rather than basing their decision on whatever single emotionally-charged issue they happened to see covered on TV.

As mentioned on the Vote-o-matic page I am happy to listen to any and all feedback and will reply to whatever I can (if you include an email address!); I’ll action any reasonable suggestion I can as well.

If you haven’t seen it, you can access Vote-o-matic here: http://trog.qgl.org/voteomatic

I thought this post was great, in the Slashdot thread about Julian Assange, the (Australian!) man behind Wikileaks:

Secrecy is entrusted to the government on the assumption that it will only be used when truly needed.

However the same power can be and is abused to subvert the freedom of its own people, as misappropriation for personal gain by powerful people and used to cover up ineffective, improper, illegal or immoral activity.

Whistle blowers object to these abuses and fight against it in the only way possible, by removing the shroud of secrecy and revealing these violations of trust to the public.

Mistakes may be made, but revealing the abuse of trust by the government is vital to the continuation of freedom and democracy.

Source – user Nadaka. I Googled the text and it seems to be original, not a quote – I thought it was a good, concise summary about why Wikileaks is handy.

Found this interesting page on the Linux memory management site which details how to clear the system cache in Linux. This was handy for us as we were testing file download performance off various VPS configurations and we wanted to be sure the file we were downloading was getting read off the disk, so we could more accurately measure the usual performance.

Basically you can just do: echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches and it will ‘free pagecache, dentries and inodes’. This worked a treat; we were able to download a file, then download it again (observing that the second download was much, much faster because it was coming out of the system cache), then run that echo and download again and observe that the speeds were back to the first download.

It is with great sadness that I just posted the news of the discontinuation of the BigPond Files service on the news page. The site will be formally shut down at the end of June.

Mammoth developed and deployed that site in around a month after BigPond decided to remove Linux ISOs from the old GameArena site due to disk space limitations. We did this back in 2003, and we have been faithfully maintaining all aspects of the site since then.

I handled most of the day-to-day issues of BigPond Files – processing file requests, making sure the latest versions of the more popular software packages were available, and support – and have done the best job possible to try to get as much cool stuff as possible available for BigPond broadband users.

While the site has never been hugely popular (it’s only linked in one tiny spot on the BigPond site and thus it’s pretty hard to find – it doesn’t even feature the ‘green dot’ that indicates it is unmetered!), it has long served a number of users interested in open source software and I would like to think it will be missed by these customers.

Thanks to all those users who supported the site – everyone that downloaded, submitted a file request, and sent through compliments and kind words about the service.

Once the site is gone, BigPond will be one of (the only?) major ISPs in Australia that does not maintain some sort of repository of open source software for its users.

So long and thanks for all the bytes.

Just a quick note for those who keep track of these things; the BigPond Files and Games (including GameArena) networks are currently offline with some network problems. They are being investigated as a matter of urgency.

Obviously it’s hard to post status updates on the websites while they’re offline but rest assured it’s a known issue and it is being actively worked on. No ETA as yet.

So for the last few months, I (via the QGL mailing list) have been receiving a bunch of what I called ‘spam’ from some douchebag, Frank Walker. This obnoxious person has compiled a list of various mailing addresses – including MPs like Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull and various interest groups – and has been spamming anti-Labor political propaganda (primarily about global warming) for a few months.

Frank Walker does not respond to unsubscribe requests. There’s no useful information identifying him – in fact, I have reason to believe ‘Frank Walker’ is a pseudonym, as shortly before he arrived in my Inbox I was getting a bunch of extremely similar emails from another name and email address. I complained to the ISP about this behaviour and shortly after, Frank Walker arrived on the scene. Possibly a coincidence, but who knows? But in short, he violates pretty much every section of the “What is spam?” rulebook for Australians.

I contacted the ACMA about Mr Walker, assuming that this qualified as spam. The ACMA got back to me very quickly and confirmed that it is, surprisingly, not spam. It’s not commercial in nature:

it does not appear to be commercial in nature and therefore unlikely to
be, for the purposes of the spam act, considered a unsolicited commercial message.

Most annoying.

Fortunately I have technical know-how to simply block these stupid emails on our mail server. Others are not so lucky – several of the unwilling recipients of this drivel have replied-to-all (yes, everyone is just included in one big “to” line; Mr Walker either is ignorant of the Bcc field or has done this intentionally to really piss everyone off) asking to be unsubscribed. I assume, like my unsubscribe request, that it was ignored.

If you’re getting Mr Walker’s silly emails, with their propaganda (the latest genius post is “KEVIN RUDDS REPORT CARD”, the contents of which are quite predictable) and silly references to nutbag blogs, then simply mark him as spam in your mail client and it will eventually go away – but remember, it’s not really spam!

(For what it’s worth, I’m no rabid Labor supporter. I think their policies, particularly when it comes to technology, are uninformed or outright stupid, like the Internet filter.)

Update: This person has changed email addresses and is now identified as ‘Annie Walker’ of freedomlover69@gmail.com. Clearly an intentional effort to evade spam filters.

Update: This person has changed email addresses and is now identified as ‘William Jones’ of communistfighter@gmail.com.

Update 2010/08/30: Another new email address, this time ‘John Richardson’ of therealfacts4u@gmail.com.

If you apt-get install proftpd on Debian it seems that support for resuming an FTP transfer is off by default.

For some reason the setting that controls this isn’t exposed in the default proftpd.conf, but basically it’s just a case of adding the AllowStoreRestart option to your proftpd.conf (ie, ‘AllowStoreRestart on’), then restarting proftpd via /etc/init.d/proftpd restart, and you’re away.

Just went to drop some new ebooks on my iPhone and got the following message:

Stanza can only share books with your iPhone or iPod if you have the Apple “Bonjour” software installed. Would you like to launch your browser to the install page for Bonjour?

Argh!

I quickly realised it was probably because of the recent version 9.1 update for iTunes that I installed, overwriting or otherwise breaking Bonjour somehow.

Fortunately the workaround for a fix is simple – just redownload the latest Stanza installer and reinstall. It’ll install a working version of Bonjour and you’re away.

Just had a bit of a weird problem with Thunderbird v3.0.3 throwing an error dialog with the following text:

An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: qq write error or disk full (#4.3.0). Please check the message and try again.

Or in image form:

This of course looks like a server error, so I panicked and harassed our Ops guys, thinking the mail server was running out of space. Some simple testing indicated this wasn’t the problem – I was able to send through our mail server’s web interface (Zimbra) and others were able to receive mail with no problems, so it was clearly a problem at my end.

I restarted Thunderbird with no effect, and rebooted with no effect.

The solution was to right click my ‘Sent’ mail folder and hit ‘Rebuild Index’. I guess the index got corrupted somehow and it couldn’t write to the Sent mail folder, triggering that (wrong) error message.

While at the Games Developers Conference, I have lost my beloved iPod touch in the vicinity of the St Regis Hotel in San Francisco, in the area of 3rd and Mission Streets. If anyone has found it or finds it later, please let me know!@#

It is in a loose-fitting black silicon case. The front picture is a Parisian rooftop, though the battery is probably flat by now.

I desperately would like to get it back for the plane ride home so I can use it for reading and playing Sudoku.