Sigh, look, I know we don't actually live in a democracy (but a corporatocracy instead), and I should never expect the relevant ministers to care about my meek little protestations otherwise, but I keep writing these letters to ministers for transport anyway, under the vague hope that it might remind them that they're ministers for transport, and ( Read more... )

I do have to admit, I had some fun writing this one:
Dear Transport Minister, Terry Mulder (Denis Napthine, Local MP Ted Baillieu, Ryan Smith MP responsible for Parks Victoria, Parks Victoria itself, and Bicycle Victoria CCed),

I am writing about the sudden closure of the Main Yarra bicycle trail ( Read more... )

Oh well, if The Age aren't going to publish my Thatcher rant, I will:

Jan White (Letters, 11 Apr) is heavily misguided if she believes that Thatcher was one of Britain's greatest leaders. For whom? By any metric 70% of Brits cared about, she was one of the worst. Any harmony, strength of character and respect Brits may be missing now would be ( Read more... )

Since The Age didn't publish my letter, my 3 readers ought to see it anyway:

Reynah Tang of the Law Institute of Victoria says that road rage offences shouldn't necessarily lead to loss of licence ("Offenders risk losing their licence", The Age, Mar 21) . He misses the point -- a vehicle is a weapon. Road ragers demonstrably do not have enough ( Read more... )

Could someone explain to me why the simple and obvious patch in kernel bugzilla 12557 to resolve an invalid filehandle being found by stat() when a file has been recently updated on an NFS server, causes more problems than it solves and thus will not be ever applied to a mainline kernel? "CLOSED DOCUMENTED" seems to be documented by saying "NFS is ( Read more... )

This wasn't published in The Age presumably not because it wasn't brilliant, but because I was 26 words over the 200 word limit:

Why does State Transport Minister Terry Mulder think that building an East-West freeway link will help solve problems similar to today's -- the likes of which happens roughly once every 13 years? To be most useful (but ( Read more... )

I'm too cheap to afford a power metre, but finally got some useful power estimates by tackling some 15% segments in today's ride (the steeper the hill, the less air resistance and rolling friction will matter. The extreme being a vertical slope, where the power output is going entirely into elevation gain (and rope friction)). If I am not ( Read more... )

Going to have to reset the time on a lot of servers tomorrow! automount here on my machines at home were all spinning at 30% with this strace ( Read more... )

I love UNIX. It suits really lazy people like me.

I had a need to capture output from one file (captured into "$df", and from each line , take the corresponding line from another file (captured into "$blocksizes"). Join should be able to do this right? Other than the fact that you can't tell it to use the line number as its joining field ( ( Read more... )

Just in case you haven't seen this brilliant explanation before (I'm a proud bureaucrat). Sorry, don't know who authored it, merely that I got it through James Cook on bicigaga.

21 Economic Models Explained With Cows

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISMYou have 2 cows ( Read more... )