Russell Coker: Victorian State Election
Election TomorrowOn Saturday we will have a Victorian state election. As usual for state elections most people will vote on issues related to the federal government, the mainstream media has little coverage of state politics and people seem to vote on what they see on TV. Presumably that means we have a good chance of having a similar situation to the last Federal Election where the Labor and Liberal parties each won 72 seats in the lower house and Labor formed a coalition with the Greens MP and three independents.The independent MPs didn t give much explanation of the reasons for their choices. But it seems that a large motivating factor was the Greens success in the senate, as Labor was more willing to work with the Greens that meant that if a Liberal based coalition had won in the lower house there was a good chance of a Double Dissolution.The Liberal party can t make dealsIn a world where sanity prevailed the result of this would be the Liberal party firstly adjusting their policies to appeal to Greens voters and secondly trying to make some deals with the Greens at a high level to allow the possibility of a Liberal/Green coalition government. While there are substantial policy conflicts between the Liberal and Green parties it does seem possible to get a coalition working if both sides accept that they won t get everything that they want. Forming government and getting only some of your policy implemented seems like a better option than being in the opposition and getting almost none of your policy implemented. Also there is no reason why we couldn t have a Liberal/Labor coalition government in the next decade it seems unlikely that any election will deliver a result that doesn t have Liberal + Labor comprising more than 50% of the seats in both houses.But it seems that sanity doesn t prevail. The Liberal party have put the Greens below Labor on their preferences for the upper house and on their How To Vote cards for the lower house [1]. This greatly increases the probability of Labor scoring an outright win. It also seems likely to drive a wedge against the conservative voters who want to conserve the environment.The Sad State of the Liberal PartyKevin Andrews (Liberal MP and former minister) wrote a strange and amusing diatribe titled The ideological drive behind the Greens [2]. Here is what I regard as the best part:First, those who vote Green as their primary vote: This is the Don s Party group that used to be in the ALP in the 60s and 70s: young university students or graduates, frequently working or still studying in academia, no kids, often gay, arts and drama type degrees or architecture where they specialise is designing environmentally friendly suburbs, agnostic or atheist, often US or Canadian refugees from capitalism, but well paid in professional consulting or media jobs. According to the CIA World Factbook [3] the median age of Australians is 37.5, the majority of the population were born in 1972 or later. The film Don's_Party was released in 1976 and was about the 1969 election. While Kevin Andrews was old enough to remember the 1969 election clearly the majority of the Australian population weren t even born before that election and isn t old enough to have watched the movie when it was in the cinemas. Kevin is making it quite clear that he and his party represent a time that is past. The rest of that paragraph is filled with strangeness that is a good sample of the rest of his article.The sad thing is that he seems to think that this appeal to the minority of people who are old enough to remember the 1969 election, bigoted enough to appreciate the discrimination against homosexuals (which is a long standing Liberal policy), and politically clueless enough to support McCarthyist policies against alleged communists.We need a decent and sane conservative party to represent the decent and sane Australian citizens who are politically conservative. I am beginning to doubt that the Liberal party could ever be reformed enough to become such a party.
You may wonder how I manage to write one Useful but Unknown Unix
Something 
d-i is the very first thing many of our users see, and has a huge range of uses, from simple desktop installs to massive corporate deployments; it s unspeakably important that it works well, and it s a testament to its design that it s been able to trundle along without actually very much serious refactoring for the best part of five years now.
I have a soft spot for man-db too. It was my first major project in Debian, starting out from an embarrassingly 
For the Freaky Wall I have installed a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD system
using the installer with ZFS support announced on:
Somebody linked me to 
I ve never quit a job before. Well, not a real job. Quitting PC World was more than easy, it was practically required for my soul not to leave my body. Quitting Waitrose was, well, it was a freaking supermarket job. And Southampton football stadium I just stopped turning up after one girl fainted in the kitchen from heat exhaustion. But a real, proper handing in of notice is something new in no small part because I ve been in the same place since my first job as a new graduate.
Not that I m ungrateful, mind. Looking after big iron at the University of Oxford has been pretty awesome more blinky lights than you can shake a stick at but there comes a time when you need to think about your career, and move on to pastures new. I m fairly sure six and a bit years is WELL past that point.
When I started looking at work, I had only a few mandatory criteria a sysadmin job, working with Free Software, without any significant decrease to my monthly income. Beyond that well, in this economy, who am I to argue?
What I hadn t accounted for, however, was a job whose awesomeness can t be contained. A job with a dedicated Free Software company whose entire staff roster, top to bottom, is filled with the most talented, smart, and generally awesome people you could hope to work with. Such a job would be a fevered dream, the mere ramblings of a madman. Yet, somehow, for the second time running, I find myself in an enviable job, working exclusively on Free Software.
Being able to show off root access to a box with 256 cores and a tibibyte of RAM is pretty cool. But you know what s even cooler? A job where I never need to worry about openSUSE 10.1 administration ever again. A job where several of my colleagues are fellow Debian Developers, with all the prestige and knowledge that comes with such a title. And somehow, by rolling proverbial twenties, I find myself in that position.
I am very, VERY proud to say that from the start of January, I ll be joining Collabora Ltd as their new Systems Manager.
This week I've mostly been experimenting with lighting, most obviously in 
Everybody already heard about Ironman triathlons: 3.8km swimming,
180km cycling and a marathon. these are everywhere around the world now.
But, have you ever heard about 
I have been asked how Ubuntu relates to Debian, and how packages flow from one to the other. So here s my attempt at clarifying the whole picture.
My trusty somewhat-old laptop has been under the weather lately. It will not boot when it's cold, and it's fairly picky. ~20 C seems too cold already; so I have to heat it up at little.
Can I count myself in a majority of people that feel that, while the USB standard is a great advance regarding the way we used to connect our stuff to the computer some years ago (when we used a different cable for every friggin' device we had, and we had to care about having only one parallel and two seral ports in regular configurations, and don't even get me started on port settings speed, parity, etc.), every time we hold a USB cable in our hand we feel one of the designer teams decided to play a prank on humanity by making the connector's orientation basically unguessable?
