Gambling Lesson

A few years after my fiasco with Galilee in 1966, I was living in Perth and playing pub pool in just about every waking moment. I got hooked when I teamed up with Keith, a workmate who claimed to have been Scottish snooker champion. I can find no evidence of that, but he was an outstanding player. When he was thirsty, he was capable of breaking and clearing the table without giving the other three players a single shot. Once he had his eye in, he enjoyed performing trick shots and entertaining the crowd. In those days in Perth pubs, you always played for the cost of the table and a beer. We drank for free for about a year.

Despite his ability to drink free beer as long as he wanted, Keith had a taste for expensive spirits and for backing losers at the races and those two failings had him almost constantly in debt. We were paid fortnightly and Keith always ran out in about three days. He would borrow from me until the next payday. On payday, I'd collect what he owed me before he had a chance to pay anybody else or to put a bet on any new sure thing. And I was careful never to lend him more than his usual pay packet in any fortnight.

I went to his home once, but his wife clearly held me responsible for his financial failings and threw me out on the spot. And after a while, I started to get itchy feet as I became increasingly aware that I had only put 3,400 km between me and my parents in Melbourne. I moved on to Darwin and I lost touch with Keith. But at least I was by then confirmed in my attitude to betting on horses.

A Horse to Remember

A weedy little bloke from some runt of a town in western NSW walked into a pub on a Carlton street corner one spring day. The regulars at the bar gave him the stare, but he went ahead and ordered a beer. His name was Kenny and he became a regular and some of the men started to recognize him. He bought beers for me and some mates and we got to ask him why he was in Melbourne.

This was not something he wanted to share with everybody, so he almost whispered it. "I'm here to back Galilee in the Cups," he said. This theme was constant for a week or two. He was an odd punter, always in the pub rather than at the racecourses or even the TAB. This was 1966, and this pub had never had a TV in the bar. But he kept having enough money to buy his share.

He disappeared on Caulfield Cup day, but was back with a major hangover and a lopsided grin the following Monday. Galilee had won and Kenny had won with the bookies. Over the next few days, my mates decided that Kenny knew something and decided they had to back Galilee in the Melbourne Cup. I was a student then, so the other guys elected me their representative to back the horse on Cup Day. I'd never been in a TAB or bet on anything, so this was a shock.

I did some reading and found that only five horses had won the cup double in the past 90 years. It seemed unlikely that it would happen this year. So I kept the money, avoided the TAB, drank as much as I could hold and discovered too late how treacherous horses and gambling can be when Galilee came home first. We never saw Kenny again, and I was lucky to see anything at all when my excited mates came to collect their winnings. I vowed to avoid horses and betting for the rest of my life. And I had to find a new pub.

Fine Day for a Holiday

Days off work are good for everybody, whether they are workers or employers. In my family, we're mostly self-employed, but we still take days off on public holidays. We have our little rituals of parties and fun. Unfortunately, most of the public holidays in Australia are either religious holidays or celebrations of nationalistic ideas or wars.

Melbourne Cup Day just celebrates the crooks in the racing industry, who can easily be ignored by those of us who don't actually care about horse racing, leaving us with a fun day off at a good time of the year. I'd like to see more silly holidays, scattered through the year, as a sign of good will towards the mental health of the entire community.

NaNoWriMo

Last year, I saw people talking about NaNoWriMo and was smart enough to take no notice. This year, I'm going to play. But I'm making up my own rules. It's certainly not the year to add to my collection of unpublishable novels and it's almost certainly folly to imagine that I'd write something every day.

But, having had a small victory with the project I've been working on today, and having found myself with a few minutes to spare before I head out for my last Italian lesson of the year, and having noticed that it's the first day of NaNoWriMo, here is my initial contribution.

Faced with a splendid piece of written homework that I had crafted around 1962, my English teacher, Brother Monagle (who must be dead by now), told me that I would never be a writer. This encouraged me to try to prove him wrong over the intervening decades, but the record of my writing achievements seems to show that he was right. I still think he was a bit of a bastard for saying that and I'm not quite ready to forgive him for it, although I will always take some solace from the revenge I took not long afterwards involving unauthorised use of the large car that his brother had loaned him.

The prime fault with that homework was the length of the opening sentence which meandered well on to the second page before bumping into a full stop. I was made to read just that first sentence aloud to the class for their amusement. They were duly amused. I was happy that it turned out to be readable, although the humiliation of that day remains fresh.

My mother was inclined to say that I never learned. This was in relation to my failure to comply with all of her rules, something I never attempted to learn. But it's probably true to say that I have had trouble learning to reign in my long-winded story telling. I'd like to blame Brother Monagle for that too. Or my genes.

Since this post is almost content-free, I'll do the right thing and stop here. But I may be back tomorrow, or some other day.

Public Goals Revisited

Some time ago, I wrote about my hope that stating some goals in public might assist me in achieving them. In particular, I mentioned a desire to shed 10 kg in 100 days and invited people to keep on my back about it.

As it happened, this wasn’t interesting for many people and just one friend did remind me and ask me how I was going at suitable intervals. I’m very grateful for that. The sad thing is that it doesn’t seem to have worked for me. The 100 days ended at the start of this month and my weight is unchanged. To be specific, the day I started it was 78.8 kg and it was 78.8 kg this morning. In between, it has fluctuated between 76.7 and 80.0 kg. I think it’s fair to describe that as “no change”.

So what’s next? I still wish to lose that weight, but it is clear that I will need to adopt a better strategy to accomplish it. While I was away in Sydney recently, I managed to get in some decently long walks and thought I might be able to make a specific time for walking every day back at home. I have now been getting up at 5:00 every morning and immediately going for a brisk one hour walk. It is too soon yet for that that have made any impact—as the scales make clear. However, I am hopeful that, by doing this walk regularly, I might make some progress.

Gmail Makes Another Step

I’ve whined previously about gmail’s “conversation view”, claiming that it’s too broken to use for non-trivial email. Recently, I was pleased to discover that Google have finally—albeit reluctantly—acceded to the requests of thousands of users who don’t want it. It can now be turned off. I have turned it off for me and my wife and we both prefer it to the old gmail way.

Of course, gmail is still broken in that the non-conversation view is less useful than what was provided a dozen or more years back by software like exmh or mutt. But at least we can avoid Google’s peculiarly inept idea of email threading. There is still room for improvement, but I’m finding the low level of maintenance of gmail to be a compelling reason to stick with it. For now.

Where Now?

As I write this, we still don’t have an election result—although I imagine that will change some time today. I have no idea where the country will go once the result is settled, but today I’m thinking of my own immediate future.

I’m about to have a few days off with my sweetie, partly to do some family duties, but chiefly to have a break from our routine. Most of the vague big ideas that I had for 2010 have borne only minimal fruit, so I’m hoping that this time of recharging my batteries will allow me to see what I really want to do in the last third of this year.

Gmail Priority Inbox

After wrestling with various Gmail extensions with similar aims, I was pleased to hear about the new Gmail Priority Inbox which I have now turned on for my Gmail. I don't think they have it quite right yet, but I expect it will evolve over the next few months and that it might just become so useful that I end up feeling that I did the right thing moving all my email to Gmail.

I’d be interested to see what other people think about this feature as they try it out.

Giving Chrome Another Chance

Back in February, I reported my intention to try Chrome as a replacement for Firefox. A week later, although most parts of the experiment went well, I reported that Chrome was useless for printing in Australia (or anywhere that uses A4 paper).

That was a blow, but I hoped that Google—despite their complete contempt for bug reports from their users—might one day rectify this issue. Naturally, when they did fix it, they did not announce that in any place that was useful to me and so I discovered the fix by accident. If I was cynical, I might even think they had fixed it by accident. But I won’t go there.

At any rate, now that Chrome appears to be able to do almost all the things I need, I’m going to drop Firefox again and see if I can manage with just Chrome. That’s where I’ll find out if “almost all” might really be “all”—if Chrome can manage with 12 windows and 180 tabs open, which is what I currently have going on this desktop. In fact, if it’s at least only half as clunky and slow as Firefox, that will be wonderful.

Coles Puts Customers Last

For ages now, all the Coles supermarkets I use have had a nice simple EFT setup. While the cashier is scanning your purchases, you could swipe your loyalty card if you had one and you could swipe your credit/debit card and select your account. At the end, you could quickly enter your PIN, wait a few seconds for the receipt to be printed and be on your way.

Today, the local Coles introduced a new "improved" system that finally took into account the chip on your debit/credit card. And, at the same time removed the little bit of streamlining that everybody has become accustomed to. You can no longer do anything with the card reader until the cashier has finished, and you can't swipe your loyalty card at all—that difficult task is now reserved to the cashier. So you wait, then you insert your card, then you wait until the machine is ready, then you select your account and wait a bit more. Finally, you get to enter your PIN. This all adds a noticeable delay to the checkout process.

Coles, it's not an improvement at all and there's just no excuse for it.

Gmail Spam Detection Is Good Enough

In the past 30 days, Gmail has successfully tagged 8712 spams with a mere handful of false positives (which have now been flagged) and only three false negatives. I'm happy that this is good enough for me—as of now I will no longer review the spam folder.

If you email me and get no response at all and think you should have got a response, this may be a result of your message being flagged as spam. In that case, feel free to follow the advice in the Contact tab of this blog.

Is Oracle the new SCO?

I avoided Java for many years, partly because I thought it was a failure in language design and partly because I found Sun's tight control disconcerting. I avoided Solaris because of Sun's tight control and because there were plenty of satisfactory alternatives.

When OpenSolaris appeared, I began to experiment with it. It still felt risky, but operating systems are much easier to change than the languages you use to create software with, so the risks seemed acceptable. When Sun made moves to open Java up, I began to consider using it or, more likely, other languages that built on the JVM.

Then Sun fell in a hole and I put things on hold. I had some hopes for a takeover by IBM, based on my belief that that they might continue the Sun stuff of interest in a way I could live with. That might have been unduly optimistic, but is now irrelevant. IBM went away and Oracle stepped in. Oracle is not a company I have ever admired in any way and it is run by a man I find even less admirable than Bill Gates. But many analysts, who claimed to have better sources of information than I have, seemed to think that Oracle would probably continue with OpenSolaris and would certainly nurture Java.

Now it appears that OpenSolaris is dead. And Larry Ellison has decided to tackle Google over Java. I have no idea how that will unfold. I do know that Google have the money to withstand a legal challenge. I'd like to see Oracle do a SCO and collapse under the legal mess, although I fear that they might survive. I am certainly going to avoid OpenSolaris and Java for the next few months or years. I'm also starting to think about alternatives to OpenOffice. I'd love big Oracle customers to announce that they are going to walk away from Oracle because they can't rely on Oracle's ability to survive.

At least database technology is pretty much a solved problem and alternatives to Oracle exist and others can be created. So it will be possible for people to drop the Oracle database money pit. Getting everybody to walk away from their Java investments will be much harder, but I'd like to see people considering that too. At least I have nothing to lose, having no investment in either Java or Oracle. But I will be cheering for anybody who helps to cut the ground from under Oracle.

Why I will vote for the Greens

I've voted Labor all my life, not because I like their colours or the dress sense of their leaders, but because their policies have been generally in accord with my own principles. I've never voted for the two big conservative parties because their policies have been (and remain) focussed towards meeting goals that I believe to be unethical.

And, until now, I have never voted for a minor party—mostly because their policies are either single-issue or unethical (or both). However, the continuing drift of Labor to the right and the abandonment of policies that are of fundamental importance (the environment; the treatment of women, minorities and refugees; the education and health systems, to name several) has made me look harder at the alternatives.

In the past, I was not impressed by the narrow focus of the Greens or by their lack of real policies beyond their principal focus. And I have been unimpressed by some of their preferences decisions. But they have come of age at a time when the major parties have descended into irrelevance. The Greens now have real and ethical policies on most of what I see as the important issues of 2010.

Obviously, the election on 21 August will return us a government controlled by one of the two major parties. But now seems like the right time to tell them something about how people really feel. So, if you think the Greens are right about at least some of the important issues, do what I'm going to do—put them first in both houses of parliament and then give your second preference to the major party of your choice. If you're lucky enough to find the Greens' preference allocation meets your needs, then vote above the line. Otherwise, do what I do and take the time to number every box below the line. It's not hard and we only get to do it once every three years. Seems like a small price to pay to put pressure on whoever is the government to start doing the right thing.

LCA 2011 — Call for Papers extended to 14 August

BRISBANE, Australia – Sunday 15 August 2010 – Good news everyone! Due to a large number of requests, the deadline for the LCA2011 call for papers has been extended for an extra week.  They will now close on Saturday, 14 August 2010.  Unfortunately, no further extensions can be granted after this date.

The organising committee is pleased with both the quantity and quality of proposals that have been submitted to date and are still accepting proposals for

• Papers
• Tutorials
• Miniconfs
• Posters

Please read the Information on Presentations page before submitting your proposal, to give yourself the best chance of being accepted.

Call for Papers Deadline is now: Saturday, 14 August 2010

In Which I Yield to Powerful Forces

As long ago as it was possible, I began running my own mail servers. Over the years, I employed a variety of software and hardware and for the past decade or more I've had to run antispam software as well. I did it partly to avoid the alternatives (which were pretty unsatisfactory in the early days) and partly to understand the process in case clients needed help with their mail servers.

Happily, I am now without clients. And the alternatives might not be so bad. But I am stubborn, so I decided to solve my most recent problem by setting up some new software on a VM in the USA. The problem I was solving was the increasing unreliability of my ADSL connection—not through any fault of my excellent ISP, but because Telstra appears to have a policy of letting the copper infrastructure decay sufficiently that any successor won't be at all glad to be saddled with it. At any rate, there have been no spare pairs in my street since we got the last pair five years ago. Since then, we've had line faults after every heavy rain and it takes between three and seven days to fix things, where "fix" means find the wet joint, dry it out, patch it up and say "she'll be right now mate."

So I looked at all-in-one solutions for email, in the mistaken belief that there would be something out there that I could more or less just drop into place on a VM, do a bit of DNS magic and sit back happily. I looked at Horde, Zimbra, Zarafa, Courier and a couple of others whose names escape me now. They probably are all capable of doing the job, but all require a great deal of dedicated setup and they look as though they need a fair bit of care and feeding once they are operational. None of them looked like what I wanted and I started thinking that if these were the answer to my question, I must have asked the wrong question.

So I considered Google. I've had a bunch of gmail accounts ever since it was launched. I don't particularly like it, although that's mainly just me. And, for various reasons which I can't talk about here, plain gmail accounts don't work for much of the email I have to provide. But Google Apps offer a bit more than just gmail, so I thought I'd spend a little bit of time investigating. I gave myself a maximum of one day to complete this and in fact needed much less. I now have all email addressed to my 11 operational domains going to Google Apps accounts for me and my wife. Nobody has to change the email addresses they use, and the outgoing email looks as though it still comes from where it always did.

And Google's antispam stuff is awesome. So far, we've had a few thousand emails arrive and every spam has been caught without a single false positive. It's so good that I'm going to stop checking the spam folders now. This is so simple that it's a total no-brainer for me. The only possible downside is storing our email with Google, but that is easy to fix via their nice API that allows you to download it all for storage wherever you like.

Well, the other possible downside is that my wife might spit the dummy when she returns from seven weeks in Europe on Monday and discovers that she is not using exmh any more. But it will be too late and I hope it won't end in tears. At least she has been using one of the ordinary gmail accounts every day while she's been away, so she is familiar with how it works.