SemiArticulate

Random Musings
November 9th, 2012 by Lucas

Mandatory Internet Filter is dead! Long live the mandatory internet filter!

The minister for DBCDE (pronounced debacle) has announced that the plans to impose a mandatory internet censorship is dead.

The only problem is that we are all still getting the mandatory filter. Just not via legislation (which would be impossible to get through the current parliment).

The ACL is NOT HAPPY.

In other reportage the minister is planning to use s313 of the telecommunications act to impose a blacklist of the INTERPOL child abuse websites.  For those not paying too much attention, this means that the infrastructure to “improve” the scope (say at the request of some pressure groups like *ahem* the ACL) is now already in place.

As this is a danger going into the future (but I predict not this electoral cycle or the next), we will need to be vigilant.

November 5th, 2012 by Lucas

Computer Troubles

It would seem the computer troubles have greatly diminished, if not gone completely.

All I had to do was update the nvidia drivers to use their own AGP driver, and presto, problem fixed.  I can build Java now, and I haven’t seen any instabilities.

November 4th, 2012 by Lucas

Gliding Status Report

Just one flight today in the Junior. Patchy conditions with reasonable thermals (up to 5 kts in places), and unreasonable sink in places (6-7 kts).

Totals: 85h55 (49h34 PIC)

On a related note, it is good to see Beaufort GC and VMFG join us in the Destination Bacchus Marsh OLC comp (Geelong is still number one!).

October 20th, 2012 by Lucas

Gliding Status Report

Yesterday I had two flights (only because I launched too early and needed a relight):

Flight 1

Flight 2

Both in the Junior. As you can see, the second flight was much better at 2h55.  In a slightly related note, the Destination Comp on OLC, Geelong Gliding Club is winning (at this point, because the other two clubs have not turned up 🙂

Totals: 84h23 (48h2 PIC)

October 13th, 2012 by Lucas

Computer Troubles

For a while now I’ve been having random failures of my main system. This blog entry is just to document what I’ve done to fix it. Updates will be posted below.

The system:

Gigabyte AM3+  motherboard (GA-970A-D3)
AMD FX 6100 six core black edition (FD6100WMGUSBX)
Gigabyte/ATI video card ( GTX560)
G.Skill 4x4GB DDR3 1600 (GS-F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL)

The symptoms:

I would randomly get programs failing. Flash would fail (nothing new there, but I digress). Trying to rebuild openjdk6

I’ve completed a full memtest86+ (v4.20), so the RAM looks fine.

131800LOct12:

I’ve tweaked some of the BIOS settings to the recommended. (I don’t know why “Auto” doesn’t set it to the recommended). Stability hasn’t seem affected, but hasn’t fixed the problem. It must be noted that it doesn’t fail in the same place, and not with the same error. I randomly get SIGILL, SIGBUS, SIGSEGV, and a java “shouldn’t reach here” error.

I’ve included the logs from the last build:

September 9th, 2012 by Lucas

Gliding Status Report

I know I haven’t done one of these in a while.

I’ve been solo on the winch a while back, but I’m still having trouble with release with a load still on.

Today’s winch launch wasn’t that bad in that respect, but it was still back released under load.

Not entirely sure what is going on.

August 7th, 2012 by Lucas

WordPress is now working again

It would seem that a few files went missing a few weeks ago, and everything stopped working. All fixed now.

June 26th, 2012 by Lucas

Urgent – Lobby Greens to Uphold High Court Challenge Ruling on Chaplaincy

Reblogging from http://thatsmyphilosophy.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/urgent-lobby-greens-to-uphold-high-court-challenge-ruling-on-chaplaincy/

National School Chaplaincy/High Court Challenge Update:

This is urgent. It would be great if everyone could get behind this today and promote it to your own networks. This is the time to mobilise folks.

The Federal government announced last night they are going to pass legislation to circumvent the High Court ruling on funding for the National School Chaplaincy Program. This is a cynical, underhanded move which, I imagine, won’t impress the High Court at all. It is not at all clear that this attempt to snub the ruling won’t end the government back in the High Court, but we have to wait to see their legislation first.

What we can do immediately, although it won’t overturn the legislation, is try to get the Greens to stand up in Parliament and oppose it – or at least demand amendments to the program. This will get publicity about what is going on and shine a spotlight on what the government is doing. But we need *you* and your networks to help.

As a matter of urgency, please send an email to the following list:

senator.milne@aph.gov.au, adam.bandt.mp@aph.gov.au, senator.dinatale@aph.gov.au, senator.hanson-young@aph.gov.au,
senator.ludlam@aph.gov.au, senator.rhiannon@aph.gov.au, senator.siewert@aph.gov.au, senator.waters@aph.gov.au, senator.wright@aph.gov.au, senator.whish-wilson@aph.gov.au

Here is a sample letter. You can use your own words if you like, but please use the three dot points as they appear so we present a cohesive message.

Subject: Funding – National School Chaplaincy Program

Dear Senators and Mr. Bandt

You will be aware the ALP are planning to rush legislation through parliament to subvert the High Court decision in Willams v the Commonwealth and Ors.

This is an opportunity for the Greens to hold the government to account. The High Court has made a ruling which provides a greater level of public accountability and now the ALP – undoubtedly with the support of the coalition – intend to circumvent that ruling through legislation.

This is an opportunity for the Greens to make a public stand for some incredibly important issues, including public accountability, separation of church and state and our children’s right to a secular public education system.

I would be grateful if the Greens would represent my views in respect to this matter. They are as follows:

1) I do not support the Howard-Gillard program that supplies chaplains of any faith in Australia’s public schools, and I urge you to prevent the continuation of chaplains in today’s forthcoming legislation.

2) If we are to have Commonwealth assistance supplied to schools in this manner then I am firmly of the view that they must be fully qualified as school counsellors, which means they are qualified teachers with a degree in psychology and postgraduate qualifications in school counselling, and nothing less can do.

3) It is time to stop outsourcing this work to third party contractors and these fully qualified school counsellors must all be employed as public servants in the relevant Education departments in each state and territory in order to ensure some high level of confidence in their training, integrity and the outcomes.

Yours sincerely

————————————

Fellow bloggers – can you please consider reblogging this – either cut and paste this post or rephrase as you see fit, but please keep the three dot points intact.

February 13th, 2012 by Lucas

New cat enclosure

Sarah acquired a new cat enclosure, and we’ve erected it just outside the kitchen window:

January 29th, 2012 by Lucas

Gliding airspace data

I’ve started a new project to maintain the airspace and turnpoint data for various gliding programs.

The link to the project site is at http://git.ldjcs.com.au/projects/soaring-exchange. It isn’t much at the moment, but I should be able to work on it in the coming months.

Plans for this project:

Maintain the airspace and turnpoint data.
Create a web-based tool for data extraction.

January 29th, 2012 by Lucas

Gliding Status report

I’ve converted into the LS4a! Yay! I even managed a 64 minute flight my fist go. It flies beautifully.

Here is the OLC for the LS4 flight: Online Contest LS4 Flight

Yesterday, I managed to break the new trim spring in the Junior 🙁

Totals: 63h58 (29h56 PIC) over 171 (45) flights

December 24th, 2011 by Lucas

Gliding Status Report

It has been an extremely long time since I’ve done one of these reports. Never fear, I am still flying. Due to the posting to Adelaide, it has been more sporadic (mainly to maintain currency).

Now that I’m back in Melbourne, I should be able to do more flying. I did my annual check last week, so I’m good for another year. I’ve also started powered flying lessons (more on that later).

Totals: 62h54 (28h52 PIC) over 170 (44) flights.

January 24th, 2011 by Lucas

HDCP Master Key

Another act of civil disobedience (see this post), and posterity, I’ll post the HDCP (think HDMI cyrpto):

hdcp-master.txt

Don’t ask me how to use it (there are some technical instructions in the file), as I don’t know and have never used it.

January 23rd, 2011 by Lucas

Australian National Classification Scheme Review

The Classification board is taking comments on the Terms of Reference for the upcoming Classification Review.

You can read about it here: Classification website. You can also submit your comments on line.

My submission:

With regard to the Terms of Reference (ToR) for the review of the classification in Australia, I would like to make the following comments:

The ToR seems to be based on the old-media view of the world – the use of the terms “industry” and “content and distribution industry”. Whilst a review of “industry” is warrented it is apparant from the experience of the internet that an increasing amount of content is user generated (think blogs, youtube etc). Distribution becoming end user to end user, rater than content producer to distributer to end user. The ToR does not take this into account.

The ToR does not not specify a review on whether classification is warrented (or appropriate) at all in the 21st century, or is appropriate for citizen to citizen communtication (think user generated content above).

The ToR does make reference to classification schemes in other juristictions, but does not specify if Australia should regognise classifications from country-of-origin (with the view to reduce classification costs, prevent doubling-up).

regards,
Lucas James

January 23rd, 2011 by Lucas

WordPress upgrade

Well, I’ve upgraded both apache httpd (to 2.2.17) and wordpress (to 3.0.4). It seems to have gone fine, and pretty urls are now working again.