Chris's Random Ramblings
Headed out for a walk to Tinderry Twin Peak, near Michelago just south of Canberra. Saw an echidna, and quite a few large goats. All were pretty shy, but at least the echidna was slow enough I could get a close up photo of it. I had to wait a while for it to calm down and stop trying to hide its head between two rocks. One of the goats was sleeping in the sun in the middle of the track, but quickly took off when it saw me coming.
Last week was new toy week with an iPod and a T41p laptop arriving. Took a day to get everything transferred and setup on the laptop but Xinerma (how did I ever live without that!) and DRI are working, though not together. Spent a few hours trying to get suspend to RAM working with ACPI, but finally gave up and went back to using APM.
Setting up the iPod I noticed that it supports a very limited number of timezones. Interestingly the only Australian timezone is Brisbane or Brisbane (DST), which is strange not only because Apple chose Brisbane to represent Australia, but Brisbane doesn't change its time over summer. Luckily they don't appear to know that, and the time still changes by an hour. Little bug aside, it is a very nice portable audio player, especially compared to my previous one, a four year old PJB-100 which is about 3-4 times bigger.
Martin writes more about Wikipedia. He comments that:
As an example of this filtering in action, the Australian Gannet page was originally created as an attack on Wikipedia, but now it has useful content.
I wonder if this is really true? I certainly don't know of any factual inaccuracies in the information, but the page was created by by googling for relevant websites. I'd say its representative of what people who publish pages on the internet, that google has found, believe to be true of Australian Gannets.
I do find it rather concerning that lawyers are using Wikipedia for legal research, and actually citing it in cases. Orin Kerr, an associate professor of law, had a look at a few pages on topics he believes he knows fairly well and noted that:
Its entries seem to be a strange mix of accurate statements and egregious errors.
He does say that this is only a tentative conclusion based on a few sample queries, and I don't think you can extrapolate that to all of Wikipedia. I think its most accurate in the non controversial scientific areas (eg whats a hectare), and least accurate on topics which are controversial, as people are beginning to use it to promote ideological agendas. Factual errors created not just from vandalism, but also garden variety, well intentioned ignorance. Like other sources of information, its important to understand its limitations and weaknesses.
Sometimes Canberra gets accused of being out of touch with the rest of the country. This sort of came up in a recent IRC conversation when talking about the recent federal election result, and a friend mentioned that they hadn't spoken to anyone who was happy with the Liberal party being returned. I suggested that Canberra is a bit of bubble.
I didn't really have any figures to back this up, so I went looking for some information on Canberra - some basic statistics on income, education and crime, compared to other parts of Australia. I found some data on the ABS website for 2002/2003.
For equivalised gross househould income, the average income in the ACT is is 29% above the national average. Canberra also has the the youngest population, second highest employment to population ratios and relatively low unemployment rate. Also the proportion of people deriving most of their income from government pensions and allowances is the lowest in the country.
Looking at education, it has the highest year 12 retention rate (for males it is almost 20% higher than the national average). For people aged 15-64, about 30% of the population has at least a Bachelor degree or higher, compared to the national average of 17.8%. The second closest state is Victoria with just under 20%. The crime rate in Canberra is also well below average in nearly all areas except motor vehicle theft and other theft.
So I think I'm justified in saying that Canberra is a bit of a bubble compared to the rest of the country. Whilst there is still poverty and crime, it is in general not as bad as most other places, and people are significantly better off than in other cities in the country. Perhaps its this privileged position that we're in that leads many of us to have different priorities from what we want from the government.
I haven't been keeping up with web design techniques for the last few years, so I spent Sunday night learning CSS. Hopefully my web pages look a little less last-century now.
Democracy is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get, but one thing you know for sure, there'll be a lot of empty wrappers before it's your turn to pick up a choccy.
"Many trekkers have actually begun to enjoy their brief stints with the rebels"
Thats one way to explain you might get held up along the trail. Though apparently they even issue receipts.
talloc allows you to create hierarchies of memory allocation, and then when freeing a parent, having all the child nodes also freed automatically. It also allows you to attach arbitrary destructors to nodes which are run when the memory is freed. One example of using a destructor is to close file descriptors. These features allow you to remove a lot of complicated or cluttering error paths from your program without leaking resources. It brings to C some features of C++. Appealing to those who have a strong dislike of programming in C++. Next on the list may even be exception handling.