Map of the Ethno-Linguistic groups in the Caucasus region, from Wikipedia.

As far as I can tell it’s about the same distance from T’bilisi to Ts’khinvali as it is from Canberra to Goulborn, I never did like those Goulborn types … as if that’s even how you spell Goulborn, surely it’s Golborne!

If Brendan Nelson and Greg Hunt were in charge:

“There has to be a real reduction [in emissions] from other countries before we take any steps that inconvenience Australians.” - Brendan Nelson

“There has to be a real reduction [in emissions] from other countries before we take any steps that inconvenience China.” - Hu Jintao

“There has to be a real reduction [in emissions] from other countries before we take any steps that inconvenience Indians.” - Manmohan Singh

…

And that’s the end of that, no pesky emissions trading schemes to setup, no clean coal bollocks to worry about, in fact nothing to do at all - and who says the Liberals had forgotten about small government.

If only Brendan Nelson were in power and petrol was 5¢ cheaper, we wouldn’t have to become a one car household … or maybe not!

Hopefully the first of many defeats after the sham that was 2006.

As Jeremy mentioned, the IBM QS22 was released a few weeks ago. The QS22 is the newest Cell processor based blade server, sporting the new PowerXCell 8i chip, and up to 32 GB of memory.

Because the QS22 can support larger amounts of memory, Linux needs to enable the IOMMU, whereas on previous blades that was optional. For some workloads this could lead to a performance loss, so I spent some time early this year working on a solution which avoids the IOMMU overhead.

Although he’s too modest to mention it, Jeremy maintins spufs, which is the key infrastructure in the kernel which enables the Cell processor’s power - the SPEs. If it wasn’t for Benh, who also works with us in Canberra, the QS22 probably wouldn’t even boot. And as of this year we’ve also had Mark, the NKOTB, working on Cell.

As of this week Roadrunner, powered primarily by the QS22, is the current world’s fastest computer, according to the Top 500. It’s also the first computer to break the “petaflop barrier”. That means it can do 1 quadrillion calculations per second, that’s the same as 1 million billion or 1000 trillion .. or a lot.

Did I mention it runs Linux

Another great TED talk, this one from Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International.

Her talk is well worth a watch, under five minutes, and pretty disturbing. I wouldn’t call the US a well functioning democracy, but at least it’s functioning. However with an increasingly uninformed population, and a government openly spreading propaganda, one wonders how long they’ve got.

I guess some of the blame must lie with ol’ Rupert.

Stumbled across these seriously nice looking offices the other day. I have office envy. Although perhaps the nice offices are to make up for the fact that they make marketing software, blurgh.

Eventhough I’ve never had one, it’s pretty obvious to me that private offices are the best option in terms of productivity for concentration-workers [1]. I also want a pony.

Browsing on officesnapshots.com, it seems most tech companies still don’t go for private offices. Or perhaps it’s just that the “cool”, “hip” companies are all too edgy to have private offices … man.

A special dishonorable mention for the flickr offices, cube farm without proper cubes even! Photo by mylesdgrant.

The new Mozzilla offices come a close second, saved by the fact that presumably they’re planning to fit them out a little better. RedHat aren’t really trying either, in Brazil at least.

I don’t mind the look of the Last.fm office, although it reminds me of the “lab” at Uni, which was not the most productive place in the world - although fun.

I can forgive some of the smaller companies for having grungy startup style offices where everyone’s sharing a beanbag, but for the bigger companies I just don’t get it. You’re paying all these programmers to build your products, so you pack them all in a room together where they can’t concentrate? I guess the upfront costs are too much for the accountants.

Even the companies that do make an effort, seem to focus more on gimmicky stuff, cafeterias, break-out rooms etc. The core office spaces, where you’re going to have to spend some time - face it - aren’t that special. One aspect of that is probably that “cool” stuff is better for marketing yourself to potential employees, just don’t mention that at some point they will have to do actual work.

Part of Google’s Zurich office, photo from Picasa (which has no visible copyright info?)

So I guess for a while at least, a lot of programmers and the like will continue to get their best work done in the wee hours of the morning or night, when all is quiet and the logic flows.

Or perhaps we should just all work from home, then we can all have our own personal perfect office, and  we could stop worrying about petrol too.

[1]: I just made that up. But I mean anyone whos work involves concentrating on one task for tens of minutes at a time, like for example programming

Is it just me, or is Ubuntu Hardy sucking so far?

So far I’ve got:

• Pidgin: randomly segfaults, glibc double free etc.
• Rhythmbox: randomly segfaults, no stack trace?
• F-Spot: randomly dies, it always did, but it’s more common now.
• Epiphany: dies sometimes loading flash - that’s probably flash player’s fault though.
• Metacity: vertical maximisation is broken, very annoying.
• Kernel: fails to resume more often than previously, sometimes locks up completely when undocking.

The killer is when you try to file a bug report you’re supposed to attach the info from /var/crash, but I have nothing in /var/crash!

Can I have my money back?

Another great campaign from the folks at GetUp.

It seems the honeymoon is over, and not only is Kevin Rudd means testing the Solar PV rebate, now he’s trying to derail an international treaty to ban cluster bombs! I haven’t seen anything in the news, but I guess that’s just part of the conspiracy.

So go sign the petition to ban the bombs.

I also liked part of their intro:

As one of the very last acts of the Howard Government, Brendan Nelson bought $14 million worth of cluster bombs - weapons that contain mini-bombs, some of which remain unexploded on the ground for years awaiting innocent civilians.

I wonder how many 5¢ petrol vouchers you could buy with that?

ps. everyone’s already subscribed to GetUp’s email list right?

In case you haven’t already been, get along to Hume to check out the new climbing gym. It’s run by the same folks who run the Mitchell gym, and it’s brand spanking new, no shiny worn-out holds!

There’s a bunch more routes, and they seem to be more interesting than the Mitchell ones. Although perhaps that’s just because I’ve been to Mitchell a million times. Still, there’s a bigger bouldering cave, a whacky roof section, a bouldering mezzannine, and stacks of overhanging routes.

We went along on Friday and really enjoyed the variety. I took a few shots, but they don’t really do it justice, it’s at least twice as big as it looks in any of the photos. And as you can see it’s pretty empty, so get along while there’s plenty of room!

View the photos »