Category: Uncategorized

I know making fun of Australia’s proposed citizenship test is all the rage, but really, some of this stuff needs paragraph length answers.

9. How are Members of Parliament chosen?

The given answer is by election but the first thing I thought of was which ones? Also how?

There are important, if arguably out of date or unfair, reasons why the two Houses of Parliament are elected differently. Each member of the House of Representatives represents a reasonably equal number of people in a geographical region. Each member is elected by instant run-off voting, and the entire House is dissolved at every federal election. The Senators on the other hand are at least supposed to represent the states, with each state having twelve senators and each territory having two regardless of population. They’re elected by the entire state using a modified single transferable vote (you don’t have to assign your own preferences, you can select a pre-assigned list of preferences, normally chosen by a party) Only half the Senate is dissolved in most elections, except where they disagree with the House of Representatives too much in a particular way.

Who is the head of the Australian Government?

This one has kept the press entertained since at least the 2000 Olympics. We do still have a Queen after all, and she has a Governor-General who exercises her powers here, although not to the extent of getting to have regular little chats with the Prime Minister.

The question is usually phrased as who is our head of state? and is thorny precisely because our constitution doesn’t use the phrase. Also, despite not being a republician (far from it), the current Prime Minister does like to do many of the more ceremonial head of state-like things himself (particularly when they involve shaking hands with heads of states, make of this what you will) even though by convention either the Governor-General does them or the Queen pays us a visit. So this question is an odd one. The only correct version is discuss the role of the Prime Minister and the Governor-General in the Australian government and recent controversies surrounding it.

Serving on a jury if required is a responsibility of Australian citizenship: true or false?

I suppose this one slides by. There are lots of people who aren’t required to do jury service and a number who are forbidden from it (it varies on a state basis, actually), but someone slipped in the phrase if required!

As an Australian citizen, I have the right to register my baby born overseas as an Australian citizen: true or false?

The answers say ‘true’, but really it’s only nearly true. If you yourself have citizenship by virtue of descent (being born overseas to an Australian citizen), there’s also a residency requirement for you to register your own children.

Australian citizens aged 18 years or over are required to enrol on the electoral register: true or false?

This one is, frankly, down to sort of true, because there’s apparently nearly a million Australian citizens living overseas and they do not have to enrol on the electoral register, and in fact some of them can’t choose to either.

I’ve edited Wikipedia in minor ways: there is one article that’s almost entirely my work, another couple that I’ve edited heavily and a sprinkling of minor stuff. So this entry is mainly prejudice confirmation, but a comment by Zora on Making Light supports what I’ve always suspected heavy involvement would be like, both the good and the bad:

One strength that folks here haven’t mentioned is that if you take your editing seriously, it’s an educational process. I started by editing the Muhammad article and ended up owning shelves full of scholarly texts on early Islamic history. Every argument sent me to the books and I learned more and more. I’d say that I have at least the equivalent of an MA in Islamic studies after that experience.

The grind sets in when you start having the same arguments over and over, with endless new waves of idiots who don’t intend to learn anything. If you’re just replaying old fights, you aren’t learning anything yourself.

… It is FUN to see a good article emerging out of a back-and-forth with someone who disagrees with you, but does so productively.

…

The POV warriors, however, were tireless. They drove me out. I was losing my temper and wasting my time trying to keep controversial articles respectable. I ended up feeling as if I were shoveling dung, and hating it.

I’m back from Romania, about 32 hours in transit. I shouldn’t, morally, count hanging around in Vienna for 8 hours with friendly locals who knew the places to get wine (thank you Gina, and hi from Australia!), but since it was part of my 48 hour "no sleeps only a few short naps" marathon I guess I have to. Six hours of sleep later, I am vaguely alive. Exciting stories of being sick in Romania later.

When I want to forward an email to someone as an attachment (usually because I want them to reply to it without having to snip gunky forward ‘headers’ in the body and preserving Message-ID and such) I can’t always forward-as-attachment, sometimes because I’m replying rather than starting a new mail, sometimes because I’m forwarding messages from multiple folders.

Up until today, I’ve resorted to all kinds of tricks to add other messages as attachments to mutt messages. One old favourite was copying them (shift+c) to a new maildir, attaching the individual files and manually setting their MIME type to message/rfc822. This does actually work but there is an easier way, the attach-message function, bound to shift+a by default.

On the screen where you normally add attachments, press shift+a. Navigate to the folder containing the messages you wish to attach (if they’re in different folders, just do this once per folder). Tag all the messages you want to attach (the default keybinding for tagging a message is ‘t’). Quit from the folder browser (‘q’). All tagged messages will be attached to the outgoing mail.

I was surprised to see this pop up in the news relatively quickly after my posts about the price of laptops in Australia. (Other electronics are also very expensive, I’m just not looking to buy them right now.)

CommSec chief equities economist Craig James, quoting from the latest consumer price index (CPI) figures, said that while the Australian dollar had risen by almost 19 per cent in the 15 months to June, prices of technology goods had only fallen by 7 per cent.

…

James added: "What it’s showing is the benefits of falling global technology prices and the higher Australian dollar seem to be flowing to retailers rather than consumers."

Retailers fail to pass on exchange rate bonus

Just so that everyone feels appropriately sorry for me (I’m currently in Iaşi in north eastern Romania):

• Balkans brace for heatwave, 18 dead in Romania
• Weather wreaks havoc
• At Least 13 Dead in European Heat Wave

Yeah, I know Melbourne had a 43℃ day in December 2006 and Sydney had a 45℃ day in January 2006. I experienced both! But they have buildings that fend off the heat better! And air-conditioning in some places…

We fixed our bug.

Yeah. We spent hours on that, poring over bugs 38688 and 116996 trying to figure out what was stealing the memory addresses that by rights belonged to the SATA disk. And actually, I think there was a genuine bug with ide-disk stealing addresses from ata_piix, just like pnpacpi does in bug 38688 (38688 is a helpful bug for working with help one of my disks is missing confirmation). But it wasn’t the boot that blacklisted ide-disk that fixed the problem, it was the one two after that, after we tried switching the working DVD burner with the hard drive, and then moved the hard drive to a new slot.

I swore to myself while this was going on that it was not going to be A Learning Experience, as in I was not going to be all well, I did spend six hours in the depths of despair, but that’s OK, I learned something. But actually I do feel good for knowing more about the kernel now. GRRR.

We now have a brand new computer… which is unable to read the hard drive on which we store all our mail, photos, etc etc.

Updates to come, I guess.

I have been rather talkative lately haven’t I? Well, never fear kiddies, because not only is my laptop dead (needs new power supply, spent $230 to get a fix that lasted for all of two weeks) but our trusty router/fileserver/machine of all trades also just failed completely in the middle of me switching USB plugs. Failed as in cannot boot as far as the BIOS. Failed as in the motherboard won’t even beep in alarm at us. Hopefully not failed as in ate all our data, but we can’t tell yet.

So I’m online-deficient for a while. Everyone keep Andrew’s laptop in their thoughts OK? Because it’s all we have left… sob.

Seeing Yellow: did you know that your printer is likely printing a unique pattern of dots on your printouts such that someone with appropriate information can identify which printer (and therefore which small group of people) printed it? Well, neither did I, until I read Mako’s blog entry about the Seeing Yellow project.

Fact about me you probably did know: my household doesn’t have a car.

Fact about me you probably didn’t know: my household doesn’t have a printer.

The Tyranny of Distance: Part 2, more reasons why being an Aussie geek in a big big world is a pain. If you head on over you can also see me account for some of the painful aspects of travel that I’ve only learned from living with someone who once commuted to London for four day’s work and has done so several times for a single week. (The amusing plan whereby he’d go to London for a week, come back for a foreshortened week’s holiday and go again for another week never came to pass though, so there’s no competing with those people I once saw in the paper talking about how they’d once flown to London for a single two hour business meeting and then flown straight back. Yeah, business class, but even so.)

Of course there’s some kind of offset we can apply for the considerable advantages all being either native speakers of English or fluent speakers with regular exposure to native speakers, plus wealthy, minus widespread monolingualism. How does the balance sheet look then? Not sure.