Choice quote:

At the beginning of windsuit base jumping, we were trying to get as far from the wall as possible… and now it’s getting boring, so we play around.

Note to directors of James Bond movies: Quantum of Solace kinda sucked because it was a generic action flick and lacked distinctive Bond-ness. You can fix this by immediately hiring some of these guys to do this stunt in the next Bond film. All will be forgiven.

Do it now.

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That is all.

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Having proper backups is your insurance policy against theft, fire, accidental damage, etc. for all of your photos, code, blogs, letters to your parents, whatever. If your house burned down today, what would you lose?

Learn from the mistakes of others by observing the case study in abject backups FAIL that is journalspace. I hope they didn’t have investors, because that kind of completely boneheaded failure would have me looking up the words fiduciary duty.

For those who don’t understand RAID, I’ll explain it simply: RAID is not a backup. Ever. Anyone who tells you differently is a) lying, and b) probably selling something. All RAID does it keep your computer running if one of its disks dies. This doesn’t happen all that much when you only have a couple of disks. I’ve had 1 disk fail in my home servers in 15 years. Most of the time, you need backups to recover from humans doing stupid things. I do stupid things all the time. I’m special because I know that I do this, so I’ve set things up so that I can recover from doing stupid things occasionally.

Now is a good time to review Jamie Zawinski’s excellent advice. It’s really not that hard, or expensive, to have solid backups that work.

RAID can be even more complex than that, and, quite frankly, if you don’t understand it, don’t use it and blindly assume everything will be fine. Either learn what you’re doing, leave it to someone who does know (I am one of those people), or lose all of your data. Those are your only choices.

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I’ve Learned a Lot

I sold my house about 6 months ago. This has left me with a bunch of cash (a scary amount for someone who thought the mortgage on the house was a ridiculous amount of money at the time), which is just sitting in a high interest savings account. We’re planning to buy another house better suited to the two of us than this one, but we’ve been looking seriously at what we’re going to do with our combined finances. Over the summer break, I’ve been reading up on investing. I’ve been learning a lot.

I’m not completely ignorant of financial concepts; I understand compound interest, inflation, I’ve owned shares (some of which even made me money!), and I’ve lost money on stupid speculative purchases. I’ve not made any spectacular moves that would have the business press hail me as a guru. I’ve certainly done a lot of dumb things with money in the past. However, I have managed to buy a house and have no debt at 32. Not too shabby. I also graduated from the AICD company directors course, which means other people believe I know enough about reading company financial statements to be able to make assessments of whether they’re insolvent or not, among other things.

Why This Book Is Awesome

The recent shenanigans in world financial markets tells me that the so-called ‘experts’ are often wrong. The more I learn about what some of them have been up to leaves me flabbergasted that they were allowed to get away with it. There are a lot of managers not paying adequate attention to what their underlings are doing, or, what I suspect is more likely, there are a lot of managers who plainly don’t know what they’re doing. ABC Learning’s practice of reporting multiple income streams as a single line item on company accounts is astounding, not to mention that some of what they called ‘income’ plainly wasn’t. To quote from Essays, attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

“How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”

I”ve read quite a few books on investing and finance, and this should be the next book you read on finance. Seriously. It’s that awesome. Mr. Buffet’s financial record speaks for itself, and this book is a collection of his essays that he has sent to the shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, over the years. It’s pure condensed financial wisdom from one of the smartest financial guys in the world.

But Wait, There’s More

Having finished that one (which I will continually refer back to), I’m now reading the book that Mr. Buffet thinks is awesome: The Intelligent Investor, by his mentor Benjamin Graham. In Essays, Mr. Buffet refers to this book, and Mr. Grahams approach, on many occasions. Their philosphy is about making solid, safe returns on investments they understand. They’re not chasing theoretically optimal, or amazing, market-beating returns. And yet, following this approach, Berkshire Hathaway is one of the best investments you could have made at almost any point in the past 50 years. There are precious few stocks you could buy with their sort of record. One assumes that maybe they’re on to something.

Much of the problem is that there is an awful lot of jargon in finance. I work in IT, so I’m used to more than my fair share of jargon, and I’m now getting a new appreciation for why senior management, with no background in IT, would find discussions of technology mystifying. I find myself in a similar position when I read about bond coupons, convertible offers, percentage yields, and so on. These terms have very specific meanings, and some exist more for historical reasons than any other.

For example: bond coupons. Back in the days before computers, bond certificates would have little ‘coupons’ on them, just like the ones you get in your supermarket jumk mail. They had dates on them, and you would clip them out at or after that date, and hand them over to a bank, who would give you money in return, based on the amount of the bond, and it’s percentage interest. A $100 government bond with a rate of 10% (its yield) might have yearly coupons, each worth $10. So now, when referring to this payment today, people often call it a ‘coupon’, even though no physical coupon is required.

And that’s why finance is confusing. All these special terms for things obscure what people are really talking about for those not familiar with them. Just like me talking about the SAN having hot spindles and needing to have the I/O load re-balanced. WTF?

Knowledge Is Power

But, if you learn the special code, the jargon, suddenly a lot of things start to make sense. The trap, as always, is to get too wrapped up in the jargon, and the abstractions, and to forget about what’s actually going on underneath. Hence the current debacle caused by people who should have known better playing with Mortgage Backed Securities and Credit Default Swaps. This is where Warren Buffet and Benjamin Graham come in.

In Essays, Mr. Buffet is able to explain some somewhat complex ideas in simple, concrete terms. He is an excellent writer, and while he has a formidable knowledge of arcane finance and accounting, he is able to explain ideas in a way that the relative novice can easily understand. He’s also not shy about explaining what some of Wall Street gets up to, and decrying it for the borderline fraud that it is, and with a wry humour to boot.

Essays sets the standard for good financial books. I now expect a book on finance to simply and clearly explain what on earth it all means, and why I should care. I expect the jargon to be clearly defined, and used consistently. I expect that I will gain new insights into the way things really work, not the way the economic theorists think it should work if the world was filled with purely rational people. If it can’t get close to the standard set my Mr. Buffet, why on earth should I waste my money, or more importantly time, on it?

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My desktop system was replaced with a New! Shiny! Intel Core 2 Duo system before Christmas, and that freed up some hardware to be used for the server that hosts this website. I simultaneously wanted to replace the aging Debian install with a fresh Ubuntu server install. It’s all gone rather well, considering that it was a major, MAJOR upgrade, and it’s basically done in less than a day. Here’s a quick summary of what I did:

• Server upgraded from a Pentium-something and 512MiB RAM to an AMD64 Athlon with 2 GiB of RAM
• Debian stable replaced with Ubuntu 8.10 Server
• Cyrus IMAP server replaced with Dovecot
• Bind8 upgraded to Bind9
• Zope 2.9 + CMFPlone updated to latest repository builds
• Wordpress upgraded to 2.7
• Various other software upgraded as a result of going to Ubuntu 8.10

The new hardware alone has dramatically improved things. Mail is processing at least twice as quickly. Web pages are loading, much, much faster than before. There was a noticable delay in pulling up the main seafelt.com page, which is served from Zope. It’s now near instant over the LAN, so you guys should be seeing much improved page load times, too.

I’d been planning this upgrade in my head for a few weeks now, and was starting to dread having major issues. In the past, there’s always been some little issue that pops up and makes everything hard. Usually something relating to software dependencies.

The ease of this upgrade is a credit to the Ubuntu guys. I really am just loving this distro now, and can’t really see a reason for using any other distro for all my computing needs. I’ve now got 3 servers with Ubuntu, and a laptop. The 8.x series is tremendously usable, stable, and things just work. Which is ace.

Now it’s a few days of watching to see all the automated systems roll through and make sure everything works as before. Then I can decommission the old server for good. Hooray!

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This is eleven different flavours of awesome.

No, I don’t plan to grow up any time soon. Why?

No related posts.

An example he gives is that kids who might be really good at, say, ice hockey, don’t get selected for preferential treatment (extra training, access to better coaches, etc.) early on, so they miss out on the opportunity to be awesome. As a result, the people who were picked, but who wouldn’t have been as good all other things being equal, end up actually being the best. The kids who didn’t get all the extra training, coaching, and so on, aren’t any good at ice hockey, relatively speaking, after a few years.

This seems to be common sense, in many ways, but Malcolm makes some very interesting points about what this kind of systemic bias does to the way that people capitalize on their natural abilities. There might be some kids who would be awesome long distance runners in the U.S., but because the focus over there is on American football, those kids aren’t likely to try out long distance running, or get noticed and trained to be as good as they could be. The same goes for many other areas.

On a personal level, you can interpret this in two ways. Firstly, you could interpret it as meaning that you should focus on what you’re naturally good at. In this way, you’ll be capitalizing on your own natural abilities, and are more likely to be very good at that activity. Secondly, you could interpret it as meaning that if you do more of an activity, you’ll be better than those who might be naturally gifted, but who don’t work at it.

Figuring out what you’re naturally good at can be tricky. What if you live in the middle of Uzbekistan, and you’re a naturally gifted SCUBA diver? What are the odds that you’ll get to practice enough to be as good as someone who lives in Miami, Florida? Instead, you choose some other endeavour, like the kids who missed out on ice hockey. Maybe you choose to be an accountant.

The good news is that if you work at it, you can be a really good accountant. Better than someone from Miami, Florida, who should have chosen SCUBA diving, and who bumbles along not working very hard because they don’t really like accounting. Since you’re going to have to do it a lot to be good, it helps to pick something you like doing.

The magic trifecta is to be naturally gifted at something you enjoy, to realise this early, and to spend a lot of time doing it. That’s the recipe for amazing success. Second best is picking something you like doing, and doing it a lot. Third best is just working hard at something you’re not naturally good at, and that you don’t really like. You’ll still end up better at it than people who are gifted, but don’t work hard.

I guess I’d better stop writing nonsense on the Internet and get back to work.

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People are too busy to care, and they think that it’ll never happen to them. Watch this, and then tell me it won’t happen to you:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=akKeLNj9OUI

That’s why I care about these things.

How about you?

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I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, as those who know me are aware, but I can accept that there is a place for their software. It’s now getting to the point that I’m much more used to Unix based systems, and the specifics of how you admin a Windows machine are just so different that I find it much harder to achieve what I want to do in a reasonable amount of time. The hardware upgrade and software reinstall of Ubuntu (from AMD64 to x86) went much smoother than attempting to get Windows working.

I find Windows hard to use when all is not well, because it abstracts away all of its innards. When things go wrong, I find it hard to open the bonnet and get my hands dirty in the engine, fixing whatever is a little awry. Too much of the ‘fixes’ in Windows land appear to be “reinstall something, and then reboot”. It’s all very IT Crowd “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

Windows also seems to suffer from ailments that I just don’t get under Linux. I had a LAN party some years back, and someone’s machine had a virus… which affected my GameOS. I didn’t have virus protection installed because

• I never connected that machine to the Internet (this was pre-Steam et al)
• I have a firewall between the GameOS machine and the big, bad Internet
• I didn’t want to have to continually update software to catch the latest viruses
• I didn’t want to have to pay for software to fix a problem that should never have existed

so the virus was able to get in because I trusted my mate’s friends more than I should have. I now use free virus scan software to protect against infected friends.

I think Windows can be quite good for certain things (like games), and you just need to be very specific about what those things are. You also need to understand and accept that with Windows comes a variety of caveats:

• Install anti-virus software, and get regular updates to its blacklist
• Patch regularly, particularly if you’re Internet connected
• Replace Internet Explorer with something better, like Firefox
• Don’t ever change the hardware without major planning, and a full set of backups

Now I’m off to replay a bunch of games from scratch. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all!

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I know I said previously that I wouldn’t buy NVidia again. I actually bought a Gigabyte card, which has an NVidia chipset in it. There wasn’t much more choice in the shop for dual-DVI output, and it is at least a known quantity. I was pretty sure that the driver would work under Linux. It turns out they’ve done quite a bit of work since the earlier drivers.

You can now run an NVidia setup application from within X that will actually save the configuration settings to xorg.conf. No more hand-editing the file to add obscure card configuration settings so you can do more exotic things with their hardware. TwinView (the dual head setup) is now easy enough to turn on, and you can tweak all kinds of other parameters through the GUI. There’s always the hand-editing mode if you need it, but it Just Worked when I clicked the appropriate buttons. Well done there, NVidia.

Now that I have a more modern graphics card, I wanted to check out the new Compiz fusion window manager that can do all the funky screen effects. I’d seen other people do these funky sliding transitions and whatnot, and I wanted to join in, dammit! Well, now I have. And my is it pretty.

To be honest, there are a bunch of effects that are pure eye-candy, but that really hurt usability for me. Like the Wobbly Windows thing that deforms the windows as you move them around. That makes it really hard to line them up nicely where you want them to go. But my major finds so far are a couple of window management effects: Ring Switcher and Scale.

Ring Switcher is like Alt-Tab for changing windows, but instead of them being a single line across the middle of the screen, little icon versions float up and you scroll left and right around the 3D ring effect to find the window you want. This is quite neat, and better represents what’s actually happening, I think.

Scale is way cool, though. Alt-Shift-Up brings up a icon grid of all the windows in the current desktop, making it really easy to find the window you want, with mouse or keyboard. This is awesome for someone like me who runs multiple xterms in a desktop while coding and testing. I’ll now be able to flip more easily between different xterms to find what I want. Woo!

There’s a bunch more stuff to explore, and I haven’t even tried booting into GameOS to find out what Half-Life 2 and Spore look like with this new card.

Do you have a favourite Compiz feature?

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