Australian schoolkids could be getting Linux laptops for high school

Australia’s prime minister Kevin Rudd has been pushing a “revolution in education” since before the election. Labour’s plan was to digitise the education sector and bring a laptop to every schoolchild. Well, now, those laptops might run Linux. Red Hat’s CEO is over here right now talking with federal officials.

It makes sense from a cost-cutting point of view, and also from a “not wanting the kids to play Counter-Strike during class” one, too. Instead they’ll be playing Tux Racer. The chances of this adoption happening (at least in New South Wales) aren’t all that low, either: just look at how Brazil, Germany, Italy and others have deployed Linux in their education sectors. The article also points out that Red Hat is already used widely in the NSW state government.

If this happens, it will bring about a huge increase in the awareness of Linux in Australia, as well as force more and more institutions to be standards compliant — all those schools are going to have to know what ODF is now. The best part is that these switches are just going to become more and more common as Linux makes advances and the world becomes more aware of its options when it comes to technology.

Ringo Starr finally stops signing autographs

He’s going to throw away anything anyone sends for signing from the 20th of October onwards. Fair enough. It’s been almost four decades since the Beatles broke up! He can’t have that many fans from all his new stuff. It’d piss anyone off to have to spend hours every day signing your name over and over for people selling signed Beatles shit on eBay. It’s hard enough to move in new creative directions without having hundreds of people remind you of your past, daily.

When the Smashing Pumpkins came recently to Melbourne for the V Festival, Billy Corgan got angry at the crowd which consistently cheered when old classics came on and booed when he tried to play his new stuff. I understand how that could be frustrating, but, then, he really shouldn’t be playing under the name of the Smashing Pumpkins if it’s really going to be “The Billy Corgan Band” with a little help from the old drummer or something. It was his own (probably greed-inspired) decision.

Anyway, this is what I pictured as soon as I heard it:

Ringo Starr in "Brush with Greatness"

Dear Marge.  Thanks for the fab painting of Yours Truly.  I hung
it on me wall.  You're quite an artist.  In answer to your question,
yes, we do have hamburgers and fries in England.  But we call French
fries `chips'.  Love, Ringo.  PS: Forgive the lateness of my reply.

and:

Dear Sally.  In response to you letter of December the 12th 1966,
me favourite colour is blue, and me real first name is Richard.
Thanks for the snapshot.  You're a real cute bird.  Love, Ringo.
PS: Forgive the lateness of my reply.

I guess those days of Ringo tirelessly going through every last letter are over. If he hadn’t told everyone and just stopped sending things back maybe he would’ve been accused of theft.

PartedMagic: a free Linux-based bootable partition manager

When you want to resize, convert, move or do anything to the partitions on your hard drive, you need a partition manager. In days gone by, the best solutions for this were commercial. I used Partition Magic for a long time, when FreeBSD and Linux had trouble working with NTFS drives. Thankfully, there’s now a totally viable and blissfully FOSS alternative: PartedMagic.

PartedMagic blank desktop

PartedMagic is only 45MiB, and can boot from CD or USB. It supports all of the major filesystems, has a nice GUI (with Firefox installed!) and includes TestDisk — a piece of data recovery software that has saved my digital life a couple of times now. There’s enough software on there for you to perform most rescue operations.

Doing what it was made to do.

While PartedMagic has just about as many features as you could want it to, it’s still being actively developed. In fact, they just released 3.1 RC1, which updates the kernel and base software as well as giving it a nice graphical overhaul. It now uses LXDE instead of XFCE, and all the artwork has been redone — it looks extremely polished now.

Some of the software included

PartedMagic is something that you should always have a copy of lying around, just incase. It’s a very handy rescue CD. While it doesn’t do everything that it’s bigger sibling System Rescue CD does, it does enough and it does it reliably and well.

Music Monday: Medeski, Martin & Wood – “Just Like I Pictured It”

This instrumental piece is short, smooth and polished. It’ll make you want to get up and dance slowly on the spot with your eyes closed.

Via tuneage, my favourite music blog.

Chaser’s writer slams VSU

Dom Knight (a former writer on the Aussie show The Chaser’s War On Everything) has posted a long, scathing attack on Voluntary Student Unionism, and on the Rudd government for not getting rid of it more immediately. They’re reversing some of the damage that Howard did, but are still fucking around.

Dom sums the whole situation up well:

No-one seriously objects to the government funding Olympic athletes, or running an art gallery, or paying for community centres, so why is it any worse when a university or a student union does it?

and:

John Howard destroyed our valuable campus culture to make an unimportant ideological point, and the sooner his work is undone, the better.

Worth the read.

PMSBuddy.com

I really wish there were some females home at the moment so I could work out whether PMSBuddy is mildly funny or wildly offensive. It makes me laugh — mainly because all of the ads are for flower delivery services, lingerie shops or dating websites. Finally the web is being put to good use.

There are tips, such as “First and foremost, don’t ask ‘Do you have PMS? It sure seems like it'”. It also has stories. I particularly like this one:

I’ve been married for 29 years.Never cheated or anything .Once a month the bus to crazy town show’s up and guess who’s on it . You got it ! She started it yesterday morning got my coffee newspaper and just did my morning routine.Crazy showed up and decide that I did not do enough to help out And I was a lier screaming, hollering just nut’s.Finally after 20 min.of this I just said you are an F-ing Idiot.

Men holding firm together, I love it.

FiveThirtyEight.com or "how I keep up to date with the US election"

Polls are inaccurate. There are several reputable companies that try hard to gauge the opinions of voters, but there are just fundamental restrictions that stop any one poll from being trusted. This is a shame, because it’s nice to know how the world’s most important election is going. Luckily, Nate Silver has built FiveThirtyEight.com. From their FAQ:

What is the mission of this website? Most broadly, to accumulate and analyse polling and political data in way that is informed, accurate and attractive. Most narrowly, to give you the best possible objective assessment of the likely outcome of upcoming elections.

It aggregates all of the polling data as it is released, and adjusts it according to how well those polling companies have predicted previous elections. It does all kinds of fancy statistical tricks, and then runs ten thousand simulations of the election. Based on how many of these, for example, McCain won, it will work out the probability of him winning when the election comes around. There’s an element of chance in there as well, to better reflect real life. I’m no statistician, so it’s much better explained in the FAQ.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed checking in on the site every day or so to see how Obama is doing. When I first started going to the website, he was slightly behind McCain in the probability of winning. As of today, he’s got a 90.9% probability of winning. Even more fun to watch is the map of the US with each of the states coloured according to how much they’re in favour of the democrats of republicans. I like seeing the blue slowly spreading into traditional red territory.

Part of the reason I find the US election so much more interesting to watch than the Australian one is that there’s so much variety in America from state to state. Nate updates the site very frequently with commentary on how different factors are affecting the standing of either candidate, and what matters to Americans in different parts of the nation. Nate’s travelling around following the campaigns and comparing what he’s seeing to the changes in opinion polling. He’s in the process of doing a big entry for every state in which he details major demographic factors such as race, religion, education and economic status of the voters in that state and whether that factor works to McCain’s or Obama’s advantage. Here’s one for California. Check out the Starbucks:Walmart ratio.

There’s so much bullshit about the elections in the news, it’s nice to see a really scientific way of sorting out what really matters when it comes down to voting. It’s not just numbers, though: I really enjoy (and learn from) reading Nate’s analyses.

Retiring

Scott Adams is asking why the current system of retirement — in which individuals can live for decades without contributing to society — exists:

“Now we have people retiring at 60 and living to 100. Do you still feel good about that? Even if the retiree has saved money for retirement, society is still picking up a big part of the tab. You have the Social Security payments that usually exceed the amount paid into the system, and all the roads, police, firemen, and other services that are being funded by other people’s taxes. The list goes on.”

I agree with him. It’s really crazy that we have this arbitrary age line where, once you cross it, you no longer have to give anything to society — just take. Not all men and women who turn sixty or seventy are infirm or unable to do some productive work. Even if they’re not holding down a day job, they can still be doing something for society in childcare centres and schools and lots of other places. If they’re really not fit to be productive in any way, then they should be in a retirement home or hospital.

We’re giving away huge sums from the collective taxes we pay to men and women who are going to spend decades eating, drinking, smoking, watching television and going to the doctor. All the time without giving anything back to the community who fund their inactivity. There really needs to be a rethink of the situation. Check out Adams’ idea for a carbon-trading-style scheme.

This Is Not Art: Wrap-up

So TINA finished on Monday. I’m back shivering in chilly Melbourne after burning in sunny Newcastle, and relaxing for the first time in a week. It was fantastic, and a shame that I couldn’t’ve blogged more of it while I was there. Next time I’m going to bring a camera and a laptop.

Things that happened:

• I won the Cipher Cities game design competition. $200 JB Hi-fi voucher and a year’s subscription to EDGE! I enjoyed chatting with the team, though I felt sorry for them because not that many people got involved. There was way too much on for most festival-goers to take the time out to design a game.
• I met one of the editors of Vertigo, Tracey, who also works at Next Media, which publishes PC Powerplay and Hyper. She’s since talked to the editor of PCPP and set up an internship for me there. Brilliant.
• I sock-wrestled with Geoff Lemon, slam poetry champion of Melbourne and former poetry editor at Voiceworks. He won, even with a cracked rib.
• Helped produce and distribute Nanoworks, a zine created by Voiceworks and Farrago and contributors specifically for TINA. We were up until 3am doing it in Staple Manor.
• I got an awful haircut.
• Attempted to dance to over-the-top avant-garde electro noise bands.
• Watched wanky, existential anarchist theatre:
• Got assaulted by protesting zombies. Constantly.
• Met lots of young, talented, creative and ambitious people.

There are photos up on flickr.

Here are some from Annie Ly:

The point: come to TINA next year or you’re a fool.

This Is Not Art: Bike Fixing

So the hostel I’m staying at for TINA is a 10 – 15 minute walk from the fesival hub. A bike would be a fantastic solution to this problem. The good news: TINA has a bike library. The bad news: I didn’t preregister a bike weeks ago, so I don’t get one.

However, there are piles of discarded, unloved and very broken bikes that the organisers have collected. If you can repair one to a ride-worthy state, you can borrow it. I tried to do this today under the tutelage of a bike-hippy-mechanic guy named Daniel, and didn’t get very far before I had to go off to the introductury electronic music workshop. It looked pretty rideable to me, but Daniel wanted to take the whole thing apart and make it fantastic (and safe).

I’m going to go back and do some more work tomorrow and hopefully get a bike out of it. There were lots of other people doing the same thing. The whole point of it, as Daniel and the others kept pointing out, is that we throw out bikes that could really easily be fixed, and that can still have a lot of value derived from them.

I’m really shit at working with my hands, but most of the operations are pretty simple if you have someone telling and showing you what to do. I find the experience really wholesome, and I can step back and look at something and think “Hey, I just made that, kind of, except it was actually made in a factory and then broken and then I put it back together but not really because Dan did most of the work.” Fantastic stuff.