Earth Hour : symbolic or silly?

Well, wasn’t that fun! Actually, no.

We dutifully turned off all the lights at 8pm, and pondered the meaning of it all — environmental responsibility etc. For a few brief minutes, it was a little special, like christmas, what with the candles and the twinkling lights from the clocks on all the appliances.

And did we feel virtuous? Actually, I felt somewhat oppressed by peer pressure, as if forced to participate for fear of what the neighbours would think of us if we didn’t. But worse than that, ultimately, was that I felt rather silly, sitting in the dark. The problem for me is I’m too rational. Yes, I can appreciate the symbolism, the gesture. But I also cannot avoid knowing that, in terms of overall power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, it made bugger all difference whether I sat in the dark or not.

Eventually, proceedings were unexpectedly truncated by our cat, Pascale, producing a gigantic and very smelly emission of his own. Well, no way was I going to sit in the dark for another half hour smelling that! The Antarctic ice shelf was suddenly a long way off, while that poo was very, very close. In the dark.

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Tags: environment, greenhouse, emissions, cat

Is it already too late for the Murray? | The Australian

Is it already too late for the Murray?

Andrew McGarry and John Wiseman
| March 29, 2008

The nation’s most important waterway is dying from the mouth up.

The agreement reached earlier this week between the states on “saving the Murray” was described by the media as an “historic occasion”. Well, sorry to be negative, but I will consider it historic when the Murray actually resumes flowing into the sea, something it hasn’t done for many years now.

Agreements are all about consensus, which is a polite term for compromise. And unfortunately, compromise will not save the Murray. The problem is that this is, to use a mathematical term, a zero sum game. There is only so much water available (depending on rains), and any water taken out of the Murray reduces the flow to the lower reaches. So, in a time of drought, unless the farms are allowed to dry up and wither, the Murray cannot flow. Present policies are directed at trying to satisfy some of the needs of all of the “players” (if we include the river itself as a player. That kind of response is doomed, because to farmers, half of their requirement for water is useless., and in fact a further waste of water if the crops cannot survive on a reduced allocation. Equally, with losses due to evaporation, a reduced flow to the river doesn’t work, because the trees still die and the lagoons still turn into acidic salt pans.

It may be time to accept rather than fight the forces of nature. Attempting to save the lakes at the Murray mouth are probably doomed, and perhaps the best long-term solution would be to open the gates and let the sea in. This will change the ecology of the lakes, sure, but perhaps nature is trying to tell us something here. Time to give up?

Meanwhile, the problem for Adelaide is its dependence on the Murray for drinking water. Instead of trying to fix the Murray flows to accommodate that, lets recognise reality and work on alternative strategies — increased catchment in the Hills (in case we get any real rains), and desalination plants. These will give us independence from the Murray (and incidentally increase flows to the mouth).

Harsh, perhaps, but real.

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Tags: environment, drought

Book Review: Facebook, The Missing Manual

Facebook: The Missing Manual
by E. A. Vander Veer
ISBN 10: 0-596-51769-6
ISBN 13: 9780596517694
US$19.99

Well, I finally received my review copy last Thursday of this new offering from O’Reilly. That’s the down-side of living down-under — it takes ages to receive anything sent by surface mail. This took so long that I was beginning to suspect some irony in the “missing” part of the title!Anyway, I have it now — and it’s a beautiful thing! I’ve bought O’Reilly books before (“Programming Perl” was top of my bedside reading pile for a long while), and I’ve always been impressed by the quality of the production and the content. This new offering (published in January) doesn’t disappoint. The book exudes quality; the typeface is clear, and I love the fact that the colors used match those of the Facebook site. (I’m sure that was no accident.) (And unlike the manuals of another well-known publisher of IT-related books, the content appears dense and detailed — there isn’t so much whitespace that you suspect the book could have been half the size!)The content is well organised, and immensely detailed. While I’d like to think of myself now as a FB “power-user”, I did discover a few things I didn’t know, which is a tribute to the thoroughness of the author.Writing manuals for software is hard to do well (god knows I’ve suffered through enough of them in my time). Usually they fall into the mind-numbing and ultimately pointless trap of taking you step by step through on-screen functionality — which you can see on the screen anyway! E.g. “Telephone number field — enter your telephone number.” (Duh!) However, while Vander Veer does take us step-by-step through every function on Facebook, she manages to do so with humor and insight. More important than the what is the why, and her she excels, giving us important information about the implications of each field and option, and warnings where necessary about pitfalls.

In summary, I would have no hesitation recommending this book for beginners, and in particular for those who are a little reluctant to join in. The section on privacy is excellent, and the author is at pains throughout to point out where caution might be advised — enough to reassure the most cautious of users. At the same time, she never loses sight of the essential core of Facebook, which is that its fun.

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Tags: bookreview facebook O’Reilly

Hello world!

I’ve migrated from Blogger. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but prompted now by a desire to see how and if WordPress can be used for Library news and events.

Update on Ubuntu

Well, a quiet day at work seems like a good time to catch up on things, and one thing I’ve neglected (among many) is to provide an update on my Linux desktop / Ubuntu experience. If you recall, or even if not, I spat the dummy at xmas over Windows, and installed the Ubuntu desktop on my IBM T42 laptop. That was two months ago, so ample time for me to determine whether or no this was a good idea.

The overall verdict is a resounding cheer and two thumbs up. Ubuntu is providing (almost) everything I need, and most of what I had under Windows. There are differences of course:

The first difference is in speed. The laptop having only 512MB ram, things were a little slow on Windows. Startup was taking almost ten minutes, and I partly put this down to all the extras that our IT people load into Windows. With Ubuntu, startup is just a touch over 60 seconds.

Open Office replaces MS Office, and, while this software is maybe just as annoying in different ways as MS Office, it is certainly no worse and no less robust or featured. Once you learn where the controls are, its as easy to use. No problem here.

I don’t have Adobe Acrobat, but then again, I can seamlessly create PDF files from applications, so I’m not missing it.

I had to dump Outlook, and while Ubuntu comes with something called Evolution, I couldn’t get it to play, so installed Thunderbird. That works brilliantly, and includes a Calendar add-on, so I’m not missing anything there either. And I much prefer the Thunderbird approach to mail storage over Outlook, since I’m not locked in at all. I can read the mail files with a text editor if need be.

For imaging, I used Paint Shop Pro and Picasa on Windows. On Ubuntu, I have, if anything, too many imaging options, but I’m using F-Spot for general image management (replacing Picasa) and GIMP for more serious photo editing.

Other than all that, I’m in Unix heaven. Because I manage a number of Unix servers, I’m finding it much easier to do that now that I have a Unix interface to work through. All the tools I use on the servers are available to me on the laptop, with essentially the same interface. I can instantly bring up a bash shell and run command line instructions. And I have Perl at my fingertips, and I can test all my Perl scripts on the laptop before deploying them to servers.

I’ve also installed the Apache web server locally, so that I can test out Apache-related stuff.

Sure, it’s possible to do this on Windows too (using Cygwin, for example), but this is so much smoother and simpler. As I said, heaven.

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