In NZ the government has declared that raising the literacy and numeracy rate is extremely important to the economic growth of the country. That is very commendable but…. THEN WHY THE H*LL ARE BOOKS SO DARN EXPENSIVE HERE? No wonder nobody reads. It’s like 3-4x more expensive buying the book than the DVD. Even Blue-Ray disks are cheaper. For the price of a mid price book I can get the DVD and the DVD player to match.
So my civil duty it is to tell my fellow new zealanders about www.bookdepository.co.uk. It’s like Amazon but it has a distinct advantage…..FREE GLOBAL DELIVERY!!!! Now that is music to a Kiwi’s ears. No more waiting until you have US$150 worth of books to order from Amazon. Get them in your post box for the price of a book. And that price being that what the book really costs – before our kind bookstores put the gold-lining on the price.
Bookdepository has a very good selection of books and is sometimes even cheaper than Amazon (depending on exchange rate). The fastest delivery (and we have already had dozens) is 4 days with 5-6 being the norm. The longest was about 2 weeks. Every book is sent separately so books that are not in stock don’t delay books that are in stock.
All you bookworms out there rejoice and order to your hearts content!
This will cause more kiwi $$$ to go off-shore and will force our bookstores out of business. But…see it from the positive side. You’re doing the country a service. You are supporting the upward trend of literacy and abolishing these ridiculously high retail book prices. Let’s force them to re-think what they are doing.
Oh and… Mr. Key you can probably save a whole lot of tax-$$$ if you start ordering schoolbooks from overseas 
Ubuntu Linux is my trusty fellow at work. It is ideal for all those tasks I need to do. I have been running it from version 8.04 onwards. Now it is nearly time to upgrade again with 9.10 just around the corner. This will be another LTS release (Long Term Support). So here’s the countdown….
I have checked out the alpha and beta releases and they look spectacular. Definite improvements over 9.04. I’m also very interested in the advancement of the server side with cloud computing being the big new thing.
Tags: cloud computing, Event, Linux, Ubuntu
Do we need another certification body? ITCP (www.itcp.co.nz) is doing a concerted effort at a holistic NZ IT certification. Somehow that really is starting to bug me. Do we need all these people telling us we can do something and charging a substantial fee for it?
It costs about $370 to get a certification and another $125 every year plus a 3-yearly retest at $170 to remain certified. That is $1165 for 5 years or $2130 for 10 years. And that’s only certification. No courses to train and no materials. Just imagine spending that money on books! I think they’d teach you a bit more than the cert ever can. You can even specialise on your topic and not be over generalised.
Once you’ve read those books & invested the time to understand them you can’t tell me an employer won’t take you. By that time you should be a real expert in your field. Nobody will have charged for a piece of (unbound)paper and the know-how gain is all your doing. It gives you an immense sense of accomplishment. You’ll still go to training courses and conferences advancing your know-how. If that is not what you’re doing already I’d guess you shouldn’t consider yourself an interested expert in your field anyway.
I do agree that it is difficult for companies to recognise a good employee/candidate. It takes proper screening and good interviews with intelligent questions. The certification organisations try and convince you that their cert gives you the assurance of quality and standardisation. Well….do they compensate for losses if that is not the case? If not, what is the use? Have I checked that the certification complies with the standards of my company? If not, are my standards wrong? Will that person then fit my company?
I think certifications (I do exclude product related certs here!!) are just an easy way out for companies employing people. They think if the cert’s there they can go and blindly employ. Of-course it is ideal for recruitment agencies and managers. You can rest assured that you’re promoting someone good – yeah right! So employing is: Person is alive – tick, has a CV – tick, can spell IT – tick and has the right certs – tick. Done. An employer that does that will only get my services if I’m really desperate (and even then I’d rather not). For all involved parties it is good to remember that employment is a two-way road. The candidate chooses the company as much as the company does the candidate.
I like to be challenged and prodded in an employment process. No cert is ever going to save me from curve-balls in real employment meetings. Only my know-how and education will (and education can be obtained by several means not only the institutionalised way. See www.buccaneerscholar.com for more detail). What an employer is/should really be looking for is engagement and interest. Without those you have a working drone (which sometimes could be what you really want but most of the time not). Where is the cert qualifying engagement and interest?
When I have people apply for a job that have an ISTQB certification for example, there are two groups that I can discern:
- Those that have been dragged there by their companies (and have never thought about what they are doing)
- Those that aren’t good testers and need something that will give them a foothold
I have yet to meet someone who has taken the exam that admits to stand behind the ISTQB certification. I am guessing the same thing will happen to ITCP. Certs in my opinion are actually a qualifier for mediocre abilities and/or a disinterest in my profession. If I’m good then a certification is an insult to my abilities. If I’m not a cert won’t help me to become better it will just show that I’m as good as any other of the thousand cert-Joe’s out there. I’d be better advised to do something spectacular, amazing and outright creative with my time. No matter what it is as long as it has some relevance to my job and I can speak to it. It will get you the job.
So why do these organisations not make a course with an exam and stop calling it a certification? Then everybody who thinks this course is a good idea can take it and those that don’t can stay away without getting a stigmata? By pushing it as a certification and even going down the path of trying to make it mandatory it just plainly looks like an IT-Tax…. I wanna work in IT so I have to pay $$$ and we’ll do an examisomething so that it has a hint of legality – yeah right!
Maybe someday someone will change my mind but I doubt I’ll ever warm up to certification. Remains the hope I won’t be run out of town anytime soon.
Tags: certification, ISTQB, ITCP, rant
One thing I loved about the “old” Quicktime was that you could watch a video at 1.3x speed or similar. That allowed you to get through material quicker. With Quicktime X the feature seems gone. Now macosxhints.com comes to the rescue.
“A simple hint for the new Quicktime X player. Clicking the fast forward button increases video playback speed to 2x, then 4x then 8x. 2x, however, is a bit fast to watch a video.
To increment by .1x, hold down Control and click fast forward. I find 1.3x speed works well, and is very watchable. This also works for reverse.” (link)
Thought I needed to share that. Saved my day today! 
As you might have noted yesterday my site went down. 
What had happened was that I had tried an apt update/upgrade (something like automatic updates on Windows) on my Ubuntu 8.10 server. It didn’t go quite swimmingly. Nothing new because my installation was a little wonky anyway. But as I restarted the machine it would not let me boot anymore. I was getting an immediate kernel panic. *shock*
So I did what I wanted to do a long time ago anyway (and was now forced to do) – upgrade my system. From a good friend I got an old 2.5″ 20GB HDD to replace my USB stick with that was running my web server. Not that the USB stick was a bad idea or anything but there’s the odd thing that is made easier by having a hard drive. I chose a 2.5″ model as I still am quite stingy when it comes to power use.
So I tried installing Ubuntu server 9.04. That failed due to whatever reason. So I installed Ubuntu server 9.10 Alpha 6. Very courageous here! …which went all fine.
It was nice to see that the USB stick was not all lost and could be read by the OS. So after installing some needed packages it was necessary to install my WordPress site (i.e. this site). Now that would be a challenge I thought. Not quite so….
- Copied the WordPress directory,
- changed the mySQL password in the wp-config.php file,
- copied the apache2 site config files,
- created the WordPress database I used for my site,
- imported the database from my weekly backup file via phpmyadmin
- and restarted apache2.
Voila, here is the site! Easy as. *phew* …. *PHEW*
So after the initial shock it took me less than 24hrs to recover my site. There’s still quite a bit of detail work left but that I can tackle at a slower pace. Impressed by both, Ubuntu and WordPress here. And of course my lucky stars that I could still read that USB stick. I think now it’s time for regular full backups of my web server!
Tags: Open Source, Ubuntu, Wordpress
Here in NZ we’re a little off the beaten track. It has it’s advantages and disadvantages. One of the down sides is that Apple gear is usually quite a bit pricier. Over the last 2 years the prices have continually been creeping up. At first this was due to the exchange rate turning against us but then someone seems to have thought it an opportune time to get some buffering on those profits.
Now that Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) came out Rebecca and I decided to invest in the whole Apple product range we use. Meaning that we needed new versions for the OS, iWorks and iLife. We have 3 Macs so the family package (5 licenses) is the way to go.
This package costs NZ $479 in the Apple store. In the US it costs US $229. Google tells me that that equates to about NZD $330. Ok….so what’s the $109 difference ($41 is sales tax)??? That is definitely a bit much for postage. So this is pure additional profit! For what? Living in NZ??? Is this the living-happily-in-NZ-tax??? I honestly feel conned by Apple. And I certainly wasn’t going to stand for it. So here’s the trick on how to save lots of dough….
Go to Amazon US and get search for Mac OS X there. You will find the family pack advertised for $199 (!!) or even less. Get it shipped to someone you know in the US and then get them to ship it out to NZ. Voila, you just saved $100+.
Apple is a cool company and I love their products and will keep on buying them but if they think they can fund cheap US sales by conning the rest of the world then their outa luck. I think this should even get investigated by the commerce commission. Wonder who I write to there…
One of the biggest issues in modern IT is storing all that data. I know that I have drives coming out of my ears at home and it still is not enough. I have over 3TB of current storage divided into active data and incremental backup storage. I still do not feel as safe as I’d like. None of the drives are RAIDed but Data is duplicated at least once depending on importance.
Over the next year I predict that I will need another 2-6TB of storage to cope with added data volumes (I intend on starting to film in 1080p resolution which is about 4GB for 15min of video). Currently the largest available drives are 2TB at a cost of about $300. The issue is not with the drive itself though. It is about how and where do I connect the drive to the network.
External USB/FW drives are too slow for real use (they are OK for incremental local backups though). So the remaining solution is some kind of NAS. My HTPC/Mac (see below) will fulfill that function. It is attached via 1Gbps Ethernet and has six drive bays available and a large power supply. The unit already sports a 250GB boot drive and a 1.5TB data drive. The issue is that with that all the SATA ports on the Atom board are used. So the next drive will have to be attached to an extra SATA PCI card (which will have to be Mac compatible).
The new Snow Leopard also supports wake-on-use. That means the machine will wake on access of a drive. Currently I still need to wake it manually via WoL. Remains to be seen when Snow Leopard (10.6) will be “available” on the Intel Atom boards with all needed features supported.
The issues I have with data in my private home start to mirror what has been happening for quite a while in the datacentres. Not only does that mean I need ever more technical know-how at home to cope but it also means that something like the solution below gets interesting.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
This is of-course too large for private use but it does solve some of the issues you might encounter when building your own NAS.
One other thing that is hugely annoying in NZ is the lack of broadband flatrates. This effectively prevents you from performing sorely needed and large off-site backups. Currently I solve this problem by storing a USB hard drive off site. This HDD contains a copy of the most important data that I have (by no means all the data!).
So, what have you done for your backup today?
One year’s gone and Stanz 2009 has just finished. I like Stanz it gives us Test Analysts/Managers a regular wake-up call. It is the time we get reminded that the job we do can be more. It can be a calling, a field of interest and an engineering practice.
Matt Mansell’s (DIA) talk about Growing Great Test Analysts contained one comment that really struck a chord (not that the rest of the talk wasn’t excellent). He said (my own interpretation) that calling us testers is really putting down our capabilities and our profession. Instead we should make a point of calling ourselves Test Analysts. We ARE analysts and good testing is learned the hard and painful way. We are not monkeys or Business Analysts in sheep’s clothing. I am as guilty as are most. I will in future make a real effort in using the proper term of Test Analyst. It is a small but vital step in the right direction.
Stanz 2009 fltr: Julian Harty, Karen Johnson, Lee Copeland, James Bach
And the above really highlights what Stanz is all about. We go there to get reminded that we are in a testing profession. The speakers entice us to learn more, to read more and to get off our complacent derrierès. The 2009 Stanz definitely had the right set of speakers for this. I again enjoyed the quasi familiarity of the event. I doubt there are many places in the world where the attendees and speakers can get so up-close and personal to exchange ideas.
The effects of the recession were visible but that was to be expected. Even so I’d say the attendance was good and it was nice to see all those familiar faces again and meet some new ones.
Who knows, 2010 might be the year I switch sides from listening to talking. We’ll see…..
Today i installed the Mac OS X 10.5.8 Combo Update on my Atom 330 Mac (see below). After a reboot it was back to 1024×768 only. So I guessed the driver Kexts were overwritten by the upgrade. Just re-install the Kexts and all should be working a-OK. Hyperthreading is still not supported. Am now pretty convinced that OS X isn’t recognising the CPU correctly.
[Update] With the upgrade to 10.5.8 the sleep mode breaks. There is currently only a fix for Voodoo kernels but not the plain Vanilla ones. Very annoying this is. Maybe I’ll have to re-install.
[Update 2] I have re-installed to 10.5.6 because that gives me sleep and Atom 330 Hyperthreading. I’ll then wait & see what Snowleopard brings…
Tags: Apple, Atom 330, Hackintosh, HTPC, Mac OS X
The Computerworld writes in their news-ticker today that “Ultrafast broadband coming to NZ“. Well kudos on Telstra for bringing us 100Mbit download rates next year. Oh wait…..
You’ll have either 5,10 or 20GB cap. So that only means that you’ll reach your download limit on the second of each month and not the fourth! What is it with peoples craze for speed? It’s the same stupidity as with the fiber-optic cable to the curb. We don’t need any of that if we’re going to d*ck around with these outdated data caps. What needs to go is the Telecom bottleneck-monopoly of the Tasman cable (Kudos to Kordia for wanting to install that 2nd cable).
If we had free market conditions on the international data highway we’d have no caps, it would make sense to up the bandwidth and private companies would invest in infrastructure.
But we have a Telecom controlled monopoly so nothing happens and now taxpayers have to cough up $1.5bn so that we can get some cables in the ground only to find out that they won’t solve any of our issues.
So go Telstra! 100Mbit will not really bring us any advantage. Give us a flatrate and keep it at 10Mbit!!!
Tags: broadband, fibre, government, Personal, politics, rant, Tips