tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48040810095661257312024-03-06T05:35:22.302+11:00Critical AlphaCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.comBlogger150125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-7207639117611845222015-03-04T22:17:00.002+11:002015-03-04T22:17:50.854+11:00MurderLet's be clear about this. Indonesia is committed to murdering Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan. There are many things wrong with this.
Indonesia and in particular President Joko Widodo assert that this is their sovereign right. That may well be, it doesn't make it right.
State sanctioned murder of this type is wrong. It belittles every one of us. It reduces our humanity and stamps us as peopleCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-63708963063524094262014-03-25T20:03:00.003+11:002014-03-25T20:07:05.150+11:00Dyneema RiggingWhen Zuline was launched she had beautiful hand spliced galvanised rigging. It was done by a very talented friend and it was very effective rigging. It was also very heavy - heavier than it needed to be.
Roll forward nearly 10 years. Zuline's mast was in sad need of some care and attention. She was launched in mid winter and it had been very difficult to get varnish to go off in the cold Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-48737147700553239602013-03-09T11:14:00.001+11:002013-03-09T11:22:43.566+11:00Markdoc as a Task Manager!If you are familiar with Extreme Programming, you will be familiar with Backlog and Sprint as concepts. Otherwise a simple description is that Backlog is all the bits you have to build and Sprint is those bits from the Backlog that you are currently focusing on. These are usually expressed as short "user stories". Please don't tell me that I've over-generalised...I already know that!
So if I Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-61961501654396687862013-03-03T20:26:00.000+11:002013-03-03T20:27:08.463+11:00Lightweight Continuous Documentation BuildYou know this fixation we all have with the "document"? Yeah, that's the one, the one where we get all precious and don't want to show anyone the "document" until it's all nicely polished.
Well nuts to that!! I've been casting around for some time now to get a nice simple workflow that combines a Git repo with a lightweight wiki engine. I've finally got it up and working and happy. It's a bit of Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-63377523538931582132013-02-14T13:19:00.001+11:002013-02-14T17:15:51.028+11:00iPad at Work - WritingThis is the first of a series of posts about using the iPad at work. I'm not going to be writing about the iPad as a calendar tool or as a way to look at your email. That's just so fundamental that we'll take it as read that you already do that.
What I want to talk about are the more interesting uses of iPad at work.
Writing
This is pretty fundamental as well. We nearly all need to write at workCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-32386101087161802782013-02-11T19:45:00.001+11:002013-02-14T17:16:18.541+11:00Markdown to WordSo here's the use case:
You are increasingly working on your iPad at work. It means you don't have to transcribe hand written notes into some other document and you can write documents completely on your iPad. The problem is that the iPad and Microsoft Word are poor partners. The best way to write on the iPad is to use a Markdown editor. It's a simple markup language, anyone can learn it in 10 Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-18853116717377059422013-01-16T10:52:00.000+11:002013-01-16T16:20:30.345+11:00RanjiniThe short summary: Ranjini is a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee - she has been assessed as a refugee by Australia. She has also been assessed by Australia as a security risk. Because of these two interlocking assessments she can neither be returned to her home nor released into the Australian community. She, and her 3 children - a baby boy was born last night, are detained indefinitely. You can see moreCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-10431035018125494992013-01-10T16:34:00.000+11:002013-01-10T16:35:27.904+11:00Being a Git!!To paraphrase Linus Torvalds, he’s an egotistical bastard and so he always names his software projects after himself. Hence the name Git!
This post is not for coders, hackers or other nefarious creatures who write software for a living. This post is aimed at the common (wo)man in an ordinary old business.
Why would that sort of person be interested in Git? The Git that’s a distributed version Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-84149143728927778052013-01-03T22:42:00.003+11:002013-01-03T22:42:32.846+11:00The Unexpectedness of LossGoogling around tonight, as no doubt we all do from time to time, I was hit with a sudden sense of loss. I found that a bloke I knew briefly, but well, had died just over 3 years ago.
Ray Lynskey was a young bloke in the Royal New Zealand Airforce in 1978 when I met him. Ray was also a glider pilot. I was younger by a few years, a first year Uni student, far from home and finding life tough.
MyCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-22125945120046097032013-01-02T11:15:00.002+11:002013-01-02T11:16:19.594+11:00The Distributed Social WebIt's 30 years since the Internet began with the roll out of TCP/IP. Earlier than that the basic design of the Internet was generated in the ARPANET. The Internet and its progenitors had as a key design goal a distributed and resilient infrastructure. Poor reliability of links and nodes meant that the network needed to continue to operate even if links or nodes went AWOL.
Those requirements remainCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-28450350806003005722013-01-02T09:11:00.000+11:002013-01-02T09:11:13.520+11:00Which Blogging Platform?I’m looking for a new blogging platform without a lot of success. So, here are the criteria:
Must store posts in a user-accessible directory structure as text files. I’m not going to be stuck again unable to get posts out if I want to migrate somewhere else.
Must be able to use Markdown as the preferred markup language.
Must be self-hosted.
Technical requirements:
Any of PHP, Ruby (but I’m Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-3840785424397120072012-11-28T13:40:00.000+11:002012-11-28T13:40:22.180+11:00Drafts and Dropbox SyncI like Drafts on iOS. It’s simple, quick and efficient. However the way it appends to Dropbox annoys me.In my Dropbox I have one directory called nvALT which is where I keep all my miscellaneous text files. I rely on nvALT to find stuff in those files and nvALT will only act across a single directory. I have a scratch file in nvALT that I use for all text clipping I do. I use a LaunchBar shortcutCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-86515211922596357882011-10-02T11:20:00.001+11:002011-10-02T11:21:33.111+11:00On death and dying...A close and dear friend is dying of cancer. He's young - early 50s and has been very energetic, active and fit. A high tumour in his large bowel meant that it was diagnosed late and the rest...is inevitable, despite his vigorous efforts to stave it off.
He has had surgery, chemo, a recurrence, a bowel obstruction, more surgery, a second opinion, peritonitis, a major wound infection and has been Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-82726680138400995872011-09-18T10:19:00.000+10:002011-09-18T10:20:34.363+10:00A failure of logicDaily we hear Gillard and Bowen bleating that they don't want to be responsible for another dreadful accident like the sinking of the asylum seeker vessel at Christmas Island on December 15 2010. They therefore go on to say that it is necessary to process asylum seekers off-shore, in order to "break the people smugglers' business model" and thus to prevent a further tragedy of that sort.
By so Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-21613603006781532822011-09-11T16:54:00.002+10:002011-09-11T16:54:58.546+10:00Jabber, XMPP and why not let SMS die?The history of internet messaging, as opposed to email, is somewhat vexed and perhaps nerdy. I suspect that's why Jabber has not yet caught on like it should. That's not to stop you getting on, what is now, a fast-growing bandwagon.
First what's Jabber? Jabber is an internet standard which was developed in the 1990s and is now called XMPP - eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. You can findCritical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-60530638061678281312011-09-11T08:14:00.001+10:002011-09-11T08:34:49.385+10:00The mire we find ourselves inIt's been a tumultuous couple of weeks, and at the end I'm left with a peculiar quandary. There is no longer any party in Australian politics that comes close to representing my views. I saw on a young bloke's FaceBook page, under the heading "Politics" a simple statement: "Politicians are wankers". Based on the behaviour in Canberra and Spring Street, not to mention Macquarie Street, I can only Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-4742762398923971032011-07-16T08:46:00.007+10:002011-07-17T07:16:43.352+10:00A burnt offering: Carbon Pricing doesn't have to be like thisAustralian politics has done something over the last couple of weeks that I had thought impossible: it's taken a turn for the worse!Before we get down to the specifics of that malaise, let's just look at the environment. The US is critically close to a situation where it won't be able to meet its obligations. That's an amazing and frightening situation. Unless Obama reaches agreement with the Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-13468402973093952092011-06-25T18:28:00.004+10:002011-06-25T18:48:21.124+10:00One small step for Australia...Listening to the discussion around Go Back on SBS this week has given me some heart that we might have moved a fraction of an inch from a hate and fear filled rhetoric towards a clearer view of asylum seekers as people who are in difficult situations and worthy of our support.The difficulty is the entrenched political positions in Australia. But even there I see an avenue for major change. The Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-65031580609118719362011-06-12T08:59:00.003+10:002011-06-12T09:37:26.185+10:00The grass is Greener!An important milestone is coming soon. From July, the Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate. In addition Adam Bandt is one of the numbers keeping Julia Gillard in power. This makes for interesting times for the Greens and interesting times for Australia.Before I go any further I want to make one thing clear: I am NOT advocating for intemperate behaviour on the part of the Greens Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-31045554932816004562011-06-04T21:06:00.002+10:002011-06-04T21:30:24.458+10:00An open letter to Bob BrownG'day Bob,I decided it was time to write to you, because the country is pretty fucked and we need you to act.At the last election an interesting thing happened. The collective mind of Australia created a hung parliament. We also gave the Greens a bigger vote than we ever have before. In my electorate we elected the first lower house Green in Federal Parliament.We did all that for a reason. It Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-42462220493498763932011-05-28T07:24:00.007+10:002011-05-28T14:13:56.630+10:00Immigration DetentionYesterday, I had the most depressing interchange, on Twitter, with a fellow called @StreetSmarts111 . His profile called out his conservative political bent. The reason the interchange was so depressing, and indeed the reason I ultimately blocked him, was that there appeared no intent on his part to engage in an exploration. This Tweeter simply wanted to pound a mandatory detention path.What Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-27686918408224247562011-05-26T11:42:00.004+10:002011-05-26T12:30:36.056+10:00Spinal Fusion - The end of stage oneThe last week has been a bit of a milestone week in terms of my recovery from the surgery. It's also caused me to pause and reflect about the whole process. So this post is really a brief review of the achievements and a little bit of reflection and recounting of my learning.First the milestones. I had my 8 week review with the surgeon. That was great. Many surgeons only want to hear the good, Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-69901655790414333092011-05-15T18:08:00.005+10:002011-05-15T18:42:04.346+10:00DX before DinnerLast year, in a fit of boredom, I decided (for reasons still unknown to me) to go off and do my exam to become an amateur radio operator. I've been qualified as a marine radio operator for years and also have flight radio operator quals. I wanted to do my amateur license though. First off I did a two day course and got my Foundation license. This is an "operators" license and the lowliest of the Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-58506648975705152002011-05-15T14:29:00.003+10:002011-05-15T14:56:21.768+10:00Eight Weeks, has it really been Eight Weeks?The first week of this whole saga was spent in hospital and it was a bit of a blur, the days and nights seemed to fly by, and in retrospect I suspect a fairly heavy drug load helped that. Since then you've been able to read about the ups and downs here on a weekly basis. This is the last weekly update unless there's something pretty interesting.This week has been all about reducing pain relief Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4804081009566125731.post-68989671078578967412011-05-10T11:02:00.005+10:002011-05-10T11:41:46.158+10:00People Smugglers, Refugees and Confusing Push with PullThere's a continuing misguided swirl of political rhetoric in Australia with respect to the role of "people smugglers" and the issue of "queue jumpers". I'm prompted to write this, in part, by an ongoing conversation on Twitter with @kristinmoore2 and @timhollo. 140 characters simply isn't enough sometimes.Let's try to get some clarity through the middle of this highly charged argument. Firstly Critical Alphahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16907258677958422214noreply@blogger.com1