Time for Change

(And I mean real change).

I’ve know for some years our political system is in trouble. With the election of Tony Blair (although previous PM’s did pave the way) the position of Prime Minister seems to be more and more presidential. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if we had a system designed around a president, but we don’t.

It seems far too often important bills are drawn up in secret meeting (although to be honest most of the times they ain’t that secret) in No 10, with the occasional deal done with the leader of the opposition. Its still goes through he parliamentary procedure but with the use of whips and “timetabling” the parliamentary procedure is just done for show boating – a bit of theatre if you like. You get the feeling they only go though the process as they have to.

The Digital Economy Bill was a great example of this. Both the second and third readings allowed next to no time to discuss the bill. In the third reading hardly any of the bill got discussed, and that’s with amendments been dropped to allow more to be covered. It completely ludicrous that this situation is allowed to occur, and that none of the main parties seem to be willing to do anything about it. We may as well do away with the house of commons if this is the case. I mean the only time its seems to be full is PMQ, and that’s just a slanging match, with some pre-staged questions either designed to embarrass the government or to allow them to boast.

As for the election – well its not looking good. So far it seems to be about one party saying boo hiss look how bad the other party is – we’ll be betters. You get statements from them saying that x will or won’t do y. Well to be honest I don’t care. I don’t believe you when you say that and anyway I’ll find that out for myself. What I want to hear is what you will do and what you want do (and possibly why).

In case anyone of interest does happen to read this – here’s some idea in what I’m looking for in a candidate (in no particular order):

  • No more PFI. Its cheaper for Government to borrow, so what’s the point in PFI?
  • Parliamentary process reform – allow proper time for discussion, public consultation etc. Exepect in the case of emergency allow a week to pass between each stage. Ban the use of whips*
  • Expense reforms – pay raises for key members to bring them in line with reasonable industry and public sector roles. Clamp down on misuse of expense, and expense privileges not allowed to anyone else (IE claiming for accountants etc).
  • Limited public sector pay rise until economy picks up – say max ~£500 to help balance the pay gap
  • Commitment to more use of free and open source software, including ensuring no public services are limited to only MS and Apple systems
  • Removal of the Digital Economy bill and start work on a new one
  • Appoint Tom Watson as Digital Tzar
  • EU – Put serious work and effort into making the EU more democratic and aim for actually sorting out the issues with the EU finance so that the auditors will actually sign it off for once
  • Pubs – Tackle the tied system. It doesn’t work and is in desperate need of reform.
  • Science – Seriously increase funding for science including education.
  • BBC – Keep 6 Music etc and cut the real wastes of money. Stop pandering to Murdoch
  • Patents – NO SOFTWARE PATENTS
  • Copyright – Reduce the copyright length down to something more reasonable, introduce a fair use law
  • Environment – Increase recycling and attempt to stamp out the current trend of electronic items been consumables. Decrease out dependence on oil to minimise the effect of ‘peak oil’
  • Planning Reforms – To stop the bully and bribing big business use to get things past.
  • Increase funding for Rail Infrastructure and new trains.
  • Remove crown copy right and replace with laws on fair reporting and quoting for newspapers etc
  • Libel Law – Stop Libel Tourism and allow a right for free publication of science papers and comments
  • Whistle-blowers – Clap down on the abuse most whistle-blowers experience after there actions have become know.

There probably lots of other things I’d like to see if I put my mind to it – however the parties themselves should be coming up with these ideas, ensuring they are feasible and proposing them to us rather than bickering between themselves.

Here’s hoping things pick up from here. If not it may have to spoil my vote.

*In some case I can accept dismissing people from the party etc in case of voting against any issue the government got elected on or against key party beliefs.

April 11, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  Comments Closed

Naptan to GPX Waypoints (OSM)

If anyone has been following the goings on of OpenStreetMap of the uk you may have noticed the appearance of a load of Bus Stops (or duplicate bus stops if they where already in OSM). These have come from a database called NaPTAN kindly supplied to OSM by the UK Department for Transport and Traveline. See the OSM Wiki for more details.

These new points now need confirming/merging. I’ve also got a new GPS (BGT-31) which can alert me when I get near a waypoint – so I though why not load up the new data as waypoints into my GPS?

Heres the rough script I’ve written to download the data and convert it to the right format for my GPS. It also delete the name field, and changes the local_ref field to be the name, dropping the prefix 450. This is because the GPS only shows 6 characters for the name of a waypoint and in my area the last 6 characters are probably the easiest way to identify individual bus stops in 6 characters.

#!/bin/bash
wget http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.6/node[naptan:verified][bbox=-......] -O /tmp/naptan.osm
xmlstarlet ed -d "//tag[@k='name']" < naptan.osm | xmlstarlet ed -u "//tag[@k='local_ref']/@k" -v 'name' > naptan2.osm
sed 's/450//' < naptan2.osm > naptan.osm
gpsbabel -i osm -f naptan.osm -o ozi -F naptan.wpt

Just change the bbox to the area you want and it will generate the waypoint file which can then be uploaded to the GPS. It is a but rushed but it does the job.

September 27, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: OSM  Comments Closed

Zenoss, VMWare and Critical “is up” alerts

I’m currently working on setting up Zenoss to either replace or supplement our current network/server monitoring systems.

As its in test, it got stuck on our currently relatively unused “old” vmware environment (ESX 3). After initially going well it start to go wrong. We kept getting critical alerts that a server was up. Switching zenping to debug didn’t help either – it offered no new information and made the problem worse. As its open source I thought I’d take a look at the source, and hey presto I found the suspected problem. Stuck in an extra debug line, and confirmed it.

The problem – well it was an issue with the clock on the server caused by running under vmware , it was jumping about leading to negative rrt on pings. Funnily enough zenoss didn’t like. I’ll be submitting a bug so that it comes up with the slightly less cryptic error of Ip xxx.xxx.xxx.xx is up. To fix the problem, I had to specify the clocksource in the kernel options. See vmware KB 1006427 for details.

If you can’t fix this for some reason or can’t reboot server, for now you can put an event transform for status/ping in place to suppress them.

import re
 
match = re.search('ip (25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?) is up', evt.message)
if match and evt.severity==5:
	evt._action = 'drop'

September 6, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Linux, VMWare, Zenoss  Comments Closed

WordPress: Stopping the Sidebar from Printing

I’ve already blogged about this, but here’s a new method on how to fix the problem. This one doesn’t bloat the site as much, and keeps the css files down to a minimum.

Please note: I’m assuming you still use the default theme. Things will be slightly different with other themes, but in general the same principal should apply.

In the file header.php remove media=”screen” from the following line:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

In style.css, just before the line

/* Begin Typography &amp; Colors */

Add

@media screen {

At the bottom of the file add the following line:

}
@media print {
    /* style sheet for print goes here */  
   #sidebar { display: none; }
}

Bingo no wasted paper from printing the side bar.

August 14, 2009   Posted in: Howtos, WordPress  Comments Closed

Exim: Deliver some email address on local domain remotely

Most of my email is handled by a server I run, except for a few legacy address I can’t really move for now.  Before I had been lazy and send simply relayed all mail that didn’t have a local mailbox onto the second server.  However I was forwarding shed loads of emails to duff address.  To fix this I have entered a new router into exim and removed the other domain from the relay list.

special_remote:
  debug_print = "R: special_remote for $local_part@$domain"
  driver = dnslookup
  domains = pobice.com
  local_parts = lsearch;/etc/exim4/non_local
  transport = remote_smtp
  ignore_target_hosts = 127.0.0.0/8
  no_more

I then have entered the local_parts into a file.  Everything else then gets bounced, rather than been forwarded and bounced later on.

Word of warning – I’m no exim expert, but this seems to do the trick for me.

July 24, 2009   Posted in: Howtos, Linux  Comments Closed

Setting Up Blog Again

Any one who has been reading the Live Journal site will now I haven’t been well.  Because of that I couldn’t be bothered the fix blog.pobice.co.uk when it failed due to a Debian upgrade.

Well things have change, I’m slowly getting around to setting up my wordpress blog again, but on a better address.  I intend for this to be my home page as some point in the future too, as the old site isn’t really relevant to me today and is rather, well dead.

This means stuff doesn’t really work yet.  It’ll get fixed at some point soon I promise.

Update

Stuffs mostly fixed.  Thats enough work for now

June 14, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  Comments Closed

inputlirc

Just found a package for a bit of software in ubuntu called inputlirc.

Ubuntu lists it as:

Zeroconf LIRC daemon using input event devices
This is a small LIRC-compatible daemon that reads from /dev/input/eventX
devices and sends the received keycodes to connecting LIRC clients. Inputlircd
needs no configuration, it uses the standardised names for the keycodes as
used by the kernel. Many USB remote controls that present HID devices, as well
as multimedia keyboards should work out of the box.

Why is this good, well I just install this package and well I get full remote support – once I’ve configured the applications, which is still a pain in the arse. Now if the applications could be written to work with the zeroconfig lirc with well zero config the world will be great (well ok less un-great).

July 11, 2007   Posted in: Debian, Linux, Software, Thumbs Up, Ubuntu  Comments Closed

Yet Another Cacti Update

Well I’ve now got cacti pretty much sorted. Its finally running on a server with enough disk i/o to cope (it still > 3 years old, but at least it works). Its also now become important enough to be moved onto a server with support as some point. Once we’ve vitalised our File Servers, and maybe the odd DC and Citrix server.

Its now running on Debian for the next Cacti box (assuming it doesn’t have the gd bug).

What has helped with the new Cacti box is a combination of a few things – the new 1 min poller patch spreads I/O out better, and allows me to poll device which don’t do 64bit SNMP counters yet have gigabit ethernet ports every min, and leave everything else at 5 min. Improvements on plugins and a switch to cactid (a c version of the poller) has also really helped. The system now process ~400 hots in 35 seconds, dealing with ~4100 data sources and ~2200 rrd each min. Not bad.

There are a couple things that need improving however:
1) The threshold system now inspects data straight from the db before writing to the rrd files, which unfortunately causes the graphs in the email to be 1 cycle out of date (ie not show the data the emails about).
2) The Uptime+Threshold system host down email only works by patching files yourself at present when using cactid

As for ubuntu – either stop shipping cactid, or compile it again the correct version of the libraries. I’d much rather the package not be there than for it to not work, it gives people a bad impression.

May 21, 2007   Posted in: Linux, Software, Thumbs Up, Ubuntu  Comments Closed

HOWTO: NUT & CPU Throttling/Frequency Scaling

After a couple of power cuts lasting long enough for my UPS to shutdown my PC, I’ve been meaning to get NUTs to set my CPU to lowest speed possible when running on battery power, this week I finally got round to it. Please note these instructions are based on Debian 4.0 (Etch) and may require extra steps to work on different distro’s.

Read the rest of this post »

May 21, 2007   Posted in: Debian, Hardware, Howtos, Linux  Comments Closed

WordPress: Stopping the Sidebar from Printing

If there’s one thing that really winds me up on the net is that when printing web-pages you end up with a load of crap you didn’t want usually. For example with blogs you usually get a page or two with the content on the blog sidebar, which frankly I don’t need on a print out.

Well I’ve done something about it (well at least on my blog) – I’ve changed my theme so that on browsers that supports css and media types the sidebar shouldn’t print out. Here’s how you can add this to you’re WordPress blog

  1. Create a file print-style.css in the directory for you’re current theme with the following content
    .dontprint{ display: none; }
    div#menu{ display: none; }
  2. In wordpress, goto Presentation, Theme Editor and select the file Header
  3. Just bellow the line setting the css style sheet – should be something like this :
    &lt;style type="text/css" media="screen">
    @import url( %lt;?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?> );
    <style>

    add the lines
    &lt;style type="text/css" media="print">
    @import url(&lt;?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/style-print.css);
    </style>
  4. Hopefully this should be enough, but if the theme author hasn’t used the div’s in the sidebar file you may have to add this line <div id="menu"> to the top of the file and this line </div> to the bottom of the file

May 9, 2007   Posted in: Howtos, Rants, WordPress  Comments Closed