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As part of my ongoing plan to make things easier for Linux job applicants and advertisers I have created a Planet for Linux Jobs in Victoria, Australia. The LUV President had suggested that I make a proposal to the LUV committee about this. I have offered them ownership of the Victorian aspects of this idea as well as volunteering to run the services for them. The Libby commutation has demonstrated the contempt that the Bush regime has for the US political process, the opinions of the voters and party members, and the reputation of the US. The Talking Points Memo has an insightful analysis. They suggest that an argument could be made for pardoning Libby by claiming that the case is politically based and bogus, such an argument would be difficult to sustain – particularly given the fact that the prosecutor and the judge were Republican appointees. But a commutation is admitting that the case was valid but that Bush wanted to protect a friend – or someone who might inform on him. In either case it’s a very bad thing. As an example here’s a YouTube video of Keith Olbermann making the case for George Bush to act as decently and honourably as Richard Nixon and resign from office. Paul blogs about why embedding media players is bad for the case of web radio. One thing I notice is that there is no convenient or easy way of extracting an embedded youtube video from a web page a quick test in my favourite browser (Konqueror) showed that the YouTube embedded section didn’t even appear. The Debian package youtube-dl allows you to download the Youtube content in a format that can be played with mplayer, but only if you see the link – which seems to not happen if the web site tries to embed it. Avoiding flash is good if you want security or if you want to use a platform other than i386 Linux or Windows and youtube-dl removes what I consider to be the only compelling reason for Flash. Google has just announced the Recharge project. They are converting some of their own fleet of Prius and other hybrid cars to be “plug-in hybrids”, this means that the car can be plugged in to mains power to charge it’s batteries and petrol will only be used as a fuel of last resort. If a car is mostly used for short trips then the petrol use is dramatically reduced – but the car still has the 1000Km range that a full tank of petrol provides! Google is also going to invest $10,000,000 in companies that develop technologies related to hybrid vehicles. If you have some ideas for new technological developments related to power saving then you might want to check out what Google is doing. Mark Greenaway writes about writes about robots being designed to remove weeds from farms. This seems like a bad idea given that we currently have an energy crisis due to CO2 emissions from power plants causing environment change (including reduced water supplies), and coal and nuclear power plants requiring water to produce electricity (pity about the reduced water supply). Introducing robots that require either electricity of petrol for operation and also maintenance (which probably requires plastic parts on occasion) seems to be more of a problem than a solution. Fortunately there is already work in progress on training sheep to eat weeds. Given that we already raise sheep for wool and food it makes more sense for them to eat unwanted vegetation (weeds in a vineyard is the example given) than to grow grass specially for them. Also Mark says that the recent increase in oil price is not good news. What would be ideal is a slow steady increase in petrol prices that allows individuals and companies to change to more efficient vehicles (smaller and slower vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and more use of public transport) and also allows governments to make changes (such as building new public transport infrastructure). Having the oil remain cheap until it starts to run out doesn’t do anyone any good (apart from the short-term interests of oil companies). A comment on my previous post about my Linux Jobs Blog suggested that I shouldn’t fragment the information. However I believe that fragmenting the information is ideal due to the ability of RSS syndication to drive the cost of coalescing the information to almost zero! Currently there is a Linux job web site run by Linux Australia. It doesn’t have many adverts and isn’t even linked from the main Linux Australia web site. I believe that we can do better for the people who want Linux jobs and the people who have such jobs to advertise. If you have a central site the jobs have to be moderated (which takes work and delays listing), the larger the area that the site covers the greater the work is to do this. The solution is to have a distributed system with different people running listings for various regions and a syndication service to aggregate them. To start this I have created a blog which will have categories for the states and territories of Australia. Someone who is only interested in one region can visit the category for that region. Then recruiting agencies and companies which regularly hire Linux people can start their own RSS feeds to be syndicated in a planet instance for each state and territory. This gives a faster and more efficient response (adverts will appear quickly, can be changed or removed at any time, and less effort for moderation. I expect that recruiting agencies will occasionally post off-topic entries – but when their feed gets removed from the Planet installation they will probably make a commitment to do the right thing in future. Planet installations can syndicate other Planet installations, so we can easily have a Linux jobs Planet for Australia (possibly run by Linux Australia) that syndicates the feeds from each state and territory. In the long term I think that the best way of running this is to have Linux Australia run the central Planet instance and a LUG in each region run the local site. I started running it myself because I didn’t get a positive response when suggesting it to the relevant people in Linux Australia and LUV. That didn’t deter me, so I decided to set it up myself. If the idea takes off and if Linux Australia and the LUGs want to take it over I’ll be happy to use HTTP redirects to send the traffic to them – and help them with the sys-admin work if asked. Also there is nothing specific to Australia in this idea. I am only interested in Australia because if I was to attempt to do it in a larger area (such as the EU) then I could spend all my time on it without gaining a critical mass in any region. If you are interested in running this in your region then you need to set up a blog (for adverts that are sent to you via email) and a Planet installation that feeds from your blog and any other Linux job advert blogs in your region. If your country doesn’t already have a central Planet for jobs then creating a separate Planet installation for your country would be a good idea too. I will be happy to run a Planet installation for world-wide Linux job adverts (at least until I can convince an organization such as Linux International to run it) if this idea takes off in other countries. Some people have asked what the benefit of a Planet is over a mailing list. You have to subscribe to a mailing list while with a Planet you can immediately visit it if you suddenly decide to find a new job. Subscribing to mailing lists for jobs from all countries would never work, but visiting a Planet for Linux jobs world-wide and then visiting a sub-planet for regional jobs would be quick and easy. They admit the truth at last: “We need to ensure, notwithstanding the significant natural resources that our country has been blessed with, that we are able to access the energy requirements in our region and throughout the world” said Brendan Nelson (Australian defence minister). John Howard isn’t admitting it yet, he’s sticking to his lie from 2003 that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Currently I have some significant problems with Javascript CPU use when editing my WordPress blog. Some operations take about 10 seconds to complete which involves Konqueror using 100% CPU time. Does anyone have any ideas how to solve this problem? Is there a web browser that pre-compiles Javascript for faster execution? I am assuming that it’s Javascript at fault, because apart from that there’s nothing complex in the WordPress web pages. This is an important issue for me as the Konqueror CPU use is the only thing that makes me want to use a faster computer. Apart from that my 3 year old Thinkpad should be able to last at least another couple of years. I recently had my keyboard replaced just before the warrantee ran out and would like to keep using it until I’ve worn out the new keyboard (I have worn out about 6 Thinkpad keyboards, thanks IBM/Lenovo for continually replacing them for me). It seems to me that we need to have syndicated feeds for Linux job adverts. To start this I have created a new blog for Linux job adverts, it will have categories for the states and territories of Australia (with a feed for each category) and I will also create Planet installations that take feeds from the blog as well as any other Linux jobs RSS feeds. I will create the Planet installations when I have feeds to add. If your company regularly advertises Linux jobs in Australia then please create an RSS feed of the adverts and I will syndicate it. If your company occasionally advertises Linux jobs then you can email them to me. As of this moment there are no positions advertised, but I hope that to change soon. |
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