So it seems that taxing oil and gas is the only significant result that’s going to come out of the Henry Review, and that probably means I should work out an actual opinion on it. As I understand it, the Resource Rent Tax as proposed by the review is meant to be a different way […]
I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out why I dislike the gold standard — that is, pegging currency against the price of gold. I think currencies are fundamentally arbitrary — they’re a convention that needs to be (roughly) agreed on, but whether that’s $1 for a ham sandwich or $1000 for a […]
And here was me thinking forming an opinion on yesterday’s tax review would be hard. Turns out, not so much: the review itself was really well done, pretty much what you’d hope for from a professional public service; the government’s response, on the other hand, was impressively gutless. The most interesting recommendation (to me) in […]
The Henry Tax Review is supposed to be released tomorrow. Since that might warrant a blog post, and possibly even some criticism, I thought it might be interesting to note down some criteria beforehand to remove one avenue for bias. One issue for regulatory reform is whether changes make the entire system simpler or more […]
This year’s woblomo was a bit more consistent than last time — every post was either on the appropriate odd day of March, or before midday the next day. (I did backdate a few posts that actually got posted between midnight and about 4am the next day, just to keep the calendar widget in the […]
Sometime ago I stumbled across gearman and thought it looked cool — map/reduce and distributed processing for shell commands? Neato! Unfortunately, at the time I was looking for a distributed database (and found couchdb) so that didn’t go anywhere. The session at lca reminded me how cool at was, but didn’t get much further on […]
Yes, this post is going to mention notmuch. Whether that’s the answer to the question posed is another matter… My email habits have defaulted to mutt and procmail for quite some years now (and prior to mutt, pine which was essentially the same except older and less nifty). I had a brief interlude under OS […]
When I was looking at what new smartphone to get, the cheapest place to get it from seemed to be Mobicity which seems to be a local shopfront for a Hong Kong warehouse. That there was a discount voucher on tjoos helped too. Anyway, the price was right and it got here reasonably quickly so […]
When I last posted about my pygame/trigrid hax0ring, I said: I’m now at the point where that all works, but there’s no intelligence — peon’s will buy and transport goods without checking first that anyone actually wants them. Getting past that is proving troublesome, so this is me thinking out loud about it. The key […]
One of the XP systems I look after had a trojan this month — looks like it came from a fake “UPS package” mail with a zipped attachment that got clicked on, then stuck its tendrils into the registry and all over the place, and started popping warnings about viruses and instructions on how to […]
Subtitled: David Pennock’s Wall-Street pick up lines Dr Pennock’s latest post is about fitting stockmarket data — he comes up with a nicely matching randomly generated histogram based on a Laplace distribution over the daily log differences (that is, take the log of the ratio between daily close prices — so if you gained 20% […]
Possibly my longest blog post title ever? Anyway, here’s a link to today’s little bit of scripting. I’ve now written this script three or four times, so I figure that means it’s useful and maybe worth keeping around. I’m calling it dir2tree and all it does is take a (sorted) list of pathnames and convert […]
So this past weekend I had (hopefully!) my last Linux Australia face to face meeting — handed over the chequebook to the new treasurer, passed on some advice, and whatnot — which more or less ends my major existing responsibilities to the open source world. That happened to more or less coincide with a tweet […]
So much like last year, the Linux Australia face to face meeting has somewhat spoiled my WoBloMo posting frequency. Though, technically it’s still the 13th in UTC, New York and Hawaii, so there’s that. Anyway, I’ve bitten the bullet and signed up for the Upstarta Meetup. I’ve been in two minds about Upstarta for a […]
Ooops. Emergency woblomo post coz I forgot. Here’s the link to the other day’s screencast that apparently didn’t make it through aggregators. Hohum.