Contempt

I'm currently in Las Vegas, being blinded by the overabundent flashing neon lights.

This place looks expensive. Indeed, it's hard to believe just how much money is wasted here, let alone spent. One flashy casino has a half-hourly water show out the front of it - this is in a desert, mind. And while the water is probably recycled, I'm told that a good amount of it would probably evaporate while being sprayed into the air. Another casino has built a mountain, replete with waterfall on its front boundary. And yet another has a half-size replica of the Eiffel Tower (along with a number of other Parisian replicas) at its entrance. All of which don't really serve any purpose other than to show off their wealth.

Clearly many visitors here have too much disposable cash: if the ipod vending machines (yes, those are machines which dispense ipods. And digital cameras) weren't a clear enough indication of that, the sight of the blue-rinse set pouring their retirement savings into a sea of slot machines at 4am certainly is.

And the thing that is really difficult to grasp is that for every five-star themed uber-casino up and down The Strip, there's probably half a dozen crappy no-name casinos elsewhere in the city. Or more. Each with their own hotel attached. Which all adds up to a sea of rooms that aren't filled because of the effects of GFC - and thus some can be very, very cheap. My room is costing me US$30 per night, and I was amused to look at the rate card on the door to find that in peak times, it is $501 per night.

The casinos aren't limited to Vegas either; one merely has to cross the border on the road from Los Angeles into Nevada and the first tiny rathole encountered is spruiking its casino and insanely cheap food. As does every town that follows.

The traffic here is insane. To the city's credit, there's a cheap and frequent shuttle bus up and down The Strip, but due to the heavy traffic along there, it's almost useless. It takes almost an hour to travel the length of it, and it's really only about 2km or so long. I wonder why they've never heard of bus lanes.

All said however, there's more to Las Vegas than merely throwing money away and setting oneself on the road to heart disease from five dollar steaks. The nightlife is pretty amazing, and Vegas puts on a huge number of shows. There's at least six different Cirque du Soleil shows, countless caberet acts, as well as comedy. And then there's the various sex shows too.

I went to see Cirque du Soleil's "O" at the Bellagio - their aquatic show, which was nothing short of stunning, and I highly recommend it to anyone who visits Vegas.

Interestingly, though, for all of Las Vegas' glitz and bright lights, it's fascinating how quickly it peters out - taking a walk just five minutes down the east side of Fremont Street led me straight into one of the dodgiest places I've seen. Run down buildings, motels with that rooms-sold-by-the-hour look, aimless loiterers. Evidentally, the wealth doesn't get redistributed too well.

"An organisation that cannot afford to fully pay for its production costs is
an organisation that should already be out of business." -- Random Usenet contributor

It's hard to believe that such a thing would be necessary, but today is Go Home On Time Day - a reaction to findings that Australians are working more unpaid hours overtime each year than they get in annual leave.

While the campaign itself seems a little condescending (the idea of a "leave pass" is ridiculous to the extreme, because it's utterly demeaning to think that someone should have to ask permission to go home at the end of the day), the sentiment is sound. No business would ever expect any supplier to provide them with goods for free, so why should they expect this of their employees' labour?

Naturally, the Australian Chamber of Subjugation doesn't like it at all. They'd much rather have people sign up for slightly raised pay-packets that give the employer carte blanche to work them for as long as they like.

My advice? Become a contractor, and charge by the hour. No one ever dies wishing that they spent more time in the office.

I'm sure I can't be the only person who wishes that Rupert Murdoch would quit banging on and on about how he's going to put up a paywall around his websites and block off google, and just friggen do it.

Frankly, I can't think of a better way to bring another period of enlightenment to humanity than to have Rupert's gaggle of conservative and sensationalist rags locked up where no-one will see them.

I can't see how it's going to work, though. Newspapers have never made their profits from their cover price (which pretty much only covers the cost of distribution). Instead, it's been the advertising they carry - particularly the classifieds - that pays for the journalism (I use that word loosely here). So if Rupert is planning to recover the money lost to sites like Ebay and Seek by charging internet readers, then the price is going to have to be considerably higher than what they're asking for the dead-tree editions right now. Is anyone really going to pay through the nose for the Herald-Sun when the ABC's news is free online?

This is pretty pathetic:

...and wearing a helmet will now be compulsory for (foot-propelled) scooter riders.

Few people would be insane enough to use a foot-propelled scooter on a busy road (in which case, it would be fair to make that illegal instead), and there's really very little reason to wear a helmet when using a scooter on a bicycle path or footpath. I can go much faster - with far less control - on my rollerblades, and I'm not required to wear a helmet when using those.

The only reason I can see why the Victorian Government would want to create such a law would be to discourage people from using scooters at all. Given their obsession with cars and roads, I can't say I'm very surprised.

Redmine is a web-based project-management / bug-tracking tool, much like Trac, but so, so much better. Unfortunately, like so many web-based projects, there doesn't appear to have been much thought given to installing it on live, production systems - the general idea seems to be to unpack it in a random location on your server's filesystem and run it from there. Most sites I know would baulk at the idea of this, so I've created Debian and Ubuntu packages for it.

They're a little kludgy, at this stage - it seems to me that Ruby-on-Rails goes out of its way to be difficult to Debianise - but they work, nonetheless, and make installation fairly straightforward (although there are still manual steps involved - be sure to read the README.Debian). The packages depend on Mongrel, a small Ruby webserver; I tried getting Redmine to run under Apache, but running it with CGI was far too slow, and making it work with fastcgi appeared to be an exercise in futility.

It seems to be all the rage, lately, to eschew root shells and run all administative commands with sudo. Sudo is a great tool for allowing otherwise unprivileged users to perform certain tasks for themselves (and thus not having to annoy the sysadmin regularly) and it's also good for keeping logs of what tasks were performed.

However, what I'm seeing is a general trend towards educating people to administer servers by using sudo non-interactively. Eg:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

instead of

$ sudo su -
# /etc/init.d/networking restart

Ubuntu documentation is notorious for this.

The first method is bad practice because it will automatically drop root privileges as soon as the command has completed. This means that if you've made a mistake, you can potentially lock yourself out of your own server.

The second method will return you to a root prompt after you've run the command, and - importantly - will allow you to check that everything still works. You should always be checking that changes you've made work, before you drop root.

Sounds unlikely? Hardly. Even with the best intentions, mistakes occur. I've seen this problem happen; a person using sudo accidentally nulled the /etc/passwd file and managed to lock himself out of the root account. If this had been able to be done using sudo su - instead, then he would have been able to test that he could still access root, from another window, before logging out of the root account in his original window. Unfortunately, site policies prevented this (although it could be worked around by copying /bin/bash to /tmp and then running sudo /tmp/bash).

And it's not limited to just nulling the password file. There's plenty of things that you can screw up that will lock you out of your server if you don't have a chance to check them first - /etc/shadow, anything under /etc/pam.d, /etc/sudoers, /lib/libpam-ldap.conf to name just a few. In Ubuntu's case, if you make a mess of the sudoers file, you might not even have a root password to fall back on, due to their insane insistence on not creating one at installation time.

Dear ${BIG_COMPANY}. Did you know that you employ developers who write web applications that fail because my web browser's user-agent string contains "Iceweasel" and not "Firefox"?

Is that really necessary? Is it cost-effective? Is it LEAN?