Archive for April, 2005

Unemployable?

Saturday, April 30th, 2005

I have recently been trying to find myself a 12-month computing industrial placement starting this summer as part of my degree course. For some reason, I seem to have failed thoroughly and completely. Of all the many, many, many applications I’ve completed and all the unsolicited e-mails I’ve sent to companies and Linux-related job mailing lists, I had one actual response from an employer, who turned out to be nothing more than a time waster.

So why is this? Am I really unemployable? Well I did OK at A-level and I’m doing well at uni, I have nearly 10 years of experience using Linux (about 2 in a business environment) with a variety of distributions and server applications, I’m an experienced web developer and the managing editor of Micro Mart considers me knowledgable enough to write for them. I’m not just doing a bog standard Computer Science degree either: I’m doing a more specialised “Computer and Network Technology” degree which should surely make me more desirable?

But no, it seems nobody wants an experienced (for someone who’s still a student) employee who they can get away with paying very little for, with a guarantee that they’ll stick around for a year.

Ho hum. At least this was only an optional industrial placement, so it doesn’t matter too much that I didn’t get one. When I graduate next year however, it will be a different matter…

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The reason for voter apathy?

Monday, April 25th, 2005

There was a very interesting programme on BBC Three this evening entitled “The Hecker”, which was about training two people to heckle politicians. What they were mainly getting at was the fact that the public simply can’t participate in politics any more, even if they wanted to. In the 1960s and 1970s elected and candidate MPs would have meetings in their constituencies to which anyone could come – and if they wanted to shout out while the MP was talking, they could and most often, the MP would listen and respond. They could challenge what they were saying, demand clarification on wooly wording or demand answers if they’ve not delivered on previous promises. At the very least it made the meetings more interesting.

Today, public meetings don’t exist. Party meetings are tightly controlled and scripted – nobody gets in without a ticket (and party membership) and if you make a noise, you’re out. Not only the speech, but every movement anybody in the room makes is scripted and planned down to the fine details. The public can’t participate – they can’t even speak to their local MPs. Sure they can write, fax, even e-mail, but its rare you get to see your MP face-to-face and actually challenge what they’re saying or find out what their views actually are. You certainly don’t get within a mile of the Prime Minister very often.
If you can’t talk to your elected or candidate MP, why should you trust them? If you can’t find out what their views are, instead of the same old party line, why should you vote for them? If you can’t do any of that, why bother?

The parties have tried quite hard over the years to ensure that the public cannot participate in politics – and now they’re surprised that the public aren’t interested any more?

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Wondering who to vote for?

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005

It is absolutely, positively essential that every person eligible to vote in the general election does so. If they don’t, we all end up with a government that doesn’t represent or listen to the people.

A good new site is whoshouldyouvotefor.com, which asks questions about your views then tells you which party fits your views best. Obviously it can’t ask about every issue you care about, but it confirmed my choice of party, so it can’t be too bad.
There is also the Political Survey 2005 but it produces 3 pages of results, none of which seemed very useful.

I must say I am getting rapidly tired of the constant mud-sliging between the major political parties. You’ve got the Conservatives and Labour facing each other off and straining at the leash like crazed attack dogs, then you’ve got the Lib Dems on the sidelines getting in the occasional jab at both sides when they think nobody’s looking. Why can’t elections be about parties actually promoting their policies and selling themselves to the voters, instead of simply trying to dis-credit the other parties like children in a playground? No wonder people don’t bother to vote: all they hear are the main parties telling them who not to vote for. So how are they to know who they should vote for?
I also think that the government needs to be making much more of an effort to encourage people to vote. Maybe the TV ads help, but much more effort is needed.

So as its that time of year, I’m going to take the opportunity to pimp my chosen political party:
If you’re reading my blog you’re probably into technology, so you probably care about software patents, ID cards and free software. If you want to see the UK government fighting against software patents in Europe, the dropping of ID cards and the promotion of free software and it’s use within the government, you need to Vote Green.
If you want a party with real policies, real people and a party who aren’t afraid to make big reforms to our outdated and inefficient government infrastructure, Vote Green.
Despite popular belief, the Green Party are not a single-issue party. Read the manifesto for more details.

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Solaris Stress

Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

I’ve just acquired a nice new Sun server (4 CPUs, a gig of RAM and space for 20 hard disks) and I’ve unfortunately had to install Solaris on it rather than Linux. Linux doesn’t support the environmental monitoring features of my Sun Ultra Enterpise 450 so all the fans run at full speed all the time, which is a real noise.
At least Solaris is open source now, although the license is not GPL compatible so it’s not Free Software :-(

So I’ve had to install Solaris 10 and what an unpleasant experience it has been. For some stupid, unknown reason the Solaris installer cannot see any hard disks which haven’t already been used in a Sun machine (and have a Sun disk label). Now instead of simply creating the disk label and carrying on like Linux does, the Solaris installation says “No disks found” and dumps you to a console. Nice. The answer is to use the “format” tool to create a disk label, then Solaris can see them and install onto them.

That solved, I am still being annoyed by the installation. There is a general lack of progress bars and useful status messages (maybe the Sun engineers who wrote the OS can understand them, but normal people can’t). It’s also taking ages…

Hopefully I will have a better experience once I get to actually use the system. I believe it has a Gnome desktop, so I should feel somewhat at home. Naturally I don’t normally install a graphical environment on servers, but I’m just installing Solaris to mess with it at the moment, until I fit some more hard disks and start configuring things properly.

Eventually one of the server’s jobs will be hosting this web site…

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Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »