But how do you find out whether Windows is 32 or 64 bit when your client’s friendly neighbourhood infrastructure and desktop team have blocked users from My Computer properties? I was surprised (again) today that systeminfo doesn’t carry this crucial information, at least, not where I could see it.

windows key + R and type dxdiag, hit return. The line Operating System tells you whether 32 or 64 bit.

TBH, I’d prefer if there was a CLI command that told me.

Anyway, read the whole first page, and it appeared Vinci had videoed me from a parking enforcement car. Well, I was a bit worked up about that. “What’s wrong with a traffic warden?” I mused (shouted). “Why is this country intent on divorcing it’s law enforcement from the governed with faceless, privatised CCTV operators grabbing images and running?” I fulminated. “How can we expect our children to grow up courageous in the face of jobs-worthian bureaucracy if the jobs-worths are faceless and undetectable?” I reflected. “I haven’t compared them to Nazis yet, but I’m sure there’s a hook in there somewhere.” I reductioed ad Hitlerumed.

I read they require £70, reduced to £35 quid if I pay up quickly and quietly, increasing to £105 if I make a fuss.

TBH, by this point I’m apoplectic with rage. I have to go to their offices in Dunstable, a good 45 mins to an hour away, without parking included, to view the video, and I have to make an appointment. Being rather annoyed I’m also assuming that the appointment will be suitably close enough to the 21 day limit to ensure I have to pay the whole whack, not the reduced charge if I am proved to have parked incorrectly.

Anyway, so I turn the page and the picture I see… well. Hum. Not a tyre over a line, not badly parked, no, “parking” is accurate. In fact, with a quick glance at the picture, my 3 year old asked “Where you driving truck Daddy?” “Driving” he said, not “parked”, driving. As in moving, on a public road, with an open parking space infront of the truck in the picture. As in “Bugger off you bunch of chancers! Your assessment that this is restricted parking proves that you cannot even differentiate between a parking car and a parked car. You even have a video, allegedly, showing the parking manoeuvring. You have been outperformed in your chosen specialisation by a 3-year old who still says ‘cock’ instead of ‘sock’.”

I have no doubt the system is rigged to ensure people go “Oh sod it, pay the 35 quid, it’s not worth the hassle”. In fact, that’s what J said before she saw the picture.

I’m bloody annoyed.

I’m not paying their fine. I’m contesting it as far they decide they want to go. I am in the happy position, currently, of being able to afford to. If I, and people in the same financial position, don’t test these bloody idiots, then it impacts justice for people who have to look at the same situation and decide to pay the £35 because they can’t afford to risk having to pay the £70 or £105, or can’t afford the time off work, or the petrol and parking, to get to Dunstable to face-up to these leeches. It’s allowing corporates and the rich to afford justice, while the poor have to pay up or get screwed.

Ohhhh, I feel all “System of a Down”. Bar stewards.

Anyway, recently Windows has creaked to (even more of) a crawl on his old tosh satellite, probably infected with something horrible because he rarely boots it and something got in between AVG and Spybot updates. OpenOffice on Mint 9 is getting long in the tooth. He asked me if I could think of another way around the problem that could allow him to be able to get in and out of Windows quickly, cut and paste between Windows and Linux quickly, have a better OpenOffice version and not have to worry much about the infections.

Various solutions were discussed, researched, and discarded. Some of them were:

• Wine – MS Office is not too clever in any of the bottles yet
• Crossover office – ditto
• Full reinstall of Windows XP then Office 2010, then upgrade Linux Mint to 11 – going to be in same situation in x months time when XP grinds to a halt again

After a moment of clarity, we went with: upgrade to Linux Mint 11, install VirtualBox OSE, create a Windows XP VM with Office and take a snapshot, turn off networking on the VM, share a folder on the Linux box with the windows VM, and have Virus monitoring on the Linux box.

This solution gives us the fast switching between OSes; cut and paste (with the VirtualBox add-ins); the latest LibreOffice; and, when the Windows VM gets infected (pretty sure bet, even with networking turned off), rollback to the clean snapshot. Downsides are having to run an instance of Windows and MS Office. Money and sales target ticks for MS.

Here’s what we had to do. First the prep, which mostly took place before the big meetup. If we’d done all of it before, it would have saved us a couple of hours on the day.

1. Backup /home
2. Confirm nothing on the Windows partition needing backing up
3. Torrent the Mint ISOs and select required version (we checked LXDE and Gnome standard. My father still prefers Gnome so we went with that)
4. Find the Windows XP Pro install disk that came with your machine originally (you did get one, didn’t you?)
5. Find the Windows licence code on the bottom or side of your machine
6. Find your Office DVD and licence code
7. Download Windows Service Pack 3

For the actual day I went a little further, just to make things more bearable:

1. Persuade lovely wife to prepare and cook a topside of beef with all trimmings
2. Get in sufficient wine and cheese for the day of the install

On the day, here’s the actions we went through:

1. Confirm /home backup is ballpark. du -hs /home; du -hs /media/backupDisk/home
2. Fire up Linux Mint 11 Live DVD and install Linux Mint 11. We have a diddy 60GB HDD so partitions were:
   • 14GB primary, mount point / – system, etc (too big, but playing for the long haul)
   • 2GB swap – logical, at end of disk
   • Rest logical (44GB-ish), mount point /home
3. Restore /home from the backup.
4. In Software Manager install
   • VirtualBox OSE
   • VirtualBox Add-ins ISO image
5. In VirtualBox:
   1. create a new VM for Windows XP. Give a dynamic growth to 15GB. More than enough, but you have a lot of upgrading and installing to do and nothing is worse than a windows machine with a rammed full system disk
   2. Install Windows XP Pro (don’t even think about XP Home). Hope you have SP2 at least
   3. Install Windows Service Pack 3
   4. Install Windows Updates – there were 64 for us, the 48th was IE 8 and needed questions answering, so don’t walk away
   5. Install MS Office 2010
   6. Flag the network adapter with “cable unplugged”
   7. Start Word and fill in all the author blurb
   8. Mount a shared folder in the linux /home/username/ area (with AV protection on it). Make it permanent mount.
   9. Full screen the VM and take a snapshot
   10. Give yourself a pat on the back (and swing your pants)

   It took a long, long time, most of it getting Windows installed right, but we won’t have to do it again (I don’t think). Mint will look after itself largely, with upgrades being pretty simple now. If windows goes slow, my father can just rollback to the pristine VM image.

   Other things we wanted to do but didn’t have time:

   1. Setup sshd for remote admin access
   2. Setup LVM so we grow the disk space onto a PCMCIA card HDD at some point
   3. Setup dropbox for remote doc backups – need to investigate as last I heard dropbox had been compromised, not sure what resolution was.
   4. Setup Picasa for picture admin and remote backup
   5. Drink Bowmore
   
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6. Get your opml file (from Google Reader for example)
7. Make sure the extension on your file is .opml (NOT .xml. If using windows or a mac, check in the command line that the .xml suffix is gone)
8. In ITunes go to File…Add To Library and select your opml file from the browser
9. If yougot it right you will be asked if you want to subscribe to X number of podcasts. Click OK
10. Done

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/apr/02/david-cameron-av-attack?INTCMP…

Cameron (allegedly) says that someone who supports the BNP gets their vote counted several times. In most constituencies, their second, or third choice will be invoked, rather than their first. So, if you feel the need to argue it in those “argument from fear” terms, a counter may be: those short-sighted people’s first vote is ignored, and their more reasonable second or third vote is used. They have a partial vote, rather than a full vote. As a bonus, for the country, the first vote is included in official voting statistics, so there’s a record that something may need to be addressed in that constituency by the other candidates, especially the one that got elected. If a BNP candidate does get elected under AV, it shows front and centre that something needs addressing, rather than FPTP hiding it under the carpet for another 4 years.

A slightly more substantial argument might be: in the current system someone who would prefer to vote Green might feel that is a wasted vote in their constituency. In an AV system, that person can vote Green first, main stream second and third, and have their considerations taken in account in the official voting statistics and some additional feeling of having contributed if their second or third preference is elected.

Part of being a developed country is the additional headspace we get to worry about things outside of feeding ourselves and the children over the winter. It allows us the luxury (although it may not feel like it) of time to think about how we want our society to act and work. If we feel that thinking time is wasted because no matter what we believe, as part of the electorate, virtually all our actions have zero affect on our countries, we feel disenfranchised and go and vote on Strictly instead (a combination of round based, televoting, last man standing, and deliberative democracy) immersive voting with a fast feedback loop which feels like we make a difference each week. The only way you can feel like you’re making a real difference as a member of the electorate is to go and live in a swing seat, in which case you’re probably fully engaged anyway.

Cameron’s other quoted argument, Usain Bolt wins the 100 metres, but the 3rd place gets the gold medal, is comparing apples and oranges. A Watch the Lady argument. I could equally phrase the argument as “A husband wants his wife to shut-up so he floors her with a powerful haymaker, but under AV the wife would not shut-up”. It’s a daft argument (whether he set it up as a Straw Man so that people like me make fun of it as above and get mullered by other people thinking I’m advocating that would be too cynical and self-aggrandising).

The “our system is used by half the world” argument is argument from tradition. It’s almost not worth addressing, but for some reason people put great store by tradition . To counter:

1. Countries that use FPTP include Iran; Pakistan; Lebanon; Yemen; and Zimbabwe. 
2. Britain colonised much of the world and introduced it’s traditions there. 

Neither of which are substantial arguments for AV, and show that the reverse is true for FPTP too. 

IMHO the no campaign “which still refuses to list its donors” is the voice of those that fear change or have a vested interest in the status quo. I agreed that AV is not the best system out there, but neither is FPTP. If the no campaign win on 5th May, electoral reform will not be discussed for another 20 years, so we have FPTP and nothing else, whereas if we get AV, there will be a visible effect on politics, no matter what it is. People respond to stimuli, so seeing the political landscape changing will engage more people, whether it being arguing to change the system again, or keep it as is.

Status quo, and we have another generation lost to politics, with an inevitable further degradation of democratic thinking, discussion, and action in our countries… but probably to the huge benefit of the Simon Cowell’s and TV companies of this world (IMHO, I cite no evidence to support my gratuitous dig at trivial TV). 

Interesting take.
]]> http://mrsock.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/noble-war-in-libya-part-1/feed/ 0 Niall