Back in the 70′s, the Netherlands’ transport policy was similar to many Australian cities today, especially Brisbane in Queensland where the car is king and traffic systems are geared for this at the expense of all other city users. So just how did the Dutch become one of the highest populations of cyclists in the world? What was the turning point? What do Australians need to do to drag their government transport polcies out of the 1970s and into the present day?

Luckily I didn’t buy it as it has major compatibility issues with the Nvidia Optimus chipset. Essentially the laptop can flip between a low performance intel video card and a high performance nvidia video card when using either 2d or 3d apps. Unfortunately, if you don’t run windows and use the special windows drivers, you’re in trouble. Linux does not support this video card flipping as the design for the drivers has not been released by nvidia, add to that nvidia has not released a compatible binary driver for linux either.

Short story, the video for the Dell XPS 15 is not very well supported in linux:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=161471
“You can’t use the card with Linux since you have Optimus. You’re stuck with Intel. Should’ve researched before you bought.”

So I dodged this bullet, but now I need to find an alternative laptop with the specs I need that is compatible with linux.
I run debian or ubuntu.

So I ask the lazyweb, what’s the best laptop that has all of the following features?

• 15″ screen
• Full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution
• Video card that’s not entirely garbage nvidia or ati (read: not intel junk)
• Definitely NO Nvidia Optimus video chipset/config – not compatible with linux
• 9cell battery
• Core i5 2nd Generation
• 4gig ram minimum – 1333Mhz
• 7200rpm HD
• Wireless-N Wifi chipset supported in linux (probably Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230 or Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 630, any well supported chipset)
• USB 3.0
• Good battery life
• Supported drivers under linux
• Preferably not a cramped keyboard layout (right shift key and arrow keys not crammed with other keys)

I’m open to suggestions for good laptop make/models, leave a comment on this post or email me at pete at geekpete.com

Thanks.

UPDATE Jan 11, 15:21 - Live audio of Brisbane Emergency Services via radio scanner.
UPDATE Jan 11, 15:11 - Flood waters rising up Captain Cook Bridge http://twitpic.com/3ozmru
UPDATE Jan 11, 14:58 - Live Brisbane Floods River WebCam

UPDATE Jan 11, 14:46 - People starting to freak out, shopping spree and empty shelves. Live twitter photo updates of #qldfloods – http://twitcaps.com/s/%23qldfloods

UPDATE Jan 11, 12:14 - Brisbane CBD is under mass exodus. People coming out of buildings everywhere, traffic is really really jammed up. By bicycle it’s fine but be careful. Lots of cars exiting underground car parks as their owners get them to higher ground. More important information links have been added below. Mobile phones are not working in the CBD due to congestion.

UPDATE Jan 11, 10:39 - Brisbane River is current starting to flood. West End and Eagle Street are starting to flood as the river breaches it’s banks. University of Queensland is currently being evacuated. All mobile phone networks down at South Brisbane.
Photo: West End going under – photo link

More updates soon, stay tuned to this page.

Twitter tags to search with:
#bnefloods – https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bnefloods
#qldfloods – https://twitter.com/search?q=%23qldfloods

Important Links:

Accurate Updates & Evacuations
http://www.facebook.com/QueenslandPolice

Traffic and Travel information
Call 13 19 40 or goto www.131940.qld.gov.au

Public tranport information
http://highload.131940.qld.gov.au/
http://translink.com.au/ [parts of the Ipswich line are closed]

Warnings and River Height Bulletins
www.bom.gov.au/qld/flood/

RACQ road closure site
Call 1300 130 595 or go to www.racq.com.au/travel/Maps_and_Directions/road_conditions

For current weather information for Brisbane and surrounding areas, please check the following sites:

Energex Lightning Tracker – check current rate of lightning strikes.
Large Brisbane Lightning Strike Map – Stats for Lightning Strikes with map.
128km Brisbane Weather Radar – The Bureau of Meterology radar loop animation.
South Brisbane WebCam – The OurBrisbane webcam at South Brisbane.

Check how sea level rise might affect your suburb:
http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=-27.8390,138.1640&z=13&m=7

Brisbane Floods 1974
Australia’s worst flood occurred in January 1974 in the city of Brisbane. The Brisbane river snakes through the city and broke it’s banks leading to extensive flooding in many parts of the city.

For more info on the Brisbane flood in 1974, check the Wikipedia article or the BOM page.

What happened:

10.30am
Me : Hello Bunnings, I need new washers but you don’t sell them.
Bunnings: Have these spares for free.

M: I reckon it could be my hose too, but you don’t sell them
B: Yes, you have to buy a new tap, but we have a spare, have this for free.

Awesome. At home, I fit the washers as the hose doesn’t fit our pipe (??) and the washers are s**t and p**s everywhere.

M: Hello Bunnings these washers are s**t and water is pis**ng everywhere. Here is my tap, look at it.
B: Yes. I see the fittings are weird. Have these adapters for your pipes that you will have to buy. I will also be nice and fit this hose to your tap as you don’t have the correct tool

Awesome. At home, I fit the new fittings and they are even worse, water is everywhere and I have no idea why. Although the hoses do not leak where Bunnings fitted them

M: Hello. Again. Water is f*****g everywhere and those connections are s**t. Although your hoses are good.
B: Ah yes, you need to cut your pipes and now fix these new connections that you need to buy.

M: And the hose isn’t long enough.
B: Buy an extension. And a new spanner to fit it.

At home, I fit it all in and it leaks a bit. I tighten the fittings and it seems to work. For about 30 mins. Then it starts leaking. And the hoses that bunnings fitted started leaking. I nearly top myself, it’s nearly 4pm and I have done NOTHING ELSE.

Sunday 9am
M: Hello Bunnings, a fuc***g new tap please. And new fittings.
B: A hundred bucks thanks.

I love plumbing.
—

From the “No *expletive* Sherlock !!!” department….

For the better part of a quarter century we’ve been fed a complicated and more importantly self-serving lie… that ITIL was the IT Holy Grail that would bring the equivalent of the manufacturing industry’s QA to ITSM, felling in one swoop all the ills of IT…. sorry, wrong.

Even the most quality-conscious engineer will tell you that “QA” only aims to deliver a consistent level of output. Not premium quality. No iterative improvement in quality. Most importantly, no guarantee that the resulting output is always zero-defect. The aim is consistency, not quality. If your base quality is good, then you will deliver a quality product consistently by applying QA. Sadly, if your base quality is poor, then guess what…. QA will only ensure you deliver that consistently….. whoops..

Enter a bunch of British government braniacs… now you KNOW that will result in a quality outcome ! *choke*

So it came to pass that these bureaucrats came up with *drum-roll*…. a bureaucratic, documentation-heavy “solution” to implement an IT-oriented QA system with levels of qualification, individual certifications, etc, etc, etc…. how NOT surprising for a bunch of bureaucrats….

Now it is packaged and sold to businesses globally as “ITIL”, which is now in its 3rd iteration of trying to get it right…. so…. v1.0 must have been typical software “quality” (we ALL know better than to buy into v1.0 !)…

So, like so many other certification systems, the cost for certification is horrendous. It almost makes the software systems that are meant to support these “best practices” look cheap….

So with billions of dollars expended globally on making businesses “ITIL aligned”, you would expect that ITSM was now pretty mature and safe for non-aligned businesses to adopt…. wrong…. if a certain tier-1 OEM’s “best of breed” software for managing ITSM and implementing business practices that a business can leverage to make themselves “ITIL aligned” is anything to go by….. well, let’s just say, that business better have deep pockets and VERY patient staff and customers…..

If it is such a pain; so problematic to implement; so expensive, etc.. then why do businesses persist ? Well as I see it (yes, brace for soap box time…), the reality is that the CIOs, CTOs are all so indoctrinated by the “Institute of Management” spiel and government agencies are SO risk-averse, that it is now an almost unavoidable necessity for most medium to large enterprises if they want to do business at the “big end of town”. Meanwhile SMEs will struggle to justify the cost….

Which leads on to the quote near the end of the article…. can you say “self serving” ?

Whose idea was this, anyway?
Where did the standard model come from in the first place? The answer is both ironic and deeply suspicious: It came from the IT outsourcing industry, which has a vested interest in encouraging internal IT to eliminate everything that makes it more attractive than outside service providers.

“Everything you’ve been told is wrong: What IT should do instead”
http://infoworld.com/print/108477

Ref:
http://www.itilsurvival.com/itilhistory.html

WARNING: Anyone who holds any ANZ credit cards with automatic payment set up.

Review your December statement very carefully. Apparently ANZ had a problem with automatic payments in December which has impacted multiple customers.
The only hint my source received was a “late payment fee” on a card that is setup for automatic payment within the ANZ system.

ANZ are apparently aware of the problem, but don’t appear to be interested in fixing it proactively, only when customers point it out to them for their particular accounts.

At the time of writing, there is nothing on the front page of the ANZ site to suggest they are communicating the December glitch to customers or the public via their site.

Send this information to any ANZ customers you might know, we need to put pressure on big banks who’ve all made profits during the economic downturn at the expense of the general public and small businesses. If they are charging late payment fees for faults in their own systems, then this is just another way they profit from our inaction.

Keep the bastards honest.

UPDATE: My source further reveals the following:

The call centre operator in credit card solutions said that they were able to resolve the problem quickly because they (ANZ) are aware of the problem as it impacted a number of other customers as well.

My source:

1 – Saw unexpected “late payment fee” (auto payment was up to 40+ iterations on monthly cycle, so it has been there a long time…)

2 – Phoned bank to ask (a) why the payment was not processed, and (b) why the fee should be paid if they did nothing different, ie: the auto-payment is not the responsibility of ANZ customers.

3 – Got put through to credit card solutions after initial complaint about scenario

4 – Credit card solutions person was very helpful and advised on how to correct the problem. Apparently the problem impacts OLD / long-standing auto-payments.

5 – Got put back to telephone banking staff to setup a new auto-payment.

6 – Noticed that the new auto-payment has (a) different structure for ID from old one, and (b) has different terminology to old one. New payment IDs are much longer and alphanumeric versus simple 4-digit numeric. Old description read as balance due whereas new description says “FULL balance”, which may or may not be the same dollar figure… still waiting to see what happens in January…

So, the short answers are;

1. yes, they confirmed that the problem was with the old auto-payments

2. yes, they advised that more than just my source’s account was impacted

I got my Mongoose Switchback around 1994. It’s been a tough bastard and has help up quite well over the years. Anything plastic is deteriorating though and some bits probably need replacing.

Today I was putting my regular commuter bike/touring bike in for a service and I decided to impulse buy some Michelin fattie knobble tread tyres for the old Mongoose dirt devil. After I switched out my road slicks, gave the breaks a tune, oiled the chain and polished some of the grime off the frame and wheels, the old Mongoose showed me that it was ready for any mountain anytime. I think it was even daring me to find a huge hill and thrash down it…

Sydney Morning Herald “article” about containing the cycling epidemic
by disgraced former NSW minister is torn to shreds by
Copenhagenize.com:
http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/11/meet-carl-scully-mr-headwind.html

The SMH “article” in question:
Carl Scully (former NSW minister who was ejected from parliment for
lying to the Australian people…TWICE!) talks about his crusade to
ban bicycles and keep them out of cities:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/cyclists-do-not-have-the-same-rights-as-motorists-on-roads-20091111-i7wf.html

How citizens on twitter have reacted to the anti-cycling holy war of this ex-transport minister:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=Carl%20Scully

A refresher on the amazing “achievements” of Carl Scully on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Scully

Although Scully publicly blamed the party machine for working against
him, it was reported that some Labor MPs feared his record as
Transport Minister during the Waterfall train disaster and other
problems would have worked against the Labor Party at the next State
election if he was Leader. Carl Scully was sacked as NSW Police
minister on 25 October 2006 by Morris Iemma, after having misled
parliament twice in two weeks[3] over the consequences of the 2005
Cronulla riots in December 2005. He had misled parliament when he had
said he had not seen a report on the incident. Then-Opposition Leader
Peter Debnam had repeatedly called for Scully’s resignation.

and

“Carl Scully was the NSW State Minister for Roads during the 2008-09
widely unpopular implementation of a cashless tollway system of Sydney
roads dubbed the “$100m e-tag swindle”. It initially included a $24
administration fee for Interlink accounts not used more than 24 times
per quarter – which he said the Government would not prevent – and a
$40 bond to purchase the essentially compulsory tags. Due to
widespread complaints these decisions were reversed however, the final
cost to commuters is currently unknown.”

It’s like somehow Carl Scully has never travelled or learned about any
other country in the world. Or is it something more sinister…?

Follow the money.

What we can work out about him is that he’s very friendly with the right corporations (motoring companies and also engineering/infrastructure companies who’ve “won” tenders while he was in office) to make any Australian citizen wonder if his real motivations have anything to do with the people of Australia:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s1897261.htm

—

Cities that are well designed for cycling, pedestrians and motor vehicles to
perfectly co-exist have been quite successfully created and improved
by many countries all around the world for decades.

The technology is available.
The design is available.
It’s sustainable.

What we are sorely missing in Australia is the right leadership.

-GeekPete