Spanspek

With my upgrade to Opensuse 11 and KDE4, basic filesystem operations using a GUI has become a pain in the arse.

Unless you want to get down and dirty on the command line, you either use Dolphin or Konqueror. I'm sure there are others, but these are the defaults and they're what most newcomers would use.

I just want to be able to move and copy files. When I click on a directory's name, the directory is opened and presented to me. That's not so unexpected. But when I click on a file's name, it launches whatever app handles that file by default or user setting. For any regular users of Windows or OSX, that's very unexpected.

As yet, I cannot find an easy way of selecting a single file. If I click and then drag on a file's name, I select multiple items. I actually have to right-click and bring up a contextual menu then escape to select the file. Then I can try to drag it.

Then comes the next problem. If I want to drag it to a folder in the same directory, I may have to drag beyond the bounds of directory view to get the view to scroll to where the folder's name is. However, in Konqueror this doesn't work. If I drag too far, I get the circle/slash icon. If I drag just over the border, the view scrolls about 1 pixel every five seconds.

I tried copying and pasting, or cutting and pasting. This doesn't work either. If I cut or copy the file and then navigate to the directory where I want it, the Paste command is greyed out, even if I have ownership of the file and the destination directory. WTF?

Some of this used to be possible in KDE3. Konqueror and Dolphin are seriously broken. Listen, Linux and KDE developers: if you want people to adopt Linux, you'd better make it sufficiently similar to Windows and OSX and make basic operations easy, or you're dead in the water.

My family and I spent a bit of time in Foster, South Gippsland, between Christmas and New Year. (Happy New Year, by the way!) When we go there, we have to use my ISP's national dial-up number. This is a pain because:

1. We've become accustomed to the speed of broadband connection, even if we were forced to hang off Telstra's hardware (but I can change that now -- woo hoo).
2. I can't get my Opensuse install to communicate with the Thinkpad's modem. It's infuriating because the first version of Suse I used I paid for and it worked perfectly well with that. I have worked out that it's probably a problem with pppd's configuration, but which settings are conflicting I can't figure out. Anyway, the problem is that it doesn't even get as far as addressing the modem! So I have to reboot into Windows, which works perfectly well with the modem. (That said, while I managed to get Windows working with the broadband, I can't now. It doesn't help that there are about half a dozen entry points into network settings, none of which seem to be consistent with any of the others.)

So I got to thinking about broadband in general and what it means. The current government's National Broadband Strategy seems unlikely to improve the problem I'm about to describe.

Currently, to get broadband one chooses a provider and that provider pays Telstra some ludicrous amount of money for a technician to go into the exchange and insert a plug into a socket. So, potentially, every phone connection could be broadband enabled, as long as there were enough DSLAM ports in the exchange. This could change with a fibre-to-the-node or fibre-to-the-home but the potential remains.

So how hard would it be to have broadband remotely turned on or off for any phone connection at any time? Surely, if there were one broadband connection for every phone connection in an exchange, the switching could be done with some sort of router.

What I'm thinking here is how great it would be if I could notify my ISP of a change of phone number and have the connection moved for a time, and then moved back. I could go on holiday for a week and take broadband with me, without the holiday phone having to be ADSL-enabled (and paid for) all the time.

Of course this would require a lot of cooperation between providers and probably isn't possible if this or a future government doesn't re-nationalise the physical phone network. (Telstra's extortionate charging for access to the national network which was built with taxpayers' dollars is a manifest demonstration of how contrary to the public interest was the selling off the network.)

I can dream, can't I?

Before I travelled to South Africa, my parents and other relatives told me how utterly beautiful the jacarandas are in Pretoria. Certain areas of the city are full of them. I recall one park in particular which had few other species.

They are beautiful, but what struck me when I returned is how brilliant the colour of the local jacarandas is. It's a deeper and richer mauve than those in Pretoria. Even allowing for the fact that here they are surrounded by darker green foliage, and one never sees so many in close proximity, they're better.

Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, a Labor government is about to shred the vocational training system on the blades of the free market. Not only is the Victorian TAFE system the worst funded in the country, not only are its teachers on the lowest wages of any TAFE teachers in the country (and paid less than high school teachers), the Government is about to introduce changes which will kill off or seriously injure existing institutes and allow rampant profiteering by private corporations. Here are main "features":

• Double or triple fees paid by students
• Make government funding contestable by private corporations. This means that private providers can apply for, and receive, government funding to provide training.
• Remove limits on the numbers of places a training provider can offer

The issue of contestability is fraught with danger. As yet there's no indication of how providers are to set fees or even whether there will be limits set by the Government. Can you imagine if a private provider, who might otherwise charge $10000 for a fee-for-service place, got $7-8000 from the government and then still charged $5k?

One hopes it won't be so.

The last one has been little discussed. What most people don't know is that the Office of Tertiary Training and Education (now known by the fatuous and opaque title of Skills Victoria) put years of work into modelling the demands for skills in the employment market. Now even though my area -- sound production -- would be (and was) designated as a "low priority" course, it does make sense for the government to spend its education dollar wisely on training people for skills that are actually needed and in occupations where there are skills shortages.

Well, OTTE and the puppet Minister for Education got rolled by some arseholes in Premier and Cabinet. It is said that the then Department Secretary for OTTE was so insensed that she resigned.

So what's the wash-up? Well, since the government will now purchase as many places for students as we can enrol, maybe its not so bad. Except that it's inevitable that private providers will cherry-pick the cheap courses -- those for which only a classroom, a whiteboard and desks and chairs are required -- so established providers (TAFE institutes) will lose places.

The response at my institute, so I've heard, is to convert fee-for-service courses into "recurrently funded" courses (funded by the government). And since there's no limit on the numbers we can enrol, even in what was previously a low priority course, it's an easy way of keeping up the number of places and therefore the revenue. However, our Department is still expected to generate a high level of fee-for-service revenue even though we've lost more than half of it. So the net result is that everyone is trying to think up fee-for-service programs that can be offered.

I'm not having a go at my insitution. Converting fee-for-service places into recurrently funded places is actually a rational response to what's going to happen. But the net effect is that those of us "at the coalface" (to use a cliche beloved of politicians and public servants) are going to have to put in thousands of hours of unpaid overtime to develop new course with the meagre, and in some cases, non-existent resources that we have. And that's on top of the overtime we already do.

I would venture to say that there's probably not a single colleague who's not putting in at least one day a week extra -- even those of us who are on a 0.6 contract (three days a week) -- that we're not being paid for.

One has to wonder what the motivation is. Well, apparently the Federal Minister for Education would like to see a similar thing so I wouldn't be surprised if she planted the idea in the Premier's mind. But to throw out years of work and let the kids do whatever courses they want, regardless of whether there'll be a job for them at the end of it, and do it when the economy is tanking big time, is plain stupid.

But it's just one of a number of things that Premier Brumby is doing that no one wants... except a few small vested interests. Here are some others:

• Building a pipeline between the Goulburn River and Melbourne, effectively stealing water from the most degraded and fucked up river system in the country
• Building a desalination plant instead of regulating water saving and coming down hard on industrial wastrels
• Building more freeways instead of a reliable public transport system. It'd be really cool to get a comment on this blog from the PR guys at Dis-Connex. Hey, it doesn't matter what you say. No one believes you. Now go and get a real job.

The decisions have been made despite rational, well-argued opposition and there'll be no back-down. Because to reverse such decisions make you look weak. And Brumby doesn't want to look weak. He's just another bloke hung up about his masculinity who'll never admit his mistakes. This is exactly the macho bullshit evident in so many cultures, and in every totalitarian state, around the world that's got us where we are. Haven't you noticed? It's always the fucking men.

Brumby is no different to the leaders of China, Cuba or North Korea. He's having a mid-life crisis and has to show the world what a big man he is.

For much of the time since I started this blog (that no one reads), I've had at least 10 comment spams a day... all nicely caught by this blogging software.

But in the last few weeks, it's stopped. I had one today, but only one.

What's going on?

I guess not even spam merchants are interested in this blog!