criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: Markdoc as a Task Manager!
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2013/03/markdoc-as-task-manager.html
Saturday, March 9, 2013. Markdoc as a Task Manager! If you are familiar with Extreme Programming, you will be familiar with Backlog and Sprint as concepts. Otherwise a simple description is that Backlog is all the bits you have to build and Sprint is those bits from the Backlog that you are currently focusing on. These are usually expressed as short "user stories". Please don't tell me that I've over-generalised.I already know that! And this use case uses that same script. And that will later be importan...
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: Dyneema Rigging
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2014/03/dyneema-rigging.html
Tuesday, March 25, 2014. When Zuline was launched she had beautiful hand spliced galvanised rigging. It was done by a very talented friend and it was very effective rigging. It was also very heavy - heavier than it needed to be. We decided, after much agonising, to pull the mast out, strip the mast back to bare wood, make the minor repairs required and then get a decent cover of varnish on it. Between Christmas and New Year we took a good hard look at the other stays and realised that whilst they mightn'...
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: Ranjini
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2013/01/ranjini.html
Wednesday, January 16, 2013. The Australian legislation has ASIO making security assessments of asylum applicants. However neither the applicant nor anyone else (with some limits around a new review process) is allowed to see the assessment or know the reasons for it. So will Ranjini ever be deemed able to be released? Will successive governments continue to incarcerate her without trial or procedural fairness until she is so old and feeble as to be deemed a risk by nobody? What will happen to Ranjini?
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: A burnt offering: Carbon Pricing doesn't have to be like this
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2011/07/burnt-offering-carbon-pricing-doesnt.html
Saturday, July 16, 2011. A burnt offering: Carbon Pricing doesn't have to be like this. Australian politics has done something over the last couple of weeks that I had thought impossible: it's taken a turn for the worse! Meanwhile in Europe, one economy after another finds itself in strife, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, with the UK not much better. A default in any of those economies will set off ripples that will be uncontrollable and unpredictable. Next, and as a subset of the Henry review a...
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: One small step for Australia...
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2011/06/one-small-step-for-australia.html
Saturday, June 25, 2011. One small step for Australia. Listening to the discussion around Go Back on SBS this week has given me some heart that we might have moved a fraction of an inch from a hate and fear filled rhetoric towards a clearer view of asylum seekers as people who are in difficult situations and worthy of our support. The one small step is simple: move to a community-based processing system now. I note that Malcolm Fraser, in a speech last night in Adelaide, also made this point and another ...
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: An open letter to Bob Brown
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-letter-to-bob-brown.html
Saturday, June 4, 2011. An open letter to Bob Brown. I decided it was time to write to you, because the country is pretty fucked and we need you to act. At the last election an interesting thing happened. The collective mind of Australia created a hung parliament. We also gave the Greens a bigger vote than we ever have before. In my electorate we elected the first lower house Green in Federal Parliament. Well Bob, I'm looking at you. Here's your opportunity. It's what we put you and Adam Bandt an...Do no...
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: The mire we find ourselves in
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2011/09/mire-we-find-ourselves-in.html
Sunday, September 11, 2011. The mire we find ourselves in. It's been a tumultuous couple of weeks, and at the end I'm left with a peculiar quandary. There is no longer any party in Australian politics that comes close to representing my views. I saw on a young bloke's FaceBook page, under the heading "Politics" a simple statement: "Politicians are wankers". Based on the behaviour in Canberra and Spring Street, not to mention Macquarie Street, I can only agree. So let's get down to the facts:. The key iss...
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: Lightweight Continuous Documentation Build
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2013/03/lightweight-continuous-documentation.html
Sunday, March 3, 2013. Lightweight Continuous Documentation Build. You know this fixation we all have with the "document"? Yeah, that's the one, the one where we get all precious and don't want to show anyone the "document" until it's all nicely polished. Well nuts to that! I've been casting around for some time now to get a nice simple workflow that combines a Git repo with a lightweight wiki engine. I've finally got it up and working and happy. It's a bit of a sweet thing. Here's how it works:. If I wa...
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: The Unexpectedness of Loss
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-unexpectedness-of-loss.html
Thursday, January 3, 2013. The Unexpectedness of Loss. Googling around tonight, as no doubt we all do from time to time, I was hit with a sudden sense of loss. I found that a bloke I knew briefly, but well, had died just over 3 years ago. Ray Lynskey was a young bloke in the Royal New Zealand Airforce in 1978 when I met him. Ray was also a glider pilot. I was younger by a few years, a first year Uni student, far from home and finding life tough. Posted by Critical Alpha. November 17, 2015 at 7:59 PM.
criticalalpha.blogspot.com
Critical Alpha: Being a Git!!
http://criticalalpha.blogspot.com/2013/01/being-git.html
Thursday, January 10, 2013. To paraphrase Linus Torvalds, he’s an egotistical bastard and so he always names his software projects after himself. Hence the name Git! This post is not. For coders, hackers or other nefarious creatures who write software for a living. This post is aimed at the common (wo)man in an ordinary old business. Why would that sort of person be interested in Git? The Git that’s a distributed version control system (DVCS)? Capable of initialising and using remote repositories to enab...
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