Fitting the battle of life

Predictable puns aside, just finished running the Ubuntu Live CD on my flatmate’s laptop (a Dell Inspiron 6400). He’s been annoyed at Windows for a while, what with getting a blue screen every time he shuts his computer down (which means he either keeps it on or hibernating, which isn’t really a problem) and sound issues, along with numerous minor little niggles that get on his nerve (like, his left-click button doesn’t work all the time).

Running the live cd, I demonstrated that all these issues would disappear under Ubuntu. Wireless was flawless, graphics were perfect (integrated Intel), and does what he needs it to do. I explained it wasn’t very fast loading programmes because of the limitations of running from a cd, but he knows my older system is pretty responsive so his should be fine.

Comment of the day: “It’s odd how it’s better than Microsoft, isn’t it?”

I’ll set up a dual boot for him at the weekend.

Well it was a great debate this week, with Mark Clarke of Conservative Future and one of our ex-Presidents, Tarit Mukherjee, proposing the motion against Jo Shaw (the Lib Dem candidate for Holborn and St Pancras in the next election) and Lembit Opik MP (yes, the cheeky girl one; it actually took about an hour for anyone to mention it, surprisingly).

The following notes are my own, from what I managed to scribble down. I did not make notes on floor speeches or closing summary speeches; the port was taking its toll.

Prop Arguments

• Prop’s case was based on statistical evidence that the UK is overcrowded, with a population density twice that of Germany and 4x that of France, and a population that’s growing.
• Immigration is the only factor that we can control - fertility and higher life expectancy aren’t something we can deal with!
• Returning ex-pats, refugees and EU citizens can’t be controlled for various reasons, so we must look at those from the rest of the world, economic migrants.
• Immigration takes a toll on public services as it is happens faster at the moment that we have time to plan for (e.g. a new hospital to cope with increased population takes 5 years, a new tube line 10 years)
• It was pointed out that the Tories aren’t racist.
• Having quotas means that migrants know that there is a job waiting for them, public services they can use, and education for their children.
• The worst case scenario, as we have now, is that people turn up not knowing if they have a sustainable job or not, and so put a great burden on us.
• Quotas permit planning ahead effectively.
• Quotas are also a tool of integration, as they demonstrate that we do want those immigrating under a quota scheme in the country, increasing their self-worth and sending a message to the wider community that they should be made welcome because there is a demonstrable need for them.
• The Lib Dems’ own policy on immigration was rubbished.

Opp

•  Prop offered no details: what jobs, in what numbers, what about those who need to come to the UK for other reasons (family reasons were mentioned), and how would it be enforced?
• There must be a cut-off point and that is unfair; harms will result to someone as a result of turning them away.
• The Home Office is already rubbish at keeping track of numbers.
• Targets and numbers are the wrong way to deal with the problems associated with immigration.
• The history of Britain has set up a proudly liberal tradition in this area.
• The net benefit of immigration is £2.5billion per annum, and there are far more diverse benefits to be had as well.
• The country isn’t really overpopulated at all; statistics mean nothing.
• Population shouldn’t be controlled artificially; money is the best control as rich people have fewer children.
• This Tory policy is an unnecessary intervention in the free market: are they really Socialists posing as Tories or what?!
• It is impossible to work out how many people it will be necessary to let in; you cannot predict the future.
• Immigrants don’t come if they don’t think they’ll have a job at the moment anyway.
• If you support quotas as proposed you must support the forced removal of economic migrants when they’re no longer needed as well.

The vote was won by the Opposition by a large margin.

The floor prize was jointly awarded to Cormac and to Ruth.

Well it’s probably not Evolution’s fault - I don’t know if it’s got its own built-in dictionary or whatever - but this was very odd:

Apparently ‘prize’ isn’t an English (British) word. Looks like my degree in English Literature has taught me nothing so far.

On my random surfing of nothing in particular on the interweb (while I’m supposed to be working on an essay, as usual), I found the following options for mplayer:

mplayer -vo aa <filename.avi>

This doesn’t describe very well the effect of these options. It’s the ultimate in ascii geekery. It opens the movie file, and plays it in black and white ascii. For those that don’t know, that’s just numbers, letters, symbols and so forth. Screenshot:

That’s a guy sitting on a desk, giving a lecture. No, really it is.

Update: mgdm in #ubuntu-uk alerted me to the colour version,  mplayer -vo caca <filename.avi>:

Why you’d want to watch in colour is beyond my meagre comprehension.

Well, I read it a couple of years back because it was recommended to me by an English teacher at my school, and I must say I loved Tristram Shandy. Its black page, its marbled page, its ‘missing’ chapters later filled-in, the puns, the digression - I loved every minute of it (except the hundreds of long minutes spent reading it that, I suppose, could have been better employed).

The problem with this behemoth of a book is its terrible, loose structure. I know it’s not really a problem: it’s part of the very fabric of the book itself. It’s just that now, when I come to write an essay on it (The Tristapoedia as a microcosm of TS), I’m hamstrung by not being able to find what I’m looking for. Where does the Tristapoedia get its first mention? There’s no index, no helpful chapter summaries as in Tom Jones (and even those are often a load of rubbish - “Containing matters which will surprise the reader” for instance) . Fortunately, Google is my friend, picking up a JSTOR article that briefly references it in Volume V. A quick flick through finds it in Chapter XVI.

Now I’ve just got to read around it, refresh my memory of key passages (the key being, there are no ‘key’ passages)…and write 3,000 words on it by Wednesday afternoon. Wish me luck.

Following on from a successful term last term, where we had three teams break to semi-finals in two separate competitions, after just one week of competition this term, we have already had two teams break to semi-finals in two separate competitions: Anuj and Jon at the London IV, and Simon and Cormac at Warwick IV.

We await news as to how Simon and Cormac are faring in their semi; if they break to the final it will be one of our best performances for a long time.

He was a Windows sysadmin type thing (I was a little inebriated and it was noisy). I mentioned the L-word. He said he ‘didn’t get it’.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

He knew of Linux and didn’t understand the point. He had no philosophical bone in his body. He had no moral bone in his body.

I was too drunk to argue, unfortunately, but what if this happens again? My world will collapse.

Prep time, boys and girls. What did we learn? (This really does sound like school. I’ll stop it now.)

[I had to pop out for a bit while Dim was talking, and I spent too much money at the bar afterwards so my memory is a bit hazy as to some of the specifics, for which I apologise.]

The five-minute rule

Think of your fifteen minutes as split into three five-minute chunks in order to structure your preparation and force yourself to think –don’t leave all the hard work to the last two seconds before the judge calls you in. Keep an eye on the time.

{The first five minutes}
Make your way quietly to the room, thinking over the motion \emph{to yourselves}. During this time, make sure you know where you’re debating and go to the toilet if you need to. Use a sheet of paper for getting these starting ideas down before you forget them.

{The second five minutes}
Start talking to each other. The arguments you both come up with are probably the basic ones that you need to include; explain to each other your individual ideas. Pooling knowledge is important in this stage. Listen to each other and argue back–make sure the arguments are defensible enough to stand up for a few minutes on the debating table. Decide on a `line’ you will be following–usually something like `let’s take it right-wing’. This way arguments across your two speeches, and your PoIs, will be consistent.

{The final five minutes}
Keep talking to each other, but scribble everything down now. Decide who is taking which points, or what the extension is going to be. You must both understand each other’s arguments so the second speaker can defend them in his speech, or either speaker can defend them in PoIs.

We then went over the four main areas you need to be thinking about: actors, principles, mechanism(s) and examples.

If you’ve read one of my previous posts, you’ll know I’m using the LaTeX typesetting programme to produce a document at the moment, which consists of writing the content in plain text format with some additional instructions (such as writing “\emph{like this}” to get writing like this), and then passing it through LaTeX to produce the final document. I can write all the chapters in separate files, and the programme will pull them all together under my instructions and paginate, add page numbers and a table of contents page automatically. I find it’s far more powerful than word processing as it does half the work for you.

Anyway, LaTeX isn’t perfect. If I add a whole new section and lengthened others, some of the page numbers in the table of contents will often go a bit odd when I first run it through. So, I usually run it a couple of times before checking the output, to make sure all the numbering’s right. Now, I’m a bit lazy, and don’t want to have to spend longer than I have to at the command line typing “pdflatex filename” twice (I know, I could use the up arrow to get the last-used command, but as I said, I’m too lazy even for that!) and then “evince filename.pdf” to open the document. So, I wrote myself a little script.

It’s in bash, of course, and goes something like this:

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/Debating/guide;
pdflatex guide;
pdflatex guide;
notify-send "Document created" "Now opening preview"
evince guide.pdf;

What this does, when run with “sh guide.sh”, is to navigate to the right directory, run pdflatex twice (to produce a pdf instead of dvi file), and then send a pop-up to the desktop telling me all has been successful, before opening the file itself. A bit overkill, perhaps, but it tends to save me a little time. Using xpdf instead of evince would probably shave a second or two off the process as well, as I’ve found it to be lighter.

Ah, the joys of being a lazy student!

I do eat fruit and veg.