2004-06-15

Garbage collections days, xchat, SMP

Garbage collection days
Yesterday was a public holiday here in Sydney. Queen's birthday to be exact. And you know what? The garbage truck never comes around on Mondays, and thats probably why. All public holidays I can recall are long weekends, this means if the garbage collection day was Monday, 2 things would happen:

  1. Garbage people take a day off, resident are left with a full rubbish bin.
  2. The Council pay extra for garbage people to work on a public holiday.

Now since the first poses a health risk, and no sane MP would -ever- let his/her voters be stuck with 2 weeks of rubbish and a bin design to hold 1 weeks worth, it means therefore, option 2 must come into effect.

Now of course, the government in its infinite wisdom didn't want that to happen. So they came up with an ingenious idea: never have garbage collection days on mondays. Clever isn't it. This way, they never have to pay workers extra holiday pay (except maybe for Christmas, Easter, and New Year, but I am sure those are all long weekend style too).

Of course all it takes is for ONE region to have its garbage collection on Mondays to sink this consipracy theory.

xchat
For those won't don't know it, xchat is an irc client, written for X windows system on *nix systems. Now, its also available for windows. This means no more dependence on mirc, and I can sleep at night, knowing I am morally safe ;-)

SMP in OpenBSD HEAD
Yep, thats right, every one's favorite secure-by-default one-remote-hole-in-more-than-8-years server operating system, openbsd is getting symmetrical multiprocessing support, according to this entry.

System admins rejoice!


Back to doing past papers... it redefines fun...

Cheers,
Steve