Somewhere out there!

I think this comment from Stiglitz: What the IMF Must Do to Reestablish Legitimacy clearly states the complication of international trade. 

This poses a dilemma for Chinese policy makers. Subsidising their own farmers would divert money from education, health, and development projects. Or China can try to maintain an exchange rate that is slightly lower than it would be otherwise. If the IMF is to be even-handed, should it criticise American farm policies or China’s exchange-rate policies?

As a side note, three books on economics I can recommend to any are: Naked Economics, Freakonomics and one I finished this weekend The Undercover Economist. The last one being a very good

Technorati Tags: china, economics, international, books, trade, usa

Discovered from jwz, the flying carpets: “A Site Specific Public Art Project for the Sacramento International Airport”.

Quite a cool art project, but it also gives a vision of a future digital version: bringing new meaning to a game like Civ4. 🙂

Technorati Tags: future, art

This looks very interesting: Unattended Upgrades.

I have an interest in picking up cfengine at some point in order to manage a cluster of Xen hosts more effectively. I am aware however of it’s complexity. So this blog post stuck me as quite interesting. Even more so since it seems Puppet is ruby based. Like cfengine:

Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.

In a comment on the linked post, I also noted another system to investigate: bcfg2.

Technorati Tags: puppet, cfengine, bcfg2

In the future I will have to check these maps before making real estate decisions.

From O’Reilly Radar.

Technorati Tags: sea, level, future

Finally a decent looking Rails CMS system that looks usable: Radiant CMS.

Haven’t really gone down the Modx path yet, so I’ll look at Radiant instead as rails is my prefered web platform. Looks a big rough around the edges at the moment, but has a usable first version.  Couple things I’d probably like to see as major features for my requirements are: i) some sort of assets (pictures, pdfs, or other static files) management interface and ii) a WYSIWYG editor.

The first I might even add myself if the code looks easily.  The second is probably just a matter of time.

From the Skype Journal, get it from Skype 2.5 BETA. SMS feature looks quite cool, plus the contacting sorting is sane again.

Also SkypeIn from Australia is now avaliable. Waiting now for SkypeIn for New Zealand and a decent SkypePBX to Asterisk system.

Technorati Tags: voip, skype

Just discovered Splunk from Ben Rockwood. Splunk is a cool looking web-based log analysis system, which uses Ajax. I’ve been meaning to do a search and find a good centralised syslog system with a web interface.  Seems like I don’t need to go any further.

Check out the tour for more details on how it works.

Technorati Tags: syslog, ajax, webui, splunk

A useful list of Common Questions about the Sun X2100 Server.

I’m looking for a three colo server at the moment and was considering either a x2100 or a x4100. The ILOM feature and four drive bays will probably swing me towards the x4100.

Technorati Tags: sun, hardware, x2100

Fast OS Switching a good reason to consider the Mac Mini as your next workstation.