Written By: - Date published: 10:00 pm, June 17th, 2008 - 106 comments
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I was just checking the links to the standard and I see that Whale is being his usual self. It looks like he has finally managed to read a DNS. He has discovered that I run a server at home, and that I’m a labour party supporter. Now I’m sure I’ve mentioned this a number of times both here and on KiwiBlog and on some of the other blogs.
Whale has found that I own labour.co.nz. That was registered by myself a long time ago (early 90′s from memory) to give uucp e-mail addresses to labour party members in my electorate. This was before any political party apart from the greens had figured out that there was a net. It was done to show my skeptical local politician of the potential of the net for NZ and its exports, and has probably helped a lot of IT companies as a consequence.
I changed the owner name of the domain to the NZ Labour Party (NZLP) when they did finally set up their own domains and redirected the web to labour’s site. This gives the NZLP rights over the name under domainz and then InternetNZ rules. I still pay for the domain since it is my fellow activists who use it, so the bills come to me.
Now in my book, that means at worst, that I’m guilty of giving a donation to the NZLP – a web redirection. But Whale seems to think this is significant – but as we’ve seen before Whale doesn’t understand the law very well. It’d be interesting to find out if he understands the cost of a 300 series redirection response to a HTTP GET command.
Technical skills are in short supply around the world. Almost every tech I know provides them gratis to someone else – if only family. Most help voluntary groups from the scouts to the PTA’s. I help the NZLP because I want to make sure we have literate politicians. I also help companies I’ve worked with, friends, family, and sometimes their voluntary organizations. Of course in the bloated ego of Whale this seems to mean that there is a vast conspiracy. He should really go and help someone (or someone should help him).
My home server also acts as a backup DNS and backup mail server for my last company. That means that they have my expert assistance for helping with e-mail and DNS problems. Considering I still have shares in the company, help them on the code, and help with advice on operations – then this really isn’t surprising. They scratch my back and provide the same backup DNS and mail services for some of my domains.
With a flair for the dramatic that would make him a good journo for the Truth, he then discovers that my home server is listed as a DNS for The Standard. It appears that he doesn’t know the difference between a primary and secondary DNS because he seems to think it is the only DNS. Either that or he is being dramatic again. Since I own The Standard, I think that having my home server as a backup DNS is a good idea. Whale seems to think it is suspicious.
Whale obviously doesn’t have any voluntary organizations, friends or people that rely on his advice and technical expertise. He seems to assume that there has to be money changing hands. It is evident that he doesn’t do much around the voluntary or charitable sectors.
Whale has missed a lot. I’m pretty sure I have a pile of domains for other people on my home server DNS and SMTP server as well. Some are for friends and their businesses. Some are for activists in different areas. However Whale appears to have been too illiterate to pick up on these.
Personally I’d recommend that Whale takes a basic network course at somewhere like NatColl. Failing that could some kind net-tech of a right leaning persuasion please help this guy out. He has come so far but appears to still lack some of the fundamentals.
btw: Dolphins are so much more fun than their over sized cousins, and in my opinion, smarter as well.
Lynn Prentice – Geek with MBA
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Scoopit!
One of The Standard’s NSes is on the Orcon network. Orcon is owned by Kordia, Kordia is an SOE, Minister for SOEs is Trevor Mallard, Mallard is also Minister for the Environment. QED
Now I have proof that it is all a secret plot by the Labour-Green government to ban free speech can I guest post on Whale Oil?
Funny I could have sworn I read some rumours about what John Key said at the ‘Horn yesterday posted on this site no hard evidence to back it up, but put across as hard facts.
No Felix, put across as what it was, speculation based on rumour. Let’s start with the title of the post: “What went on at the ‘horn?” – spot the question mark? Know what it means? Then the opening sentence: “Reports have been circulating around Wellington…” tags this as based on rumour. And at the end: “Before the right wing commenters start attacking this as all just rumour and gossip, they might like to check with their National Party friends”, an acknowledgement that the post can be seen as rumour and an invitation to the reader to check for themselves. In short, not put across as “hard facts” by any stretch of the imagination.
Might want to put some tags on the post to reflect that then…
It is clearly implied in the tone of SP’s post and of the posts comments that it is indisputable that it happened.
lprent
OMG, you mean people are not born knowing how to read a DNS ?
WhaleOil must be denigrated, he’s just worked out how to do what about 2% of the population know how to do…. OMG I can’t believe that WhaleOil isn’t all over this DNS thing… No wonder he’s he just a political blogger and not some super geek!
Get real lpren – reading a DNS is about as simple as having a shit, but lets be honest here, most internet users use the internet and as tech-heads it’s our job to keep it at that level for them, not mock them for not knowing the shit we need to know to do our jobs.
Do you know how to correctly wire a sewage pump on a rising main?
[lprent: Slightly different levels of skills. In this case anyone can do it with no skills. Try this link. Type in whaleoil.co.nz, press enter. Then look at the full info. It is TRIVIAL. Whois for domains is all over the net.]
All the rest of this techno stuff goes over my head thats why geeks were invented!
Geeks rule! And we have a much more exciting lifestyle than is commonly imagined too:
http://www.igeek.com/articles/Humor/Support/DrugDealersProgrammers.humor
lprent
The changing stories about ‘The Standard’ and it’s association with Labour are the most telling, not WhaleOil’s ability to read a DNS.
The initial position was naive disclosure… We’ve just been given a brank spanking new server cluster.
That was quickly followed by… It was a temporary hosting, only a few weeks.
Followed by complete denial that there was an association at all.
Then the saga continued and people got banned all over the show for asking questions or making suggestions, as has happened in this thread.
It’s just laughable, the anon authors of the standard supported the EFA and the disclosure and transparency implications yet you continue to hide behind a thin (and changing) veil of nonsense about the association with Labour.
Get over yourselves!
heh good link rOb
rOb
“Geeks rule!” You bet, they run this show!
They are the railway barons of the new millennium.
Geeks can also be crooks (no I’m not suggesting you Lynn)
But remember y2k anyone ? We had loons running around the hospitals like lunatics telling us the world was about to end – they must’ve made a fortune.
WhaleOil must be denigrated, he’s just worked out how to do what about 2% of the population know how to do . OMG I can’t believe that WhaleOil isn’t all over this DNS thing No wonder he’s he just a political blogger and not some super geek!
Burt, if whale wants do have a techno-style rant, then he should get his facts right. If he hasn’t got them right then he can be legitimately be attacked for it. Your ignorant DNS rant just shows you’re as much of an idiot as he.
Honestly, the things you write boggle my mind sometimes, if only for their sheer stupidity.
What a laugh. Whale should stick to photoshopping kids’ faces onto porn.
lprent
RE: the domain name you say.
OK, like some other people you were an early adopter of the internet and therefore saw it’s potential earlier than most. I get that.
You then say.
Excellent, that was a good move. Uptake of ‘the net’ was rapid when it happened, the ‘packaged internet solutions’ made it accessible as people didn’t need to learn a whole pile of stuff like looking up and reading DNS. However email, as communication tool, had already been widely adopted by companies as an internal communication mechanism. Larger companies or govt departments were often using leased lines to connect between locations. Geeks had been allover it for years and the public were just catching on.
So I don’t get this bit ?
[lprent: My usual electorate is Mt Albert (that is where I grew up) - so my local MP was at the time the deputy leader of the opposition, and is now PM. It means that she was a much earlier adopter of net technologies than most of her age group.
Boundary changes now have me in that alien electorate of Auckland Central.]
Matthew Pilott
Can you a bit more specific about the ignorance in my rant, I’m interested to know what part showed I had no idea what I was talking about.
Camoron Slater will say anything and do anything to get traffic hits for his crappy blog. He is an abomination and he shouldn’t allowed anywhere a computer or woman and children.
Burt, I think it was the bit where you criticised Lynn for his critique of whale. You know, where whale tried to be all technical, and lynn showed that he’s wrong, but you didn’t think it’s ok to criticise someone about their DNS knowledge despite that being the foundation of the enitre comment.
Tell me you see the inherent idiocy in that.
Imagine that I wrote an article about turnips. Lynn then attacks me for my abjectly poor knowledge of turnips. Then you come along and say “Not everyone knows everything about turnips! Get over yourself Lynn!”
Now that would be a bit silly since my initial post was turnip-related, and my turnip knowledge was limited in relation to Lynn’s.
Honestly, where you come up with these angles never ceases to amaze, Burt.
Matthew Pilott
It think it was you that missed the point.
Imagine that Lynn wrote an article about turnips. WhaleOil then attacks Lynn, pointing out that when Lynn said turnips, Lynn actually wrote about carrots but just changed the word ‘carrots’ to ‘turnips’ and had a picture of a turnip on the front cover.
Lynn then justifies his long association with carrots, but claims a little spray paint and they all look the same and it’s no issue.. He’s always been a turnip, not a carrot and WhaleOil is an ignorant gardener.
However I do agree WhaleOil’s flown a pretty feeble kite, but it looks like it’s still getting plenty of lift all the same. Perhaps it’s structurally sound even though it’s been shot at repeatedly.
This was great, before this I didn’t know that the Standard existed but the free publicity advertised it very well.
burt: Or it is just hard to damage hot air?
You have to remember that the only thing that Whale actually said in his post was that I’m billed for labour.co.nz but the NZLP is listed as the owner. The reason for that I’ve explained above. It means that the NZLP has a right to claim the domain if I lapse it.
Everything else was just pure hot air based around the fact I have an old AMD running as a network server under my desk at home, and that I use that server to help people. It acts as a secondary dns for The Standard and as a mail server for my domain labour.co.nz.
I realise the whale is a bit illiterate, but this is the third time he has directly attacked me. Each time he looks more like a technical fool.
I’m just pointing this out to the audience outside geekdom.
I help the NZLP because I want to make sure we have literate politicians.
I think you may need to help Chris Carter more.
dave: I am but one person.
But I’d urge techs to help their local politicians. They appreciate the help, and they tend to make more rational decisions about tech than they’d do otherwise.
We need to prevent too many strange policies like the Nat’s current 1.5b broadband policy. That looks like being a disaster if it was ever implemented the way it has been spun.
It does nothing for helping the country make money – it just sounds good to people who don’t understand the issues.
lprent
I think what you do is great, assuming that all details such as any consulting you bill the Labour party for is correctly attributed where appropriate then well done. You are doing a great job, your dedication makes you a role model. I don’t doubt for one moment you do a lot of voluntary work for this blog.
The issue that WhaleOil, and others, will however continue to make head way on is that the standard has a, at best, murky relationship with Labour. Labour and the authors of the standard supported the EFA and the transparency, accountability and openness that it implied. Yet more and more emerges requiring more and more detailed analysis of the intertwined relationships between ‘the standard’ and Labour.
I think life would be a lot easier if Labour simply costed an allowance for your time and the hardware/network costs as a donation to Labour and we got on with it. You guys (the standard) could then hold up a big fat “Not guilty” sign when people accuse you of “do as we say – not as we do” in relation to the EFA.
burt: But that would probably piss off the greens amongst our writers.
Not to mention that it wouldn’t surprise me to find alliance supporters amongst the writers. The reason that the site works is that it is broad across the left and labour movement. That is wider than the NZLP
The writers put in the work to make the site worth reading. I just run the technical parts of the blog and pay the small amount that is its cash requirement. It is a cooperative enterprise. The nice thing about the net is that you can run something like this without even meeting the people you’re cooperating with. We don’t have to have a single opinion, and we don’t even have to agree with each other. Just get on with the taks at hand and work on the bits we do agree on.
There is another example of that at present in the auckland Drinking Liberally mail group. That is looking like we’ll catch up with the wellington social scene sometime.
lprent
“burt: But that would probably piss off the greens amongst our writers.
Not to mention that it wouldn’t surprise me to find alliance supporters amongst the writers.
Transparency and openness in political advocacy are not trumped by complication. Complication is arguably what the EFA was designed to restrict.
Apportion the site costs across Labour, Green … whoever you like. WhaleOil, and others, will continue to make headway as long as your affiliations are strong and undeclared.
I think life would be a lot easier if Labour simply costed an allowance for your time and the hardware/network costs as a donation to Labour and we got on with it.
Ummm – what?
There’s this party called the Labour Party. There’s this blog called The Standard. Lynn does volunteer work for both. But that does not make The Standard a Labour Party blog.
Here, let me put this in terms you might understand.
There’s this party called the National Party. There’s this blog called Kiwiblog. DPF does volunteer work for both. But that does not make Kiwiblog a National Party blog.
rOb
I did not say “You must do this because you are a Labour party blog”. That would a) get me banned and b) possibly be incorrect.
I suggested that making a declaration (perhaps $5K – chickenfeed to a political party) this entire shitty mess would be a non issue. Brighter days ahead as debate moves back to politics and away from technicalities of who’s hosting who etc.
[but it would be untrue. There is no political party funding of the blog. SP]
rOb: Yes – now think WhaleOil.
What party should we associate him with? And how long before we get denials.
burt: I’m more concerned about the writers on here. If the site was ‘funded’ by the NZLP, then I suspect some or most would leave.
You have to remember that I’m the only declared NZLP supporter amongst the people with admin, moderator, and writing access. The only reason I was hauled in here origionally was to provide technical skills.
After having the site attacked for some extremely technically stupid reasons, I got interested enough to give the site more time, and to provide some financial support to get a better server (and move to linux/apache). Similarly the writers seemed to get more motivated as well and the number of posts started to rise.
As bill brown says, the success of this site can in large part be attributed to our publicists on the right.
lprent
So are you saying it would be untrue because the standard never used a Labour party sever, never resided on a Labour party server cluster or what? Untrue because you would have been closed down like other sites that were still using that server or what?
If DPF and National or WhaleOil and National are using political party resources then they too should be outed and held to account as well. Will you accept long winded explanations about how it came to be they are one-in-the-same from only technical perspectives if that is all the justification they can offer to say they are separate?
this entire shitty mess would be a non issue
The shitty mess is all in your head Burt, and it’s already a non issue. Or if it isn’t, why aren’t you over on Kiwiblog demanding that DPF declare a donation to National?
rOb: Yes – now think WhaleOil.
If it’s all the same to you Lynn, I’d really rather not!
burt: If there had been a friendly tech with a Act party server available then I’d have used that. The problem was that the site was falling over due to loading issues because it grew faster than I had time to cope with.
We had a number of offers for hosting support. But it didn’t seem fair to use them because it’d have exposed the donator to being pilloried by the lunatic right for guilt by association. Just like Whale is trying to do with my former employer.
Eventually I solved the problem by just paying for hosting myself. It is cheap compared to my time playing around keeping the site running with low resources. We also don’t have to play around with finding screen real estate for advertisments like Whales ugly site has, and I don’t have to concern myself with being aware of site statistics (or rorting them like Whale seems to be doing).
lprent
How is that attack in keeping with your previous comment;
lunatics on both sides I guess.
Burt, you and your bloody turnips! Get this straight – whale wrote the first article on turnips. Lynn replied and called a turnip a turnip. From there on out your vegetable analogy falls apart like a steamed lettuce.
Just read the rest of te thread. What you’re saying, essentially, is “I don’t understand what’s going on, and others might not either. Just to satisfy me, you should pay $5,000 to an undefined collection of political parties for volunteer time and services.”
Get off it burt. That’s like saying a paperboy who delivers pamphlets in their spare time should bill the party for their time, because it’s a professional service. Hell, I used to get paid for delivering stuff – should I be billing for the deliveries I’ve been doing lately?
As said, your lines of attack never cease to amaze – I reckon you must be wired differently, no one else from the right ever comes close to replicating your lines. I suppose it’s more refreshing than the odd troll who just repeats national party lines and talkback dross.
burt: Why should the lunatic right have all of the fun. There are some on the left who should be able to participate as well. Who are we to deprive the ‘sod, randall, and others their opportunity to harry a whale (just so long as they do the human type).
I’m a centrist and a bit of a stirrer so when it isn’t directed at me I can just watch all of the fun.
BTW: Matt is right – you are more interesting than the trolls.
burt: I just noticed the bit about consulting. I do quite a bit of that – but I do not charge. I’ve haven’t charged anyone for work outside my PAYE in more than 10 years. That alone would make it very hard to figure out a ‘cost’ for me. What hourly rate would you charge?
What I do for work is not what I do in my voluntary work. What would be the point? I do things from outside of my immediate area of expertise to pick up new skills. I usually start using the new skills later in my job. So perhaps I should pay voluntary organisations for training?
Frankly, it was too much hassle dealing with the IRD with provisional tax. I can’t estimate the amounts I’d earn in a year, so I make sure that it is zero. It makes the equation simplier. Now there is a tax system that does need reforming – provisional tax is so archaic.
It also means that I’m very selective about who I support/help/assist.
lprent
Thewre is a new option for prov tax, it’s recently been introduced. It’s called the ratio method and you can read about it here. It’s apparently ideal for people who have significant fluctuations in their earning cycles. Seasonal workers, part time consultants that kind of thing.
Understanding the ratio option
I had a good look at it, understood how it works but haven’t jumped into it yet, this year my company will probably fall back into prov tax again for the first time in a few years, which is a bad thing and a good thing. As Sir Bob Jones once said – having lots of tax to pay is a big problem, a good problem but a big problem all the same.
I suspect a few companies might be declaring slightly larger profits this year compared to last year, something about imputation credits at 30% rather than 33% and hedging your bets for the possibility of reductions in the top personal tax rate to cash in the credits – but what would I know ….