Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Education

Merry Christmas to all of you

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Today is the 25th of December 2017 and Christina, Anya, Kyan and myself wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Interestingly, do you know that Father Christmas originally wore green and, in fact, appeared to announce the coming of spring? This would imply that he came around March every year. But he became red when Coca-Cola decided that it would be good to have Father Christmas on an advert for them and that he should wear red instead of green. That’s a pity because well, I believe, green looks much better than the overwhelming red… As you can see below, Google agrees:

A second thing I would like to mention is that I hope you all got the gifts you asked for but only if you asked reasonably. According to statistics, most Mauritian households have massive debts and it would be a pity if, for the sake of having the flashiest phone or the flashiest car, people keep on taking more and more debts. I wonder what percentage of the population has a positive net worth in Mauritius? That’s a study which needs to be made because I was reading an article the other day about the fact that, the less net worth you have, the more stressed you are.

A lot of studies show that, generally, those who have positive net worths, i.e. the millionaires, are not flashy at all. They don’t drive the latest BMW or have the latest iPhone. Real millionaires are frugal. Heck, that’s why they are millionaires. This would imply that those around us who like to show off are, as a matter of fact, poor.

Merry Christmas!

How to reduce the amount of disk space used by the systemd journal

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We, Linux people, generally use systemd now and one of its components is the journal controlled by the journalctl command line tool.

As explained on the Arch wiki,

systemd has its own logging system called the journal. The /var/log/journal/directory is a part of the systemd package and the journal will write to /var/log/journal/

The journal is always appended and therefore grows in size. On my laptop, the journal was taking 1.8Gb of space and was full of details which, I believe, I’ll never need. So I decided to clear all old contents (which the systemd people call a vacuum). I issued:

journalctl --disk-usage
journalctl --vacuum-size=64M
journalctl --disk-usage

And the journal immediately became smaller. I then issued a

journalctl --verify

which made me realise that some of the remaining journal files were corrupted (for some reason). There is no journal repair tool in systemd so I simply removed the offending files (with rm).

Now, I can easily check my journal entries for today and I know everything will be all fine:

journalctl --since today

The 7 most important people in the Liverpool coaching staff

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Here are the 7 of the most important people in the Liverpool first-team coaching staff:

Jürgen Klopp (holding the Liverpool scarf)

Born on 16 June 1967 in Stuttgart, Germany, Jürgen became the Manager of Liverpool in October 2015. Since then, Liverpool has adopted the Gegenpressing philosophy of playing “characterized by high-intensity running and pressing, a high-line across the pitch and counter-attacking football on the break.”

And now for the others, top row first, from left to right.

Zeljko Buvac

Born on 13 September 1961 in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zeljko is the First Assistant Coach which essentially means that he is the assistant of Jürgen Klopp, who refers him as “The brain” of the backroom staff.

Peter Krawietz

Peter is the Second Assistant Coach of Liverpool. Born on 31 December 1971 in Mainz, Germany, Peter excels in scouting and match analysis. Jürgen calls him “The Eye” of his staff.

Pepijn Lijnders

Born on 24 January 1983 in Venray, Netherlands, Pepijn is the First-team Development Coach. His job is to “assist Jürgen to develop a recognisable Liverpool FC style but also give young talent the chance to develop to first-team standards.” Jürgen considers Pepijn as part of “The Brain”.

John Achterberg

John is the First-team Goalkeeping Coach of Liverpool. Born in Utrecht, Netherlands on 8 July 1971, John was a former goalkeeper. According to Jürgen, John has the ability to be “a goalkeeper coach 24 hours a day” and “if you want to talk to him about anything [other than goalkeeping], he can lead every conversation in a goalkeeping direction”.

Mona Nemmer

Born around 1985 in Germany (I couldn’t find her exact birth date…), Mona is the Head of Nutrition at Liverpool. Quoting her, “I take care of the chefs, the projects, what quality of product we are buying, which components can we put on the menus depending on whether it is matchday minus one, matchday or what can be served on the bus after a game. Then it’s about when will it be eaten and what will be the last meal before a match.” She also adds: “Some players like to cook for themselves, some like to take away a packed bag with food in, but here we like to react individually. If the player wants a cooking lesson, or their wives or girlfriends do, we are free in the sense to help them with whatever they need.” She also says: “Football is difficult sport because on the one hand it is about endurance, but on the other it is strength, so I always try to update my knowledge […]”. Jürgen says that “Mona is the Heart and Soul” of the backroom staff.

Andreas Kornmayer

Andreas is the Head of Fitness and Conditioning. Born on 21 September 1974 in Munich, Germany, Andreas is the “drill sergeant” of Liverpool according to Jürgen. “He needs to be the bad boy from time to time because players don’t like running”.

This is quite an interesting backroom team: 4 from Germany, 2 from Holland and 1 from Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is very different from previous staff which, initially, were mostly from Great Britain and then Spain.

Kind of a very precise German piece of engineering with, of course, a “cool madman” at the steering wheel. I love it.