Planet SLUG

Sridhar Dhanapalan: Great start… but the hard work is just beginning

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:06:49 +0000

Donna Benjamin rounded a small group of us together to write a letter to Julia Gillard, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education. The result was widely syndicated, hopefully building some mindshare in the process. The Education Expo proved to me more than anything else that FOSS is quickly becoming acceptable to the general public — the trick is in how you promote it.

So where to from here? How can we capitalise upon the gains we have made?

Perhaps our greatest single weakness is the perceived lack of professional support. I think OSIA should be doing more to address this (note: I’m not implying that OSIA isn’t taking this seriously). Here’s an e-mail I wrote to the osia-discuss mailing list (which is unfortunately subscriber-only):

The best thing OSIA can do is fight the popular notion that there’s no
professional support available for FOSS. We can beat the TCO and Freedom
drums as hard as we want, but few organisations are willing to entrust their
computing to ‘community’ support.

I managed the Linux Australia stand at the Education Expo a few weeks ago, and
my impression is that FOSS is on the cusp of mainstream acceptance:

http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2008/06/29/education-expo-report/

Schools are crying out for ways to get better value for their dollar, but they
aren’t going to even think about FOSS if they can’t get professional support.

If I run the stand again next year, I’d like to see some involvement from
OSIA. At the very least, we should have available some leaflets showing that
yes indeed there is quality, paid support for FOSS.

Also note that FOSS isn’t Linux. We got the most interest in the
OpenEducationDisc, a compilation of FOSS for Windows.

On the community side, we can continue to make FOSS more acceptable to school administrations, bureaucrats and politicians. Here’s my idea:

My suggestion is for us to build a Web site focused on open education in
Australia. We already have the perfect vehicle: http://openeducation.org.au.
However, at present it’s just a messy wiki more suitable for our own
brainstorming than for being a public-facing resource.

The wiki should of course remain, but I propose that we build a proper,
presentable Web site that is directly accessible via the
http://openeducation.org.au address.

Why do this when we already have http://linux.org.au/education? Open Education
is much bigger than Linux, and certainly should not be anchored to it. Here’s
a short list of what it can include:

FOSS

(GNU/)Linux OS - on servers

(GNU/)Linux OS - on clients/desktops

open standards

open languages/libraries/APIs

free content/culture

open learning

open curriculum

To be honest, I fear that we might be only hurting ourselves by tying open
education to a completely Free computing environment. That might be a worthy
aim, but few institutions are going to switch over all in one go. By offering
a migration path (or paths), a school can migrate more comfortably at its own
pace. We ought to be providing real choice, not just a binary ‘with us or
with the terrists’.

FOSS (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Scribus, etc.) can run on operating systems
other than Linux. To use the recent Education Expo as an example, we got a
lot of buy-in through the OpenEducationDisc, a compilation of FOSS for
Windows.

Also note how I split Linux clients from servers. Linux’s place in the server
realm is very solid, but convincing an institution to accept a Linux client
solution is tougher. And by ‘client’, I mean either traditional desktops or
thin clients. The latter are often cost-effective and represent a real
strength of Linux, but are often overlooked or even have regulations working
against their adoption. On the server side, we have some great educational
tools such as Moodle and LAMS.

Open standards obviously include things like file formats and protocols, which
will become even more relevant as we see more applications (proprietary or
otherwise) pick up standardised methods of information exchange such as ODF
and PDF. This should also ease the integration of FOSS into pre-existing
environments. It also can include languages and all things related. Why are
schools still teaching Visual Basic when they could be teaching Python?

The final three points all link together. Most notably, they are not dependent
upon technology at all. Your average teacher isn’t a technologist, and
shouldn’t have to be. Knowledge can be shared and organised openly just like
code. Wikipedia has proven that great things can be built if ordinary people
are given easy to use tools.

Where to from this point? I suggest that we work towards getting a CMS running
at openeducation.org.au. We’ll have to agree upon a design and the message
that we want to purvey. Content creation should be separate from technical
ability, so the CMS should be simple enough for anybody to contribute.

Here is some inspiration from the UK:

http://www.openschoolsalliance.org/

http://schoolforge.org.uk/

The UK education sector appears to be much further ahead of us in terms of
embracing openness, and I think we can take some lessons from their efforts.

To clarify one thing in the above, I wrote the text for http://linux.org.au/education, but I never felt comfortable with it being there. So much of open education has nothing to do with Linux and Linux Australia shouldn’t be diverting its focus to dwell on it directly. With a more independent Web presence (in collaboration with Linux Australia), I feel that we can be much more effective.

LotD: Open sourcing Australia: OpenAustralia.org goes live

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Sridhar Dhanapalan: Education Expo, this weekend!

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:02:23 +0000

The Education Expo is on this weekend. I’ve sent a couple of missives to our helpers. The second one contains some advice that would work well in many situations regarding FOSS (especially where marketing is concerned), so I’ll reproduce it (slightly edited) here:

Subject: Education Expo, this weekend!
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:29
From: Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar@dhanapalan.com>
To: SLUG Activities <activities@slug.org.au>

Thanks again to everyone who has volunteered to help with the Linux Australia stand at the Education Expo.

The expo itself runs from 9am to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday. Entry is free. It’s a fun day for families with children in the K-12 space, so feel free to bring along your kids and make a day (or two!) out of it.

This year, the expo will be held in Rosehill Racecourse’s brand new Events Centre, and our stand is in a prime position right in front of the door. If you haven’t already, take a look at the original announcement and the Education Expo Web site.

I asked in my previous message if people could tell me when they would be available to help out. If you haven’t already, please let me know. If you’re unsure, that’s fine too: just show up and grab me at the stand.

I’ll be there at 8am on Saturday (an hour before it starts) to set up the stand, and probably at 8:30 on Sunday. I might need some assistance to set up, and also to pack up afterwards.

Some tips:

Wear comfortable casual clothing. It might get hot in the exhibition hall.

If you’ve got any Linux or FOSS themed clothing, wear that

Wear comfortable shoes. You’ll be standing most of the time.

Keep some water handy.

Talking to stand visitors can strain your throat. Some mints can help.

Make it clear to visitors that there is a vibrant FOSS community in Australia, and especially in Sydney. Invite them to SLUG, which meets in the city on the last Friday of every month (next meeting on 27 June). SLUG has a segment known as ‘SLUGlets’, which is intended for newbies.

Familiarise yourself with the leaflets that we will distribute:

http://linkpot.net/ravines/

http://linkpot.net/dethrone/

http://linkpot.net/tremolos/

Have a read of Linux Australia’s guides to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and FOSS in education. Remember to promote these to stand visitors as the best place to start with Linux and FOSS:

http://linux.org.au/linux

http://linux.org.au/education

One important point to remember is that Linux is not FOSS. We will be handing out copies of the OpenEducationDisc, which is a CD full of education-oriented FOSS for Windows. Not everyone is able to switch over to Linux cold-turkey, but we can get them started with FOSS on Windows first.

Similarly, open standards are not FOSS, but they are a good start. Inform people about the dangers of proprietary file formats, as seen with Microsoft Office, and promote in their stead open alternatives such as OpenDocument and PDF.

Show people that Linux isn’t strange and new. Many don’t realise it, but they are already using FOSS. For example:

Firefox and OpenOffice are becoming increasingly popular. The NSW Department of Education is in the process of switching over >40,000 school computers to OpenOffice.

Wikipedia is built around the idea of open knowledge, inspired directly from the FOSS movement (and it’s built on FOSS too!).

Even Mac OS X has many important components based on FOSS, such as the kernel, file sharing, printing and the Web browser.

About two-thirds of Web sites are served by the FOSS Web server, Apache.

Most of the large Web companies (like Google, Facebook and Yahoo) are built with FOSS.

It is normal for Hollywood films to be created using Linux.

Linux is prevalent in a range of consumer devices.

The popular ASUS Eee PC, and many of its competitors, come with Linux pre-installed.

Show people that Linux is easy to install and use. Ubuntu has an installer called Wubi, which is a Windows application that installs Ubuntu as a file without partitioning the hard drive. It behaves like a normal dual-boot system, but it can be uninstalled from ‘Add/Remove Programs’ just like any Windows application. We’ll also have copies of Edubuntu. Remember that this is an add-on companion, not a stand-alone liveCD as in the past. Give a copy of Ubuntu with every Edubuntu disc you distribute.

Linux is more secure. While nothing can claim to be 100% secure and virus proof, Linux has an excellent track record. It doesn’t need ‘band-aid’ solutions like anti-virus and anti-spyware software because the software was built sanely to begin with. The Internet was built for UNIX, not for Windows.

Linux and FOSS is great for families. It’s affordable and reliable. It won’t get infected and show unsolicited porn adverts to your children. There are heaps of great educational software installable with just a few mouse clicks.

Some caveats:

As a community stand, we are not selling anything.

Avoid unnecessary Microsoft-bashing. We’re running the stand because we love FOSS, not because we hate Microsoft.

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John Ferlito: Getting your key into debian-maintainers using jetring

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:05:41 +0000

I’m currently going through the process of becoming a Debian Maintainer so that I can upload Annodex packages without bugging one of the DDs I know. Thanks to horms and jaq for their help thus far.

As part of this process you need to file a bug against the debian-maintainers package to get your key added. You need to do this using a piece of software called jetring. jetring allows you to create changesets for a gpg keyring, a binary format, to make it easy for the maintainers to add and remove keys and know exactly whats being added and removed. I couldn’t find very much information on how you actually do this and hence the reason for this post.

To start with you need to grab the latest copy of the debian-maintainers keyring and extract the actual keyring from it. You can find the link to the latest version at debian-maintainers, just click on all to download it.

Here is the process I followed with comments along the way


# Download the latest debian-maintainers keyring
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/\
debian-maintainers/debian-maintainers_1.38_all.deb
dpkg-deb -x *.deb keyring
mv keyring/usr/share/keyrings/debian-maintainers.gpg .
rm -rf keyring *.deb

# Create a copy of it and add your key to it
cp debian-maintainers.gpg debian-maintainers.gpg.orig
gpg --export johnf@inodes.org | \
    gpg --import --no-default-keyring --keyring `pwd`/debian-maintainers.gpg

# Create the changset with jetring
jetring-gen debian-maintainers.gpg.orig debian-maintainers.gpg \
    "Add John Ferlito <johnf @inodes.org> as a Debian Maintainer"

# Check the changeset
jetring-review -d debian-maintainers.gpg.orig add-*

Once you have completed the above you should have a file with something like the following contents

Comment: Add John Ferlito <johnf @inodes.org> as a Debian Maintainer
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:26:31 +1000
Action: import
Data:
  -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
  Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

  mQGiBEd6MmQRBADF+BLVChN/AqKVXkrJFU2LtJoiCdYJ
  <snip>
  =SSNk
  -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

You should now add something along the lines of the below to the top of the file.

Recommended-By:
  Simon Horman <horms @verge,net.au>,
  Jamie Wilkinson <jaq @spacepants.org>
Agreement: http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00010.html
Advocates:
  http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00011.html,
  http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00012.html

The agreement line should be a URL to your signed email applying to become a DM and the advocates should be the URLs for the signed emails from your advocates.

Once you’ve done that, submit a bug with the file attached and hopefully sometime later you will have become a DM.

Simon Rumble: Blank Reg

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:12:12 +0000

I love the fact that the Secretary of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties is named Stephen Blanks.

It just goes to show that Max Headroom really was a documentary showing the world twenty minutes into the fu-fu-future.

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Simon Rumble: Good beer, bad chicken

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:09:09 +0000

A few weeks ago I got an email from the Malt Shovel Brewery about a beer and food tasting at their brew pub on King Street Wharf. Best thing, of course, was the price: free. I signed myself and Holly up immediately.

The evening started off with a Golden Ale, always a lovely drop, and a bit of a talk from Chuck Hahn. Golden was paired with some pretty good jumbo deep-fried prawns. A good combo, the fruity hops going well with the seafood. Next up was Amber Ale paired with lamb cutlets. I'm not so sure about this combo really being a match, but I like both amber ale and lamb.

The next combo was a revelation. I think the James Squire porter is one of the best beers made in Australia. It's pretty much flawless, getting the critical balance between sweet and sour just right for the porter style. The combination was a cheesecake. I'm not normally that keen on cheesecakes, but a bite followed by a slurp of porter was an amazing taste sensation. The sourness of the porter cuts through the (normally cloying) richness of the cheesecake. A brilliant combination, which I'll be serving at my next dinner party I think.

Finally came the latest seasonal brew, a Pepperberry Winter Ale. Bush foods are something brewers in Australia are trying to incorporate, with varying degrees of success. The Barons Lemon Myrtle Witbier is vile, tasting more like Toilet Duck or Strongbow Lemon than a wheat beer.

The pepperberry is more succesful, keeping the exotic seasoning as a subtle texture to the flavour instead of overpowering the beer. It's a fairly standard winter ale, dark, fairly sweet, heavy (5.2% I think) and the pepperberry gives a warm spiciness to it. The aroma is something slightly aniseed, with a similar slight flavour running through the taste. It's got a very long, lingering flavour that changes as you savour it. Well worth checking out, but it's a limited seasonal brew so get in quick.

I asked one of the brewers when they'd be making another wheat beer. Previously they've done what they called a Colonial Wheat Beer, which wasn't as tasty as I'd hoped but pretty good. I'm more into the spiced wheat beers, Hoegaarden being the most well-known of the variety. The only Australian brewer getting it right is the Snowy Mountains Brewery's Charlottes Hefeweizen. Malt Shovel's Summer brew is apparently going to be a lager, like Australia needs more of those, but hopefully they'll have another crack at wheat.

The beer event was actually pretty quick, moving through the beer and food at a rapid pace. Holly and I decided to wander into town and find some dinner, and we've been looking for a change to try the Korean Fried Chicken I saw reviewed recently.

Sadly Dashi Korean seems to have closed. We wandered all the way up and down the short laneway without finding it, though there's a not-yet-opened restaurant with workers in it, and I suspect that might be where Dashi was.

We ended up wandering around the corner onto Liverpool Street where we'd seen KoreanFC advertised to check it out. The place is a real rabbit warren, the downstairs area packed with (mostly) Koreans, so we were shown upstairs to a kind of covered-in verandah. The decor is, well, dodgy. I suspect the council would not approve.

Anyway we ordered some of the sauced fried chicken, hoping it would be as good as the stuff we've had in London. Unfortunately not in this case.

The batter was overly thick, the chicken a bit dried out and the sauce was synthetic-tasting, without the chunky bits of onion and capsicum. Altogether not very nice, and quite disappointing. Korean food always comes with little side dishes of pickles and the like, and these ones were pretty ordinary too. A simply vinegared radish was somewhat refreshing after the greasy food, but the kimchi was very ordinary and the cold clear noodles bland.

We'll just have to keep looking for the perfect KoreanFC here in Sydney!

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Jeremy Visser: Oddity when installing HAL

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:01:57 +0000

If you’re ever installing Ubuntu, and it fails while installing HAL with this error message: “Your account has expired, please contact your system administrator” Type the following: sudo passwd -u root …which should fix the problem. It’s a most strange error — I got it while installing ubuntu-desktop inside a VM made by ubuntu-vm-builder. [...]

Jan Schmidt: GStreamer Summit

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:37:54 +0000

We’re having a fairly impromptu GStreamer summit this Sunday in Istanbul.

If you’re interested in discussion where GStreamer is at, and where it might go next, come along

Details:
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/IstanbulSummit2008

Conrad Parker: Release: liboggz 0.9.8

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:03:00 +0000

liboggz 0.9.8 includes the first release of oggz-chop, as well as support for the new karaoke codec OggKate.

oggz-chop can be used to serve time ranges of Ogg media over HTTP by any web server that supports CGI. The oggz-chop binary simply checks if it is being run as a CGI script by checking some environment variables, and if so acts based on the CGI query parameter t=, much like mod_annodex. It accepts all the time specifications that mod_annodex accepts (npt and various smpte framerates), and start and end times separated by a /.

All you need to do is set up the following Apache config:

ScriptAlias /oggz-chop /usr/bin/oggz-chop Action application/ogg /oggz-chop

, and all your Ogg files will be handled with oggz-chop, which means that you can put a time range on the end, like:

http://www.example.com/candidate_speech.ogv?t=00:23/00:26

The minimal amount of data required to play the section between 23 and 26 seconds will be sent to you, such that it plays back immediately from the time requested. As for caching, it generates Last-Modified HTTP headers, and responds correctly to If-Modified-Since conditional GET requests.

It implements the same chopping algorithm as the Haskell version hogg chop, released in HOgg 0.3.0, so it will insert an Ogg Skeleton track which can give players hints about what time the in-sync audio and video data should start being rendered, and if any of the input files include Skeleton information that will be preserved, and the output will contain only one Skeleton track.

Many thanks to Michael Dale, j^ and John Ferlito for testing out oggz-chop during its development.

Robert Collins: 4 Jul 2008

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:01:54 +0000

Well, the gauntlet is down (BTW - desktop power integration. Cool!). The use case Ted talks about is actually quite interesting - we were at UDS last month, waiting on a SVN server that was apparently so slow we could have walked to it and copied stuff onto harddisk more quickly. (Really. No kidding). bzr was idling and blocked on network IO the whole time... kudos for the plugin Ted!

For my response, may I present a new index format, (branch url) 70% smaller than bzr's current default, equally fast at most workloads, up to 20 times faster at others. I started this this week, and John jumped in in overlapping time periods, but I think it counts!

Note that the perfromance wins are a component improvement - other things we haven't addressed yet can make the index improvements less visible. But several early adopters have told me that they see a 25-30% reduction in 'time bzr log > /dev/null' or other commands.

To install:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~lifeless/+junk/bzr-index2 ~/.bazaar/plugins/index2

bzr branch https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jameinel/+junk/pybloom ~/.bazaar/plugins/pybloom

To use:

cd <repository you want to experiment on>

bzr upgrade --btree-plain

(or --btree-rich-root for bzr-svn users).

A version of this will be going to trunk soon, and it will be able to upgrade from any repository that you have that uses the plugin as long as you keep the plugin installed.

Mark Greenaway: Fender vs Gibson: the Movie

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:53:06 +0000

Nearly anyone reading this would be at least vaguely aware of the endless PC vs Mac debate. For electric guitarists, there is a similiar thing going on between Gibson and Fender. Is the Stratocaster the ultimate rock guitar, or is it the Les Paul?

While the whole question is silly in a sense, guitar players have been talking about it for decades and will continue to. So it really deserves to have a movie made about it.

Which instrument you choose will affect what you can express, up to a point. There are some things that just aren't possible on some instruments that are easy on others, like dive-bombing on a Les Paul. The guitar you choose will effect not just the notes you can play and how you can articulate them, but also their timbre. Gear does make a difference.

Having said that, I think that tone is mainly in the fingers. I keep re-realising this over the years. Guitarists might choose an instrument that flatters their style, or their style might develop to suit the guitar they began playing, which I think is what happened with me. But it's the way a musician plays, their ideas about music and the guitar, that are most important.

Simon "Horms" Horman: La Perouse

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:52:50 +0000

On Sunday we went to yum-cha at Maroubra Junction, very crowded and totally awesome food, and then brefily to La Perouse. The weather was really nice. I didn't have my usual camera with me, but I did take some nice snaps with Chiz's compact camera, which luckily she had in her bag.

Photos...

Simon "Horms" Horman: The Manly Scenic Walk

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:01:53 +0000

On Saturday Chiz and I did the manly scenic walk from The Spit to Manly (actually from Seaforth to The Spit to Manly as we missed the bus stop). I think that it ended up being about 10km for us and taking about 3 hours, which was pretty much ideal for us.

It was a bit cold and the day was starting to die by the time we took the ferry back to Circular Quay, next time we will try and start our hiking a bit earlier.

Photos...

Silvia Pfeiffer: W3C Video in the Web activity

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:49:03 +0000

The W3C has just released a set of proposed charters for a new W3C Video in the Web activity with a request for feedback.

The following working groups are proposed:

Timed Text Working Group
Media Fragments Working Group
Media Annotations Working Group

Two further ones under investigation are:

Codecs and containers
Best practices for video and audio content

It is worth checking out the site and the three different working groups they are planning to create. Sure - the codec discussion is a big one. But it’s not as big as some of the other activities as to new functionality for video on the Web.

Jeremy Apthorp: Don't talk to me about life

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:31:28 +0000

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

I am happy, and I am sad; content, yet restless.

I am working and earning cash money. Some of that is pretty fun, some of it is not so fun but still interesting. I'm going to College War next week. Generally enjoying my holidays.

I want to write more, and to that end read more as well. I am forgetting how to put words together, how to bind them and make them flow. And I still have never managed to sustain a plot for more than two pages. The more I write, fiction or otherwise, the more it seems like I am rambling, and the further diluted whatever point I might have had becomes. So I write little, and I write dense. Perhaps due at least in part to the amount of time I spend on IRC and IM, I am afflicted by the curse of eloquence without a grasp of continuity.

And there it is: the paragraph break. A new topic. I'm finished talking about that, and now I am talking about this. Cut off from the past, forced to move on. But I don't have enough here. No more than a lonely handful of self-referential sentences. So the paragraph sits awkwardly, too long for an impact paragraph and too short for substance.

And life goes on. No matter I or we or the human race do, life happens. We are not, strictly speaking, special. My "me" to our "them" is as our race-wide "us" is to the greater "everything". Those of us that strive for something may or may not find it, but regardless of the conclusion of the search, the ball keeps rolling. Whether we live to the end broken and withered, or vibrant and strong, we are ultimately inconsequential. So that begs the question: why keep living? This is nihilism.

Faber est suae quisque fortunae, to make the Fortians cringe. We each make of our lives what we will. We have that power in us, though we may at times be blind to it. And so we wander, amble, dart or charge through time, taking as much or as little care as we choose. And more important than that choice being "right" in some holistic sense is that it is right for you. That you are happy with it, and that you know you are picking your path.

Simon Rumble: Dear King Pig

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:10:10 +0000

My mate Don sent a letter to the King Pig and the Special Minister for World (Catholic) Youth Day in NSW in regards to his freedom to annoy Catholics.

Dear Minister

It was my intention to be involved in a peaceful demonstration over the Pope's supposed World Youth Day on July I am concerned by reports in the media, primarily the Sydney Morning Herald, that I will be breaking the law and risk jail or a fine.

Could you please clarify that I will not be breaking the law if I:
assemble at Taylor Square, Darlinghurst at 12pm 19 July with other like minded citizens.

wear a T-shift of the English folk/rock band Chumbawumba. The T-shirt is plain black and says in grey writing "Chumbawumba" on the back "Atheist" on the front.

I will be carrying a cardboard placard A2 size. One side will say "Miranda Devine Sux" and the other side will say "World Peas" with a picture of some small green vegetables.

Offer condoms to passed by, in a respectful, polite and peaceful manner.

Possibly sing or chant harmless songs - such as one of my old rugby favourites "Has anybody seen JC" lyrics at http://www.guysrugby.com/songs.asp

Thank you kindly

Don McCallum

Stanmore

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Simon Rumble: Wow, there's still web agencies who think Flash is cool

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:59:59 +0000

Wow, I can't believe there's still web agencies who do everything in Flash. This technique is so effective, the above is what Google can see of their site. That's right, the title.

Supposedly Adobe is working with the search engines to index the internals of Flash crap. I can see this ending in tears. They're either going to expose internals that were never intended to be visible (like the kind of people who do Flash know anything about security) or the designer will have to explicitely list keywords, which will end up being as useful as meta keywords.

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Lindsay Holmwood: Positive side effects of cheating

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:47:03 +0000

Uni cheats outsource to India.

On the bright side, students are perfectly poised for a career in management!

Mary Gardiner: Microblogging

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:10:29 +0000

Tim Connors and Andrew Pollock are bothered by microblogging syndicated on Planet Linux Australia. This promises to be an absolute pile-on in the bikeshedding manner, that is, very few people are competent to comment on blog entries about SQL database underpinnings or encryption design, but microblogging is exactly the sort of thing everyone has an opinion on and shortly we'll hear them all. I hope I'm early in the crush...

Microblogging itself varies in appeal for me as much as any other kind of blogging. I guess the highs aren't quite so high: I've never seen a Twitter I wanted to bookmark. But they're 140 characters, plenty short enough to skim even if they aren't changing the world. I am not a huge fan of microblogging that is clearly written for either the writer themselves (unadorned having dinner working late without any attempt to write about it in a such a way as other people might want to read) or as an alternative to SMSing a significant other your plans for the evening. But most of it is about the same quality and style as the random jabs at the world people occasionally insert into IRC (in fact Andrew Bennetts should have a twitter account, but never will), so, fine.

However I too do not generally find people syndicating their microblogging to their main blog very interesting. Firstly, if I want to read your twitter feed, I'm already subscribed to it through Twitter, so having it pop up in your main blog is just two copies of the same thing. If the other microblogging sites take off enough I'll add people to my feed reader instead. The same is usually true of del.icio.us aggregations, Pia and Jeff Waugh being something of an exception because they provide commentary aimed at readers. I certainly won't be syndicating my del.icio.us feed any time soon, it's entirely aimed at me and if you want to subscribe that's your lookout.

For Planets, I suggest the solution is to add a sidebar or two for microblogging and links provided by Planet authors. This enables feed discovery and mild entertainment for people who like the microblogging, but means that people aren't stumbling on 30 character thoughts or unadorned collections of links when they expected substantive prose. In this model, people syndicating that stuff to their main blog are required to figure out how to exclude it from what the Planet aggregates.

Roger Barnes: Photo of the day - 03 Jul 2008

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:50:12 +0000

Sand Texture, New Caledonia

Lindsay Holmwood: Printed and sent

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:06:32 +0000

Wedding invitations went out yesterday.

Having them printed and in your hand makes it all so real. Quite exciting!

Erik de Castro Lopo: Tonight on the Telephone.

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:01:55 +0000

Its a little after 7pm and the phone rings. I answer.

Me : Hello.

Faint music on the other end.

Me : Hello!

Music continues.

Me : Hello !!!

Some Marketer : Yes, good morning, blah, blah, blah. Would you be interested in cheap holidays, blah, blah, blah.

Me : Tell me more.

Marketer : Well, you can go here and you can go there. Blah, blah, blah.

Me : That sounds interesting.

Marketer : Blah, blah, blah.

Me : That sounds good.

Marketer : Blah, blah, blah.

Pause.

Me : Can I bring my pony?

Marketer : Excuse me?

Me : Can I bring my pony?

Clunk, the marketer hangs up.

I managed to waste 1 minute 38 seconds of his time. I need to do better next time.

James Purser: OSOTA - We will be releasing this week, I promise!

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:59:59 +0000

Sigh, I know, we promised our first episode tonight, and here we are, after a weeks delay and nothing. We will be releasing this week (hopefully tomorrow night).

Lindsay Holmwood: Tuba Hero

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:30:50 +0000

A package arrived in the mail tonight. It was marked ‘T-Shirt’, which I thought was odd as I hadn’t ordered any shirts for a while.

I ripped the package open and this is what I found.

(store link)

Best surprise gift ever.

The invoice was anonymous, but I spotted an email address in the top corner hidden away. Thanks James!

Roger Barnes: Photo of the day - 02 Jul 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:41:50 +0000

Herc's Pillars

Simon Rumble: Why direct action is important

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:41:41 +0000

The Guardian has a great piece about direct action group Plane Stupid, who are all about preventing the expansion of the aviation industry in the face of climate change. It presents a passionate and well-reasoned insight into why direct action is important, and how electoral politics can't solve the world's problems.

"In a situation where you need massive, urgent systemic change, we don't really have the system to achieve it," says Thompson. "Electorally, everyone is fighting over the middle ground. So the mere fact that you're not a moderate means you can't be listened to. That means anybody who had the answer to climate change would automatically be excluded from the debate. This is why you can't just think, if I vote for the greenest party at the election, I'll have done what I needed to."

Contact me

TongMaster: How dare he swear on the Bible!

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:51:55 +0000

Sydney trash tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, had the above headline decrying the fact that Robert Mugabe was swearing himself into his new term of presidency holding the Bible.

I'm not quite sure why they were so upset. I can't see anything more appropriate than a fictitious president, Mugabe, being sworn in using a fictitious book, the Bible.

Mark Greenaway

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 02:37:22 +0000

It was interesting to read about direction action to stop a third runway at Heathrow today. While I can't comment on the political necessity of direct action, I was under the impression that airlines were in trouble already, and that high fuel prices and carbon cap-and-trade systems were going to reduce either the number of flights people take, the amount of carbon airlines emit or probably both. I'd expect the fuel surcharges most airlines are beginning to bring in to start to reduce the amount that people fly very quickly.

Pia Waugh: links for 2008-06-30

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:33:26 +0000

McDonalds sued over Happy Meal toy (by Devo)

“This New Wave Nigel doll that they’ve created is just a complete Devo rip-off and the red hat is exactly the red hat that I designed… Plus, we don’t like McDonald’s, and we don’t like American Idol, so we’re doubly offended.” HAha!

(tags: mcdonalds devo humour)

Roger Barnes: Photo of the day - 01 Jul 2008

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:17:16 +0000

Rainbow Over Pumphouse, Isle des Pins, New Caledonia

Conrad Parker: FOMS 2009 CFP

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:10:00 +0000

We recently opened the FOMS 2009 Call for Participation. FOMS — Foundations of Open Media Software — is a developer workshop "to widen cooperation and interoperability among open source media projects". It will be held a few days before linux.conf.au, in Hobart, Tasmania.

This year's FOMS had a large emphasis on free codecs, with many of the Xiph.Org developers in attendance. In 2009 we really hope to expand the participation to include people from projects with alternate technical viewpoints, such as those of MPlayer and NUT. It would also be good to get some exposure to projects like Canola2 and Bellagio, in order to deal with the issues of mobile multimedia. If you're involved in development of those or similar projects and would be interested in attending FOMS 2009, please respond to the CFP; there will be some travel grants available to help get you to Tasmania.

Related conferences

I'll be at Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 in Portland, Oregon, specifically for the "Audio" microconf.
We hope to run a Multimedia Miniconf at LCA 2009 :-)

Andrew Cowie: Low flying aircraft

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:13:00 +0000

Late this morning people in Sydney were treated to the sound and then sight of a largish four engine aircraft flying a somewhat unusual and fairly low flightpath on its way across the Northern Beaches on approach into Sydney. What made it a bit more interesting was:

the thing was painted gray
it had a fighter flying in close formation off its tail

Huh. Certainly a bit unusual to see on its way into SYD, but the fact that it was obviously a military aircraft, with a fighter escort, was more than reassuring. Mostly we figured it was a head of state or senior officer from some allied nation on the way in, getting a nice escort. I will admit that Katrina and I are both a little jumpy when it comes to very loud engines close overhead; the scream from the fighter’s jet engine mixed in did give it an unusual timbre. (Which most people aren’t used to; if you haven’t experienced fighters up close and personal, it’s not a roar but more a thin penetrating shriek. Hollywood never gets these things even remotely close). So, {shrug}. Residual jumpiness aside, what I learned from the last time a large jet flew down my street is that if you are hearing the engines firewalled, at least it is already past you.

Anyway, it all turns out to be quite innocent. The Royal Australian Air Force is retiring it’s last Boeing 707, and they did a photo shoot over Sydney. How nice.

Even though I only got a brief glance, I should have recognized the airframe. Bah. The US military still fly a number of C135 derivatives; that it might have been one did flash through my mind, but I they’re kinda getting on in years and I didn’t expect to see one hereabouts. A 707 isn’t that large, but sometimes scale is hard to tell from afar. Alas

I wouldn’t have ever given it a moment’s thought again except that a glance this evening at a local paper’s website showed it headlining an article about it, much to my surprise. Somewhat less of a surprise was them using the occasion to be all alarmist about low flying planes over cities.

After we get past the quotes of office workers who were terrified and who ran screaming from their buildings, we get to the mention that the plane was “trailing smoke”. That’s awesome. Uh, in case you didn’t know, that’s what turbofan engines do at low speed. Airplanes are made to be efficient at high altitude cruise. Pouring out power to keep a plane going at low speed is, unfortunately, somewhat inefficient. Kinda like your car starting after a red light. Jet engine manufacturers work hard on this sort of thing, but older planes are (surprise) less efficient. Which is why aircraft manufactured in the 1960s are somewhat less than ideal from an operations cost standpoint. Not to mention noise, and, yes, the black gunk pouring out the back.

The principle complaint is that people seem to feel they should have been told about this. While I’m sure the press will be full of scary headlines in the morning, and no doubt the politicians will hang the Air Force out to dry, the air navigation regulations for the Sydney terminal airspace clearly allow for aircraft doing photo op orbits over Sydney harbour and explicitly detail the procedures to be used. Gotta get that bridge and concert hall in or it just doesn’t count, right? So, quite sensibly, ATC around Sydney allows for pilots requesting permission to do so.

Now, admittedly, the average photo op by a circling Cessna doesn’t attract much attention; a largish jet is a bit more ostentatious. Neglecting for a moment that most of the approach paths bring low flying aircraft right over Sydney and its suburbs anyway, should the populace be given advanced notice of plans to orbit planes a bit lower? Hm.

Apparently at least one local radio station did know about this ahead of time, so I’d say the RAAF did its part¹ (and that’s assuming that it had an obligation to do so, which frankly, I’m not convinced of). If the journos didn’t think it newsworthy to mention in their broadcasts, that’s not the Air Force’s fault. And there in lies the problem. So long as the media is busy reporting on the latest antics of Britney Spears and how the 6 year long US presidential election campaign is getting on, I doubt there will ever be much time for public service announcements, even if we did decide that such things were topical.

AfC

¹ Update: Here’s the Department of Defence press release, last week.

Michael Fox: EMCPA exam completed

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:11:40 +0000

Sat for my Storage Technology Foundations exam today and managed to obtain 93% overall. Of course that is a pass, so I am pretty happy.

Decided only last week after starting some review that it might be wise to sit it, since the questions I was reviewing happened to be fresh in my head, not to mention I was doing pretty well at the time with the content.

So very pleased with the result. Would like to do further stuff, and might just do that. But like everything it will have to wait.

Andre Pang: Talks for 2008

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:49:29 +0000

I’ve given a few talks so far this year, which I’ve been kinda slack about and haven’t put up any slides for yet. So, if you’re one of the zero people who’ve been eagerly awaiting my incredibly astute and sexy opinions, I guess today’s your lucky day, punk!

Earlier this year, on January 2, 2008, Earth Time, I gave a talk at Kiwi Foo Camp in New Zealand, also known as Baa Camp. (Harhar, foo, baa, get it?) The talk was titled “Towards the Massive Media Matrix”, with the MMM in the title being a pun on the whole WWW three-letter acronym thing. (Credit for the MMM acronym should go to Silvia Pfeiffer and Conrad Parker, who phrased the term about eight years ago :). The talk was about the importance of free and open standards on the Web, what’s wrong with the current status quo about Web video basically being Flash video, and the complications involved in trying to find a solution that satisfies everyone. I’m happy to announce that the slides for the talk are now available for download; you can also grab the details off my talks page.

A bit later this year in March, Manuel Chakravarty and I were invited to the fp-syd functional programming user group in Sydney, to give a talk about… monads! As in, that scary Haskell thing. We understand that writing a monad tutorial seems to be a rite of passage for all Haskell programmers and was thus stereotypical of the “Haskell guys” in the group to give a talk about, but the talk seemed to be well-received.

Manuel gave a general introduction to monads: what they are, how to use them, and why they’re actually a good thing rather than simply another hoop you have to jump through if you just want to do some simple I/O in Haskell. I focused on a practical use case of monads that didn’t involve I/O (OMG!), giving a walkthrough on how to use Haskell’s excellent Parsec library to perform parsing tasks, and why you’d want to use it instead of writing a recursive descent parser yourself, or resort to the insanity of using lex and yacc. I was flattered to find out that after my talk, Ben Leppmeier rewrote the parser for DDC (the Disciplined Disciple Compiler) to use Parsec, rather than his old system of Alex and Happy (Haskell’s equivalents of lex and yacc). So, I guess I managed to make a good impression with at least one of our audience members, which gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

You can find both Manuel’s and my slides online at the Google Groups files page for fp-syd, or you can download the slides directly from my own site. Enjoy.

Finally, during my three-week journey to the USA last month in June, I somehow got roped into giving a talk at Galois Inc. in Portland, about pretty much whatever I wanted. Since the audience was, once again, a Haskell and functional programming crowd, I of course chose to give a talk about an object-oriented language instead: Objective-C, the lingua franca of Mac OS X development.

If you’re a programming language geek and don’t know much about Objective-C, the talk should hopefully interest you. Objective-C is a very practical programming language that has a number of interesting features from a language point of view, such as opt-in garbage collection, and a hybrid of a dynamically typed runtime system with static type checking. If you’re a Mac OS X developer, there’s some stuff there about the internals of the Objective-C object and runtime system, and a few slides about higher-order messaging, which brings much of the expressive power of higher-order functions in other programming languages to Objective-C. Of course, if you’re a Mac OS X developer and a programming language geek, well, this should be right up your alley :). Once again, you can download the slides directly, or off my talks page.

Jeremy Apthorp: RSS

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:48:40 +0000

Really Simple Syndication is great. It's an easy way for me to grab content from a whole bunch of different places and put it in one place. I can read things from more websites than I could possibly remember to visit every day. My RSS reader is always a good way to waste a half-hour or two (I get around 150 articles a day coming in from 125 different sources). It's like my own personalised newspaper.

So if it's so "simple", why do so many sites get it so horribly wrong? No, dear blogger, the first four words of your article are not enough to tell me what your post is about. No, dear blogger, I will not click the link to open the original article if I can't work out what it's even about. No, dear blogger, "News Feed" is not a good title for your feed.

And thus your website, with all its surely fascinating and daily content, has been dropped by the wayside like so many others before it.

Please, content creators, think of the feeds!

Roger Barnes: Photo of the day - 30 Jun 2008

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:53:42 +0000

Herc's Pillars

Pia Waugh: links for 2008-06-29

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:30:43 +0000

OAK Law Project | Open Access to Knowledge (OAK)

“The OAK Law Project has released the results of its survey of the attitudes and practices of Australian academic authors towards the publication and dissemination of their research, Academic authorship, publishing agreements & open access” - Interesting!

(tags: oaklaw ip copyright research australia)

Rich Buggy: TechNation Australia

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:57:25 +0000

If you’re involved in technology startups then you might want to check out TechNation Australia. They’re a recent blog covering the Australian startup scene. Kim’s doing a great job at building this into an Australian version of TechCrunch.

Sridhar Dhanapalan: Education Expo report

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:26:07 +0000

Two weeks ago, we had the Education Expo.

Here’s my report, as co-ordinator of the Linux Australia stand:

Education Expo
Sat 14 to Sun 15 June
Rosehill Racecourse, Sydney

The Education Expo is an annual trades show targeted towards the K-12 educational space. Visitors consist of families and educators. Linux Australia once again had a stand, with volunteers spreading the word about free and open source software.

As always, we were very successful. With each passing year, the level of awareness of FOSS noticeably improves. Whereas at previous shows we would spend much energy expounding the basic concepts of FOSS/Linux, this year most people had either heard of it or were already using FOSS products such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

One thing we did differently this year was place more focus on FOSS running on Windows. Our past efforts have been meet with some resistance, as installing a different operating system posed a barrier to entry that many would not surmount. We had plenty of copies of the OpenEducationDisc to distribute, in addition to Fedora, Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Mandriva.

The fact that the NSW Dept of Education is migrating over 40,000 PCs across the state to OpenOffice.org was a useful selling point as well.

Our marketing efforts have been improving with each event. Our message is becoming more refined, and our leaflets are becoming more relevant. On the technical side, FOSS is becoming easier and more accessible, with projects such the aforementioned OpenEducationDisc and Wubi leading the way.

Our Web presence is improving, too. It’s far easier to point a newbie to just one easy-to-remember URL instead of confusing them with a list. In addition, I built an education portal for Linux Australia just in time for the expo.

There were at least two other stands that were FOSS-friendly. In fact, one of the largest stands were demonstrating their Web-based software product on about ten computers, all of which were running Ubuntu. Other stands expressed real interest when approached.

Other highlights of our presence included:

OLPC XO laptops (from OLPC Australia)

Intel Classmate PCs (from Mandriva Australia)

ASUS Eee PCs

laptops showing Edubuntu

Rodger Dean has some photos of the event.

A big thanks to everyone who helped at the stand:

Ashley Lynn

Ashley Maher

Brendan Puckeridge

David Andresen

Gloria Arnold

Harrison Conlin

John Arnold

Megha Kanth

Pia Waugh

Rodger Dean

Vicki Burke

A special thank you goes to Melissa Draper, who was instrumental in ensuring the success of the stand in more ways than one.

LotD: Insurance company bets health on open source — I’m quite heavily involved in this project, so needless to say I’m proud of what we’ve achieved

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Erik de Castro Lopo: Goodbye Old Car.

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:01:45 +0000

For the last 8 or 9 years I've been driving this very nice 1985 BMW 323i.

However, the new apartment has off-street parking but not under cover parking. An old car like this would simply not survive being parked out in the open so I've had to sell it rather than see it rust away. It was sold a little over a week ago.

Goodbye old car.

Erik de Castro Lopo: Goodbye Old House.

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:01:45 +0000

For the last eight years, my wife and I have enjoyed the room in this picture (with that view) as our main living area. This apartment was more than big enough for the two of us, but with the arrival of our daughter five and a half years ago, it has been increasingly cramped.

After a long, long search, we found and bought a new apartment a couple of months ago and we take possession of the new place this week. We'll have about 5 days to move between houses and then we'll have to say goodbye to this wonderful home which we have enjoyed so much.

Pascal Klein: Tintin and Lorem ipsum

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:04:14 +0000

I was re-watching Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin a while back and noticed the animators set the bodies in newspapers in Lorem ipsum as filler text. Lorem ispum is a placeholder or filler text used in typography, design and other publishing as means of testing the visual representation. Lorem ipsum features roughly the same letter distribution as in English.

Tintin and Snowie were favourite heroes of my childhood. This definitely made me smile.

Roger Barnes: Photo of the day - 29 Jun 2008

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:53:53 +0000

Rainbow Over Pumphouse, Isle des Pins, New Caledonia

Robert Thomson: Warum liegt hier überhaupt Stroh?

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:45:11 +0000

Warum liegt hier überhaupt Stroh?

Pia Waugh: links for 2008-06-28

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:31:41 +0000

Simplified user guide - OLPC

A simplified user guide for the OLPC XO laptop. A good read for those wanting some basic user information.

(tags: olpc olpcaustralia xo)

Silvia Pfeiffer: to_bool rails plugin

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:00:58 +0000

In our rail application we do a lot of string conversions to other data types, including Boolean. Unfortunately, ruby does not provide a conversion method to_bool (which I find rather strange, to be honest).

Based a blog post by Chris Roos in October 2006, we developed a rails plugin that enables the “to_bool” conversion.

“to_bool” works on the strings “true” and “false” and any capitalisation of these, and on numbers, as well as on nil. Other strings raise an ArgumentError.

Examples are as follows:

'true'.to_bool #-> true 'TrUe'.to_bool #-> true true.to_bool #-> true 1.to_bool #-> true 5.to_bool #-> true -9.to_bool #-> true nil.to_bool #-> false 'false'.to_bool #-> false 'FaLsE'.to_bool #-> false false.to_bool #-> false 0.to_bool #-> false
You can find the plugin here as a tarball. To install it, simply decompress the to_bool directory into your vendor/plugins directory.

Jeremy Apthorp: Public Service Announcement

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:48:29 +0000

Ratatat are awesome.

That is all.

Silvia Pfeiffer: Dodgy Telstra Sales Practices

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:05:04 +0000

I don’t usually complain about companies and their sales approach, since I know how hard it is to sell things. But today I had a house call by a Telstra person and his sales practice was so dodgy - it’s just not something I would have expected by such a respected company as Telstra.

He came with a clipboard, had a name tag, and was on the verge of running away again when I got to the door - he really made the impression of a busy technician and took notes in his clipboard while we were talking.

He asked me whether I was with Telstra and I said no. He further asked who my phone line was with and I said iiNet. He then asked whether iiNet was looking after our physical phone line connection and I said probably no, but rather that it still belonged to Telstra - I found that a strange question to be asked by a technician who should really know, but then he might be new from India and not know everything yet.

He then said that in this case his information would be interesting for me and said that on Monday and Tuesday between 9am and 5pm Telstra would be undertaking work on the phone cables in my street and that I would be without connection, both Internet and Phone. I said ok, if it cannot be helped and thought that was it.

But that wasn’t it. Out of seemingly personal curiosity, almost as if he was making a decision for his own personal home, he asked how I was going with iiNet. I said good. He asked how much I was paying and how many phone calls that would include. I stated the rough amount and that my phone charges were really low and that amount almost covered all my phone calls and Internet connection. He then went on asking how much bandwidth I had. I stated the summary of peak and off-peak bandwidth to which he asked how much was peak and how much was off-peak. At this point I was getting slightly annoyed, since he could as well look up all these details on the Internet and really doesn’t need to get them from me.

But then came the really weird part. He then said that with this bandwidth I could barely surf the Internet and my phone line would be really crappy. He then started trying to sell me a Telstra ADSL service. This is where I got really annoyed and almost loud. I said that I knew what I was doing and that for what I am getting from iiNet I would have to pay 10 times as much with Telstra and that under no circumstances would I switch back to Telstra services.

He seemed to understand that he wasn’t going to sell me any phone or Internet services today, so he switched topic: what about a Foxtel account then? I said no thank you and good bye and closed the door.

So, now, I am actually wondering whether his initial statement that our street will have an outage on Monday and Tuesday is actually correct or whether that was just a way to get his foot in the door. I am really pissed off with Telstra for such dodgy sales practices. Unfortunately, their complaints department does not answer calls on a weekend and their technical department was not willing to confirm an outage on Monday and Tuesday since I am not a Telstra customer.

Telstra: I really wished your sales people would play fairly in the market. I could see so many neighbours talking to your sales guy and considering his offers that I almost felt like going over and uncovering his lies. He is making false claims about other Network’s services, he is making false claims about technical details and he is trying to open the door with a possibly false claim on a technical outage. Plus: I have to wait until Monday before I can tell you about it. How much worse can it get?

Sridhar Dhanapalan: Bill Gates and the importance of source code

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:43:05 +0000

Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC’s Money Programme. As he prepares to significantly reduce his direct work for Microsoft Corporation, Bill reflects upon what got him started in the first place and what kept him ahead of the ‘competition’. The video provides a brief glimpse into the character that founded and guided Microsoft. Regardless of whether you love him or hate him, he is indeed a fascinating character.

Skip ahead to the 40 second mark, to the segment titled “How the teenage Gates and his friend Paul Allen got access to a computer”. The story according to Gates was that he and his friends were allowed to hack on a company’s computer “like monkeys” at night to find bugs. He spent hours reading manuals and experimenting to figure out this “fascinating puzzle”. However, they were stuck at the “tinkering” stage until they stumbled across the source code in a rubbish bin. It was only then could the monkeys evolve.

I don’t think the producers of the show realised the significance of this admission, since they quickly cut to another segment. Reading between the lines, Gates is essentially confessing that he would not have progressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code. Without this knowledge, and without this opportunity to understand and experiment with how the internals of a computer worked, Gates and Allen would have been severely constrained in their ability to found a software company and develop products

I would go so far as to say that Microsoft owes its very existence to this access to source code.

To anyone with a passing familiarity to how things worked back then, this comes as no surprise. Source code was expected to be free, and this in turn nurtured a generation of computer hackers. But whereas Richard Stallman saw the amazing potential of this freedom and wanted to preserve it for all, Bill Gates appears to have perceived it as an advantage for himself that he must deny to others.

LotD: Gates memo shows user frustration

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Mark Greenaway

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:08:39 +0000

House prices are falling? This has to happen, of course. Almost no-one I know can really afford to buy a house, or is feeling the strain.

Roger Barnes: Photo of the day - 28 Jun 2008

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:01:47 +0000

Herc's Pillars

Simon "Horms" Horman: Boston - Part II

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:58:22 +0000

Wednesday was a wonderful sunny day in day in Boston and I had plenty of time to explore and take some more snaps before my flight left in the evening. They were generally of much better quality than my efforts on Sunday, which was overcast and rainy.

I also managed to find some excellent lunch on Charles St. in Beacon Hill. I don't remember the name of the little Italian place on the 0.5th floor, but their chicken salad was awesome.

Boston is a pretty nice place and the people seemed pretty friendly - though perhaps because the Red Sox were playing at home and mostly winning while I was there. It also seemed pretty safe, perhaps due to the police presence. I observed four separate police services in operation during the course of my stay: Boston City Police, Middlesex County Police, Massachusetts State Police and Transit Police.

Photos...

Silvia Pfeiffer: “Commercialising Video” conference in Sydney

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:22:33 +0000

On Tuesday 24th June I attended the “Commercialising Video” conference held in beautiful Jones Bay Wharf in Sydney’s harbour. AIMIA and Claudia Sagripanti from VentureOne organised it together.

It was a mixture of case studies and panels. The case studies were talks by successful digital media companies, including Sony, Bebo, Viocorp, Clear Light Digital and Fox Interactive Media (really: mySpaceTV). The panels constituted each a moderator and a small number of industry experts that briefly presented on their knowledge on a specific topic and then discussed this topic led by questions from the audience.

I thought the format was very successful and the conference covered a broad range of current topics of interest in digital media. Panel topics included:

mobile: challenges for getting video onto mobile and making a return on it
business models: how to make money from online video
sports video: what business models work with sports content
metrics: why we need to measure video and what and how
innovations: what innovative products are to be expected in the near future in video

I was one of the panellists on the metrics panel - my slides are here. The very last slide provides a very basic preview of the video metrics service that is in development at Vquence right now. Expect the final product to look much more professional, once I’ve included the awesome designs that we have just received from Chiz.

One thing that I took away from the conference is that the online video market is finally maturing and we are seeing business models that work. While they can roughly be classified into ad-supported, sponsored, and user-paid, there are many details that you have to take care of dependent on the service that you are providing. Ad-support can be inside the video e.g. in pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, overlay, or accompanying ads e.g. in dynamically loaded roll-outs, banners etc. Sponsorship is mostly used for non-profit sites. User-paid models are e.g. subscriptions, pay-per-view, pay-per-download. General video sites work not so well for ad-support as specialised sites. There is a lot of money for videos in specialised areas where your community is very keen to receive the latest video content fast, e.g. in sports.

In mobile in Australia, video business is still hard going, because the bandwidth costs are high, extra production cost is high, and because of challenges to get video into a usable form on such a small screen (e.g. soccer-ball is too small to be more than a pixel). This also means that the cost for consumers to get video is high, while the quality is still low. This obviously does not make for a very good market. The size of the iPhone screen, combined with the slow realisation by mobile phone providers that they have to drop prices for video transfers, may however totally change this situation.

Finally, I noticed that there was a large call for metrics. Measurement of the use of video and tracking the distribution of videos around the Internet, as well as measurement of advertising that relates to videos are all being requested to get more transparency into the business and mature the market. Initial services are available, in particular from existing Web Analytics and Internet Market Intelligence companies. However, the technology is new and we have a long way to go online and even more on mobile. This is a great opportunity for Vquence!

Thanks very much, Claudia, for organising this event and I hope there will be more to come in this space.

James Purser: A New Name And A New Drive

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:44:26 +0000

There is a change happening around here. I posted this on my business blog a couple of days ago, and I thought I would share some of the changes with you dear reader.

We have renamed the business, or to be closer to the truth, we have given it a real name. No longer will we be operating just under my name, instead, we will be using the name Collaborynth. Yes it's a made up name, but I think it works to show how the main aim of our business is to help our clients through the sometimes very confusing maze of collaboration options.

We're in the process of developing our own hosted collaboration products as well as continuing the development of our more general hosting stuff.

This means that jamespurser.com.au has now returned to it's normal function as my personal blog.

The future looks exciting, let's go there!

Robert Collins: 27 Jun 2008

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:20:02 +0000

Dear lazyweb number 3.

So far, I've asked:

high latency net simulations - great answers.

python friendly back-end accessible search engines - many answers, none that fit the bill. So I wrote my own :).

Today, I shall ask - is there a python-accessible persistent b+tree(or hashtable, or ...) module. Key considerations:

- scaling: millions of nodes are needed with low latency access to a nodes value and to determine a nodes absence

- indices are write once. (e.g. a group of indices are queried, and data is expired altered by some generational tactic such as combining existing indices into one larger one and discarding the old ones)

- reading and writing is suitable for sharply memory constrained environments. ideally only a few 100KB of memory are needed to write a 100K node index, or to read those same 100K nodes back out of a million node index. temporary files during writing are fine.

- backend access must either be via a well defined minimal api (e.g. 'needs read, readv, write, rename, delete') or customisable in python

- easy installation - if C libraries etc are needed they must be already pervasively available to windows users and Ubuntu/Suse/Redhat/*BSD systems

- ideally sorted iteration is available as well, though it could be layered on top

- fast, did I mention fast?

- stable formats - these indices may last for years unaltered after being written, so any libraries involved need to ensure that the format will be accessible for a long time. (e.g. python's dump/marshal facility fails)

sqlite, bdb already fail at this requirements list.

snakesql, gadfly, buzhug and rbtree fail too.

James Purser: A Curse Upon Those Who Ignore The System TZ Info

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:04:11 +0000

I've blogged about this before but I'm going to do it again.

Why, oh why do people insist on building their own TZ databases and ignoring the Operating Systems TZ dataset? Is this just a really stupid case of NIH? I've hit this in drupal (specifically the Events Module), Plone (inherited from zope), and I've been told about java having it's own tz set as well.

I might even do a t-shirt, this has got me that annoyed!

Roger Barnes: Photo of the day - 27 Jun 2008

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:56:17 +0000

Rainbow Over Pumphouse, Isle des Pins, New Caledonia

Pia Waugh: links for 2008-06-26

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:36:17 +0000

Alexandro: OpenOffice.org Migration Webinar

“Alexandro, a longstanding member of the OOo project, is testing out some new online presentation tools and providing training and a Q&A for OpenOffice users tomorrow, June 19th 2008, 19:00 CST.” Thanks Janet!

(tags: openoffice janethawtin training)

Jeremy Apthorp: My morning

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:48:01 +0000

Woke me up, alright.

Mary Gardiner: Unsolicited bulk email: still quite evil

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:20:17 +0000

Dear Google,

I am not sure how to quantify the exact amount of evil involved in unsolicited bulk email (I guess I could argue that it's even commercial email, because you are a company promoting a product, even if it is a coding competition), but let me assure you, the amount of evil is exactly the same in 2008 as it was either time in 2005, and for that matter, in 2003.

So, knock it off already.

Rich Buggy: OSDC call for papers closing

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:33:10 +0000

The Open Source Developers Conference call for papers closes on Monday. If you’re thinking about submitting a paper then hurry up. This years keynote speakers include:

Anthony Baxter
Andrew Tridgell
Chris DiBona
Pia Waugh