The Road Goes Ever On

Thanks to Mikal I now can map where I've been. This is very cool.

create your own visited states map

create your own visited countries map

As you can see, I have lots of the world still to go :-)

travel/chicago | 31 Dec 2004 | #

Interruptions

This article titled, Life Interrupted, hits the nail on the head. Life is so busy - I find myself multitasking continuously, and it is far too easy to get nothing done. In computer squeak, the cost of task switching, which involves saving registers out to memory and then paging in a new chunk of memory to do the new task, can result in thrashing if we switch between tasks too often. And that's a apt term for life in this new century.

What I have been doing for about 7 years is blocking out chunks of time in my calendar so as to get things done - i.e. achieve what is most important in my day. Even a colleague known as BoyWonder (to everyone around him but ignorant of the label himself) says that "You need to make sure you achieve some progress every day, despite all the other pressures." He's right on this one.

It's hard though in a day job with a mandated Outlook/Exchange email/calendering "solution", where the default set up bothers you on every email arrival, and people just book you for meetings all day and through your plea-for-sanity "Do not disturb" bookings. They get very offended when I don't turn up to their meetings, but hey, my booking was in there first! :-) I'm of the opinion that think these tools have a net negative affect on communication.

Sometimes I have to go a step further and cut myself off from email all day and place police-style ribbon across the front of my cube to discourage visitors. Interruptions are greeted with, "Which part of Go Away don't you understand?" Of course some smart alec (Hi Kevin!) hangs a Do not feed the Penguin sign on the ribbon, but that's fine - I can finally get some work done and I'm far less stressed at the end of the day.

tech/misc | 31 Dec 2004 | #

Photo Tidbits

Thinking about photography today - found this great Photo Tidbits site.

photos | 30 Dec 2004 | #

Love my tripod

I'm enjoying using my SLIK U9000 tripod - inside shots without flash are now possible, and the results aren't too bad either. It's very easy to use, lightweight and the quick-release mount bracket isn't too bulky on the camera. So I've re-read a pre-review of the E300 again - makes me really want one. The time will come shortly when I'll just have to upgrade to a DSLR.

photos | 30 Dec 2004 | #

2004 Summary

Well, it's a week before New Years' and a couple days from Christmas. Time for navel gazing and reflection.

What did 2004 involve?

The conference kicked the year off and was a huge success. We followed up with a week down at Christies Beach to veg - and boy did I need that! It took me more than 2 months to recover from LCA2004, and more than 6 months to tidy up all the loose ends. I was still feeling the effects later in the year, so we took another holiday, this time driving to Melbourne for what seems to be an annual pilgrimage.

I really came to appreciate lots of LinuxSAers more than ever (due to their conference involvement) - G and L - you are amazing!

I ended up going to the USA twice for work - for 3 weeks initially and later for 6 months bringing the whole family.

I sat on the Linux Australia committee and saw lots of cool things get achieved. I've been to Sydney (Media training), Melbourne (Committee meeting) and Canberra (Ghosts of Conference Past) for Linux Australia this year.

I said goodbye to many friends due to a downsizing workforce, and saw lots of hard work not rewarded.

I moved shadowfax from running Red Hat / Fedora to Ubuntu. This was not a small change - I've been running RH since 5.0. I started to run my own server at home.

I made submissions to our government on the farce that is the AUSFTA.

I wrote and was published in Australian Developer Magazine and IDM.

I've taken up photography as another hobby.

I probably wrote more lines of code this year than last, but I still felt like I wanted to write more. I spent a lot of time playing with C# under the .NET CLR (at work) as well as Mono (at home). I didn't make any real progress in trying to transition to paid open-source development as a day job.

We bought an iPod - which meant having to think about free software ethics as applied to music distribution.

Got to visit Willow Creek which was an eye-opener. Didn't get around to visiting Moody Bible so that's delayed until early next year. We've settled at Harvest for our time in Illinois.

It's been a very busy, but very worthwhile year. Goal setting for 2005 coming soon.

tech/misc | 23 Dec 2004 | #

World's Best Chocolate

In my mind, there is now a change in the world's best chocolate - Haigh's Mandarin Creams (item 237) have been replaced by Harry and David's fruit chocolates - especially the raspberries. Yummmmmm :-)

travel/chicago | 23 Dec 2004 | #

Finally fixed PyBlosxom RSS renderer

What had been annoying me for ages was that the RSS renderer for PyBlosxom was incorrectly inserting <link>$url</link> instead of <link>$base_url</link>. Finally fixed it as it causing complaints from readers of planet.linuxsa.org.au - the bug was in <install>pyblosxom-1.0.0/Pyblosxom/blosxom.py

While I was at it, I listened to suggestions and increased the refresh time for that planet to hourly, as well as dropping the feeds from LWN and /.

meta | 21 Dec 2004 | #

Marshall Fields

We went to the Marshall Fields downtown store on Saturday to soak up the Christmas spirit a little. Marshall Fields is sort of like John Martins in Adelaide used to be (before David Jones took it over and closed it down :-( It's a traditional old-century department store - warm and friendly service in a big austere building. They have animated puppets in the shop windows, telling the story of Snow White - quite elaborate. Along with a thousand other people we had a look and J enjoyed them I think.

Of course it was cold standing outside viewing the decorated shop windows - on the way in to downtown we saw from some billboards that it was only 6F (-14C). Brrrrrr.

Inside there's the World-famous Walnut Room - nice place to eat - but there was a 4 hour waiting time to get a table - sheesh. Inside the Walnut room there's a 45 foot Christmas tree - an annual must see for Chicago residents - this year its modelled on a 1960's Whitehouse tree - which ties in with the Jacqueline Kennedy revival that's going on right now in Chicago.

So a nice Saturday out - albeit cold sans snow.

travel/chicago | 21 Dec 2004 | #

LCA2005 Registrations Open

As sjh says, registrations for Linux.Conf.Au 2005 have opened!

So here is your action plan:

1) get time off from work between Apr 18 and Apr 23, 2005

2) Register

3) Convince your boss to pay, or just pay from your own pocket

4) Start counting the days

The only complaint I've got is that LCA2005 could do with more promotion - we've got to start telling people that LCA2005 is only 17 weeks away. Mailing lists, news groups, news sites etc all need pinging.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 18 Dec 2004 | #

Planet LinuxSA

Planet LinuxSA went live today. Woohoo!

Email me if you want your feed added.

tech/LinuxSA | 16 Dec 2004 | #

Icecream on a cold day

Last weekend we went to Chicago Premium Outlets in Aurora, IL to shop. Much like DFO in Melbourne, but bigger and having the disadvantage of being individual shops outside (i.e. not under one roof), meaning that visiting on a day that's around freezing is not pleasant (coats on, walk 3 metres, coats off - all day long).

Nonetheless we did well and bought Christmas presents for ourselves, and "saved" money doing so.

We had to try Cold Stone Creamery since it came so highly recommended by the locals here. Very yummy - I'll add my recommendation - pecans, rich vanilla icecream, caramel and chocolate sauces. Mmmmmm.

P.S. I never got around to describing last weekend. We went to the Shedd Aquarium which was pretty good. Baluga whales in huge tanks for you to see, obscure fish and corals for viewing, kids play areas. The only beef I had was the price - like USD 62 for a family of 4. Throwing in parking (USD 12) and shared lunch meals (USD 17), it proved an expensive day out, but I guess you've got to do these things while you're so far from home.

travel/chicago | 16 Dec 2004 | #

Javadoc^WVisual Studio "auto" documentation

A article saying that the Visual Studio / .Net environment improves productivity since it allows you to incorporate design documentation inline with your code that gets automagically extracted when you need it.

How is this anything but an evolutionary step from Javadoc? I mean, javadoc was included with jdk 1.1 (was that released in 1998?), so it's not a new concept.

I really dislike people and groups that try to re-write history.

tech/code | 16 Dec 2004 | #

It's Official - Linux has fewer bugs

Well, it's official - according to the latest research Linux has fewer bugs than proprietry offerings.

Linux, it is claimed, has about 0.17 bugs per 1,000 LOC (Lines of code).

Most proprietry software has about 20 to 30 bugs per 1,000 LOC.

Intuitively, this makes sense: 1) "Many eyeballs make most bugs shallow" - the open-source process encourages bugs to be found and fixed. 2) Most of the developers writing the Linux kernel are doing it for fun, not to pay the mortgage. As Brian Kernighan says, "Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won't do it well anyway." Without the pressures of deadlines and bad managers, developers write better code. 3) Simply put, the kernel hackers are smart people. Hang out on lkml for a while to see the intense thinking that goes on in finding solutions to hard problems - I'm often in awe.

Linux now wins in bug count, internationalisation support, security and TCO. The only 2 remaining obstacles are shrink-wrap applications availability and ease-of-use. Ease of use is being addressed by projects such as GNOME. It's only shrink-wrap applications being available down at the mall that's a hindrance. That's a business model thing - a challenge, but also an opportunity. If someone can crack that there's big profits to be made, and the chance to grab a large chunk of the market at the start.

tech/linux | 15 Dec 2004 | #

flurries

Today is cold.

On the way to work the temperature was about 20F (= -7C) with a wind-chill taking that down another 4 or 5 degrees Celcius. That's so cold that your hands sting if you're not wearing gloves.

Strangely enough there's no snow just flurries being carried by the 40mph (64kph) wind.

travel/chicago | 14 Dec 2004 | #

Of Silver Bullets and HIGs

Today I stumbled upon the legendary No Silver Bullet essay by Fred Brooks via the C2 Wiki. As I've been looking for an online version of this article for years I'll bookmark here.

On another track, AJ muses on zoomable user interface design, which reminded me to finally bookmark these sites:

• Jeff Raskin,
• Tog,
• Joel on UI design,
• The Apple MacOSX HIG, and
• GNOME's HIG.

tech/code | 11 Dec 2004 | #

Tripod

Shhh, I shouldn't really know this, but I'm getting a tripod for Christmas.

I can't help but know, because I selected and purchased it, but it's really a present from S to me.

I'm getting the Slik U9000, which seems like a nice middle of the road sort of tripod - not a professional Bogen, but something that should stretch my abilities and help me get better with my photography. Of course it will be meet my needs if I get a DSLR someday - maybe this one (Wake up Michael - as if!) I do already have a telescopic tripod, which has been great, but I've outgrown that - so I'll put that one aside for travel.

Along the way I found a nice series of articles on tripods, and some reviews of the U9000 (as well as a better description).

photos | 10 Dec 2004 | #

How to pick an American

If you are ever not sure whether you are talking to an American, ask them to say the word, "Emu".

If they are Australian, they would say, "e-MU" (as in the Greek letter)

If they are American, they would say, "e-MOO" (as in the cow)

travel/chicago | 09 Dec 2004 | #

Not again!

Last night the fire alarm went off at about 2am.

This is now the 4th or 5th time in 8 1/2 weeks. Not happy Jan.

Each time it has gone off it has been in the middle of the night. Only once was it not a false alarm - someone burnt some toast or something. Given that it is freezing or below outside and we have 2 kids under 4, we're not going to stand outside for 30 minutes until the fire dept give the all clear for us to return to our beds. We're now just doing what everyone else in the building is doing - ignoring it. It won't be long before we sleep through the sounding of the alarm.

We've talked to neighbours and it seems that once every fortnight there is a false alarm - and this has been going on for over a year. The appartment block managers try to sound concerned, but they don't do anything about it. They get "someone in to look at it" but the situation doesn't improve. Even the fire brigade don't bother rushing here anymore, and they only send a couple of guys, not a whole squad.

If there ever is a real fire in our appartment block hundreds of people will die because of "the boy who cried wolf".

So we're in a bind - I can demand the corporate housing company to move us to another location, except that we like it here except for the false alarms - there are facilities that keep S and the kids occupied since they only have the car 2 or 3 days a week. And moving would be hard - we'd have to get in professional movers and pack up our stuff again, change our address at banks, the state department, other bills etc. and all that for just another 4 months. It hardly seems worth all the effort. Our safety comes first, but this is ridiculous.

travel/chicago | 09 Dec 2004 | #

Little Heads vs Big Heads

Joel again writes the truth with Little Heads vs Big Heads, quoting the great article You need Developers, not Programmers.

Basically you need people who love developing software, not just doing it as a day job. I've commented on this before, and so has Joel, specifically about interviewing for the right people.

I guess one of the first signs of a developer mindset - do they have a junkcode directory, or a public code respository? How about a useful blog showing a history of thinking-outside-the-box?

tech/code | 07 Dec 2004 | #

Sanity returned

Geoffrey has heeded the call to split the LinuxSA mailing list in 2 - the main technical list "linuxsa" and "linuxsa-talk" for everything off-topic.

Thank you Geoffrey - some sanity returns to my mailbox!

tech/LinuxSA | 03 Dec 2004 | #

Smart search

On some blog this week I read about repeated failures in UI design - mistakes that keep getting made in multiple OSes multiple times.

While I can't find that article again (bookmark Michael, bookmark!), the author mentioned that sorting of strings in a pull-down or a list-view was typically broken - multiple spaces, common words such as "The" and "A" shouldn't be considered when sorting etc. He held up iTunes which did a better job.

So I wrote some code last night to do it. Wasn't too hard - I'll make it public once I clean it up some. A good break from my day job which right now is reading and writing documents :-(

tech/code | 02 Dec 2004 | #

Generosity

When I published my Christmas 2004 wish list I did so as a bit of a joke. I mean, who would just buy you something because I publicly mentioned it?

Well someone did. I'm now the owner of Secrets and Lies by Schneier. The person who bought it for me wanted to remain anonymous, but they forget about the billing address associated with the order :-) If Amazon had labelled it as a gift, I wouldn't have looked - but it sort of surprised me that an Amazon package turned up unexpectedly in the mail. I won't name the generous person here except to say thank you K for your generosity.

This is an interesting example of how small and interconnected the world has become. I'm sitting in Chicago (UTC-0600), my wish list on my blog sitting in Adelaide (UTC+1030) was read by a computer geek somewhere in the world, and via Amazon (NY state?) they purchased and shipped something to me. I find that really weird, but also really cool.

tech/misc | 02 Dec 2004 | #

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was last Thursday, and we were blessed to be able to spend it at the Zehner's with their family.

After getting lost (due to Michael not being able to follow directions) we arrived at their beautiful traditional American 2 storey to find a snowman sitting out front. We were greeted by the 2 boys and 2 dogs of the family - Cameron, Jack, Ruby and Max (you can guess which way round).

Tom and Julie gave us the grand tour of the place and introduced us to the rest of the family. Tom, while pretending to be a graphic artist, is really a geek from looking at his desk full of computers.

For Thanksgiving dinner we had 2 big turkeys, green-been salad, sweet potato baked dish, salad, along with scone-like dumplings and all the appropriate condiments. That was followed up by pecan pie and the traditional pumpkin pie. Boy, was there too much food!

We had a great time, and got to spend the holiday with some very nice people and felt part of the American tradition that is Thanksgiving. That was so nice of you Zehner's to invite us. We were so tired that we just stayed home for Black Friday - the day after Thanksgiving.

travel/chicago | 01 Dec 2004 | #

Drivers Licence

After 3 hours of waiting in lines, sitting a multiple choice exam, and doing a driving test in very light snow, I now have my Illinois driving licence.

This means AVIS will let me keep our rental car, and I won't have to catch taxis. And I got the licence with 5 days grace period left :-)

travel/chicago | 01 Dec 2004 | #

Which way?

North, south, east and west isn't always north, south, east and west respectively here in Chicago.

When driving and you come to an intersection of a road that is aligned north / south, you'll find signs that are giving you the option of going east or west?!? Huh?!?

You see, east and west don't really mean east and west. They mean, "Do you want to go towards the city, or away from it?".

Chicago is situated on the west side of Lake Michigan, so any travel towards the city is east and any travel away from the centre of the city is west. So a road that leads north / south eventually either heads towards the city at one end and away from it at the other - hence the designation of east / west instead of north / south.

Understand?

Me neither.

travel/chicago | 30 Nov 2004 | #

Walking in the winter wonderland!

Woohoo! Last night it snowed for the first time. This is the first time 3 of the 4 of us have seen snow. This morning there's gotta be 5cm of precipitation covering everything.

Today is Thanksgiving - the start of the "Holiday Season", so snow is quite appropriate. We're off to the Zehner's who have very graciously invited us to be part of their celebrations. We're really looking forward to today - the holiday known as the eating holiday! :-)

Thanksgiving write-up coming soon...

travel/chicago | 26 Nov 2004 | #

Wikipedia goes mainstream

Today at work I was reviewing a colleague's whitepaper on something I can't talk about. Going through his references to verify his assumptions, he made 5 references to Wikipedia. Wikipedia goes mainstream - now being quoted from boring company internal reports!

In other news, my new toy - an iPod - arrived today from Shanghai. Less than a day after the headphones and travel-kit arrived from Tennesee. How can something from China and something from Tennesee arrive within a day of each other?

tech/misc | 25 Nov 2004 | #

When you wish upon a star

I now have an Amazon wish list. Feel free to buy me anything on this list - but I'll be especially happy if you buy me any of the priority 1 items :-)

tech/misc | 24 Nov 2004 | #

US Banks

Today I finally received my credit card from a US bank. That was hard work.

You see, some retailers won't accept non-US credit cards, and without one you can't buy on-line from some retailers, or receive good phone card deals etc etc etc.

As an alien they don't want to give me a credit card - even though I have an L1 visa (an employer sponsored work visa), a social security number, and (overseas) credit history. After 3 face-to-face meetings I finally persuaded them to give me a _debit_ card on the basis of my employer vouching for me. But, No credit for you!

So now I can register and get cheap phone calls and I can make use of iTunes while I'm here.

Speaking of banks, the financial system here is quite a bit behind the times. The best you can get on a credit card is 30 days grace, whereas we can between 55 and 60 days in Australia. Likewise line of credit accounts where your purchases made on a credit card are automatically withdrawn from your morgauge after the interest free period is up haven't been heard of. Everything is check(sp - cheque)-based, and are only slowly moving to friction-less payment systems.

But the shop-front side of (e)commerce is great in the USA. Order something on the net, pay via credit card, and it's shipped free to your front door within a couple of days - even if it originated in Shanghai, CN!

travel/chicago | 23 Nov 2004 | #

Weekend of surprises

Went to RAM on Friday night for a meal. Very nice food and we struck up a conversation with the table next to us. Just a couple of business guys, chatting over a steak and some beers. Well, they left the restaurant before us - and paid for our meal!!! What a wonderful surprise - such a nice thing for them to do - we're going to pay it forward somehow.

On Saturday we went downtown and walk The Magnificent Mile to soak up the atmosphere of The Annual Lights Festival. Sort of like the Adelaide Christmas Pageant without Christmas (the MagMile event is unfortunately PC), with 3-4 times the number of people, with only 10 floats instead of Adelaide's 100 or so, and being Disney-centric. But it had great atmosphere which made up for the temperature which was under 3 degrees C!

Sunday was rest and recovery, except that we went to a local mall and bought beanies and gloves. It's getting cold now - Thanksgiving this Thursday will be around 0 degrees C!

travel/chicago | 22 Nov 2004 | #

Koder kan't find kode?

Looking for open-source source code to do something in particular? A new Google-like search engine called Koders has arrived - which allows you to search source code. You can free-form search, specify the language and the licence. They also do project-level summaries with cost calculations. Cool.

As of todat they're claiming they've indexed 125,112,016 lines of code. Wow.

They're obviously still getting started, lots of projects aren't being searched, but it's a good start.

tech/code | 20 Nov 2004 | #

To dream the impossible dream

Found an interesting requirement today:

     Binary data shall be compressed by more than 40%. 

No qualification. Now for any sufficiently random binary data you will not be able to meet this. There are certain exceptions - unpacked image file formats for example - but in general you just can't do it without restricting the requirement to a subset of all binary data.

Hang on a minute - I have an idea, I can get about 50% compression by throwing away all the 1's :-)

tech/code | 20 Nov 2004 | #

Nail in the coffin

The ABC reports that Australia and the USA will commence the "Free" Trade Agreement as of Jan 1, 2005.

A sad day for the Australian IT industry. It mentions that one of the benefits of the AUSFTA is "enhancing protection for intellectual property". Unfortunately it does so by going down the path of adopting DMCA-like provisions, without giving Australia "Fair Use".

The AUSFTA is net-negative for the Australian IT industry - obviously Australia's future isn't in high-tech industries, but as a producers of wheat and sheep. I should get into farming now, ahead of the rush.

In better news, Rusty posts a lengthy tome on Software Patentability. He concludes "the patentability of software has brought no improvement to the industry. "

tech/IP | 19 Nov 2004 | #

Linux.Conf.Au CFP Reviewing

As mbp says the judging of the CFP submissions for Linux.Conf.Au 2005 is well underway, and I can happily say that I've finished my bit of that.

Wow, there were a _lot_ of submissions, covering a very broad spectrum of ideas - interestingly enough there is a different slant in the topics submitted, but the quality of the submissions is just as good. Linux.Conf.Au continues to amaze me as a fun, technically strong, eclectic conference. Should be great again.

Conference opens in 21 weeks. Make sure you are there :-)

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 18 Nov 2004 | #

Making Fedora boot faster

OSNews has a story on making Fedora boot quicker. Interesting thread - here's the challenge, here's the response, and here's the graphs.

I just think this is really cool. A classic example of an itch getting scratched.

tech/linux | 17 Nov 2004 | #

All quiet on the western front.

We just had our first quiet weekend since arriving in the USA. Up until now it's been, "Go Go Go!".

Well, pretty quiet: J did have another birthday party to attend, we did try a Cinnabon, and we visited Harvest for the first time on Sunday (which was pretty cool), but besides that we didn't do much :-)

(WARNING: Over the top flash demo on the Cinnabon site. This is appropriate given how over the top Cinnabons are :-)

travel/chicago | 16 Nov 2004 | #

Ice Ice Baby!

Last night was cold.

For the first time this morning we found the car covered in ice. It was only 1/2 cm thick, but is was ice. We're gonna need an ice scrapper very soon.

When I arrived at work just before 9am, while I was waiting for Microsoft Exchange to give me my emails (sigh 30 minutes :( I checked what the weather was outside. 29 degrees Fahrenheit, which is -1 in Celcius.

travel/chicago | 13 Nov 2004 | #

GlobalFS

Lots of things are converging lately.

Google is now offering me 1Gb a space to store my emails on-line, and the search features required to usefully access that mail archive. Google have also got their desktop search solution, allowing me to google for information that is on my local computer, or out in the wild world. Already Google archives everything I make public, providing me with a pseudo-desktop search capability, and an offsite backup mechanism - all free. All I give up is privacy :-)

Back on task. Novell have created iFolder which is a globally accessible sharable filesystem mechansim, with a cross-platorm .Net implementation. Apple have something similar in iDisk, part of iMac.

The open-source community has contributed with useful search capabilities in the form of Beagle, with Apple copying with Spotlight, and likewise for Microsoft with WinFS search capabilities (or sometimes called "Implicit Search" by Microsoft).

Very soon, we're going to have ooodles and ooodles of publicly available disk, available to be searched from your computer anywhere where there is connectivity. Sun's phrase of "The Network is the Computer", while being hyperbole marketing schmuck, is entirely true. Our computing experience is very quickly moving off of our privately owned machines, and onto the network as a whole. Already I'm in the USA accessing all my data off a combination of a small personal server in Australia and google's huge databases. We live in a borderless electronic world.

So what needs to happen before this becomes a reliable reality for all? Authentication and Privacy. While I may be foolishly using google as my personal backup tool, not everyone wants everything they want backed up to be publicly searchable. Similarly, last thing I'd want is for someone to trick google into letting someone else update it's cache of my data. I guess I could get google to cache asymetricaly encypted data, but that doesn't scale too well :)

One version of the future has iFolder giving me filesystem access that is authenticated, secure, with ACLs, but it provides no search and no actual storage. Add Beagle for searching and find someone with a couple of thousand freely available terrabytes and we're done.

No matter which combination of technologies actually make it, it can't be too far away. I can't wait.

tech/code | 12 Nov 2004 | #

Lexmark and the DMCA

Good news on the Lexmark printer replacement ink cartridge court case - according to this ZDnet article, common sense has prevailed - printer ink shouldn't cost more than purfume, i.e. Lexmark can't use the DMCA to stop the 3rd party ink cartidge market for their printers.

This is great news, unless you are in Australia.

The ZDnet article goes on to say...

     The court said that "lock-out" codes in software that's designed to
     control or limit interoperability is not covered by the original-expression
     intentions of copyright law. Furthermore, said the court, SCC's reverse
     engineering was not a circumvention of Lexmark's Toner Loader Program but
     a replacement of it, so even if the code had been covered by copyright,
     SCC's implementation would have been allowed under the fair-use doctrine.

Bingo - there's "fair use" again. Having the DMCA without fair use in Australia could give these sorts of companies a chance to create monopolies. Australia adopts the bad parts (e.g. DMCA) of US law, but not the good (e.g. "Fair Use"). While this result is good, until we get similar fair use provisions in Australia, consumers aren't protected - and Australians will continue to have less rights over what they have purchased than our compatriats in the USA.

tech/IP | 10 Nov 2004 | #

Red Hat history

Since Fedora Core 3 was released today, it's time to record the history of the releases so I don't need to look this up anymore.

Sources: http://www.fact-index.com/r/re/red_hat_linux.html, http://fedora.redhat.com and the fedora.announce mail list, and http://openskills.info/view/boxdetail.php?IDbox=1094&boxtype=distro.

    * 1.0 (Mother's Day), November 3 1994, $49.95
    * 1.1 (Mother's Day+0.1), August 1 1995, $39.95
    * 2.0, September 20 1995
    * 2.1, November 23 1995
    * 3.0.3 (Picasso), May 1 1996 - first release supporting DEC Alpha
    * 4.0 (Colgate), October 8 1996 - first release supporting Sparc
    * 4.1 (Vanderbilt), February 3 1997
    * 4.2 (Biltmore), May 19 1997
    * 5.0 (Hurricane), December 1 1997
    * 5.1 (Manhattan), May 22 1998
    * 5.2 (Apollo), November 2 1998
    * 6.0 (Hedwig), April 26 1999
    * 6.1 (Cartman), October 4 1999
    * 6.2 (Zoot), April 3 2000
    * 7.0 (Guinness), September 25 2000
    * 7.1 (Seawolf), April 16 2001
    * 7.2 (Enigma), October 22 2001
    * 7.3 (Valhalla), May 6 2002
    * RedHat Enterprise Edition 2.1 AS (Pensacola), May 6 2002
    * 8.0 (Psyche), September 30 2002
    * 9 (Shrike), March 31 2003 (this release is labeled "9" not "9.0")
    * RedHat Enterprise Edition 3.0 (Taroon), October 22 2003
    * Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow), November 5 2003
    * Fedora Core 2 (Tettnang), May 11/18 2004
    * Fedora Core 3 (Heidelberg), November 8 2004

tech/linux | 09 Nov 2004 | #