Leveraging synergy in this championship year
Michael Davies' Blog
Michael Davies
michael [at] the-davies.net
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Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Michael Davies,
All Rights Reserved.
All opinions are mine only.
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 :-)
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.
Photo Tidbits
Thinking about photography today - found this great Photo Tidbits site.
Love my tripod
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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. |
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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.
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 :-)
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 /.
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.
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.
Planet LinuxSA
Planet LinuxSA went live today. Woohoo!
Email me if you want your feed added.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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)
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.
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?
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!
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 :-(
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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...
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?
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 :-)
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!
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!
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.
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 :-)
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. "
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 :-)
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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
Late October in Chicago
The novelty still isn't wearing off - Chicago is a huge city with lots to see and do. We're still learning what is available, so I don't think we'll run out of things to visit while we're here. We had a look just south of the Loop on the weekend and found the Museum Campus and Soldier Field. Places we just have to visit - with the museums we're waiting until we run out of nice weather first, and if the Bears keep winning I definately won't be able to get tickets to see Soldier Field! :-)
On the food side of things, we finally tried a traditional Chicago Pizza Pie from Giordano's. Mmmmm, yum! While I'm reluctant to ever eat pizza from anywhere else again, if I must I wouldn't mind trying Lou Malnati's while we're here. Contrary to what I just said, I've been able to keep to my goal of eating somewhere different everytime we eat out. Over the past few weeks we've now added Lonestar, Stir Crazy, Chevy's and Boston Market to our list of visited eateries.
We finally made it back to Lincoln Park Zoo - it took 2 Saturdays to see it all due to Halloween events on our first visit. The Halloween thing at the zoo had one benefit - J got to meet his hero. The animal enclosures that are here at Lincoln Park Zoo are top notch - better than anything I've seen in Australia - although I think Adelaide Zoo has more animal variety. Since the zoo is free, we'll go back again several times.
Can you tell we're enjoying ourselves? :-)
BTW, more photos have been added from page 8 onwards.
Visited NWCLUG
Last night I visited NWCLUG, a local Linux User Group in Palatine, Illinois. Being election night, turn out was small at about 20 people. I gave welcomes on behalf of Linux Australia and LinuxSA. They have a LinuxFest coming up soon which sounds interesting.
The speaker spoke on TeXmacs, and emacs-like structured document editor (in my mind, similar to Scribus and LyX). TeXmacs is still in early development, but looks quite promising. Especially if it moves to gtk+ for its widget set as was suggested - whatever it's currently using is awful. Some HIG lovin' is needed - it currently uses something like "Shrinking Factor" instead of "Zoom", and that's not an isolated label name strangeness! With the advance of things like Open Office and AbiWord, I'm not sure there is a market niche left for TeXmacs.
Everything in TeXmacs is in Scheme - the save file format, configuration file format, internal libraries, the plug-in interface etc. This means that like the kitchen-sink-disguised-as-an-editor, you do anything if you just write a plugin (and like Emacs, it'll eat all your memory too :-)
The US Election
Well, we've just survived the US election. With the saturation of newspaper, radio, television, and billboards over the past 3 weeks, it's been unavoidable. The initial result is in, and from this summary, it appears Bush is going to win by a larger majority than in 2000. It looks like Bush has won the popular vote and the electoral college vote (whereas in 2000 he lost the popular vote contest but still won).
But elections are a strange thing over here, yesterday the Kerry camp was quoted as saying that they had USD 71 million dollars, and 10,000 lawyers ready to contest the result in court if they didn't win. The Bush camp wasn't much better, saying that they had a war chest of USD 11 million to battle the result in court if required. The Bush camp called Kerry "dellusional" for not conceding defeat already, and Kerry's running mate Edwards was quoted as saying that they'll contest every single vote in court if necessary.
What else is interesting is that Bush is reported to have a personal fortune in the realm of USD 40 million, whereas Kerry is reported to be worth USD 1 billion. So much for throwing away the notion of the rulers only coming from the rich class in society.
Either way, this election has left the USA a divided country. The far east and west coasts voted Kerry, with just about everyone else voting Bush. Reading blogs this morning I've found lots of bitterness and disbelief and refusal to accept what has happened, along with sighs of relief from the other side. Exit polls showed the biggest issue on American minds were moral issues - whether same sex marriages should be recognised, and whether human embryoes can be harvested for stem-cell research. The economy and Iraq were the next 2 biggest issues.
I'll be really glad when the result is confirmed, the legal challenges are gone, because right now it appears everyone in the USA is putting their life on hold until it's all resolved. The mood at work today is sombre.
The clock is now ticking
Today is not black, but the winds of inevitability are blowing. The clock has started ticking for the next black day.
Dynamic User Interfaces
I'm having lots of discussion on building user interfaces dynamically. Here are the links I was talking about.
In the Longhorn world there's XAML - http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/core/overviews/about%20xaml.aspx
In the GNOME world there's Glade/Libglade - http://glade.gnome.org/ and http://www.jamesh.id.au/software/libglade/.
In the Mozilla world there's XUL - http://www.xulplanet.com/, http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/ and Rapid Application Development with Mozilla.
The first one is vapourware until 2006 (2007?). The first two are reasonably tied to their respective platforms of Windows and Linux. The third is cross platform (built with the blood, sweat and tears of Netscape employees and Mozilla contributors). And there's also the in-house proprietary API that we've got.
Do we switch, or maintain the existing code base?
Great Hackers vs No Great Hackers
Via this submission to Joel's upcoming Best Software Essays of 2004 book, I learned of 2 really good essays contrasting whether you want to hire a great hacker or a professional software developer.
Essay on hiring Great Hackers - http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
Essay on hiring professional software developers - http://software.ericsink.com/entries/No_Great_Hackers.html
Graham's essay covers more ground, and rambles, but is excellent. Very interesting to see the defensive responses of people who seem to have a bent against people who code for fun more than code for a living. Perhaps they know they aren't great hackers :-)
That's not to say that Sink's essay doesn't say plenty of good stuff - indeed creating teams that work together to meet your customer's needs is vital to the success of any software business (see Peopleware on that point) especially for small ISVs.
But in practice, every software company needs both Hackers and "professionals". You need people who'll do the boring stuff so that the product gets out the door, and you need the trailblazers who will do the amazing stuff to get you the market in the first place. I think I said something like that before, but in regard to open-source vs proprietary development models. Bringing hackers and "professionals" together and forming a close-knit team is what a good Software Team Lead does. And they're as rare as hen's teeth.
Footnote: The exception that proves the rule is Google. I keep reading about this incredible team they have of highly innovative people. The only Google-ite I know is Marc, and he fits that mold.
Have you cut code today?
There are lots of people around me who are day-job software engineers - clock in by 9, clock out by 5, do the job and go home - they certainly don't waste time reading books or writing code at home.
For me, it's different. I code because it's something that I enjoy to do. I'll trade sleep for coding time - the day just isn't complete unless I've written some code.
Sometimes working at a big company as a software engineer, I spent a lot of time writing documents, attending meetings, triaging bugs, assigning work packages to my team, playing politics, writing an RFP or suffering compolsory training on some irrelevant topic. All these other things are necessary evils when you work at a big company.
At the end of the day though, I put up with all these things because eventually I get to do what I love to do - cut code. And writing software is what they are ultimately paying me to do. When you interview they don't test you out on how to write a document or attend a meeting - they want to know if you can code. Why then do big companies divert their software development staff to these other activities? As it has been said many times, a software developer does not a good manager make. At least most of the time.
And I'm a software developer - the longer I'm in this industry the surer I am. Why? Because if I haven't cut some code today, I'm just not happy.
The past weekend
A very nice weekend was just had by the Davies in Chicago. Lots of shopping on Saturday morning (because it was raining) - spent up big at Old Navy, Randhurst Mall, and Circuit City.
On Sunday it was beautiful weather, so in the afternoon, we drove to downtown straight from church. Feeling adventerous, we went via the I-94 instead of the I-90 - without a map. We didn't get lost, so I was pretty happy with my navigation skills. We visited Lincoln Park, 1200 acres of open space forming Chicago's largest park. We walked around the Clock Tower and found the zoo but ran out of time. It was very beautiful down by the lake, must do this again before it gets cold.
Footnote: I forgot to mention one important shop we visited, IKEA, which was amazing. From 10am 'till 10pm that store is full with people buying stuff - probably stuff they don't need too :) (28/10/2004)
Online photography course
Garrett LeSage posted about Jodie Coston's Free photography course at the morgueFile.
I'm bookmarking, because if I can find some free time, I'd really like to take better photos. Buying this might help, but I need to get the most out what I have beforehand.
Euro-Patents
The issue of software patents continues to be a strongly-debated issue world-wide in the IT industry.
In Australia, Linux Australia and the OSIA are continuing to highlight the dangers of software patents in a Open Source forum with the legal world.
In Europe, Red Hat, MySQL and others are contributing to the No Software Patents campaign to stop Europe following the same mistakes as the US.
Reading No Software Patents led me to this:
This is sobering.
Same, but different.
Everything is the USA is different to Australia. Everything. But at the same time it's all just the same.
For example, take TV. We have Comcast cable TV at home (it came with the apartment) with some 80 channels. At home, we have 5 channels (7, 9, 10, ABC and SBS). That's quite a bit different. Yet why is it so that there is often nothing on TV worth watching either here or in Australia? :-)
Same with politics. People don't like what Bush has done, but don't like what Kerry stands for. Substitute Howard for Bush, and Latham for Kerry and it's just the same. Even the election result is likely to be the same - the conservatives will be returned. So how are they different? The Australian elections showed that Australia has a vibrant upper house with multiple party representation, where minority views can get aired (e.g. the emergence of the Greens and Family First parties), whereas in the USA it's strictly a 2 party system, and where there is even less difference between the parties. I think Australia's system is better.
There's also the difference in service industries. In the USA walk into a shop and the staff bend over backwards to help you. It's quite a contrast to Australia when sales staff can be even rude (in comparison) to potential buyers. It's been quite an eye-opener for me. Of course the shops are all the same in both places - trying to make you want to buy stuff that you don't really need.
Church is different too - we visited Willow Creek this past weekend and had a great time, just like at our home church back in Australia. Both churches are trying to reach out to their communities, and present a message relevant for today. They are different though on scale. Willow Creek is enormous.
Even light switches are different. Up is on in the USA and off in Australia, and vice versa :-)
Cool Mono Apps
Edd writes on Seven Cool Mono Apps, which interestingly enough, has some overlap to my post to LinuxSA today.
Chicago Photos up
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First set of Chicago 6 month trip photos available at http://michaeldavies.org/gallery/chicago6months. |
Out with the Xircom, in with the Linksys
We now Cable internet... not without a small hiccup though.
After 4 years my Xircom RBEM56G-100 bit the dust - it never worked properly in Chicago. Of course this immaculate timing meant that my cable internet sat unused for 24 hours since shadowfax didn't have an onboard NIC.
Having Circuit City, Best Buy and CompUSA within 3 miles of home is a wonderful thing when you are in the market for electronics. I picked up a Linksys PCM200 for a very cheap price - plugged it in and it just worked (tulip driver). Nice when that happens.
2 weeks down
The Davies family have survived 2 weeks here! Tomorrow is what we're looking forward to - Saturday!
As long as the weather is favourable, we'll drive north on route 12 into Wisconsn to see the "colors[sic] of Fall".
Independant of the weather, we'll make our first family visit to Woodfield Mall, which just has to be seen to be believed. J will certainly enjoy the crocodigle (crocodile for everyone above 3 year of age).
Legacy Windows DLL signatures
Useful reference to find method signatures in legacy Windows DLLs: http://www.pinvoke.net/
Shamefully, this is a IE-only. Interestingly it is a wiki.
Book Review: User Interface Design for Programmers
Last night my copy of User Interface Design for Programmers arrived in the mail from Amazon. I finished it just a little before midnight - I couldn't put it down! Joel of Joel on Software hits the UI mark with this book. There are many original observations about what makes an application usable, concepts that aren't difficult, non-intuitive, nor surprising, but enumerated together like this in just 144 pages (including index) is rare.
I've already emailed my boss asking if the company can buy a copy to give to the development team back home.
One highlight for me was on options dialogs:
"When you are designing and you try and abdicate your responsibility by forcing the user to decide something, you're not doing your job."
"... This doesn't mean eliminating all choice. ... There's another category of choice that that people seem to like: the ability to change the visual look of things without really changing the behavior. Everybody loves WinAmp skins; everybody sets theior desktop background to a picture. Since the choice affects the visual look without affecting the way anything functions, and since users are completely free to ignore the choice and get their work done anyway, this is a good use of options."
This caps off a great chapter explaining why functionality options should be minimised - the default should just work. It's like customising your emacs or vim extensively, works great until you need to use another machine and then you need to tar up your configuration and port it to a new machine. Sometimes it's just better to learn the defaults, and stick to them because your productivity will increase because the defaults are always there and they work all the time. (BTW, that's an argument to use vi[m] - it's always there :-P
Other ideas that are gold are Activity Based Planning, Imaginary Users, hallway usability testing, "Days are Seconds", "Months are Minutes", and "Seconds are Hours". You'll have to read the book to work out what they are. Chapter 16, Tricks of the Trade is also gold. Stuff that I'll use at work today.
Overall, a great book, a must have on your shelf. It's my latest addition to my Essential Books collection.
Look out for beagles
I'm still playing around with Beagle (wiki, planet) when I can find the time - I really like what these Novell guys are doing. The ideas they're coming up with are getting mirrored elsewhere - I've found that I now can't live without the copycat LookOut for OutLook at work when I'm compelled to use this abbomination of an MUA.
The US Medical System
So I was quite a bit sick the last couple of days - ear infection, infected throat and conjunctivitis. Being overseas in Chicago for less than a week made this more difficult than it should have been - trying to get medical attention without knowing the full details of your employer-provided medical insurance means that everyone wants to charge you full price.
A simple trip to a family doctor (a GP in Australian-lingo) costs USD 151. Eye drops and some anti-biotics costs a total of USD 122. That's a total of AUD 380! That would have cost me AUD 30 for the doctor and maximum AUD 40 for the medicine. I should be able to claim back all but USD 100 (AUD 140), but that's still double the Australian price!
I know the aim of the 2 systems is different - Australia aiming to have affordable healthcare for all and the USA aiming to have the best healthcare in the world, but this is ridiculous. How can anyone afford to get sick over here unless they are earning amazing amounts of money?
A small bright spark
There was one good thing about yesterday - I discovered that the local grocery store, Jewel, sells Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
Woohoo!
Fun with a rash
So had no fun last night with the company paid-for health scheme - J had a rash and we wanted some advice, so we called up the 24 hour emergency advice line and was refused service. "But my company is paying for this?!?" "We don't have any record of you in our system - contact your HR department - we won't help you"
Nothing like being in a foreign country, at night, needing medical assistance and being refused it. Not happy with my employer today.
We ended up getting advice from people who would normally have charged for it, but hearing our sob story of being Australians in the US for only 24 hours, they helped us without cost. J is ok, might still need to see a doctor, but that's easier to do during the day.
Safely here in sweet home Chicago
Arrived in Chicago safely late on Monday night 30 hours after we left Adelaide. Of course I couldn't tell anyone about it because once we were dropped off at the appartment I discovered that international phone calls were barred. There was no internet. I had no car. And there was no food in the house.
Of course we survived. A local call to a pizza bar saved us. And it wasn't bad pizza anyway :-P
Got the rental car the next morning (actually we had 3 different Avis branches contact me - I could've had 3 rental cars that day :-) Then had to find my way back to the appartment and the family. No real problems driving on the wrong side of the road - I guess it's only been a couple of months since I was last out here. Didn't get lost.
Went grocery shopping, spent a fortune, had a look around. Still nice weather, somewhere in the 20's. Jetlag not too bad.
Started work, some chaos. Starbucks in the company cafe helped. Chewed 4 days of work email, discovered that my domain was offline again, rang Australia to get a manual reboot. And since you're reading this, everything must be working again :-)
Very close now...
Today is Wednesday. This means 2 more working days until the STA begins.
Mostly things are going well, accommodation seems to be arranged, I have full company approvals, visas to work in the USA, tickets booked but not yet received, no car to pick us up yet, suitcases bought, USD purchased, internet banking organised, house-sitters found, movers booked etc. So while there is still lots to do (both at work and at home) we're getting there.
Must...keep...energy...levels...up...
P.S. California Pizza, Champs, Stir Crazy, Star Bucks, and Krispy Kreme - here we come! :-)
Schaumburg's weather
Lifted from Mikal is the weather in Schaumburg.
Black Day
Today is a black day. That is all :-(
When all you have is a hammer...
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For Pia... |
Stop the world, I want to get off
Just discovered something cool - a real-time open-source software activity log which monitors CVS checkins.
Amazing to see CVS checkins going on around the clock. Open-Source Software really is a global phenomenon.
But it's more than just information, it's a real indication of project activity. I mean I've known about Planet GNOME News for a while, but this sort of planet-style aggregation of CVS commits is a great idea.
The next step? How about security patch information? LWN and Linux Today have security pages and feeds, but not quite in the right form. LWN has good security info, but not in an RSS feed. Linux Today have advisories mixed in with general security articles, but one big RSS feed. If we had LWN security advisories for the major distributions available as an RSS feed, that'd be sweet.
Windows Command-Line Completion
Something I can never find when I have to play with the devil: Command-Line completion on Windows.
The Essential List
Whenever I go anywhere I always take a selection of technical books with me - with the number of books being proportional to the time I'll be away from home and the rest of my collection. As Chicago is only a week away I had to make my selection.
The Essential Books
Why these books? Some are reference books - what perl operator do I need?, some are for passing on to the unenlightened - Read Chapter 17 of Peopleware and then we can discuss. Others, like HHGTTG and Latin for all occasions provide inspiration for release names. I'm currently playing with C# using Gtk#, so Mono - A Developers Handbook and The Official GNOME 2 Developers Guide are essential.
P.S. Yes, all are mine except Object-Oriented Design Heuristics and C# in a Nutshell which are my employers.
michaeldavies.org upgraded
michaeldavies.org has moved from www to bree.
www, a Cyrix 686 120Mhz (120.01 bogomips) with 64Mb RAM and 6Gb of disk, has certainly earned retirement.
Linux Australia overview presentation
Spoke at LinuxSA on Tuesday night, with a 20 minute overview of Linux Australia. Slides here.
Received well, as was Geoffrey's talk on setting up basic services (www, sendmail, pop etc).
Beagle and Dashboard
The Beagle project had a hackfest with the Ximian^WNovell dudes visiting Novell in Bangalore. Results look good.
I really like the Beagle/Dashboard projects because adding implicit search as a fundamental feature of the desktop is a great leap forward. Being able to find artifacts of any type, cross-referencing between them, and to do this as you work, leaps over the competition. As I've blogged before, the idea is so grand Microsoft and Apple have started their own projects to replicate what the OSS community is doing.
rml started PlanetBeagle to track this stuff. Woohoo! I'm looking forward to hearing rml talk on Project Utopia at Linux.Conf.Au 2005 in April next year.
Sun and Linux contributions
Sun complained about the difficulty of getting their patches into Linux, Greg K-H rebuts well.
I think it's important that Linux keeps on doing what works. There has been, and will continue to be, lots of groups that want to integrate their code into Linux as they see the strengths of this operating system. They will try and make Linux adopt their techniques. And that's ok, just so long as that doesn't make Linux transmogrify into something it isn't and lose the qualities that have made it so successful.
SCO have whinged about IP, so now Linux has responded with better IP assignment, and Groklaw has been pointing out the errors in the acqusations. Novell, IBM, SGI etc have successfully adopted their mature development practices to fit in with the community - the question is, will Sun? They have cool stuff to contribute, but that's only going to get in if they do it Linux's way, and is clean good code, and gets there by meritocracy rather than bullying. Sun has done it in the GNOME community, they just need to do the same with the Linux kernel community.
Why is the iPod for sale in Australia?
Kim Weatherall talks about how putting music on your iPod is illegal in Australia. She also references the Builder AU article on the MPAA acting like a big ignorant bully in Australia.
I'm really glad that people like Kim are taking the time to point out what our laws say - and point out where they conflict with what people think the law says.
US Visa acquired
Up at 5am, took the family to Melbourne to apply in person for the US Visa required to spent 6 months in Chicago. Big day, home about 6pm, but worthwhile since I was told that the Visa was approved.
All go...
Voted!
So yesterday I voted due to the upcoming trip.
In my electorate of Makin there were 7 candidates wanting my vote, but only the 2 major parties were handing out How to vote cards. Interestingly enough they both asked for them back, "you know, recycling and all that."
I'll be only just over jet lag by the time I get to see who won.
Hardware wrangling
Had fun trying to get a DLink DFE-528TX+ PCI Ethernet Card working with a motherboard with an AMD 1Ghz processor. The PCI card and motherboard refused to negotiate an IRQ no matter which PCI slot was used, even though there were no other PCI cards on board. The 8139too driver didn't give me much I could fiddle with after Linux booted.
This is very strange since I've used these cards before with absolutely no problems. To get it working I needed to disable PnP on the motherboard and allocate an IRQ via the BIOS. In the good ole days when ISA was king I could play with driver settings in software rather than needing to deal with this at the BIOS level. So much for PnP. Why is PC hardware so bothersome?
MD5 Collision Found
A report of an MD5 Collision on Aug 17, 2004:
Consider these 128-byte files, which only differ in six bytes (in fact
their Hamming distance is only six bits, too):
file1.dat:
00000000 d1 31 dd 02 c5 e6 ee c4 69 3d 9a 06 98 af f9 5c
00000010 2f ca b5 87 12 46 7e ab 40 04 58 3e b8 fb 7f 89
00000020 55 ad 34 06 09 f4 b3 02 83 e4 88 83 25 71 41 5a
00000030 08 51 25 e8 f7 cd c9 9f d9 1d bd f2 80 37 3c 5b
00000040 96 0b 1d d1 dc 41 7b 9c e4 d8 97 f4 5a 65 55 d5
00000050 35 73 9a c7 f0 eb fd 0c 30 29 f1 66 d1 09 b1 8f
00000060 75 27 7f 79 30 d5 5c eb 22 e8 ad ba 79 cc 15 5c
00000070 ed 74 cb dd 5f c5 d3 6d b1 9b 0a d8 35 cc a7 e3
MD5(file1.dat) = a4c0d35c95a63a805915367dcfe6b751
file2.dat:
00000000 d1 31 dd 02 c5 e6 ee c4 69 3d 9a 06 98 af f9 5c
00000010 2f ca b5 07 12 46 7e ab 40 04 58 3e b8 fb 7f 89
00000020 55 ad 34 06 09 f4 b3 02 83 e4 88 83 25 f1 41 5a
00000030 08 51 25 e8 f7 cd c9 9f d9 1d bd 72 80 37 3c 5b
00000040 96 0b 1d d1 dc 41 7b 9c e4 d8 97 f4 5a 65 55 d5
00000050 35 73 9a 47 f0 eb fd 0c 30 29 f1 66 d1 09 b1 8f
00000060 75 27 7f 79 30 d5 5c eb 22 e8 ad ba 79 4c 15 5c
00000070 ed 74 cb dd 5f c5 d3 6d b1 9b 0a 58 35 cc a7 e3
MD5(file2.dat) = a4c0d35c95a63a805915367dcfe6b751
This clearly shows that the resistance of MD5 against collision attacks
is significantly lower than 2^64 indicated by its 128-bit digest. Since
the attack allows free selection of IV, these attacks mean that MD5
should not be used for any serious cryptographic purpose.
Note for that because MD5 is a chained hash function, you can generate an
infinity of new collisions from these by simple process of concatenation:
$ echo 'Hello, World!' > hello.txt
$ cat file1.dat hello.txt | md5sum
158701224aef36986648d9f0dfb0ca3c -
$ cat file2.dat hello.txt | md5sum
158701224aef36986648d9f0dfb0ca3c -
Time to patch passwd(1)? :-)
Envy
Got around to installing Ubuntu on shadowfax alongside Fedora Core 2. Very nice...
P.S. I want this.
Briefly back home
Returned from holidays at Kyneton today.
Relaxing.
Worlds apart.
Joel writes on the Five Worlds of software development - how you need a different mindset as a developer depending on which category you are developing for. The categories he defines are: Shrinkwrap, Internal, Embedded, Games, and Throwaway.
Shrinkwrap is easy. It's what I do for a living and its what the open-source world produces everyday. There's two main variants, the one that Joel recognises when he says, "we have higher bars for ease of use and lower bars for bugs", which is the Windows-world. The other side is the open-source way which is the less emphasis on ease of use and more emphasis on being bug free. These two extremes don't seem to get bridged very often in our industry.
Most open-source projects aren't very focused on the user experience - and ad hoc evidence from my Windows-focused work colleagues tells me that this is a common complaint with open-source software.
What do we do about that? As Joel also writes, "things that are not considered "fun" often don't get done in an all-volunteer team", which is why the contributions that Sun and other corporations make to GNOME are very important - they do the boring stuff that the enterprise expect. Perhaps this is the model for successful open-source software development in the large - let the enthusiastic volunteer coders trail blaze, and let the paid developers do the polishing. Testing, documentation, cross-platformness, i18n are all things that paid developers do better that volunteers.
Internal software is all about stuff you develop or contribute to, so that you can concentrate on producing the real software that you want to sell. This is the Larry Augustin story about building a Linux box so he could complete his Masters thesis (but instead founded VA Research).
This is a great space for open-source projects by the way - twiki, samba, bugzilla, apache, php etc etc etc which are all in common use where I work.
The line here blurs, is this really just internal software? What's definately internal software are the cgi-based meeting room bookers, meeting minutes registry, software metrics database systems etc. They all share the following attributes: One purpose, custom built, often shoddy user interface. Internal software is quite often write-only software. The projects I mentioned don't fall into that category but are very much behind the scenes players. Do they form another category of software - shared internal - which is higher-quality, single-purpose, internal software that is so good that it gets shared?
Internal software is a good candidate for open-sourcing. It's non-core business for your employer, and gaining external developers and testers can improve the quality of the code, not to mention finding uses for it that you hadn't thought of. Afterall, that's how things like patch started out.
Embedded. No comments on this right now :-)
Games. Interesting mindset that I hadn't really thought about. Games are just like movies from the financing perspective. Either they fly or they flop. There is no inbetween. Create too many flops in a row and you're dead. Create a couple of high flyers and that gives you the ability to create flops for a while. Interesting. Joel then comments that, "id software is not about to hire Ed Yourdon to talk about structured analysis". This just shows that each of these catagories of software need to be approached differently.
Throwaway. What struck me immediately on reading this was Tridge's junkcode. Of course junkcode isn't totally throwaway, but stuff you write once that might be useful again. All code might find another use, hence why I listened to Tridge (even though it's very meager right now).
Joel's main point in his article was that:
Whenever you read one of those books about programming methodologies written by a full time software development guru/consultant, you can rest assured that they are talking about internal, corporate software development. Not shrinkwrapped software, not embedded software, and certainly not games.
A very good observation.
Poor office environments
Today has been phone conference day. Up early, arrived at work just after 0630 to talk to a customer in the USA. Then a short break, and more phone conferences with other developers in several different timezones. My ear hurts, my shoulders ache, my co-workers dislike me (today) because I've been talking louder than usual to be heard over the conference bridge.
There must be a better way.
I've mentioned this before, but Fog Creek appear to have a very nice work environment. If you look at the design of their offices you can see how it's a better way to work. It just could be Programming Paradise.
Joel on Software also has an online discussion area. Here is where office design is discussed, including some other nice references. These articles remind me that I need to read chapters 7 through 13 of Peopleware again - last time I did that I changed jobs :-P
It's nice to dream...
P.S. I'd even appreciate the ability to plug my Linux laptop into the network here at work. *grumble*
GNOME 2.8 almost here
jdub announces the GNOME 2.8 Release Party.
So if you are in Sydney, this is what you should be doing on Sept 15.
About hugin
There are some early packages available, but they don't seem to work yet
Did I listen? No. Did the pre-built packages work for me? No. Brain in gear? No.
Creating Panoramic Photos
When I was in Chicago recently I took a few panoramic shots - specifically of the White Sox and Willow Creek Church. Haven't got around to stitching them together because the panoramic software that comes with my camera doesn't run under Linux.
Recently Chris wrote up how he did it, but I still didn't get around to it.
Today I just found this article, which looks pretty good as well. I'm running out of excuses :-)
Non-breaking hyphens in HTML
Em width hyphens, en width hyphens, non-breaking hyphens. Why isn't this documented anywhere common?
The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters).
ALP make noises on the AUSFTA
Senator Kate Lundy of the ALP released this statement to placate the angry Australian open-source industry.
A good start, but who knows what this means in practice. Will the ALP provide surety for OSS over software patents? Will circumvention for the purposes of fair use be legislated? Is there wiggle room in the AUSFTA to allow this? Will they have the intestinal fortitude to enact legislation that better balances the rights of end users and big multinational companies? Does actively monitor mean something will happen? Or is it political speak for do nothing?
Linux.Conf.Au 2004 Conference CD/DVD online
At last the conference DVD and CD iso's are available online.
Online browsing at: http://www.linux.org.au/conf/2004/eventrecord/LCA2004-cd/ and http://www.linux.org.au/conf/2004/eventrecord/LCA2004-dvd respectively.
iso downloads here: ftp://ftp.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2004/LCA2004-cd.iso and ftp://ftp.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2004/LCA2004-dvd.iso, not to mention BitTorrent too.
More from SCO at 10.
In this article, Jonathan Corbet summarises IBM's latest request for a summary judgement. It's pretty damning for SCO - as a relatively objective observer, it appears SCO are stuffed. No matter which way the case goes, they can't win.
Given that SCO are also saying that Linux doesn't exist, it's a matter of trying to fit both feet in your mouth at the same time. As mbp says, "I want to see Boies explain to a judge that SCO has spent man-years and millions of dollars suing over something that doesn't exist."
Thanks to Groklaw, mbp, and LWN. You guys do well.
tivo-stage-1
Imaged a 120Gb hard disk, installed it, plugged in ethernet, booted, pinged, telneted. All good.
Now "all" I need to do is to route some ethernet through the walls to the adult retreat room, and do some IR mangling for my PAL source.
Busy little bees
On top of working flat out doing the technical stuff for the Chicago short-term assignment, I've been very busy doing the organising of the trip itself.
Passports for family - done, Organising accommodation - started, Booked flights - done, Joined frequent flyer - done, Organising a second personal credit card - done, Organising transport of personal effects - started, Company approvals - still in progress, US visa application - once I get the family's passports, US visa interview - once I submit the application, go crazy - done.
Not long to go now...
Avalon APIs
miguel makes good comment on the delays for Longhorn and what Avalon might be like when it arrives.
From the Free Software perspective, I like how Miguel contrasts API stability and how GNOME has learnt how to ship things that aren't set in concrete until real developers have been using them in anger. i.e. haven't become part of the platform. This is important, no-one writes perfect code (except g it seems :-) so giving APIs time to settle before solidifying them is a good idea that has emerged in GNOME. We don't want .NET 1.0/1.1 style incompatabilities going forward with Avalon.
Learn from GNOME - the desktop to rule them all :-)
From the software engineering perspective, I don't envy those guys writing Avalon. Overnight it appears they've inherited two target platforms - Longhorn and XP, with similar delivery dates, meaning compromises between compatability issues or functionality trade-offs. Given the bugs my team found with differences between .NET on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and between the English and Traditional Chinese versions of each of these, I can't see them avoiding this sort of debacle again.
Audio
mbp writes:
Hopefully LCA2004 audio and video will be up someday.
Well, it now is :-)
http://www.linux.org.au/conf/2004/eventrecord/LCA2004-cd
Linux.Conf.Au now in wikipedia
Linux.Conf.Au now has a Wikipedia entry.
Please go and add more content.
Ghosts completes
More meetings, today we covered the budget which is the most important check-off item for Linux Australia. Another venue tour, this time without people. Everyone wearing out from such a hectuc weekend. Good result, but a little dragged out. Rusty did well in supplying 16 coffees late in the day.
Ghosts wrapped up, now time for a f2f Linux Australia meeting at the pub late in the day. Met for an hour or so over a very belated lunch. Saw the latest revisions to the new website, to be rolled out real soon now. Pia and Stewart have done a good job to continue where I left off - thee's some things I don't like, but fortunately for me they are willing to take comments :-)
Told everyone about the Chicago trip, and clarified for blog-readers that it's only for 6 months, not forever.
Completed the day with some really nice gelato, courtesy of Rusty. Rusty continued his great hospitality by taking me to the airport, and chatting in the Qantas club lounge.
Photos from the weekend will appear here soon.
Now resuming regular programming...
Replacing Windws apps with Linux apps
Looking for an equivalent Linux application to replace the one you have on Windows?
Saturday Night
Up early with local Canberra wildlife chirping away outside the window. Different, nice, but too early.
Off to ANU for the start of the official Ghosts meeting. Lots of chatter and catchup while the inevitable network problems are sorted out. At least this year we didn't have to rely on AJ to bridge wired-to-wireless networking. Stewart showed us why he's not a morning person. We then did the standard Linux Australia thing and got off topic almost straight away but covering issues that needed to be talked about :-)
Did the venue tour of ANU - the site of LCA2005. Nice venue, lots of room, good level of excitment amongst the organising team - which is a good team of mixed skill individuals. They'll do a great job. Took lots of photos.
Lunch at the Purple Pickle was hearty, good discussion with Rusty, AJ, Agent Smith and mbp on IP issues and what we can do about it to make things fair for consumers, IT developers, artists and content owners alike (rather than the current imbalance towards content owners).
Afternoon dragged a bit, but we gained some insights into the exciting things that the Canberra LCA team will spring on the unsuspecting Australian OSS community - I've been sworn to secrecy, so don't even ask, just be here :-)
Evening off to a popular Canberran casual dining place, the Woodstock Steak and Pizza. Yes, it's named after that event, and yes there are gaudy 70's pictures on the walls.
Overall positive and producive day, still more to do tomorrow. Going to be yet another great conf! Can't wait!
Cool Stuff
Today's list of cool stuff from Planet GNOME is:
- Larry Ewing and F-Spot Hacking.
- Robert Love on GNOME netapplet entering CVS.
- Davyd Madeley on his jbuild tray icon.
- John Palmieri on his Application wheel of fortune.
What is it? Is there something in the water today that's making all this cool stuff appear?
Where is the focus?
Joel made some comments on competing forces within Microsoft and lots of people commented, including me.
Well it seems that some people within The Great Satan have taken it to heart. What did catch my attention was this:
The Microsoft culture is about creating the newest, latest greatest thing that 'changes the world' not improving what is already out there and working for customers.
Wow.
Here's an important guy working in the trenches, creating APIs for millions of developers, and he admits they don't work for customers and they have a culture that's about doing cool stuff. Maybe they aren't that far from the OSS community after all :-)
Of course, Joel didn't miss that point either, and concluded:
As a developer, I would much prefer if the Raymond Chen camp won -- it sure makes my life easier -- but as a competitor to Microsoft, I have to assume that the stupider Microsoft is, the better.
...to which I add my thoughts. It's a balance - cool stuff and customer satisfaction. Cool stuff is strategic, long term, things you have to invest in or else you will lose in the end. Microsoft have to do this, because with 85% desktop market share, there's only one place to go - down, if they don't. There will always be some nimble startup, some guy in his garage, who will come up with something cool and eat your lunch.
On the other hand, customer satisfaction is tactical, short term, easily lost, and something that is driving people to Nirvana every day. The fact that security isn't getting better out of the box under Windows, that you still need to install n different products on top of Windows to get a usable and secure experience, and that every software upgrade needs a subsequent hardware upgrade due to the bloat creep, shows that they don't get the customer side of things either.
So, it's a balance. Does OSS do it better?
In some ways, yes. OpenOffice is seeing massive uptake everywhere I look - on the OSS desktop and on Windows. Similarly the Gimp - on OSS and Windows! Seeing how easy it is to manage my Debian boxes remotely puts Windows to shame with that SMS mess. But hearing horror stories of getting Gallery running with Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows, shows me we still have a long way to go in some areas. OSS has the moral upper hand advantage too.
OSS needs to focus on delivering for customer, while continuing the astounding pace of innovation. GNOME's doing just that, other OSS projects can too.
Friday night ghosts
So Ghosts has started, for me this is the first time as the interrogator, rather than the interrogatee :)
First thing is that the flight from Adelaide to Canberra had one of the roughest landings ever. There were squeels from other passengers. On the flight started reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Not impressed so far, book review to come once I finish it. The other book I've brought with me to read is Mono: A Developer's Notebook by Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein.
Alli was on the same flight, so I hitched a ride with Alli and Rusty back to their place to see the wonderful jigsaw and to eat sugary nuts. Then off to All Bar None to catch up with Anand, AJ (briefly), Martin, Stephane, John (last two met for the first time) and of course the Man-Who-Has-Lost-His-Life-For-Another-7-Months.
Back to sjh's house, talked LCA some more, chewed email and blogged. Time for sleep. Big day tomorrow.
Ghosts
Off to Canberra tonight for the Ghosts of Conference Past meeting with sjh and co to talk about preparations for Linux.Conf.Au 2005.
Also a face-to-face meeting with the rest of the Linux Australia committee.
Getting noticed
Via Garrett's Blog I read about the Advice for Open Source Job Seekers talk at OSCON 2004. I was almost going to get to go on the company, but scheduling for the Chicago trip changed all that at the 11th hour :-(
Finding that also reminded me to write down the reference to mbp's advogato article on How to get a conference abstract accepted.
Both of these articles are worth a read if you want to get in on a good thing - submitting a paper to Linux.Conf.Au 2005 in Canberra.
Peer to Peer
Kim Weatherall has a good summary of the legality in the USA of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, and the legal history which got us to where we are.
But why isn't peer-to-peer mainstream yet?
I mean, there's those people who trade in music and video and other copyrighted material today - but pimply teenage boys are hardly representative of society. Why aren't Linux distributors and big (proprietry) software companies using p2p to distribute their software? Why isn't Hollywood delivering DVD movie images to your home? Why isn't the music industry selling CDs the same way?
It just shows that even if something is legal, it doesn't necessary mean it will be adopted by corporations. There is a huge market here, and ad hoc polling says that consumers want this technology implmented by companies they can trust. But copyright holders don't want to go down that path because they fear the lack of central control.
Take a risk guys! - I remember reading about the guy who came up the DVD concept and his quest to get Hollywood to adopt his idea for high-quality movie distribution to people in their homes. Originally it didn't sell, Hollywood was scared to release high-quality format media to end-users, but it sure has paid off since! DVDs are now a huge money earner and the staple income source for movie makers.
Take a risk on peer-to-peer - sure, address the presevation of copyright problem - but let the distribution mechanism go free and watch the profits roll in!.
I'd certainly buy and download a music from the music industry if I was allowed to burn it to CD, put it on an MP3 portable music player as well as upload it to my car stereo. Bring on fair use (time and format shifting) legislation in Australia.
FreeDNS
Signed up with FreeDNS since I can't get ADSL at home since Telstra cost-cut on infrastructure, and the only broadband I can get is Bigpond Cable, where I can't get a static IP address.
My domain name registrar had a web cloaking option, but it didn't work well with gallery and the web posting mechanism of PyBlosxom, hence the search for something better.
Very happy with FreeDNS so far - amazing how a free service run by one guy can provide better service than Australia's national telecommunications carrier that just reported a $AUD4,000,000,000 profit - it's highest ever :-(
GNOME Tutorials
I like GNOME.
I like the technology, I like the community, I like the fun.
Not only does GNOME now have some great applications, it's now producing some good developer documentation, and has done so for some time.
My TiVo
I was able to get a TiVo Series 1 from eBay for only $AUD100 while in Chicago recently. Amazing that my seller would ship to an Amerisuite hotel in Illinois, but not to my home in Australia! Also picked up ethernet for it, which cost me more than the TiVo itself...
Something to play with in my spare time :-P
AUSFTA Wrap-up
So the Australian parliament has ratified the treaty between the USA and Australia on Free Trade. The only improvements forced through by Labor were to help the PBS - the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Unfortanately we've signed up to chapter 17 - Intellectual Property as is, despite lots of evidence that there's no benefit to Australia. We gain obligations to follow the US-style DMCA, but have no agenda to implement "Fair Use" in Australian Law. It's also debatable when software patentability has been widened by AUSFTA obligations, that's unclear right now without seeing any proposed new legislation. I need to link to Rusty's Tragedy of RProxy article here - a good reason to say that software patents aren't in Australia's best interests.
All this makes me a little sad - the looming Australian Federal election has muzzled debate on the AUSFTA, and what benefit or loss there will be to Australia. We're just running head-strong in to this without examining the outcomes - and we're signing up for life - hamstringing Australian parliaments in the future to correct any mistakes.
The only good thing that came out is that our community has started to speak up - people like Rusty, AJ, Brendan Scott, Kim Weatherall, OSIA, CyberSource, Linux Australia, and many others, have all provided input into the political process. We're going to have to start doing more of this, to prevent more rights being taken away from consumers and software developers.
Chicago Take 2
So it looks like I'm going back to Chicago again, but this time I get to take the family.
Passports for the family, check.
Visas, in progress.
Organising Life, not done.
Interview Tips
Joel on Software wrote some time ago on tips for interviews. If you ever interview where I'm on the panel, make sure you read that first!
Why am I blogging this? As I'm about to head off to Chicago I know that during the first few weeks I will be under intense scrutiny. Is this guy worth the cost of bringing him out here?
It's like starting a new job, the same sorts of enthusiasms required then will be required when I start the secondment. The first few weeks set the tone for the whole secondment (or new job). It's hard to overcome first impressions, so it's important to get them right first time.
Secondary storage
mbp makes some good observations about how search engines are the new interface to the web, and that any particular web site isn't read deeply but rather the whole web is read broadly. I like Martin's thought processes.
He does ask this question though:
I ask: why are you publishing anything at all? Because you want people to have the information, and/or to have the information from you.
I'd answer that by saying that the reason I publish is for my own selfish benefit. My head is small, and fills up too quickly. My website is secondary storage for my brain. If others benefit, great. If via my website I can find the exact reference to that very interesting thing that I can't find via google, then my website has achieved its purpose.
Trusted Code
To get .Net ISL running on a Windows computer where the filesystem where the bytecode lives is not local you need to make that filesystem trusted.
Why? Well, in .Net the local computer is considered safe and tamper free (even if it is running Windows :-) but remote filesystems, like ones residing on a Linux box mounted over NFS or via Samba, aren't. Neither are remote Windows shares btw.
So how do you get these remote filesystems trusted?
You need to create the Dilbert Zone.
Bring up the .Net Framework 1.1 Configuration tool (see Program Files\Settings\Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 Configuration) and navigate to Runtime Security Policy\Machine\Code Groups\All_Code\LocalIntranet_Zone and select "Add a Child Code Group". Name that "The Dilbert Zone" (why? because then it's easy to find again :-) You need to specify that the membership condition type is "Zone" and the zone is "Local Intranet", and that the Permission Set is "FullTrust".
If you do all this, ISL that's sitting on a disk remote from your workstation will be sufficiently trusted to execute on a Windows box. Yay.
Chicago photos up
Chicago Trip photos now available.
Back online
Finally webmail, gallery, blog, imapd etc for michaeldavies.org is online after the Chicago Trip.
Dashboard / Beagle wiki link
So, now the Chicago trip is over, I want to start playing with Beagle and Dashboard again. This link is just for future reference.
Don't Know Much About [American] History
On the flight home from Chicago I read Don't know much about history, which, strangely enough, is all about American History. What is interesting are the significant world events that we didn't learn in school in Australia - like the land grab of 1830 against Mexico, and the official policy to reduce American Indian numbers back 100 years ago.
Not very flattering for the land of the free...
But neither can most countries boast - there's dark secrets in most culteral groups backgrounds. It's just interesting that I'd never heard of either these two facts before.
Mrs O'Leary's Cow strikes again!
So it's 3:45am on a Monday morning in Chicago and the fire alarm in the hotel goes off.
Grab some clothes, find my passport and wallet, race down the stairs. I help an elderly couple with the husband using a walking frame down the stairs. I can smell smoke, but there are a dozen people around me smoking already.
Fire brigade turn up, a dozen firemen race inside.
Darn, I think to myself. Left my Motorola badge and my camera inside. Besides the passport and wallet, these are the things I should've taken with me.
45 minutes later and the fire brigade decide it's a false alarm. People were smoking in their rooms, someone smelt smoke, and pulled the fire handle in the hallway.
Had a look at the fire engine. They're running the PMDC Client v5.5. My first look at the predecessor to what we're developing actually running in the field. Works well enough to get the fire brigade here. The night mode looks pretty ugly.
Back to the room and email. 4:41am is too late to go back to bed. It will be a long day.
Mmmmm
I discovered something yummy in Chicago...
Krispy Kreme doughnuts...
Chicago Day 1 - July 10
Up early at 4am for a 6am flight to Sydney. All goes smoothly until we get ther when I find out the flight has been delayed due to mechanical failure. Ok, not problems, better to be safe. But now there are two SYD->LAX flights within 10 minutes of each other. Where this becomes a problem is bording. The two gates used are adjacent, and the ground staff don't allow extra time for security clearing 600 instead of 300 people. Both flights delayed further - mine being over 3.5t hours late :-(
Sunrise over Sydney
600 or so people going through security
Arrive at LAX and yes, I missed my connecting flight. No problems, rebooked on the next one. Only just made it after getting through security. I've learnt that a young male travelling alone is always a terrorist suspect - even if he's while skinned.
Arrive at ORD, must lusher than I expected given Chicago's reputation as the hub of the US automobile industry. Get into a cab and start driving off only to find out he'll only take cash. I leave the cab without payiong for the 100 meetres or so travelled to the disgruntled look of the driver. Tough, to expect cash is a bit rich I think.
Finally arrive at the hotel, still about 3 hours later than planned. The new cab driver was good, but needed me to do the navigating. Huh? I've never been to Chicago before - he admitted to being new to the area too.
Dinner at RAMS, watched "A Few Good Men" on TNT, finally to sleep at 2am. Cold Turkeying the body into the timezone is the only way to go.
Chicago is go!
Work confirmed I'm off to Chicago next week for 3 1/2 weeks!
Mono 1.0
uptime gone
About to get some electrical work done at home, but this means that :
~$ uptime 07:33:29 up 21 days, 18:27, 2 users, load average: 0.32, 0.09, 0.03
this goes away. Uptime starts again :-(
Java 5
Java 5 J2SE aka "Tiger" is about to be released. Looking at the release notes and the Java 5 in a Nutshell article, Java's finally got generics (Ada had them in 1983 :-) not to mention inherited primitive type boxing borrowed from C#, and varargs, and as would expected, many more APIs.
The market swing (pun intended) appears to be towards C#. Will this release revive Sun's fortunes?
Project Looking Glass
Project Looking Glass (screenshot) from Sun Microsystems is going to be GPL'd at JavaOne according to The Register.
Inspiration for GNOME 3.0? Or even incorporation >:->
Static IP address
Contaced Telstra again yesterday about a static IP address.
*sigh*I can't get ADSL at my place because there's no spare copper in my street, but I can get cable. But Telstra don't offer a static IP address option for any cable customer.
This is typical for Australia's heavy-weight telecommunications carrier :-(
History never repeats...
O'Reilly have built on Eric Levenz's work and produced a nice poster showing the geanealogy of the 50 most important computer programming languages. As per usual with O'Reilly, they've made it next to impossible for someone in Australia to get their hands on a copy. For previous promotions like this, I've sent emails them emails, which have simply been ignored :-(
This sort of history keeping is very important, especially given recent attempts to change the history of Unix. Fortunately efforts like Grokline and Eric Levenez's Unix history, along with the rebuttals and clarifications of various people who would know exist to shine the light on this dishonesty.
With languages like Java and C# now being covered by patents, it's important to keep track of where these languages come from to protect the large code bases that the open-source community produce.
The theme of anti-open-source companies seems to be that if they can't win on technological grounds, they'll drum up a law suit, or pay some lobby group to say nasty things about open-source. Very sad to see - why can't they expend that effort into making their products more secure instead?
Webmail working
Took some effort, but squirrelmail and courier-imap are now talking together to provide access to my mail archive via the web.
Biggets problem was convincing woody to reinstall squirrelmail after I blew away a config file by mistake. I thought apt-get was supposed to be easy :-( What I needed to do was...
touch <missing-files>
apt-get install squirrelmail
apt-get remove --purge squirrelmail
apt-get install squirrelmail
Now I just have a couple of gigs of mail to sync up and I'm done. All with 9 days to spare...
The Mono stack
Found what I was looking for - but after I blogged :-(
The Mono stack contents vs Microsoft .Net API stack contents is mentioned in the Mono Beta 1 Release Notes.
There was a nice image comparing the two, but I can't find it now.
One runtime to rule them all
Joel on Software writes, "How Microsoft Lost the API War", which details how Microsoft has in .NET devalued the win32 API and how this is going to cost them big-time going forward. Nice article explaining that you have to throw away cruft eventually.
The big argument is based on whether breaking backwards compatability will lose them some of the developer base. Joel argues that it affects end users (i.e. breaking legacy applications on recent OSes), and I don't disagree, but do developers care? He does suggest that engineers like to get things right, so wouldn't a change in the APIs, even if it breaks them, be welcomed if it meant that they are now just right?
Perhaps where they have gone wrong is by revealing their roadmap - Avalon, WinFX, WinFS etc - too early, meaning developers won't come up to speed on current .NET APIs now, knowing that come Longhorn everything will change. The vaccuum created is a great opportunity for Mono to move people to the Free Software Stack (tangental reference) using this new fangled C# language, instead of waiting to see what the long term path from Microsoft is.
Another thing that struck me was the developer tool angle - Microsoft won't be giving away their development tools for free because that will kill off all the other tool vendors (i.e. Borland) and create the monopoly that they'd like, but will be used against them in further anti-trust cases. This is another wonderful thing about gcc, gdb, vim etc. They're free. You can fix them. And no-one can compete with them because of these strengths.
It's very interesting to see that an admittedly pro-Microsoft commentator thinks the move to managed runtimes is a good thing. I've always hated using C on a Windows box because of segmentation issues, buffer over-runs crashing the OS etc. Glad to see that the lessons learnt under Unix and under languages like Ada and Java are finally being brought to Windows under .Net. Perhaps that's why C# is no great step up for anyone who's developed under Unix. It's also why developing C under Unix has been an awful lot friendlier than developing anything under Windows.
Lots of interesting thoughts in this article.
Statistical spam filtering with bogofilter and dspam.
Geoffery spoke on Statistical spam filtering with bogofilter and dspam at LinuxSA on Tuesday night.
Good stuff - I need to move to something else as my current spam solution is letting too much gumpf through. As a result of Geoffrey's successes, I intend moving to Bogofilter soon.
incoming mail in place.
Now for setting up incoming email. This was easier than expected, just a /etc/fetchmailrc and a ~/.procmailrc in place and it all just works.
Webmail is also there, and working for outgoing, but for some reason it's not seeing my Maildir folders. This is strange, last time I set it up it was just a case of installing an imapd and it all just worked.
One step away from beng a complete solution.
You will soon be returned to your normal program
After 6 days off work from sickness I'm back. Unfortunately J is still suffering - so I was up to him several times last night :-( Not what I need when I'm getting over it myself.
Back to work today - state of the project is <undefined>. Trying to stop the free-fall - would have been better if Kevin wasn't on leave, but am thankful that he covered for me while I was away. Need to make a release later today or early tomorrow - at least we have our release management process down pat which should make life easier.
Easter 2004 Photos
As a test to see if I've got gallery properly configured, I've put up the photos for Easter 2004 "Moana" camping trip.
Update: Darn that gallery - today we had a power failure during a 70+ file upload. Gallery's file upload (from a URL or local directory) broke such that a) it didn't recognise the in-progess upload when I attempted again, and worse b) wouldn't allow the same files to be uploaded again. Eventually traced this down to the browser session cookie which simply neeed deleting. Sigh, not a good example of [[OSS]] robustess :-(
Exim now talking SMTP
Another piece of the puzzle down - I've got Exim handing SMTP traffic to my ISP. Doesn't sound like much, but up until now I've been using sendmail and since my web presence is doing Debian, I should be following suit.
All it required was:
smart_route:
driver = domainlist
transport = remote_smtp
route_list = * mail-hub.bigpond.net.au bydns_a
that to go into the routers section, and the following to go into the transports section.
remote_smtp:
driver = smtp
Easy once you've done it once :-)
advogato
Advogato is still down :-( Disappointing as it has been, this has been a good push along to get my own weblog up and going. And SMTP. And offline-imap. etc. So when advogato comes back eventually, I might truy and do the jdub thing and mirror at both places. A little redundancy can't hurt, right?
Planet LinuxSA
LinuxSA needs a planet.
I will do it.
linux australia website redesign started
Currently re-designing the linux australia website, after excellent work by Stewart et al. Still some work to be done, but here's the obligatory screenshot.
First Post
This is the first post in my blog.
On writing...
Essential English for Journalists & Writers, Harold Evans (Pimlico, 2000)
Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande (Pan Macmillan, first published 1934)
Lend Me Your Ears, William Safire (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997)
Troublesome Words, Bill Bryson (Pengion, 1987)
Death Sentence, Don Watson (2003)
http://www.selfpromotion.com
Linux Australia f2f Meeting:
Friday: Flight to Melbourne via Virgin Blue, ok except for the very bumpy landing. Met Pia at the airport and drank the first of my 8 coffees for the weekend. Caught up with all the SLUG and LA gossip in the cab on the way to the hotel - passed a protest on the freeway which prevented Stewart coming and getting us.
Met a bunch of LUV guys at the James Squire, and then onto a little SouthBank restaurant called BonBons for food. Talked with Mike, a RedHat contractor, on the likelihood of Fedora succeeding, about yum vs up2date vs apt, and why I should use his sources.list file. Also had a good chat with Andrew Chalmers - one of the other people who ran for committee membership this year. Got his take on a few issues which was pretty valuable.
Saturday: Up early, breakfast was more coffee and ham and cheese croissants. 1/2 hour walk uphill to Trinity College, next door to Melbourne Uni and met up with Daniel Stone who was our doorman / sysadmin for the day. Thanks DanielS for providing the great facility!
Talked all day with the committee, minutes soon to be available, achieved big things. Very positive atmosphere.
Met conz for lunch somewhere in North Carlton. Nice food, and a nice day to sit around and drink (yet more) coffee.
Back to Trinity College, and covered lots more. Everyone asymptotically approaching stuffed state. Did the committee keysigning and orkut thing :-) and then finished up 6-6:30pm. Took everyone back to the hotel, shower, and off to the pub. This time the Metropolitan. Pia foolishly stated she'd do the 7 pint thing, so I dutifully reminded her of this all night :-) She didn't like that :-)
Talked for ages, on everything from Linux to .Net to religious issues to OSS adoption to LUV/MLUG politics. Good night.
Back to bed late, needed the wake up call early on Sunday.
Sunday: Out the door before 8am, looking for shops that are open to do some shopping for my wonderfully supportive family back home. Nothing was open until 9am, and most shops didn't open until 10 or 11am. So much for a city that claims it never sleeps.
Did the touristy thing. Walked bits of the yarra river, the shopping district and around Crown casino. Afterall, what do you do when the shops aren't open, you've done the technology thing to death, and you have 2 hours to spare?
Introduced Pia to Haigh's chocolates - best in the world. It's always nice buying a great SA product interstate.
Cab back to the airport, just in time for my last coffee of the weekend. Hudson's Marble Mocha is pretty good. Completed Essential Python and the chocolate bullets I bought at Haigh's on the flight home. Really glad to see the family. I hate travelling without them. Once home, crashed on the sofa.
Stuff
Playing with orkut like everyone else. Cool stuff.
Getting sick again - trying to wrap up the budget for Linux.Conf.Au 2004, while doing Linux Australia committee things, while hacking dashboard (trying to get something ready for submission), and some python/gtk hacking for demonstration at LinuxSA next month, while trying to earn some brownie points with Susie - I owe a lot after this past year.
I need 30 hour days.
Dinner with Chris and Kirsty
Chris, Kirsty, Nic, Danni, Nat and Alex came for dinner tonight. Very nice time with old friends. Too bad we see them so rarely.
Blogs:
There's a lot of garbage getting blogged nowadays, but it's refreshing to see that the medium continues to be expanded to new heights (depths? :)
Watching how a project develops via blogs is far easier than subscribing to cvs log emails - things like Evolution's blog is really nice. Makes you almost want to get your hands dirty with yet another project (as if my own backlog isn't big enough :-)
The other thang that I like in blog world are aggregator sites - using RSS feeds to pull together the blogs of developers in a particular community - like PlanetGNOME - which also gives you a feel of what the community is like, how the air tastes, and whether that's a (virtual) place that you'd like to call home. Another indicator of success is now to get your blog incorporated into someone's aggregator site :-)
Planet
planet.gnome.org got it's own URL - pretty cool. About time (although it might have been like that for a while and I didn't notice. Or something). While jdub wants to have contributed enough to get listed on planet debian I'd be happy getting listed on Planet GNOME :-) I know, I know, it's all about what you contribute... at least I have that goal going forward this year...
Web100:
Last night we had a very interesting talk at my local LUG, LinuxSA. Glen Turner spoke on the Web100 project, squeezing better performance out of TCP networks, especially on high latency networks (like everyone in Australia i.e. most of the internet is over in the US which is 280+mS away). It seems that there's plenty of headroom still to be utilised - but for it to work on a large scale, people need not to cheat and ignore congestion control. What is also nice about the project is the set of visualisation tools to analyse your networks performance - very nice stuff. I should make an effort to patch my 802.11b network at home, but first I need to get a round tuit.
Yet another bad patent
Microsoft has a patent pending in NZ for a Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML.
They've said "If we don't patent something that we've invented or developed someone else would". They invented? Huh? Storing a document in XML isn't a new invention - given that XML derives from HTML you could easily argue that storing a structured document was the first intended use of XML! The use of XML for data interchange between software components (I think) was a secondary use. This patent (pending) is a good example of the flaws of Intellectual Property assignment - there is no invention here, there is prior use, it is a trivial application of technology, and the only "benefit" of this sort of assignment is to increase the defensive patent portfolio of large companies (to be used to squash small companies).
I readilly accept IP if there is real invention, but that's not happening here. But I strongly dislike IP assignments for trivial things because it stiffles innovation industry-wide - imagine if IP was assigned for mathematical discoveries? We'd be living in single story buildings, using candles and riding horses.
The O'Reilly Kangaroo
I find it midly annoying that O'Reilly are advertising a free shipping offer with a kangaroo as a logo, but only including U.S. addresses in the offer.
What about us in Australia?
The Perfect Office
Living in cube-land for your real job? Have a look at what I consider a pretty nice working environment. The key things are privacy, natural light, and not silly corner cubes. It's unfortunate, but here in Adelaide, Australia, most employers like open-plan cube-villes :-( I'm sure that it negatively affects your productivity working in a poor environment.
Transitioning email...
So earlier this year I registered msdavies.net with a hosting company, only to find that the IP address range is on the SPEWS list, and they don't have reverse DNS setup. Of course this means many MTAs don't accept mail from me right now. What's worse is that they won't fix the problems, just blurt that they don't have to - SPEWS isn't their fault and reverse DNS isn't mandated in the RFCs. sigh.
So I've convinced a local Adelaidean (who can get ADSL at home unlike me) to host msdavies.net for me, using some of his spare bandwidth. (Thanks Phil!) Of course everything is set to go, except that I need to do the switch and wait a couple of days for the DNS to transfer. In the mean time, I'm forwarding mail from msdavies.net to the new home, and IMAPSing from there. And, (to get around the clunky old webmailer provided by the hosting company), sending mail from the new home as well.
I'm wondering how many mail lists will drop my subscription when they get bounces while the new MX isn't working, and the old MX has been turned off. Hopefully not too many.
.Net bugs...
Debugging some code today and was wondering why some dynamic UI components were getting created twice. Ahha! I have it - System.IO.DirectoryInfo.GetFiles(string) is documented thus:
public System.IO.FileInfo[] GetFiles ( System.String searchPattern ) Member of System.IO.DirectoryInfo
Summary: Returns a file list from the current directory matching the given searchPattern , such as "*.txt".
Parameters: searchPattern: The search string, such as "*.txt".
Returns: An array of type System.IO.FileInfo.
So why would anyone think that "*.xml" includes both "foo.xml" and "foo.xml~" ?
This astounds me. I have to nuke my save files so the broken regexp doesn't mistake them for real files. Now I'm starting to understand the difficulties mono must face in developing bug-for-bug compatibility.
Dashboard:
Development continues at break-neck speed. I really like the .doc frobnicator work being done by msevior out of AbiWord. Had to stop implemeting my own ideas on dashboard right now as cvs is changing just too quickly for me to keep up. I'll start again around January 18 - once Linux.Conf.Au finishes and normal life resumes.
Why we shouldn't all be programming in perl.
Free advertising:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Linux+Conference
Sponsors and Postcards...
Sponsors: What's laughable right now is that a sponsor is hassling me to give them an invoice so they can give me money. They don't want to wait any longer to give me the cash. boggle.
Our demo hackable ucLinux devices have arrived. Time to start evaluating. Woohoo!
And... the next batch of LCA Postcards have arrived from the printers. Soon to be distributed across Australia at local LUGs. Registrations open September 1 (hopefully) - media blitz to occur RSN.
And on postcards, 300 or so OLS attendees should have got our postcard, which hopefully means we'll get some North Americans registering too.
LCA2004 Call for Papers
The LCA CFP has 4 weeks to run today. The flow of submissions has been steady, but I know there's a lot more still to come. Hint: Avoid the rush and submit now - the longer you leave it, the less chance of getting accepted :-)
1 week to go:
havoc: you will have no trouble getting people to come to your keynote. Seriously.
linux.conf.au is only a week away - everyone[1] came back from holidays today, so I didn't get many actions done. I think my list is sub-50 items, not mentioning writing the conference opening and closing. Needless to say, a few of my projects are getting neglected as a result.
Big things get announced hopefully tomorrow and Thursday. Hope embargoed press releases stay that way - don't want to scare certain people away >:->
Last conference comment for today: Go back and read our news page - I'm constantly amazed at the cool stuff that's we've organised!
[1] the conference sponsors, and just about every journalist in .au *And* they *all* called my mobile today.
Interview
I got interviewed in linmagau this month in this article. Pretty nice for my interview to be sitting alongside one with akpm.
Surprise speaker acceptance...
Sometimes you have an awful day at work, and you spend your spare nanoseconds thinking about where you'd like to work instead - full-time OSS of course :-) But then an email arrives in your mailbox that just makes your day - this time it was about Linux.Conf.Au 2004.
3 weeks to go!
Linux.Conf.Au 2004: The conference is coming along nicely with 3 weeks to go, with new speakers jra, corbet and willy added to our list of speakers. But not just that, some really nice things like corporates giving away great prizes for the Hackfest contest, FIXITs (BOFs with an outcome), and the Wireless CyberCafe. We've actually run out of things for companies to sponsor! :-)
The big surprise will get announced in a fortnight's time.
Registrations continue strongly - at the current rate of registrations, there's only 10-12 days or so before we sell out. So if you are planning on coming, you'd better get in quick! This is a hard-core developers conference, so if we're going to sell out I want to make sure the right sort of people are sitting on the seats.
My Linux.Conf.Au 2004 photos are now available...
LCA2004 Conference Programme:
After a death-march stint last night, we've finally released the Linux.Conf.Au 2004 conference programme, the list of abstracts to be presented, and the speakers' bio's.
Whew! That was harder than I thought it'd be - there's been issues in scheduling, getting speakers who submitted abstracts to confirm, and website engine debugging fun. The system we've now got allows me to modify abstracts, speakers, timelslots, locations, all dynamically without going to the code. Very nice.
Linux.Conf.Au update #2
Here is the current list of "miniconfs" we intend running in Adelaide in January. These will be running on the Monday and Tuesday preceeding the conference proper. These are getting to be serious events in their own right :-)
What *is* interesting is that we're seeing demand for a low-cost miniconf only registration category for educationaLinux. It appears there are people in the education sector who aren't geeks, but would like to come and hear stuff about OSS, paying their own personal way. So we'll accommodate them.
Another strangety is IPv6. It appears aarnet are intending to run an IPv6 2 day conference about the same time, so it makes sense for our miniconf and that event to be one and the same thing - although the arrnet event would be a little more flashier than what IPv6 would have been by itself. So we'll have a different registration category for people wanting to go to just that event, and charge accordingly so we can meet their expectations.
These 2 miniconfs make things a little more difficult, but should it all just work, I reakon it'll be a great value add for the conf.
LCA2004 Delegation
Dan is encouraging me to delegate more for organising Linux.Conf.Au 2004. I should listen more - I can't do everything.
Linux.Conf.Au 2004 - the day before:
The day before the conference starts (well the miniconfs anyway)... Been to the airport twice, picked up wildfire, jdub, mtearle, lathiat, leon. More to come later today, when that flight from SFO finally gets in. Hopefully L got my phone number, I don't want him stranded at the airport.
Ugly stuff going on with a part of the conf. Just wish requests could have been made a couple of weeks ago, not just the day before. sigh.
Started writing the conference opening last night, talking to speakers this morning lifted my spirits, many of them wrapped around too.
It's all very exciting, can't wait for this thing to start.
The Art of Unix Programming / Linux Kernel Development
Like most people I'm making my way through both The Art of Unix Programming and Linux Kernel Development. Both have their strengths and weaknesses - I'll add my summaries to those of mbp, joel, and everyone else soon...
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