Which way?

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

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

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

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

Understand?

Me neither.

travel/chicago | 30 Nov 2004 | #

Walking in the winter wonderland!

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

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

Thanksgiving write-up coming soon...

travel/chicago | 26 Nov 2004 | #

Wikipedia goes mainstream

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

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

tech/misc | 25 Nov 2004 | #

When you wish upon a star

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

tech/misc | 24 Nov 2004 | #

US Banks

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

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

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

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

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

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

travel/chicago | 23 Nov 2004 | #

Weekend of surprises

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

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

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

travel/chicago | 22 Nov 2004 | #

Koder kan't find kode?

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

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

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

tech/code | 20 Nov 2004 | #

To dream the impossible dream

Found an interesting requirement today:

     Binary data shall be compressed by more than 40%. 

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

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

tech/code | 20 Nov 2004 | #

Nail in the coffin

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

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

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

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

tech/IP | 19 Nov 2004 | #

Linux.Conf.Au CFP Reviewing

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

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

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

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

Making Fedora boot faster

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

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

tech/linux | 17 Nov 2004 | #

All quiet on the western front.

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

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

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

travel/chicago | 16 Nov 2004 | #

Ice Ice Baby!

Last night was cold.

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

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

travel/chicago | 13 Nov 2004 | #

GlobalFS

Lots of things are converging lately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tech/code | 12 Nov 2004 | #

Lexmark and the DMCA

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

This is great news, unless you are in Australia.

The ZDnet article goes on to say...

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

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

tech/IP | 10 Nov 2004 | #

Red Hat history

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

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

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

tech/linux | 09 Nov 2004 | #

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.

travel/chicago | 09 Nov 2004 | #

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 :-)

tech/linux | 04 Nov 2004 | #

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.

travel/chicago | 04 Nov 2004 | #

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.

tech/misc | 02 Nov 2004 | #