RAD with gnome talk

Sorry Colin that my talk was too basic for you. I was trying to cover too many bases in too little time. Perhaps a hands-on tutorial next year would be good...

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 27 Apr 2005 | #

Standards are important for documents too

Standardisation of code is a no-brainer. We need to follow applicable standards so we can interroperate with other pieces of software.

But we also need to follow standards when writing documentation. Example: I'm currently spending today reformatting a (binary) document by hand for changes in document styles. It's going to take 3-4 hours and it's very handrolic. There is no benefit besides consistency to be gained, but since this document is part of a greater set, the changes need to be made.

The problem is that a standard was originally agreed upon, but someone decided to start tweaking the format for some trivial benefit. Now since we had inconsistency, the format was reconsidered and changed substantially. Now I don't have a problem with that, but since the document format is un-machine-editable binary, the changes have to be made by hand. If the document source was XML it would be just an XSLT transformation away.

Laziness is a wonderful attribute of the OSS community. Spend more time upfront to save time later - the downstream task time drops dramatically, as well as gaining many benefits. See Tridge's keynote on auto-generated code in Samba. This is sadly missing in other worlds - the focus is on peep-hole optimisations and not optimising the whole process.

tech/code | 27 Apr 2005 | #

LinuxSA Apr 2005 - Linux Workshop

This is a couple of days late :-(

Hi all,

Time for the LinuxSA April Meeting announcement...

The usual details:

  When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
          Tuesday, 19th April, 2005
  Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
          of South Australia (SSABSA)
          Boardroom (1st floor)
          60 Greenhill Road
          Wayville SA
  Cost:   FREE
  Who:    Anyone and everyone.
          Pre-registration necessary if you want to bring a computer.
          Email workshop at linuxsa.org.au with your name so we can keep
          track of numbers.

Presentation:

  Instead of the usual presentation this month, Janet Reid will be
  running a Linux workshop with other friendly ITShare
  (http://www.itshare.org.au/) people.  Bring along your computer and
  questions for assistance with installing, configuring, or using
  Linux.  Or if you don't need assistance, come along and help
  somebody else out.

  If you are bringing a computer, you must also bring its monitor,
  keyboard, mouse, power cables, and anything else you need to make it
  work.

  Any questions?  Email workshop at linuxsa.org.au

Pizza:

  After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
  Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

For more information:

  Email:        workshop at linuxsa.org.au
  Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
  Mailing List: linuxsa at linuxsa.org.au

tech/LinuxSA | 21 Apr 2005 | #

qotd-20050421

"...when you move out of your parents' basement."
            -- Jeremy Allison to Leon Brooks

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 21 Apr 2005 | #

Day Three

So today is day 3 of the conference. Perhaps I'm getting old or something, but I'm weary already. Today is the official conference opening, with the last 2 days being the "unofficial" miniconfs. Earlier sjh approached me about doing him a favour - and this morning it all came to light - someone had to be Tux.

So despite my best efforts I ended up featuring in the conference opening for the second year in a row, albeit in disguise this time. At least sjh wasn't able to convince me to ride a mountain bike down the stairs while wearing the tux outfit, carrying the Linus cutouts. You just have to draw the line somewhere :-)

So the conference proper was opened by sjh well, and the first of many surprises were announced. Speakers are able to hand out one 1Gb USB memory key device each lecture to whomever they wish. And it appears there are daily prizes of IBM laptops for conference attendees, drawn randomly - you just better mke sure you are in the room when your name is read out - unlike some unfortunates this morning :-(

Tutorials were next and I was stoked to do the kernel hacking one. Unfortunately my laptop wouldn't mount filesystems loop-backed, so I was stuffed as this would be something I'd have to do regularly in the tute. Most disappointed. But at least this meant I could drop into Malcolm's pygtk talk, which looked a pretty good choice as well.

Someone was faking DNS replies today, making life difficult for wireless users. Why they'd do this I can't understand.

The jra quiz show was next - which went down very well. Jeremy is a character. This is something we should do, perhaps over conference dinner, in future years.

Afterwards off to dinner with the Bennett's - both types.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 20 Apr 2005 | #

Photos take 2

After putting up the first days photo on my personal domain and having it flattened, a new solution had to be found.

Thanks to Andrew, conference photos are now available at http://friends.andrew.net.au/mrd. Right now that's only Monday's, but yesterday's and today's should be up soon. The permanent home will still be michaeldavies.org, but only after the conference finishes and interest returns to regular, manageable, levels.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 20 Apr 2005 | #

Day Two

So Day Two (Tuesday) went well. The GNOME.conf.au miniconf went all day, and was pretty cool. Got to hear Luis Villa speak for the first time which was great. Lots of good ideas flowing around, in addition to the usual call for more people to get involved and also to get involved in grass-root evangelism as well.

Much better write-ups here and here.

Tuesday night was the Speakers Dinner. Nice spot, good food and great company. Utterly exhausted and to sleep quickly. Conference proper starts on Wednesday.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 20 Apr 2005 | #

Day One

Started the morning at the Debian Miniconf, with Jon Oxer opening up and Bdale giving us the "State of the Ntion" talk, suggesting that Debian needs something better than SPI and should consider the Foundation model used elsewhere. Bdale also talked about scaling problems in Debian - the number of developers increased, but so has the packages. Add in the multiplier effect of platforms and there's a problem. At least insome people's minds. The other thing that surprised me is the almost anti-Ubuntu feeling amongst many Debian developers.

Lunch was at the Pickle along with Bdale and hangers on. General technology chat.

After lunch was keithp's talk on Twin at the Embedded Miniconf. Very interesting talk. Eye Candy crack in 100k. I should play with an ARM processor device sometime again soon. Afterwards sat thru Russell Coker's NSA SELinux stuff - still not convinced it's not a too overcomplicated solution.

By this stage my brain hurt and I decided to do a dry run of my talk for Friday. That went well, althuogh I just realised I've got one more diagram to draw still. Perhaps on Wednesday :-)

Nighttime saw a bunch of us go into Civic to some pub. Nice chatting to some New Zealanders - next year's organisation is coming along well.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 19 Apr 2005 | #

Photos pulled

Pulled my lca2005 photos from the web - my webserver was flattened by the load.

Once I remember how to resize a directory full of photos, I'll put them back.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 19 Apr 2005 | #

Loser

Random Loser who decided to rip off linux.conf.au by swindling a student ticket when not a student, and bragging about it on their blog.

Loser.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 19 Apr 2005 | #

LCA2005 Wiki

LCA has a wiki up here: http://wiki2005.linux.conf.au

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 18 Apr 2005 | #

First photos

My first photos for the conference are now available.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 18 Apr 2005 | #

Day Zero

So after church this morning it was a quick dash home to grab the suitcases and head for the airport. Virgin Blue got us to Canberra, along with 10 or so other South Aussies who were on the same flight. Penguin t-shirts and laptops were dead give-aways. As was the Sunray someone carried in hand luggage!!!

Next to me was Tim Ansell, another conference speaker, with seat allocation entirely by chance. sjh was kind enough to pick the both of us up from the airport - the last thing I expected the lead organiser to be doing :-) He was nice enough to pre-register the both of us too.

Off to University House, dump the gear, then to Manning Clark to chat with some of the team and then back with 7 or so hackers to Woodstock pizza bar - for tales of eating live octopii, discussions on whether Buenos Aires was the future haven of free software hackers and other miscellania. Good stuff. Back to Uni House for this blog entry in the library using a Windows PC (*sigh*) and then back to the room for connectionless hacking before sleep and the big day tomorrow.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 17 Apr 2005 | #

LCA2005 almost here

LCA2005 is just about upon me and boy, am I looking forward to it. Last year (if I don't mind saying so) was such a great conference, but as an organiser, I didn't get to see any of it really. So now that another year (and a bit) has rolled around I am so looking forward to being a geek this coming week! Cool talks, catching up with friends, meeting smart speakers who have dream jobs, and having time to just cut some code.

Woohoo!

P.S. The Kernel Hacking Tute is looking like it's gonna be very hands-on and useful. Especially with Rusty and rml running the show.

P.P.S. All the best to pipka and jdub for Sunday.

P.P.P.S. Now there's a quiz night on Wednesday night run by jra. What other wonderful surprises will sjh and team unfurl?

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 15 Apr 2005 | #

Drugs in the USA

Over in the USA they don't have Paracetemol, instead they have Acetaminophen. Strangely, the local pharmacy^Wdrug store had never even heard of paracetemol, even though they are the same drug.

tech/misc | 13 Apr 2005 | #

work

Today started with a conference call and product demonstration at 3:30am to people in the USA.

yawn. Is it linux.conf.au week yet?

tech/misc | 12 Apr 2005 | #

Gtk# or Windows.Forms

Mikal asks whether developing cross-platform .NET you should use Windows.Forms or Gtk# as your widget set.

Good question. Mono now uses a non-Wine Windows.Forms implementation by default, which is a plus going that way. I think Gtk# looks nicer, so right now it might be looking at what your primary audience is - if you are targeting Windows and some Linux, go Windows.Forms. If you are targeting Linux, with some Windows, go Gtk#.

I think from a compatibility and stability front, Gtk# is probably a better choice today.

tech/code/C-Sharp | 08 Apr 2005 | #

Looking out my backdoor

Just got back from Illinois, left the front door open, oh boy...

We're home. And safe.

Update: So our trip home was.... interesting.

We arrived at O'Hare at about 10am and checked in with the Qantas partner in that part of the world, just some "American airline". Check-in amazingly took over an hour as the lady booked our seats, unbooked them, printed boarding passes, ripped them up, and started over again several times. The worst part of this was for the 3 flights OHA->LAX, LAX->MEL and MEL->ADL she split up the seats so the four members of our family weren't sitting together.

Not a huge problem until you realise we have 2 children under 4 years of age.

So getting through security went ok, and saying goodbye to Heather who had met us at the gate, we boarded the aircraft for our 1pm flight. S convinced a gentleman to give up his seat so the 4 of us could sit together, which was very nice of him.

Flight went well, with the kids did very well on flight #1. Arriving in Los Angeles meant we had an 8 hour stopover, since the booking system I had to use wouldn't let me choose more sensible flights. If you haven't been there, the international terminal at LAX, the Tom Bradley, has got to be one of the most boring terminals on the planet. No place for a family of 4 to spent 8 hours waiting for a flight.

We went to see the Qantas counter about the poor seat choices and they were wonderful. Honestly, given a choice I'll never fly international with anyone else. They fixed our seat allocations for the next 2 flights and apologised for their partner carrier's ineptness. Thanks Qantas.

Finally boarding QF094 bound for Melbourne, we had a long 15.5 hour flight ahead of us. With 2 small kids that's a long flight. The 747-400 had a small mechanical problem with 1 of the 16 wheel brakes reporting a fault, meaning we had to detour for repairs. This was because Melbourne airport is undergoing improvements to handle the new A380 aircraft joining the fleet soon. But this meant the remaining runway wasn't long enough for us to land on with one brake out of action.

So landing in Sydney was our fate. Unfortunately Qantas left us in the aircraft for about an hour while the brake was replaced. Normally not a problem, but quite tiring after being in the air for 14 or so hours already. Especially with no refreshmeants left. The air hostess was very kind in lending us her mobile phone so we could inform friends and family waiting for us at the airport that there would be a delay in our arrival.

Leaving Sydney we soon resumed our trek and arrived in Melbourne, albeit thoroughly sick of airports and planes by this stage. Local Qantas staff there were unhelpful with luggage, causing a slight ruckass with our heavy suitcases that had been accepted at O'Hare. The detour to Sydney meant we missed our connecting flight, and the need to go through security and check luggage again meant we missed a few more flight opportunities. Finally we boarded our last flight, arriving in Adelaide 2.5 hours later than expected. Glad to be home.

travel/chicago | 08 Apr 2005 | #

Firefox non-free?!?!

This article interviewing rms pointed me to this fsf page which suggests that Firefox is non-free. The key point being that the pre-built binaries have something called TalkBack included which is bug-reporting software. I hadn't heard about this before - this is a real shame.

tech/windows | 01 Apr 2005 | #

Warming Up

Chicago is fighting its way to enter spring. The last 2 days have felt more than warm - I even turned on the air conditioning in the car - even though the mercury reached only 77F (25C). It's almost overwhelming seeing blue skies again, and watching the grass green up overnight. Strip malls (shopping centres) are now selling selling shorts and bikinis, and the mood of people you meet has climbed following the temperature trend - the weather really does affect people's moods. But the warm spell was only brief - last night a fierce storm arrived, prompting another tornado warning, and plunging temperatures again today to around 40F (4C). Running to the car last night in the storm saw me drenched through to the bone as strong rain pummelled Schaumburg.

Unfortunately we'll see precious few moments of spring 2005 here - we're heading home on Monday morning. It will mean 3 winters in a row - although suggesting that Adelaide has winters is nonsense once you've experienced the same here in Illinois. Our belongings have been all packed up by the movers, and our suitcases are standing by for the trip home. S has had multiple farewell events with her new girlfriends, and I've been out to lunch with work colleagues several times. Right now we're in the calm before the storm - the 3 flights that will take us home.

travel/chicago | 01 Apr 2005 | #

ploon.net goes live

Opened up ploon.net - my photoblogging site. We'll see how it goes.

photos | 01 Apr 2005 | #