Michael Davies' Blog

A sprint is a focused development session, in which developers pair in a room and focus on building a particular subsystem. A sprint is organized with a coach leading the session. The coach sets the agenda, tracks activities, and keeps the development moving. The developers work in pairs using XP's pair programming approach. This might be a cool adaptation for BOFs or for a future hackfest at linux.conf.au's.

/tech/linux-australia | 31 Mar 2005 | #

shared source cluelessness

Rhetoric from an ex-Microsoft employee. I wouldn't normally mention it, but since I made reference to Shared Source here recently, I thought I'd better followup.

Steven makes points along the line of revenue. That's not the main point. Average Joe is going to continue to buy his Windows OS via a shrinkwrap because of the assurances that buying Microsoft gives him. It's the same as Red Hat - take Fedora and package it - that's RHEL. Why do people buy free software? The assurances and the paid support. MS would not lose in this scenario by embracing open-source.

The main issue is modifiability. Being able to modify the code means fixing bugs. That's the major advantage of OSS. Being able to fix problems and guarrentee maintainability long-term.

Why doesn't my JVC video camera not work under Windows XP? It's too old, so the driver no longer ships withe the OS, and JVC don't care. This wouldn't happen with open-source.

/tech/windows | 31 Mar 2005 | #

michaeldavies.org back online

michaeldavies.org is back on-line after a few days in the wilderness. After a power failure it didn't come back and I was relying on remote support. What is strange is that it's back, but the TZ where the server is located suggests it's 2am :-%

This also means planet.linuxsa.org.au is back too.

/meta | 31 Mar 2005 | #

Ubercool

Soon linux.conf.au 2005 will be a wonderful memory. Fortunately GUADEC 2005 will be the new thing to look forward to if you are a conference groupie. With jdub, davyd, AfC, conrad and gman all presenting, the Australia/New Zealand region is going to be very well represented.

Just wish there was the business case for my employer to send me :-P

/tech/GNOME | 26 Mar 2005 | #

linux.conf.au 2005 - 3 weeks to go

Only 3 weeks to go until the coolest-of-all-conferences happens - linux.conf.au - this year in the nation's capital, Canberra.

According to their webpage, there's only 22 places left. You'd better hurry if you were leaving your registration to the last minute! :-) Hope to see you there...

Personally I'm looking forward to the miniconfs, which I've missed out on seeing the last 2 years for differing reasons. Having some less formal chat and hack sessions will be great. Also catching up with people and talking about all the cool stuff that's happening, especially in the free software desktop arena. Oh, and I'm looking forward to getting this over and done with :-) Please, only ripe fruit.

/tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 25 Mar 2005 | #

IronPython makes a release, but Boo is fun

So Jim Hugunin made a new IronPython release here after a rather long break, and despite repeated calls to kick start developemnt again over the past 6 months.

In the mean time, I moved to Boo instead.

I was hoping that I'd still have time to track and play with IronPython, but now that I have some investment in Boo, that might just not happen. IronPython is *real* python, which is a major bonus, but Boo is *almost* python and gives me static typing, my biggest complaint against python. It's a bit of a toss up which one is better technically. But, IronPython has just moved to a Microsoft Shared Source licence, so the final answer is now clear - it's one of right and wrong. Boo, licenced under BSD/MIT, wins hands down. Sorry IronPython, you are destined to be history now.

Both projects have sparse documentation, so DumpAssembly has been quite valuable.

/tech/code | 25 Mar 2005 | #

Cubeville frustration

mikal recently talked about distractions in cubeville, so did sjh. Right now I have a couple of different teleconferences going on over the other side of the cube wall, one to the north, another to the south, both on speakerphone. They think their comfort is more important than the productivity of the whole office. sigh.

I have my Bose TriPorts on, and music as loud as I can make it and still work, but I can still hear the details of this conference call.

The funny thing is that about a month ago the perpetrator complained to me because I was shelling pistachios in my cube. That noise was too much.

Breathe Michael, breathe. Two weeks and you'll be home. I'm not going to cause waves now.

Even Technorati tells me that cubeville problems are common.

/tech/misc | 23 Mar 2005 | #

ourmedia

Where can I store original creative works forever? ourmedia.

/tech/misc | 23 Mar 2005 | #

MSNbots

Looking through Apache logs yields some strange things.

The host 207.46.98.82, which resolves to msnbot.msn.com, is continually hitting my website looks for free software people.

For example, in the last 24 hours here are some requested non-existant URLs:

/person/jdub/
/person/rsharpe
/person/mbp/
/person/murrayc/
/person/msevior/
/person/rasmus/
/person/hp/
/person/bdale/

Huh?

/tech/windows | 20 Mar 2005 | #

Random Links Of The Day

Today's interesting links are:

This collection of links is brought to you by the numbers 0 and 1.

/tech/misc | 19 Mar 2005 | #

A few of my favourite things...

Building upon the list of things that S made - here's my list:

Things that I'll miss in Chicago

Chicago, Our new friends, Navy Pier, Krispy Kreme, Great Grains Crunchy Pecans breakfast cereal, StarBucks, Barnes and Noble bookstores, Borders bookstores, Harvest Bible Chapel, Best Buy stores, Circuit City stores, Comp USA stores, snow, WMBI, Chevy's mexican restaurant, Olive Garden restaurant, The Mag Mile, self-serve and payment counters at grocery stores, Woodfield Mall, Apple stores, Uno's deep-dish Chicago pizza, Millenium Park, Chicago highways, The gym at work, Free Amazon shipping, Friday night eating out, No house maintenance jobs, Column-shift cars, Cheap petrol, The NBA, Major League Baseball, The NFL, The absence of ~~revenue-raisers~~ speed cameras on every road, polite staff at restaurants and stores, Old Navy.

Things I'm looking forward to in Adelaide

Adelaide, Friends and Family, No tolls or potholes on the roads, Driving on the correct side of the road, OBC, Cadbury chocolate, Haighs chocolate, Adelaide Central Market, Farmers Union Iced Coffee, LinuxSA, Froggy Cakes, Talking to people who say car-a-mel, not car-mel :-), Only having 6 channels of TV to choose from, Enclosed shopping centres, A sane affordable medical system, 50F (10C) minimum daytime temperatures in winter, No need to scrape ice from the car windscreen in the morning, Indian restaurants, Australian wood-oven pizza, No tipping, Adelaide Zoo, Kangaroos, Koalas, and Emus, Babysitters :-), Plastic money, Aussie Rules Football, The Redlegs, living in a city of only 1 million people.

/travel/chicago | 17 Mar 2005 | #

First Shots

First shots with the new camera :)

Bokeh example
B&W example
No swimming today

/photos | 16 Mar 2005 | #

PPC becoming mainstream

FC4 test 1 is out and announces support for PPC[64]. Couple that with Ubuntu supporting PPC[64] means that Apple laptops suddenly look very attractive. Cool hardware and cool free software on top. Mmmmmm.

G5 laptops from Apple are supposed to come along this year. When that happens, my Dell I5K, shadowfax, might get retired for a cool mobile 64bit platform :-)

/tech/linux | 16 Mar 2005 | #

Fort Wayne, Indiana

On the weekend we drove down to Fort Wayne, Indiana for a concert in their coliseum (sick). A great night out - well worth the effort to drive down. Guy, David, Bill and Marshall were fantastic, and a couple of the supporting acts were pretty exciting too.

We had to drive through Gary, Indiana which has to be one of the most industrialised regions I have ever seen. Steel mills, factories, railroads, smoke, pollution, and despair all were visible from the highway. This is not a place to go on holiday.

Passing through the industrialised area soon saw us in farm country which reminded me a little of interstate driving in Australia. One difference was the driving snow on the way over made things difficult, but on the way back we saw blue skies for the first time in months. That persisted all the way back home, but a return to grey clouds awaited us this morning. Temperature hasn't moved, being high-20's, low 30's (Fahreinheit that is).

/travel/chicago | 15 Mar 2005 | #

Hash attacks

Schneier comments on more hash attacks. MD5 collisions in 8 hours. /etc/passwd soon to be in trouble.

/tech/code | 11 Mar 2005 | #

LinuxSA Mar 2005 - Ubuntu

Time for the LinuxSA March Meeting announcement...

The usual details:

  When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
          Tuesday, 15th March, 2005
  Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
          of South Australia (SSABSA)
          Boardroom (1st floor)
          60 Greenhill Road
          Wayville SA
  Cost:   FREE
  Who:    Anyone and everyone.
          No pre-registration necessary.

Presentation:

  Brian Astill will be giving a talk about Ubuntu Linux, "a Linux
  distribution that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular
  releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability
  (it should "Just Work", TM) and a commitment to security updates
  with 18 months of support for every release."

  Anyone with spare Ubuntu CDs to give away is encouraged to bring
  them along (we ran out last month).

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:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
  Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
  Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

/tech/LinuxSA | 11 Mar 2005 | #

New Toy

My new toy arrived yesterday. Woohoo!

[Aside: UPS Suck. I arrived home to find a UPS truck outside my apartment, so I ask the guy if there is a package for me - afterall, I was expecting one. He said that he didn't, and that it would probably come tomorrow. I went inside, a little frustrated. After talking to S, I went back downstairs to double-check with him - the UPS website said the package was Out for delivery i.e. in a van. I then found a note that the UPS guy left on the front door of the apartment block after I left saying that he had attempted delivery and no-one was home. That wasn't true because S and I were in the apartment. So I went to the Dry Cleaners room - the place UPS drops undeliverable packages. They didn't have my package either, so I drove around the complex and finally found the UPS van at another apartment block. After confronting him again, he handed over the package - he said he got "confused". This made me angry because he lied to my face about the package, and then put the note on the apartment security door after lying and didn't attempt delivery. This isn't the first time a UPS driver has been too lazy to deliver a package either. At least the camera arrived safely.]

/photos | 10 Mar 2005 | #

Another one bites the dust

On the weekend we went and visited The Field Museum in downtown Chicago. Got to see the world's most complete T-Rex skeleton (not to mention the largest) - which has been named "Sue". Seeing paleantologists at work dusting off fossils on the other side of glass windows was interesting - but do they feel like they are in zoo themselves? We saw the Jacqueline Kennedy exhibition, which was overcrowded, hot, and something that toddlers don't enjoy even if their parents do. And what museum is complete without their own McDonald's restaurant, situated right next to the ancient Egypt exhibit?

That's one less thing left to do before we leave Chicago and come home...

/travel/chicago | 09 Mar 2005 | #

DumpAssembly

After stuffing around trying to work out what name a .Net assembly used in an interface to an existing C library, I wrote DumpAssembly. At least now I can find class and method signatures, even if there is no documentation for that API.

I note Mikal did something similar once before for different reasons, and I know others have probably done similar, but I wanted to play with reflection anyway :-)

/tech/code/C-Sharp | 07 Mar 2005 | #

Europe and Software Patents

Big things are happening in Europe right now over software patentability. Looks like Denmark is joining Poland is saying that software patentability shouldn't be rushed through the EU parliament - it should be re-drafted to be fairer to software producers and open-source software, and not just benefit big American software companies . Very good news.

Monday is the big day. If you haven't already, you should have a look at http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ and read for yourself what is at stake here.

/tech/IP | 06 Mar 2005 | #

The New Newlyweds

Will jdub�tv provide jdub and pipka the chance to be the OSS community's Newlyweds?

I know it's GNOME, but is it KDE?

/tech/linux-australia | 05 Mar 2005 | #

Ratings

sjh wrote "this of course has me wondering where exactly on Michael's scale, using the numeric units 1 to 5, does the point a must read fall?" in reference to my book review yesterday.

This made me laugh. I'm been saying stuff like that for years - it's non-sensical of course, but it's my way of saying a scale of 1 to anything is essentially useless. Using "must read" is a much better indication of value. Are rating scales linear? Most often not - if you looked at the distribution of values of book reviews, say on Amazon, you'd probably find lots of 1's and 5's, but not many 3's.

Tangentally, S asks me to rate the dinners she cooks, so she can know if it was a success with me or not. My rating scheme is hevily weighted towards the top end - you'd never want to tell someone that the food they cooked for you was a 2 out of 10! (but that'd never happen as S is a great chef!)

/tech/misc | 04 Mar 2005 | #

Understanding Exposure

Recently finished Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera (Updated Edition) by Bryan Peterson. I found this book really useful to me - I'm just a newbie photographer - so having Peterson explain things like the relationship between film sensitivity, aperture and shutter speed was exactly what I needed to hear. His explanation of correct exposures verses creatively-correct exposures made a light go off in my head. Similarly his division of different apertures into story-telling exposures, singular theme exposures and "Who Cares?" exposures, along with his discussion of shutter speeds - freezing the action, panning, and implying motion was succinct and useful.

Learning how TTL metering works, 18% grey, being able to correctly exposure everything from sunrise to sunset, snow, lots of green etc etc etc, all filled in gaps in my knowledge. Peterson takes photos that I like, and uses examples of his own work plentifully in this book. I like both his writing style and his photographic style. I've taken to writing some of his hints on 4x6" index cards to carry when out photographing. Out of the many books on photography I have read, this one is the best.

On a scale of 1 to 5, this book is a must read.

/photos | 03 Mar 2005 | #

Intertwined Connections

Today I got email from some guy in the UK (Hi Paul!) who corrected me on some typos in my blog. Why was he reading my blog, and how did he find it?

I think the trail was something like "Slashdot ClearLooks story" -> archived desktop-devel mail -> ?? -> jdub's blog -> your blog.

Just goes to show that the world is very connected, and the flow of ideas around the world really does benefit from blogging. There were some comments earlier this year made by someone saying the linking to other people's blogs was just for vanity seekers (i.e. the google juicers), or for those who had nothing to say themselves. While that can be true, it's also an important way for ideas to be built upon, linked together and for conclusions to be drawn. As it has been said, "we stand on the shoulders of giants", and blogging not only makes that possible, but also accessible, for all.

/tech/misc | 02 Mar 2005 | #

Tornado

Another strange thing about living in Chicago, Illinois is the risk of tornados. Kansas isn't that far away...

Today at home, S and the kids were watching TV and all of a sudden the TV show stops and a weather warning replaces regular programming:

Tornado warning for Cook County in effect until 12 midday

No-one seems to raise an eyebrow, life continues as normal. My response is to just have a look around in the building that you're currently in and identify the room or rooms that are listed as "Tornado Shelters". About 3 times in the last 6 months the sirens at work gone off indicating that the risk of tornado is high. Talking to locals, there hasn't been a tornado in living memory around here, but nonetheless the warnings continue to go out.

/travel/chicago | 02 Mar 2005 | #

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