10 Year Anniversary Dinner

Last night I went to the LinuxSA 10 year anniversary dinner. Wow. 10 years. And Geoffrey has been very faithful, leading the whole thing the whole time. Thanks Geoffrey for your continued efforts!

So we had a good time, talked about a variety of interesting geek-related topics over some decent chinese food. The usual suspects were all there, although some piked at the last moment or couldn't make it. There were as per usual new faces to get to know too. Thanks to all who came and made it a fun night!

/tech/LinuxSA | 20 Dec 2006 | #

About AES

Russell blogs about choosing encryption algorithms. He comments:

The US government (which incidentally employs some of the best cryptologists in the world) recommends encryption methods for data that is important to US interests (US military and banking operations for starters). Why wouldn't you want to follow those recommendations? Do you think that they are putting back-doors in their own systems?

This is true, but for an additional reason not mentioned. The current block cipher standard is AES. While it was chosen by the US government as a standard, it wasn't develoed by the US government - making the chance of back-doors even less likely. This is not the case for DES - which was an in-house US Government development effort - meaning that it's open to claims of back-door introducing.

There are some questions asked about whether there are inherit weaknesses in AES, but these centre around the "newness" of the mathematics used - the strength of any crypto system is based on solving "hard" mathematical problems, so if someone finds an easy way the "tower of cards" all falls down - and all data is open. But the same could be said for ECC. That's why some people encrypt their encrypted data with a different encryption algorithm - even if one crypto system falls, there's another barrier protecting your data.

So, as a recommendation, you need to ask a few things - how important is the data you are wanting to protect? What timeframe does it need to stay secure? If it needs to be protected forever - like who killed JFK :-) - then you need a really strong crypto system. If it's a personal deep dark secret, probably just your lifetime. If it's your travel planes, only a few weeks. If it's your online banking session - it's only minutes. The other thing is identifying your adversary - if it's the government, then nothing really is secure enough - be assured that if it's in their national interest they will break open the data. If it's some local phisher/cracher - then a much weaker system is all that's needed to protect you as they don't have the mathematicians, nor the computing power, to cause you grief in the timeframe that the data is sensitive.

The easiest solution though is have nothing to hide :-)

Addendum: There's nothing new here - just go read Schneier for more info.

/tech/code | 16 Dec 2006 | #

A way to waste lots of time :-)

So, via Richard Jones I discovered Galcon - an awesome high paced galactic action-strategy game. You send swarms of ships from planet to planet to take over the galaxy.

Oh my goodness. This is a very ubercool swarm-style arcade game written in python. Brings back fond memories of that 'ole xlib game with bases and pipelines. I'm not going to say how much time I spent playing this yesterday.

Update: The old xlib game is xbattle. Still being packaged and available on Debian/Ubuntu/wherever.

/tech/misc | 13 Dec 2006 | #

Michael's Unofficial Guide to OSDC Day 3

So it's the last day of OSDC (well, 2 days ago :-) and while that's a bit sad, I have to say it's been a fun time. Had breakfast again with Rob, Martin and Erik de Castro Lopo - been good to chat with these guys about a broad range of stuff.

Keynote: Scott Penrose on his web framework called Zaltana looks interesting - the demos were good. If it can truly integrate different web applications under an AJAX-enabled common style, then it would be very nice.

Adam Kennedy on "The Portable Image testing Architecture". The Perl CPAN problem - 23,000,000 LOC, 11,000 modules, 20 perl versions, 100+ known platforms, 150 config params - all modules (unless stated) assumed to work on all combinations!?! Software Combinatorial Explosion - every module needs testing in (20x100x5x4) 40,000 environments. He introduced PITA-XML. He sees a combination of virtualisation and automation as a panacea. Could be applicable to other similar problems.

Erik Castro de Lopo on "Career Development for Developer Geeks". Dang projector failed, which made life difficult for Erik, but he solderied on nonetheless, presenting a good talk which covered a bunch of good ideas and hints to prevent you from losing your life to the day job.

Martin Poole and Rob Collins on "Managing Distributed Version Control". Very many good hints on how to manage a distributed project - the things you should set in stone early to save you from grief later on. Good stuff. I would have liked this to go longer, as there was plenty of stuff that could have been discussed further.

Andrew Bennetts on "Coding in a Distributed Team". One key point is to keep "trunk" building and keeping tests passing using autobots. Passing the test suite is one of two gates for committing to trunk. The second is peer code reviews - done remotely with some useful tool which automagically presents diffs over the web and allows scores to be kept on the usefulness of the patch. Also covered the cool features that a distributed SCM like bzr gives you (like cheap branching allowing 1-1 mapping between branches and bug fixes/branching). Another talk that could have been extended out to an hour to give out more goodness.

Lightening Talks - Richard Jones on Selenium, a web testing recording tool. More people who tried (and failed!) to write code during a talk - this time using a lesser known framework. Someone else succeeded with Ruby of Rails. Some crazy guy modified LISP to take out the parenthesis and used python-indention instead (+1 crazy). Mary Gardiner covered Women in FOSS groups. Paul Fenwick presented an OSDc compiler (which was Jon Oxer's mini-language that he invented and presented the day before) - now available in CPAN as ACME::OSDc :-)

Did the quick dash at afternoon time back to the hotel and then onto the airport to make my flight home, so I unfortunately missed the conference close. But congratulations to the organisers - a good interesting conference! Again I'm blown away by the totally amazing number and quality of OSS developers in Australia!

/tech/conf/osdc2006 | 10 Dec 2006 | #

Michael's Unofficial Guide to OSDC Day 2

Notes from the second day of conference paper presentations:

Keynote: Richard Farnsworth - "Open Source Synchrotron" - More physics than software, but judging from the questions from the audience, this talk was very well received.

Pitty, Keith - "J2EE and Open Source Innovation: The Relationship between Open Source and Standards". A number of J2EE frameworks were presented - including "Spring" which is focusing on JavaBeans instead of EJBs. Now popular enough to have it's own conf. Also mention of the GPL'ing of J2ME|SE|EE.

Richard Jones - "Shiny, Pretty Things". Fun talk on a new python library, pyglet, "not-yet-alpha" which eases OpenGL in python. Richard showed off a bunch of games (incl Funnyboat, Neely's Rooftop Garden, Power Core) to demonstrate how cool stuff is easy to hack together in python. Demonstrated Wings3D as an alternative to Blender (aka "anyone can use it"). Richard presents well, and does cool stuff. I'm looking forward to pyglet getting released.

Mark Rees - "Development of Mono Applications with Agile Languages". Good talk on a topic that's been done many times before, but this time by a core contributor to one of the projects :-) Introduced the fork of Iron Python (http://fepy.sf.net) so that the community can contribute back - take the Microsoft releases when they happen and add in patches - not sure if I like the myriad of licenses it uses though. Also talked about Boo - which is something I played with before IronPython got a better license.

Patrick Sunter - "Open Source on the Scientific Bleeding Edge". Preventing fragmentation of a large vertical niche market largely-OSS application. Interesting to see the adoption of more formalised XP (as opposed to just hacking :) Good war-story talk on boostrapping up a development process that is maintainable - and over the past 3 years or so it appears they've grown the project well.

Lightening Talks - besides the pr0n there was some cool stuff - including a call for help on The Python Papers, but the wackiest was Jon Oxer's OSDc mini-langauge (you are one sick puppy, Jon!).

Andy Todd - "Accessing Relational databases with Python". Introductory talk about Python's DB-API. Quite rushed, but a good point made was regarding Python DB-API's lack of support for SQL injection vulnerabilities :-)

Afternoon Keynote: Anthony Baxter - "futurepython". Started with IronPython + fepy.sf.net. IronPython (on win) faster than CPython for pystones, but half the speed for pybench. Shows the problem of optimising for benchmarks :-) IronPython on Mono is like 1/7 the speed - need for some improvement here. Covered cross platformness - esp System.Windows.Forms etc. Then moved onto Python 3.0 - won't be 100% backwards-compat, but Guido suggests this is a "once in a lifetime chance" to fix niggling python problems to achieve world-domination ;)

My vote for Talk of the day is Richard Jones with "Shiny, Pretty Things"

Postscript: No, there are no photos from me. The camera was left at home so that I didn't need to check any luggage on the flight over.

/tech/conf/osdc2006 | 08 Dec 2006 | #

The Anti-Bruce Perens campaign

Looks like there is now a following of people who think that Bruce Perens does not speak for them.

/tech/linux | 07 Dec 2006 | #

Michael's Unofficial Guide to OSDC Day 1

Notes from the first day of conference paper presentations:

Keynote - Randal Schwartz - "Free software - a look back, a look ahead". Good to hear an industry legend speak. Interesting point shared - release your software and make money on the magazine articles.

Anthony Baxter - "What's New in Python: 2006 edition". Project overview basically, lots of good things here - ctypes should be good for interacting with native code and more importantly (IMHO) getting try...catch...finally is a wonderful addition - one thing that C# brings to the table.

Alan Green/Ben Askins - "Rails/Django Comparison". Building the same webapp in both environments leads to the following conclusion: the Django version took slightly less time to implement and took less code than Rails. But only just - no silver bullet here. Both appear to be useful, with more momentum behind Rails right now e.g. books, jobs etc. The talk was good, but with more time I would have liked more detail - you'd have to know both Django and Rails already to really benefit from this talk - and then you wouldn't need to hear it.

Alex Holkner - "Ctypes. ctypes run!". Very fast talker - did cool stuff via Google's SoC with pygame-ctypes and SDL-ctypes. So ctypes is all about having a very nice way of interfacing to native libraries directly from Python - on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Looks like it makes life easier - in Java it was painful, C# made it easier, and Python is now even easier. Performance is still something that I'd like to know more about.

Richard Jones - "What's Old is New Again". Good presentation, all about remembering what features went into previous Python releases when writing code that needs to work on older installs (remembering that new features appear in each new release of which a new one happens every 18 months). Trivia - import __hello__ :-) Things covered: sub-classing, __slots__, property(), __new__ vs __init__, static & class methods, enumeration, sets, union_update, symmetric_difference, issubset, issuperset, generators, random.sample(population, k), math.radians, math.degrees, bz2. Could've used a longer timeslot to do justice to a good topic.

Adam Kennedy - "Nothing can possibly go wrong". Very entertaining talk about decisions you make now that you regret later. Some discussion of open vs closed problems. If developing for self, choose closed problems. If you have a happy customer with deep pockets, choose an open problem to solve :-) Auto-emailing bug reports covered. Also discussion on ease of install vs functionality/level of bugs in product - easy installation is much more important than you think. Excellent talk that makes you think.

Burgess, Chris - "Web Application Security - Tools, Techniques, Tips and Tricks". Introductory talk on web application security - introduced OWASP which was new to me. Also talked about the security risks of reusing code - may lead to class breaks.

Mark Hammond - "Python in Mozilla". Mozilla is a complete application framework - and is now language agnostic, so Python can now be used (but probably won't be bundled). What for? New applications using the framework and also for writing extensions for Firefox (but right now that means compiling your own version that includes Python). All the heavy lifting of XUL, XPCOM + all of Pythons libraries etc all available in Python on Mozilla. Cool. Looks like there will be a "blessed" Python version that can be installed as a plug-in in the Firefox 3 time-frame. Some questions remain on how you get your non-technical audience to setup their Mozilla-product to support your Python code.

Mary Gardiner - "The Planet Feed Reader: Better Living Through Gravity". Discussion of what what a planet aggregator web site is, moving onto what the planet software is and how it started - as well as some interesting anecdotes on various things. Quite a good talk - would have been better if there was more time to further discuss some of the project's challenges and future direction.

My vote for Talk of the day is Adam Kennedy's "Nothing can possibly go wrong"

Best talk I missed today was probably "Wile Coyote's Toolbox: The Acme Namespace - 20 minutes, 90 modules" by Jose Castro. (I did get to see it at LUV last night though :-)

BOFs - talked Planet with Mary, Russell, and a few others continuing on from Mary's talk - including a quick chat on Venus.

Conference Dinner - At the Gryph Hotel on-site. #include <std-buffet>. Damian Conway's After Dinner Talk was very entertaining - an adaption of The Da Vinci code. He suggested that it was a 100 hours in the making and I can believe it, given the line-noise^WPerl he incorporated ;-P He also suggested that what he presented will eventually make it's way onto the web, so watch out for that - it'll be worth the download!

After dinner caught the last train back to Melbourne city, made plans for breakfast and got back to coding. Afterall, there's plenty of time - there's no need to be at the conference until 9am tomorrow :-)

Note taking thanks to the power of Beagle...

/tech/conf/osdc2006 | 07 Dec 2006 | #

OSDC Day -1

The day started with the flight from Adelaide to Melbourne - the first amazing fact was that from the air you can see that everything is so dry. Australia could really do with rain from heaven.

Arrived at Melbourne airport and experienced the ease of taking the SkyBus into the city - a very good system that Adelaide needs. What I wouldn't want to see copied is the long wait SkyBus gives you for the hotel transfer - we had 30 or so people waiting for hotel transfers from their depo, and they were servicing them 4 people at a time, leaving their smaller buses half-empty :-(

So after that I checked into my hotel, and did the wander around the city. Melbourne is a pretty exciting place, although the 33C day didn't make exploring much fun after a flight.

Being an Adelaide boy, I'm not very train-familiar, so I did a trial run out to Caufield - wall-to-wall school girls and grannies - but there were no problmes finding he conference venue. Afterwards it was out to Stewart Smith's place, just a few train stops further down the line. We sat around chatting on MySQL stuff, MythTV, Linux Australia, and hacking in general.

Off to LUV was next, heard a very interesting talk on Perl's ACME namespace (love that ACME::Bleach :-) by Jose Castro and a talk on GPLv3. Interesting to note the momentum building around v3 given the Novell-Microsoft death-spiral.

Then off to dinner at some nice authentic Italian restaurant. Good chats with Robert, Martin, Jon and others.

Ride back to Collins St in the city by Stewart (thnx), and get some well-needed sleep. Conference proper starts tomorrow!

/tech/conf/osdc2006 | 06 Dec 2006 | #

The Top 10 Arguments Against DRM

The Top 10 Arguments Against DRM

Thanks Digg...

/tech/IP | 20 Nov 2006 | #

cotd - Organic Nicaragua

Today's coffee of the day is Organic Nicaragua, which is a Fair Trade product.

"There are a total of 112 organic coffee producers who contribute to this coffee, 95% are small producers. This shade grown crop complies with the national organic programme requirements to produce a coffee with a rich praline flavour with a smooth sweet finish."

Coffee purchased at Rio Coffee.

/coffee | 14 Nov 2006 | #

Java to be Open Sourced

As gman says, "Hell has frozen over."

Sun will be making an announcement here very soon that Java is about to be released under GPLv2.

This is great news, albeit 5 years too late. I hope Java gets some momentum again now as a result. Well done Sun! Long live Java!

/tech/code/Java | 13 Nov 2006 | #

LinuxSA November 2006 - Ruby On Rails

  Hi all,

  Time for the regular November meeting announcement -- we've got a
  programming talk this month.  Also, don't forget about the special
  November meeting this Monday (details at
  http://www.linuxsa.org.au/meetings/).

  Have fun,
  Geoffrey.

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 21st November, 2006
   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:

   Alex Moore will be giving a talk about Ruby On Rails. Alex is a web
   application developer for Valuation Exchange. He also develops
   applications for personal and commercial use in his spare time in
   Ruby On Rails.

   Alex plans to cover the following topics in his talk:

     * Demonstration - Code up a simple application from scratch in
       5-10 minutes, explaining each step
     * Why I switched to Rails (development in PHP etc), MVC
       architecture
     * Overview of key features of Ruby compared to Java/PHP/ASP etc.
     * Go into Rails features:
     * ActiveRecord (ORM Layer), Migrations (database stuff)
     * In built scriptaculous stuff (Pretty cross-browser AJAX stuff)
     * Testing (and how great it is, and how rails would convince you
       to do it)
     * Lollyjar and our experiences, our "best practices" we've adopted
     * How to learn - overview of best books, resources etc.

  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 | 10 Nov 2006 | #

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 released

.NET 3.0 has finally been released. What's is it?

Basically it's .NET 2.0 with extra APIs such as Windows Presentation Foundation WPF (was "Avalon"), Windows Communication Foundation (was "Indigo"), workflow stuff etc. What will it let me do? Hopefully do high-level programming for rich clients. Hopefully not having to avoid bugs in the 2.0 release.

The most interesting question is how this relates to Mono. Will these new APIs be supported?

/tech/code/C-Sharp | 08 Nov 2006 | #

Stikkit opens

Another web2.0 startup goes public with their beta - stikkit.

This one looks interesting - postit notes, todo lists, web bookmarks, calendar, tagging all combined together. Another competitor to Google Tools and Services (free) and Apple's .Mac (non-free). There's also integration with North American cell^Wmobile carriers, allowing for SMS reminders; not to mention the ability to share stikkits with others as you see fit.

What I like about stikkit is the ease at tagging entries - I can say this entry is @work or @home, as well as @priority-one or @low-priority. Very simple concepts, but broad in power allowing you to use it however you think will work for you.

I signed-up this morning, and the biggest wow feature that struck me was having a private email address which automatically creates new stikkits for you. This is fantastic! Up until now I've been using a fragile home-built TODO email gateway, but now I'll move over and try this one out.

Overall, looks pretty cool. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out after a couple of weeks serious use.

/tech/misc | 08 Nov 2006 | #

Silvia / Rocky Links

• Lots of stuff about Silvia and Rocky: http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/contrib/rancilio_silvia/
• About grinders, and a look inside Rocky: http://www.sweetmarias.com/prod.electricmills.shtml
• Cleaning Miss Silvia:http://technocosm.org/espresso/rancilio-silvia.html
• Cleaning Rocky:http://www.coffeegeek.com/guides/cleanrocky
• Cheating Miss Silvia:http://www.coffeekid.com/archived/rancilio/cheatsilvia
• Judging Expresso Extraction by Crema:http://www.virtualcoffee.com/judge.html

/coffee | 06 Nov 2006 | #

Motorola to release JME stack under Apache Licencing

Motorola plans to release a Java Micro Edition under Apache License V2.0.

Wow. It's nice to see this happen. I worked on a J(2)ME stack and a Javacard stack eons ago - I wonder if any of my code survived :-)

/tech/IP | 03 Nov 2006 | #

JPEG now safe

Good news on the software patent front (at least regarding one patent that has been troublesome). It's now safe to write software to read/write JPEG images!

The Public Patent Foundation requested the USPTO reject the patent (4,698,672) due to new prior art discovery, the USPTO ruled and rejected the broadest claims of the patent, and Forgent has now responded by doing the right thing by abandoning the patent.

Thanks to Groklaw for pointing this out.

/tech/IP | 03 Nov 2006 | #

LCA2007 Programme and Registrations!

The hard-working, hermits-for-a-year Seven have released some further details about the to-be-rockin' linux.conf.au 2007 conference. The salivating geek-hordes gave them no choice.

The conference programme is now available, as is your chance to secure your spot by registering. From what I hear, the stampede of registrations have started, so don't delay - if you leave it too long you'll miss out on the early-bird discount, and maybe even miss out on a spot altogether! Register today, and start counting down - only 75 days to go! :-)

/tech/linux-australia/lca2007 | 02 Nov 2006 | #

Getting Things Done

AJ have you consider the Getting Things Done methodology? There's even an Emacs mode implementing it! (Sorry, I don't know of a vim equivalent, which would be my preference)

All that to say that I don't actually use GTD (yet), as my prioritised TODO list in a paper (gasp!) diary works well. I might migrate to GTD though as it sounds interesting.

/tech/projects | 25 Oct 2006 | #

cotd - Espresso Perfetto

The current favourite coffee in our household is Espresso Perfetto - Medium to Strong. Based on Cuban coffee, this blend gives a rich, sweet, full bodied cup in the perfect Northern Italian style, with the perfect lingering aftertaste.

/coffee | 24 Oct 2006 | #

Atom complaints

So Russell complains thus "James Purser said I'm betting that your feed is an atom feed. We had the same problem on PLOA with Jeff and Pias feeds when they switched to atom. Planet needs to be upgraded. Well I am using an atom feed, so this probably explains it. Sorry for the inconvenience to the Planet Debian readers, I guess that things will stay the way they are until it is upgraded."

Now Russell, I do't want to have too much of a go, but when Jeff and Pia's problem arose, I upgraded p.l.o.a within about a week. Upstream only had proper support for Atom for about a month earlier that that anyway.

Anyone running an aggregator (p.l.o.a, Planet Debian, etc) is likely to have other interestes too - it's unlikely to be the main gig for anyone. It's just a service that is (normally) happily provided. So if you change to a new, (currently) less supported syndication format, you may find it takes a while for all the aggregation software installs to catch up. Afterall, this is a volunteer-run service - we could have dropped your feed until we had upgraded instead, y'know :-)

/tech/linux-australia | 19 Oct 2006 | #

A new career? Not likely.

Last night I took Lavazza's Professional Barista course, and as a consequence I now can make Ristretto, Espresso, Dopio, Latte, Cappucino, Avogatto and other delicious coffee combinations. The only problem is that I consumed far too much caffeine - meaning zero sleep last night ;-(

No, this isn't a change of career - it's just another step fulfilling Michael's First Law:

"The day you stop learning, is the day you start dying."

/coffee | 19 Oct 2006 | #

LinuxSA October 2006 - Building an Open-Source Segway(R)

  Time for the LinuxSA October Meeting announcement (it was yesterday :-(

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 17th October, 2006
   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:

   Geoffrey D. Bennett will be presenting a talk on how to build an
   open-source Segway(R):

     Building a self-balancing scooter like the Segway(R) has
     previously been shown to be "not actually very hard" by Trevor
     Blackwell.  I have replicated his experience by building my own
     two-wheeled self-balancing ride-on robot using only off-the-shelf
     parts, and open-source hardware and software.  Some info, a video,
     and source can be found here:
     http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/meta/

     The presentation will go through how my scooter was built and the
     theory and practicalities of keeping it upright, along with a
     demonstration.

  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 | 18 Oct 2006 | #

Places other than Schaumburg exist?

Wow! Places other than Schaumburg, IL exist.

I think you'd almost have to have lived there to understand :-)

/travel/chicago | 18 Oct 2006 | #

The Latest Distraction

My latest distraction is a Rancilio Silvia coffee machine with matching Rocky conical burr grinder. It arrived on Wednesday last week, purchased over the net from Coffee for Connoisseurs in Melbourne - these guys are great! Not only do they thoroughly test the machine before sending it out, they set the grinder to an appropriate setting, and include lots of free coffee to get you started. I'd certainly buy again from them!

Now is where all the fun starts - adjusting the grind, the tamp, temperature, volume of water, preinfusion, bean flavour, all in persuit of the perfect repeatable cup of coffee. Yum!

(BTW, good coffee certainly helps while reviewing the very large volume of wonderful paper submissions to linux.conf.au 2007 that I'm trying to wade through right now.)

/coffee | 01 Oct 2006 | #

LinuxSA September 2006 - World's First Open Movie "Elephants Dream"

  Hi all,

  Time for the LinuxSA September Meeting announcement (it's this
  Tuesday)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 19th September, 2006
   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:

   Lee Salvemini will be giving the presentation.  Lee was one of the
   Lead Artists for the world's first open movie "Elephants Dream", and
   will be talking about the movie and open source.  All his artwork
   was done on a Ubuntu computer with Blender being the main software
   used, as well as Gimp.  The movie was produced on both Linux and Mac
   machines.

   He has been to San Diego to meet and worked with Tom (developer and
   code writer for Blender).  Made the movie in Holland, currently
   doing commercials for Val Morgan and next month is off to Bollywood
   (India) to work on his next project - he is 20, and has had a fairly
   busy life so far :D.

  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 | 18 Sep 2006 | #

Weatherall on The TPM (OzDMCA) Exposure Draft

Kim Weatherall has written some initial comments on the TPM for OzFTA.

Summary: Things may not be as rosy as was initially reported elsewhere.

/tech/IP | 07 Sep 2006 | #

Draft Copyright Law changes now available

So the big news this week in Intellectual Property Land is that the Australian Government has released their draft Copyright Ammendment Bill for public comment.

If you remember, this bill is to meet Australia's obligations under the AUSFTA. There's been quite a fight going on to ensure that consumers get some rights to fairly use the copyrighted material they purchase.

While some things look good (like linking TPMs to compyright infringment), I'm waiting with baited breath until some others take a closer look. In the mean time, there is some analysis out there which makes good reading.

If you care about this stuff, read up on the issues and make comment now (as per the government's request) before this becomes law - you only have until September 22, 2006. The fight isn't lost yet, so act now.

/tech/IP | 06 Sep 2006 | #

linux.conf.au 2007 CFP time

linux.conf.au is coming. You can feel it inside. That week-long, sleep-depriving, brain-bursting overflow of excitement and geekyness is coming. And it's less than 6 months away.

Got cool stuff you're working on? Open-Source related? Then you want to submit a proposal to the Call for Papers.

Now.

Why should you bother?

• You will be contributing to the Australian Linux and Open-Source community by inspiring them,
• You might become famous and get recognised by your peers,
• You'll be treated like a rockstar during the conference,
• Employers might offer you a job,
• The pressure of being ready on time will force you to finish that feature for your project that you've been dragging your feet on :-)

Go do it. Submit a paper. You know you want to.

/tech/linux-australia/lca2007 | 31 Aug 2006 | #

LinuxSA September 2006 (extra meeting) - Piratpartiet, file-sharing, privacy/freedom of speech/communication etc

  Hi all,

  Sorry for the last minute notice, but we've organized an extra meeting
  for September (additional to the usual one on the 19th).  This one
  should be interesting enough to justify it though :-)

  NOTE: This is for next Tuesday.

  The usual details:

    When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
            Tuesday, 5th September, 2006
    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:

    Egil Moller (http://www.redhog.org) is a Piratpartiet member from
    Sweden, working as a free software developer currently in Adelaide.

    He'll be giving a presentation on the Piratpartiet and surrounding
    issues, such as file-sharing, privacy/freedom of speech/communication,
    PP's history/policies, patents, and the effect of issues concerning PP
    which will have huge effect on Free Software, Opensource, Copyleft and
    software developers if fully implemented.

  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 | 31 Aug 2006 | #

SHA-1 partial chosen plaintext attacks successful

So back in February, we found out that SHA-1 was gone - researchers could generate 2 plaintexts that generated the same hash. But at least the plaintexts were gibberish, meaning that while SHA-1 was broken, the break was of limited use.

Now comes a more serious blow - in a similar vein to the previously reported MD5 attacks it's now possible to choose part of the plaintext and still get the same hash. Yikes.

Quoting the article:

         Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML
         documents with a long nonsense part after the closing  tag, which, 
         despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage
         have the same hash value.

Now what if I could add some nasty javascript to a web page and retain the original hash? Validating the web page with a MD5 or SHA-1 hash won't tell you of the maliciousness. Combine that with DNS redirection and you have something a bit scary. Can you say phishing attack?

We need a new hashing function, openly and publicly selected, just like AES. Moving to SHA-256 or SHA-512 are just stop-gap measures.

/tech/code | 28 Aug 2006 | #

Milestone day today

Today is a milestone day for me. Seven years at the one company - I guess it had to happen eventually.

Looking back it's been busy - building everything from Java VMs, to smart-card operating systems, to crypto libraries, to web applications, to web services, to location-based services, to distributed audio processing, through to end-user GUI applications - across Linux, Solaris, and .NET - not to mention also doing customer management, business development, herding cats, cutting code, graphic design, and sysadmin duties. Whew! It's been a whirlwind of constant change. Have to say, I love the diversity!

/life | 23 Aug 2006 | #

Writely comes out of beta

Google's Writely comes out of it's secret beta today. I've been playing for a little while today (ahem, when I should have been doing other things ;) and I reakon they've done a good job. This is what the AJAX-enabled Web2 is supposed to be.

Quick feature review:

• Import Word docs
• Export out of Writely to HTML, RTF, Word, OOo, PDF
• Fully-featured word processor
• Online collaboration
• Publish to HTML, stored on their server
• Blog posting integration
• Revision history

So this post should have been done in Writely, but I'm not willing to hand-over username/passwords to a 3rd party app yet. That bit scares me a little. I'll need to hack some addition security in first.

/tech/misc | 21 Aug 2006 | #

LinuxSA August 2006 - Why the law re. DRM matters: restoring the balance in Australian Copyright Law

  Hi all,

  Time for the LinuxSA August Meeting announcement (it's this
  Tuesday)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 15th August, 2006
   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:

   Darren Kruse will be giving a presentation on "Why the law re. DRM
   matters: restoring the balance in Australian Copyright Law".

  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 | 12 Aug 2006 | #

Mandatory Uniform

So Leon, is there a mandatory uniform? Perhaps a cursed -3 amulet of blindness? :-)

/life | 25 Jul 2006 | #

Implantable RFIDs not fool-proof

Who wants to become Linux Australia's president for a day? :-) Engadget is reporting that implantable RFIDs are quite easy to clone, making it quite easy to steal someone's identify.

So Jon, the good news is that no-one will cut your arm off - instead they'll just scan you from afar ;-)

/tech/misc | 25 Jul 2006 | #

Planet Linux Australia upgrade

We interrupt this blog feed to announce that Planet Linux Australia has been successfully upgraded to a new version of Planet.

An unnamed source at Linux Australia's Planet team reports that the reasons behind the upgrade are World Peace and decent Atom support.

Returning you now to your regular program...

/tech/linux-australia | 22 Jul 2006 | #

Roboscoble does PlanetPlanet

Microsoft's RoboScoble (aka http://msreadr.com/), uses PlanetPlanet as an aggregator, running on FreeBSD and Apache.

Huh?

/tech/windows | 17 Jul 2006 | #

LinuxSA July 2006 - Anycast DNS servers

  Hi all,

  Time for the LinuxSA July Meeting reminder...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 18th July, 2006
   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:

   Glen Turner, Network Engineer for AARNet, and Kim Hawtin from the
   University of Adelaide will be giving a presentation on the reasons
   and configuration of anycast DNS servers.

   Janet Hawtin and perhaps others involved in Software Freedom Day
   will give a brief presentation on what's happening with SFD this
   year.

  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 | 17 Jul 2006 | #

A small update on work

In 7 months we've made 13 formal releases of our software - this morning we sat down and looked back at this busy year to date. That's 3 product lines out of the same source tree - #ifdef'd and managed by ClearCase config specs, each product release interleaved as customer deadlines dictated. All of the code "fagan" inspected, and manually tested (don't get me started on manual testing). Soon you'll be able to buy the results of our blood, sweat and tears - boxed and shrunk-wrapped.

So sitting here on a Friday night, thinking about what we've achieved, I have to say that I'm pretty happy with the team. We've achieved a lot. We've pushed the boundaries, and now we're looking to push them even more - hopefully a new product line coming out the successes of what has been achieved (*sigh* more ClearCase branching :-) using different hardware, adding new cool functionality to the product line, and being able to support more networks.

Besides happy, I'm also exhausted. Holidays aren't far away, and I'm looking forward to both re'ing and laxing.

/tech/code | 14 Jul 2006 | #

Mounting Beagle search as a filesystem

Cool stuff from rml - mounting a beagle implcit search as a filesystem.

/tech/GNOME | 24 Jun 2006 | #

Font madness for dummies

Simple explanation of the dogs-breakfast-known-as-X-font-management by the legend that is Glen Turner.

Glen, you need to write more!

/tech/GNOME | 22 Jun 2006 | #

LinuxSA June 2006 - Linux-based recording studios

  Hi all,

  Time for the LinuxSA June Meeting reminder (it's tonight!)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 20th June, 2006
   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:

   Matthew Geddes is presenting a talk on Linux-based recording
   studios:

   Linux is proving itself as a capable platform for handling much of
   the work in a recording studio.  Not only is it more-than-capable of
   performance in the same league as some of the alternatives, it is
   incredibly flexible, making it invaluable to the long-term lazy.

   Using a session with a female duet as an example, we'll see one
   example of how Linux can be used to record both live stereo
   performances and multitrack recordings, as well as performing
   necessary post-processing and mastering.

   The studio described is incredibly modest, but capable of quite
   reasonable results. It's also cheap and portable.  Did I mention
   cheap?

  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 | 20 Jun 2006 | #

Liberty vs Control (or Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?)

I've just read Bruce Schneier's latest Cryptogram. In there he presents his essay The Eternal Value of Privacy.

It's a very good read.

I am very concerned about the reckless abandonment of freedom to protect ourselves from terrorists. It's like we're stomping on our own sandcastles to prevent someone else from doing so. I remember after 9/11 the cry that went out was, "we won't let them win", but in the process of protecting ourselves we're throwing away that which we value greatly - our freedom.

So why is this filed under IP? Surely my own personal privacy is my intellectual property!

/tech/IP | 16 Jun 2006 | #

DMCA Fight!

[I'm blogging this because it's important, even though all these facts are presented far more eloquently elsewhere]

So it looks like Australia is steam-rolling towards following the USA's mistake in implementing DMCA-like legislation - putting further control in the hands of big multinationals and taking it away from Australian consumers.

Fortunately Linux Australia and the OSIA, through the efforts of people like Rusty, are trying to make a difference now before we get bad legislation.

So what are we talking about?

DMCA is about using extensions to copyright to increase the control of big multinationals - from companies telling you what you can do with your legally purchased digital content, to stifling innovation and competition, and locking off the future of Australian high-tech industry. If you think I'm exaggerating, you should consider some facts on the topic, read this press release, and even listen to a podcast, if you are so inclined.

Then once you understand what's at stake, and if you feel that you should do something about it - download the petition, sign it yourself, get everyone you know (including your dog) to sign it, and then send it in to be collated and presented to our elected representatives, so that they know this is an imporant issue for all Australian consumers.

Act now before freedoms are lost.

/tech/IP | 13 Jun 2006 | #

Back online June 2006

After hardware failures to bree and lothlorien, switching ISPs, and finally having a couple of free hours, michaeldavies.org is back online. Finally. It's only been 2 months :-(

/meta | 12 Jun 2006 | #

linux.conf.au 2007 Ghosts of Conference Past

Spent the weekend in Sydney for the Ghosts of Conference Past meeting for linux.conf.au. Typical fly in Friday night, go to the local LUG, crash, up early Saturday, meetings all day, crash, meetings all day, rush to airport humming the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone, fly home, taxi, find my family already asleep, crash and find myself a zombie on Monday morning at work.

A busy weekend - now my 4th ghosts attended (if you include "ours" in Adelaide).

There was an unusual amount of secrecy, but what I can say about the weekend is that the seven are well on track to bring us a great linux.conf.au 2007! I'll plead with the organisers and leak what I can when I can :-) But I will say this - you will be disappointed if you're not there in January 2007!

/tech/linux-australia | 03 Apr 2006 | #

L Glass

After this past weekend I'm now the proud owner of some L glass, the Canon EF 70-200 f4 lens.

I then spent a couple of hours at the zoo, playing with my new toy. Some samples will be coming soon to ploon. All I can say is that I agree with the online reports - once you've used L glass, there's no looking back :-P Fast, Sharp, Light-weight, Not-too-expensive. Love it!

/photos | 28 Mar 2006 | #

LinuxSA March 2006 - git: the stupid content tracker

  Time for the LinuxSA March Meeting announcement (it happened 3 days ago :-(

  The usual details:

    When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
            Tuesday, 21st March, 2006
    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:

    Paul Schulz will be giving a talk on "git - the stupid content
    tracker[1]":

    What is it? What does it do? How can 'git' improve the way I write
    and contribute to Free and Open Source software?

    If you are interested in the answers, come along to LinuxSA[2] and
    find out about another program that Linus wrote.

    References:
      http://git.or.cz/ - A good introduction
      http://www.kernel.org/git/gitweb.cgi
                        - A gitweb listing of projects at kernel.org

    Notes:
      [1] - Not "GNU Interactive Tools"
      [2] - GitSA?

  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 | 23 Mar 2006 | #

offlineimap - where hast thou been?

So after years of prodding, I finally started using offlineimap (as packaged in Ubuntu Multiverse).

Wow! Very cool, very powerful. I can't believe I delayed using this for so long. Managing 000's of messages is now much easier - especially on the road.

/tech/linux | 14 Mar 2006 | #

Flagr - local knowledge sink

Flagr - more Google Maps fun. Find places recommended by others.

Problem is, how do you stop abuse? How do you prevent a call centre full of monkeys polluting the system with over-priced, ecologically unsound, ethically challenged business franchises? How do you guarrantee that only local genuine knowledge gets into the system? And why is this looking like another Orkut wannabee?

/tech/misc | 07 Mar 2006 | #

eXtreme Programming Overview

While trying to find an online version of the famous Kent Beck quote for a team member:

       "Make it run, make it run, make it fast, make it small"

I found the following XP Overview quite handy.

/tech/code | 07 Mar 2006 | #

IP ignorance proof

So Scoble publicly admits that his employer advises him not to look at patents, presumably to avoid triple damages claims (in the USA) for informed violation. Here's the quote:

(the patent lawyers ask employees to refrain from looking at patents)

Shows us again that IP law in the area of computer software is sick, and in desperate need of overhaul.

/tech/IP | 27 Feb 2006 | #

LinuxSA February 2006 - Hacking Consumer NAS Devices For Fun And Profit

  Hi all,

  Time for the LinuxSA February Meeting announcement (it's in 8 days
  time)...

  The usual details:

    When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
            Tuesday, 21st February, 2006
    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:

    Rod Whitby will be giving a talk on "Hacking Consumer NAS Devices
    For Fun And Profit - An insider's view of the NSLU2-Linux project
    and the Debian port to big-endian ARM devices".

    Rod is the Adelaide-based project lead of the www.nslu2-linux.org
    and www.debonaras.org projects, member of the Debian big-endian ARM
    porting team, and Chief Architect at the Freescale Semiconductor
    Australian SoC Technology Centre.

  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 | 13 Feb 2006 | #

Sorry for the interruption of service

Currently got a network issue over on michaeldavies.org. Sorry for the rather regular breaks in transmissions - will rectify soon and correct the source of instability. Grumble.

/meta | 08 Feb 2006 | #

Music to code by

So, someone showed this to me 12 months ago, but I only just realised that it's good to code to - badger badger badger.

/tech/code | 06 Feb 2006 | #

LCA2006 [photo]blog competition is now closed

And.... time!

The linux.conf.au 2006 [photo]blog competition is now closed! Judging will now commence. Watch for an announcement from Mike Beattie for the winners...

/tech/linux-australia/lca2006 | 31 Jan 2006 | #

Software Requirements Management

This is the sad truth of commercial software requirements management.

/tech/code | 31 Jan 2006 | #

Photography: White Balance

This article on colour balance is very useful - I'm only now getting a grip on white colour balance and how to increase the saturation of photos in-camera rather than in post-production.

Simple rule: Colour temperature at noon on a fine day is about 5500K. To add more red to an image move your colour balance towards shade, ie. 7000K - the camera thinks the colour temperature is cooler, so it adds more red. To add more blue, move your white balance towards sunrise/sunset, ie. 3500K ie. camera thinks the colour temperature is hotter, so adds more blue to compensate.

Back the front, but makes sense :-) Experimentation is the key.

/photos | 24 Jan 2006 | #

Planet LCA2006 RSS feed now available!

Due to popular demand, Planet LCA2006 is now even better - an RSS 2.0 feed is now available for your sucking pleasure!

/tech/linux-australia/lca2006 | 24 Jan 2006 | #

LCA2006 Blogging

Are you blogging LCA2006 in Dunedin, NZ?

If so, you'll be pleased to know that Planet LCA2006 is now available for you to read and contribute to.

If you want your feed added, just send email to planet@lca2006.linux.org.au and we'll add you in a jiffy.

And BTW, you must attend the conference opening - Mike Beattie has some surprises to announce that are related :-)

/tech/linux-australia/lca2006 | 24 Jan 2006 | #

LCA2006 has started

Well, the pre-conference mini-conferences have. Rock!

/tech/linux-australia/lca2006 | 23 Jan 2006 | #

WebClient class omission

In the .Net framework there is a nice helper class WebClient which makes it easy to [up|down]load files off a network. Unfortunately it ignores the GlobalProxySelection setting - meaning that there is no way to use WebClient through an http proxy.

A small note is found on this page which suggests that WebClient has a proxy property in .Net 2.0. This is another indication of the immaturity of the .Net Framework library - so many simple things have been overlooked. sigh.

Note: Haven't checked the implementation at Mono yet.

Update: Ok, so it is possible. WebClient will honour the global proxy settings, just not with the default credentials of the user invoking it. For reference...

     System.Net.WebProxy proxyObject = new System.Net.WebProxy(proxy);
     proxyObject.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(username, pass);
     GlobalProxySelection.Select = proxyObject;

     WebClient client = new WebClient();
     client.DownloadFile(this.uri, localFilename);

Thanks James...

/tech/code/C-Sharp | 19 Jan 2006 | #

p.l.o.a. now accepting old entries

To keep the masses happy, I've modified the planet install for p.l.o.a. so that it accepts entries older than a year.

Previously it ignored the feed for someone who had entries that were more than a year old. This was the default behaviour, and from looking at the error log, there were more than 20 people who fell into this category. Whoops.

I've moved that out to 3 years to keep everyone happy - although you need to ask, why would anyone want entries that old being syndicated anywhere. It'd be better if people changed what they offered on their feeds to only recent entries.

Anyhow, that's fixed for now. Just need to update the install sometime soon to a later release of planet, and make sure atom gets supported properly - while there's the feedburner solution, I'd prefer to do it natively.

/tech/projects | 18 Jan 2006 | #

Why is it...

Why is it that when you need network access Telstra Bigpond cable decide to have an outage in your area?

2 *grumble* hours *grumble*

/meta | 18 Jan 2006 | #

GPL v3 Draft Summary

Everyone is reporting that the draft version of the most important free software licence, the GPL v3, is now available.

Very good writeup over on Groklaw, I must say.

I'm impressed with what the FSF have done in this draft. Improvements in the area of patent license-ability, digital rights management (which the Free Software Foundation prefers to call "handcuffware"), improvements trying to recognise differences in copyright law internationally, and provisions that are designed to reduce license incompatibility (i.e. allow non-GPL'd code to be combined with GPL'd code).

Of course, this is only a draft, but so far it looks like a very good start to tackling a very hard problem - how do you update a licence that needs updating to cope with advances in legal and technological barriers, but has been deemed as too restrictive by big business, and as having too many loopholes by free software developers?

/tech/IP | 18 Jan 2006 | #

Software Patent Reform in the USA

It appears the US Patent Office has announced that they will be reforming the patent system, with specific reference to Open-Source Software. It appears that OSDL, IBM, Novell, Red Hat and SourceForge.net are all going to be involved in providing a searchable database of open source code so patent examiners and the general public can search for prior art from the open source community when considering a patent application. What about Koders? Doesn't that do the job already? Anyhow...

This has already been reported everywhere.

I'm looking forward to what Weatherall might say on the topic. Specifically whether this implies that the Australian patent office might eventually follow suit for harmonisation reasons.

As for me, this is a good start, but the comment in one of the articles about speeding up patent awards doesn't sound good. With so many patents getting awarded, who is going to spend the effort to shoot down all the bad ones by prior art checks? The USPTO is looking for OSS community support for this. Is this just a devious attempt to divert the community to spend time defending against bad patents rather than innovating in code instead?

There's also reference to being able to receive emails on new patent applications - with the mindset of triple damages for wilfull un-licenced use of someone else's patent - who in their right mind would receive these emails? I don't read 10% of the emails I receive today - if I received all the US patent applications by email, and didn't read them, would I be liable for triple damages if I infringed? ick.

So, I guess I have some issues with this initiative. Any improvement is good, but the cards are still stacked in favour of big companies and not OSS developers working independantly. Is the future only one where we still have to rely upon the efforts of big OSS-friendly companies to do the patent defending for us?

/tech/IP | 11 Jan 2006 | #

Google Juice link

Free DNS is who I use for DNS. After a couple of years service I have to say that they're good.

/meta | 10 Jan 2006 | #

On the road again...

This is very good news! Mono can now be adopted as part of the GNOME platform proper.

And there was much rejoicing!

/tech/GNOME | 10 Jan 2006 | #

Restaurant recommendation - Adelaide

Last week we had a wonderful lunch at Cafe Palazzo in O'Connell Street, North Adelaide. On the same day that was followed up with dinner at The Rocks Grill at Oaks Plaza Pier hotel at Glenelg.

Both were first time visits, and both are recommended.

/social | 10 Jan 2006 | #

AUSFTA - One Year On

Kim Weatherall reports that Australia is the worse off after the first year of the Australia-US "Free" Trade Agreement.

No surprises there. And just wait for the PBS ammendment to be thrown away and we lose generic drug branding. Yay!

How is any of this in the national interest? If the boot was on the other foot, US citizens would be calling for impeachment.

Now is the time for the government to use the 6 month escape clause and end this lopsided agreement.

/tech/IP | 05 Jan 2006 | #

Big Bang

Just finished reading Big Bang : The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh over the Christmas break. While I immensely enjoyed The Code Book and Fermet's Last Theorem, I found this volume of 600 or so pages lacking. Not that Singh doesn't tell a good tale, but his explanation of the Big Bang theory left me more dissatisfied than when I started.

He does well in establishing the history of cosmology, but very much fails to convince this reader of the water-tightness of the theory. All of the "good physics stuff" is crammed into the last section of the book and feels rushed - there's more on the competing personalities than on the physics.

With grand statements suggesting that the theory of the big bang is the greatest scientific achievement of this past century I'd expect him to make his case with scientific exactness. Instead we're reminded that several holes exist in the theory, but that it's the best "scientific" theory we've got today. Sorry, you've got to do better than that. One thing that was very annoying was that he insisted that the notion of a Creator has now been debunked, while in the same breath saying there were several big unanswered questions that the theory fails to address.

Singh invokes Occam's Razor as he tells his tale, suggesting that a wind storm is the more likely culprit of a fallen tree that a pair of self-vapourising meteorites. True enough. But he then fails to recognise that alternate theories may exist which more accurately tell of the long-ago unwitnessed past. He considers the Big Bang to be a done deal - can I hear the echo of Thomas Watson and the world-wide need for only 5 computers?

Singh fails to make the distinction between experimental physics, and observational physics - you can't be absolutely sure unless you can witness an experiment. And you can't experiment on a universe scale, meaning there's automatically a lower confidence level in any theory that is in this class. This is a point that should have been made.

It's still a good read, just like his other books, but there are holes and it's a big rushed in the later chapters. I reakon it's about a 3 out of 5.

/tech/books | 03 Jan 2006 | #