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 | #