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 | #