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 | #