Bush Walking 2007

Last weekend we made our way up to the Flinders Ranges, some 5 hours drive north of Adelaide. We based our stay in a quaint little town, Quorn - home of the Pichi Richi railway, at the local backpackers.

I must say it's very green up that way, much more than I would have expected. In the last month or so the rain they've had has quickly transformed the area. If I compare it to my last trip to Rawnsley's Bluff a few years ago, which was post-winter, I'd have to say it's much greener now.

So we visited quite a few places up that way, taking in some beautiful sights such as Alligator Gorge (picture above), and Hancocks Lookout (picture below). The camera spent more time out of the backpack than in - and now I have a couple of full CF cards to weed through for the gems :-)

I just love the Australian countryside - it's one of the reasons I haven't moved overseas permanently.

/travel | 26 May 2007 | #

LinuxSA May 2007 - How to Build an Embedded Asterisk IP-PBX

  Hi all,

  Time for the May meeting announcement (it's next Tuesday)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 15th May, 2007
   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:

   David Rowe will be giving a presentation on How to Build an Embedded
   Asterisk IP-PBX.

   David is an engineer who is developing open telephony hardware and
   software full time.  At the moment he is working on open IP-PBX
   hardware and an open source line echo canceller, plus a few smaller
   projects.

  Finding the Venue and Parking:

   You can park either beneath or next to the SSABSA building.  If you
   are driving west along Greenhill road, you can turn left into the
   driveway if you are going slow enough to notice the sign and turn in
   time :-), or you can turn left at the next road, and left again to
   go along the street behind the building to access the carpark that
   way.

   If you try to enter the building from street level but the doors are
   locked, walk down the stairs and use the lift in the below-ground
   carpark.

  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 | 08 May 2007 | #

Australia's Do Not Call Register opens

Finally Australia's anti-telemarketer Do Not Call Register website opens.

Hopefully this will stop the flood of phone calls from telecommunications companies with call-centres in Mumbai asking me to switch carriers during dinner.

Attribution: Our ABC - even though they got the URL wrong :-)

/tech/misc | 03 May 2007 | #

Dynamic Support for Scripting Languages

Microsoft today announced 1st class support for Dynamic Scripting Languages for the .NET Framework. That is, they're adding first-class support for dynamic languages on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) - they've coined it the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).

Currently the target languages are Python, JavaScript (EcmaScript 3.0), Visual Basic and Ruby. I'm not sure if this is big P Python, or just improving the integration of IronPython.

This is important, even though it's just a Microsoft announcement for their Windows platform. The Mono project will no doubt be inspired by Silverlight to raise the bar again. Looks like we're going to get multi-language, cross-platform, client-side immersive web applications - this is AJAX++.

Links:

• Jim Huginin's announcement
• Miguel de Icaza's prophetic post
• Microsoft's Silverlight
• IronPython

/tech/code | 01 May 2007 | #