LinuxSA July 2008 - Linux & FOSS Adoption: A case study, road map and story

  Hi all,

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

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm on Tuesday, 15th July, 2008
   Where:  EXCOM Education
           Ground Floor
           191 Pulteney Street
           Adelaide SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Piers Rowan will be giving a talk on "Linux & FOSS Adoption: A case
   study, road map and story":

   Many people use Linux as their preferred desktop. Many web sites
   are hosted on Linux. But why would a "run of the mill" business
   adopt Linux across desktops and servers alike?

   Just over two short years ago Extrastaff had two offices with a
   dependency on Windows systems for desktops and servers. Today
   Extrastaff has nearly 10 offices in two countries and a big part of
   this growth has been partly due to Linux and FOSS. Any business can
   benefit from the lessons learned in this process.

   This presentation will cover the various stages of the process,
   including:

   * The background decisions and objections
   * How to talk to management about adoption issues
   * Change management from the user perspective
   * Roll your own: making your own rules & a point of difference with
     your customers
   * Making the System Administrator's job easier
   * What went wrong, what to do when things go wrong
   * Capturing innovation

   The areas which Extrastaff uses Linux & FOSS

   * Desktops
   * Internet Kiosks 
   * CRM
   * Web site hosting
   * Candidate management
   * Document storage
   * Domain controllers
   * Content filtering
   * Email / Webmail / etc
   * Payroll
   * Billing system
   * Messaging Services

   The presentation is aimed at being interesting to everyone
   interested in Linux, and also owners and managers who would like to
   hear about how they can benefit from this excellent business tool.

   About Piers Rowan:

   I am a Director and shareholder in Extrastaff Recruitment.
   Extrastaff is a 2nd generation family business which my brother and
   I purchased a little over two years ago. Previous to holding this
   position I was split between the roles of Marketing & IT Management.
   Coming from the technical side I am always keen to tinker and get
   something up and running and having the marketing background means
   that I am always focused on what benefit the tinkering will have on
   the customer or business.

   I have been using/breaking computers since the ZX Spectrum and did
   my time in the Windows 98 trenches. I'm running Ubuntu at the moment
   but have used Fedora on my laptops quite a bit. For servers I've
   used Red Hat 9.0, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora and the occasional Solaris
   and BSD. Most of my "productive" time is spent writing software that
   is critical to my business. I first started using Linux in 1999.

  Pizza:

   We'll order in pizza to have at EXCOM after the presentation.  Bring
   $8 if you are hungry.

  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 Jul 2008 | #

Very Sad

It's a very sad situation when whinging leads to other people asking for their feed to be removed from ploa.

Think before you post. The world is listening.

tech/linux-australia | 10 Jul 2008 | #

ploa poll on which Mikal feed to use :-)

To answer one of life's toughest questions - Should ploa use Mikal's blather or non-blather feed? ploa is now running an on-line poll :-)

Vote now!

[Aside: I'm using yourfreepoll because it's the first one I found when googling - but be warned, there's a google ad over there so if you're sensitive to such things don't go there]

tech/linux-australia | 04 Jul 2008 | #

NextGen Broadband delivery in Australia

Great article about the Australian government paying for fiber installation - asking the question whether it is good stewardship for the government spend $4.7 billion to deliver a slower than ADSL2+ broadband solution that will cost consumers more than they pay for ADSL2+ today, and in the process giving Telstra another monopoloistic position - http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/FTTN---piracy-and-porn-G7SM4?OpenDocument

Can we have some common sense, please?

tech | 04 Jul 2008 | #

Perl's CGI is broken

  use strict;
  use warnings;
  use CGI;
  use Test::More qw( no_plan );

  my $cgi = new CGI;

  $cgi->param('foobar', 6);
  ok( $cgi->param("foobar") eq '6', "6 is a magical number" );

  $cgi->param('foobar', 4);
  ok( $cgi->param("foobar") eq '4', "And 4 is a favourite" );

  my %hash = ( "random_key" => '13' );

  $cgi->param('foobar', $hash{'randomKey'} );
  ok( $cgi->param("foobar") eq '13',
      "but a simple typo in a hash key shouldn't be so hard to find" ); # Fail
  ok( $cgi->param("foobar") eq '4',
      "so it hasn't changed but there's no complaint" );

  $cgi->param('foobar', $hash{'random_key'} );
  ok( $cgi->param("foobar") eq '13', "The key is to get the key right :-)" );

What sort of deranged API silently ignores calling a setter with an undef? Surely a warning or exception could have been thrown? Or perhaps setting the value to undef, or to the empty string, or even "You messed up, Idiot!". But quietly swallowing the error and leaving the value unchanged is really bad form.

This sort of thing doesn't rate well on Rusty's API design advice: How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse?. Grrr.

tech/code/Perl | 20 Jun 2008 | #

Zookeepr - Hearding the Elephants

Awesome! - Zookeepr is seeing some open-development lovin'.

tech/linux-australia/lca2009 | 16 Jun 2008 | #

LinuxSA June 2008 - Open Street Map (OSM)

  Hi all,

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

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm on Tuesday, 17th June, 2008
   Where:  EXCOM Education
           Ground Floor
           191 Pulteney Street
           Adelaide SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Adrian Billiau will be giving a talk on Open Street Map (OSM), a
   free editable map of the whole world, made by people like you.

   The presentation will include:
   - about the OSM project
   - tools used by the project
   - advice on contributing, collecting data, uploading data, and using
     JavaOSM
   - a demonstration

   Adrian is a 3rd year Surveying student at the University of South
   Australia.

  Pizza:

   We'll order in pizza to have at EXCOM after the presentation.  Bring
   $8 if you are hungry.

  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 | 11 Jun 2008 | #

The Barossa Half

Today I was able to tick off another *huge* life goal - completing the Barossa Half Marathon in Tanunda, SA - I wish I knew ahead of time about that hill that I had to run up 3 times! Ouch - they didn't provide an elevation guide online. Despite that it was a perfect day out - cloudy, overcast, not too hot, with friendly country folk running the event. And what was a wonderful surprise was being able to complete the event in 1:59:50 - just shy of the magical 2 hour mark.

The scary thing is the next tick. I'm not sure my knees and ankles will allow what my mind wants to do :)

Update:Thanks Stoyan for the photo :-)

exercise | 27 May 2008 | #

LinuxSA May 2008 - LinuxMCE

  Hi all,

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

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm on Tuesday, 20th May, 2008
   Where:  EXCOM Education
           Ground Floor
           191 Pulteney Street
           Adelaide SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   David Wolverton will be giving a talk on LinuxMCE.  LinuxMCE is a
   free, open source add-on to Kubuntu including a 10' UI, complete
   whole-house media solution with PVR + distributed media, and the
   most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to
   use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer
   skills.

  Pizza:

   We'll order in pizza to have at EXCOM after the presentation.  Bring
   $8 if you are hungry.

  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

| 15 May 2008 | #

LinuxSA April 2008 - One Laptop Per Child

  Hi all,

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

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm on Tuesday, 15th April, 2008 
   Where:  EXCOM Education
           Ground Floor
           191 Pulteney Street
           Adelaide SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Joel Stanley will be talking about his Adventures working for OLPC:
   baking laptops in a pie warmer, an impromptu weekend trip to
   Romania, being interviewed by Red Symons and making the front page
   of Slashdot.  After the talk there will be XO's for all to play with
   -- the best way to get a feel for the collaborative software they
   run.

   Joel is an undergraduate Computer System Engineering student at the
   University of Adelaide. He has a passion for microelectronics,
   embedded systems, open source software and cool toys.  In 2007, he
   spent 10 weeks working for One Laptop per Child (OLPC --
   wiki.laptop.org) at their offices on MIT's campus in Cambridge,
   Massachusetts.

  Pizza:

   We'll order in pizza to have at EXCOM after the presentation.

  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 | 09 Apr 2008 | #

No going back

Well, there's no going back now - I went and registered for the Barossa Half Marathon today. 47 days to go. Can someone tell me why I'm doing this to myself? :-)

exercise | 07 Apr 2008 | #

LinuxSA March 2008 - Games games games!

  Hi all,

  Time for the March meeting announcement (it's next Tuesday).  Please
  note that the venue has changed.

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm on Tuesday, 18th March, 2008
   Where:  EXCOM Education
           Ground Floor
           191 Pulteney Street
           Adelaide SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Tim Ansell will be talking about Games, Games, Games!:

   Come and find out about some of the cool and interesting things that
   are happening with FOSS and computer games. Including but not
   limited to, commercial game companies dirty secrets, FOSS games  
   which are better than commercial games and how FOSS gaming is the
   final step to taking over the world.

   Tim is an avid FOSS game developer, founding the Thousand Parsec
   project 7 years ago in 2001. Originally getting involved in FOSS
   development via a game project called WorldForge, he now believes
   that games are a very important part of the FOSS ecosystem.

   Tim has given talks about FOSS gaming at a number of conferences and
   organised the Gaming Miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2007 and 2008.

  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 Mar 2008 | #

The Ghosts of Conference Past, 2009

This past weekend was The Ghosts of Conference Past meeting at the location of linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart, Tasmania. For me it was a chance to meet with Ben Powell and Leah Duncan, the lead organisers of next year's conference, along with the rest of their team - Garry, Josh "A", Josh "B", Michael E, Kevin and John (I think I got that all right).

Boy! Was it a busy weekend! I flew in on Thursday night, and was met by Michael E at the airport, and took me off to the hotel - via Mt Wellington. If you ever get some free time in Hobart, it's worth having a look. I hear that there's running and cycing tracks leading up the mountain - something some of our regular LCAers might indeed be interested in doing come next January.

The rest of the crowd came in late that night, but I had already hit the sack. Next morning over breakfast the postmortem of Melbourne's conference began - with lots of reminiscing of all the fun we had only a few months ago.

We then met with Ben and Leah and the crew for a facilities tour around University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay where the conference proper will be held. The usual checking out of keynote venue, lecture theatres, tutorial rooms, "secret conference business" rooms, eateries, networking points etc etc etc was had, along with the unravelling of some of the wonderful secret plans lca2009 will hold for us.

After that it was onto accommodation of various grades and costs, walking between the various options to trial run what it will be like in January. We then had some lunch and time to get to know the Tassie team a little better and to start dumping conference knowledge to the team. We continued face to face discussions all afternoon that then continued into the night over food and a few drinks, making for a tired Michael at the end.

The alarm clock rang far too early on Saturday morning for my liking, although it was entirely necessary as we had an early start - lots to get through on the agenda. Breakfast with the other ghosts was highlighted by Steve's talk of deep frying baby ducks, and Donna's excessive coffee consumption.

Saturday was an all-day meeting as we went through the conference line item by line item, with plenty of hints, tricks and tips from previous conference organisers. We talked through things that worked well in the past, things that bombed, and encouraged the Hobart team as they shared some of their plans. By Saturday night we all were simply exhausted - we broke off into a couple of groups with some heading out for curry and Open Day discussions, while others stayed at the hotel and called it a night early on. Both the curry and the conversation was flavoursome, leaving our brains and bellys full.

Sunday was rinse, lather, repeat with more face to face meetings, followed by looking at more venue options. After that it was off to the airport for the trip home, via Melbourne. I slept on both flights, only waking up as the aircrew prepared for landing. An exhausting weekend with little sleep, but a very exciting time seeing what lca2009 will bring - hopefully the weekend helped the Hobart team in their preparation to bring us one fantastic conference in January 2009.

tech/linux-australia/lca2009 | 11 Mar 2008 | #

LinuxSA February 2008 - The Winter of my Disconnect - Operating Autonomously in an ever more connected world

  Hi all,

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

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 19th February, 2008
   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:

   Mike Taht will be talking about "The Winter of my Disconnect -
   Operating Autonomously in an ever more connected world".

   Mike Taht has worn all sorts of hats in the computer industry - he's
   been a systems programmer, system administrator, oil boy, serial
   entrepreneur (co-founding an ISP in 1994), database programmer
   inside Borland and Sybase, embedded Linux hacker for places like
   Montavista and Timesys, voip dude (various), and works on the Linux
   DAW, ardour.org, in what remains of his spare time.

   On the side he plays piano and chases women, and has even written a
   song about the GPL.

   Currently, he's recovering from working at one too many startups,
   traveling the world, and recoiling from what the web is becoming.

  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

tech/LinuxSA | 13 Feb 2008 | #

LCA2008 Days Four and Five

Thursday

The morning started with Stormy Peters' keynote on Would you do it again for free?. It was a thought-provoking keynote on the motivation behind OSS development. Do open-source developers lose motivation once companies pay them? Once they leave that job, do they continue doing open-source development? Stormy suggests they don't lose heart, but suggests that hackers may move to another of their itch projects if they no longer are paid to hack on the original.

Then it was onto Clinton Roy to talk about Antlr. This was useful for the fact that using YACC and Bison can be black magic, so having another tool in the toolbox is great. Would have been better if we'd gone as far as generating a grammer and hooking it up to show the ease of building something real end-to-end. Tutorials are best if they kick-start usage.

After lunch was the usual high-quality Tridge talk on ctdb. Interesting to see the scaling of Samba instances being almost linear after this work, as well as various tridge hack discussions.

Next was Leslie Hawthorn on the Google Summer of Code program. While being an interesting talk in and of itself, what I really liked hearing about were the developers who were bootstrapped by the program continuing into open-source contribution afterwards. This is a wonderful outcome for OSS. Thanks Google!

Next was Michael Smith with Gstreamer followed by Dtrace by Peter Karlsson. This last one was more of a vendor talk, and would have been better if the presenter didn't spend 20 minutes trying to get video output working on a Solaris/MacBookPro combination, followed by failing to get OpenOffice to display his slides full-screen. That and the 15+ typos in the slides didn't reflect well on Sun or on Dtrace. The talk had so much potential, but the most useful part was the questions by SystemTap developers in the audience - hopefully both projects will benefit was better understanding of each other.

Dinner with Mikal and Steve tonight out at some random Italian place - quite nice food to go with the excellent company. Of course, after dinner on Lygon Street there is no better thing to do than to follow up with sorbet from Casa Del Gelato ice-creamery. Walking down Swanston found us Andrew Chalmers with friends Sam(??) and Amanda. Good hilarity followed, along with a kind offer from Sam and Amanda to bed down on their lounge room floor to save me from the backpackers. Some people are just genuinely kind - I'd never met them before, so their offer was very unexpected. Thank you for your offer and all the best for your trip Europe bound soon.

Friday

Wonderful keynote by Anthony Baxter on Python 3. Anthony presents well, and the confirmation of a supported 2.X series during the early days of 3.X deployment was appreciated. Glad to see that the Python project is taking the opportunity to clean up the inevitable cruft that accumulates in the language and reduce it so hopefully it stays small. Of course I'm biased with python being my favourite language right now, but I found this the best of the keynotes this year.

I went to Ralph Giles talk on Ogg Design Internals, followed by Paul McKenney on efforts to put concurrency into C and C++. Paul is a clever cookie, and did a great job of explaining how the C/C++ standards don't guarantee sequential execution as most people subconsciously assume, with the result being pain and suffering where you don't expect. Fortunately Paul has been there at the standards meetings representing our community's interests well.

That brings us to the afternoon with Keith Packard talking on fixing various X limitations. He started the talk with an Intel announcement surrounding their release of full developer documatation for the Intel 965. Wonderful news! Should mean that advancement on that platform should skyrocket even further, and hopefully spur the other graphics chip manufacturers into providing better support for the developers who generate end-user sales! But I'm preaching to the choir now...

Last talk of the conference for me was Eric de Castro Lopo on Library API Design. Another important topic, but I would have loved more depth.

Moving on, we went to lightening talks and conference close. We had the usual bag of both ok and excellent lightening talks - some of the Gaming Miniconf lightening talks could have been repeated to the larger audience to great effect. Bling bling bling. Notable was Pia announcing OLPC Australia, hopefully making a difference here with that excellent project.

Conference close was a time to reflect on all the cool stuff that the week contained, and gave the chance to wrap up all the loose ends. While Open Day follows on Saturday, the official conference close is Friday afternoon. We also got to meet Ben - and found out that the conference is going to Tasmania for the first time! Cool! Less than 400 sleeps to go now :)

Jeff Waugh went on to announce the transfogrimifation of the Rusty Wrench Award into (hopefully I get this right) the Australian Open Source Awards. It'll be great if the whole community get behind this and it becomes something truely representative of our community here in Australia. Website launch occuring soon.

Finally was the Google Conference Party. A traditional bbq stand-around and chew the fat s'more with conference attendees. A good time was had by all - thankyou Google and Leslie Hawthorn for organising it. Finally two old and tired previous conf organisers wandered back to Casa Del Gelato for that last sorbet of the week, contemplating with great expectations what Tasmania will do with linux.conf.au 2009 next year.

And for the absolutely final thought, a big say thank you to Donna and her team for putting on a very solid and fun conference! Thank you LCA2008 organising team! We know it's been hard-work, but we appreciate your sacrifices to serve the Australian Linux, Free and Open-Source Software community!

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 02 Feb 2008 | #

LCA2008 Day Three

Wednesday

I forgot to mention that I had a great time last night talking to Keith Packard, Jon Corbet and Paul McKenney at the Speakers Dinner. Talking was both technical and social - I really enjoy catching up with these guys whenevr I can get to a conference where they are.

Wednesday morning started with the Bruce Schneier keynote on Reconceptionalising Security - explaining why both the feeling of security and the reality of security are both important. Introduced how the Lemon Market applies not to just used-cars but also to security products and technology in general. Mary has more good stuff to say on his talk.

Actually, before the keynote we had a small issue with chairs not being setup for the keynote. Fortunately the OSS community here in Australia came to the rescue - suddenly 20 people dropped everything to set up 600 chairs in a hurry. Seeing Leon Brooks rolling up his sleaves and just getting the job done was inspiring - thank you Leon.

After that I went to Jon Oxer's tutorial on Second Life and hardware integration for Linux. This was really cool - not just hardware interfacing to Linux over USB, but controlling Second Life objects via the hardware, and then triggering real-life from inside Second Life. A talk to open your eyes to the possibilities. I bought the Arduino kit Jon assembled and plan to play around with that s'more. So far, this has been the conference highlight talk for me. What was fun during the tute was getting this going on Linux running under virtualisation on Mac OS X - just another level of indirection :-)

From then it was off to Jon Corbet's talk on what's happening in the Linux Kernel, and where things are likely to be going. Being primarily user-space oriented, it's great to get this summary at LCA. It's interesting also to see how the linux kernel development process morphs to continue to scale - sociologically very interesting.

Then it was the OLPC report from Jim Getys. This wasn't your usual technical talk, but rather seeing how this technology is making a difference in the lives of the world's most disadvantaged children. I don't think anyone would have left this talk not touched.

From there I sat in on Bdale's talk on Peace, Love and Rockets (link). Bdald was his interesting self - I have no idea how someone so busy can find the time to have such interesting hobbies. He's building his own altimeter because the commercial offerings don't meet his needs - a standard case of scratching an itch. Thanks Bdale for inspiring us to not accept things the way they are.

Wednesday night was the Penguin Dinner. This was at Melbourne Markets and was the most relaxed conference dinner yet. It also was a very cool idea. Spent the night talking to Mikal Still and Steven Hanley - also had a good chat with a husband and wife (whose name I cannot remember) about the conference and where it has been and where it should go. We had a good fun night. I also ate too much sorbet, but am glad I did :-)

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 01 Feb 2008 | #

LCA2008 Day Two

Tuesday

I started Tuesday by going to the GNOME Miniconf in the morning. We had a talk about Conduit by John Stowers, which showed off the potential of having a generic mechanism to sync devices. It's quite nice to be able to visualise data sources and sinks, and to hook them up visually. I'm hoping that many data connectors get written so that the ease of moving data around between web2.0 applications.

Then it was Martin Sevior talking about bringing Sugar concepts (from OLPC) into the desktop. We ended up spending lots of time talking about collaboration and presence - projects like Telepathy and Empathy - to achieve our dreams. Again very nice stuff with great potential.

In the afternoon I moved over to the Gaming Miniconf, which was a lot of fun. Since OSDC 2006 I've been a big fan of pyget, so sitting in on a tutorial by Alex Holkner and Richard Jones on the topic was something I was very much looking forward to. The tute was writing a cross-platform space invaders-style game in python in less than 40 minutes! Quite amazing what can be achieved in such a short time. It helped that Alex types very fast! :-)

Brett Nash then spoke on using Enlightenment for 2d Games. Then it was back to Richard Jones for an intro to PyWeek. I wish I had the time to commit a week of evenings to try it out.

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 30 Jan 2008 | #

Keynotes now for your streaming pleasure!

Just a quick public service announcement - if you're not at the best technical conference in the world today, you can watch the action live streamed to your computer. See Steve Walsh's post.

Thanks LCA and AARNET for making this happen!

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 30 Jan 2008 | #

LCA2008 Days Zero and One

Sunday

Arriving in MEL at around 3pm on Sunday meant that I got to survey the lay of the land ahead of the unofficial conference opening on Monday (otherwise known as Miniconf days). It looks like I wasn't alone, with 80 or so others wandering around the conference venue. Rusty's & Kelly's Newcomers talk on Sunday afternoon was so full that they had to stop people going in.

But now I'm already jumping ahead of myself. I decided this year to stay at the recommended backpackers, which I have to say is interesting. The benefits are that I get a 25 minute walk to the conference venue each day, whereas the problems are that they don't servce breakfast until 8am (too late) and it's a bit too rowdy to get much sleep. Mea culpa.

Back to the conference venue - Rusty led the masses off to the pub, so it was natural to follow. Much socialising continued, including talking quite a bit to Alli, Hugh, George and Tim. I find it really interesting to find out what people have been doing with themselves since the last conference when we chatted.

Monday

Like I said, not much sleep was had, which was a bad thing leading up to my talk on Source Code Integrity and Protection with the sample toy implementation of zign. Fortunately it all went well except for a brown-bag bug that I showed everyone during the demo part of the talk. Still, I got some good feedback from people, so hopefuly the talk achieved it's pupose by making people think about the unspoken assurance of the source code they release.

More catching up with people - Andrew, Grand Pajamaran Donna, Peter, Steve, Stewart, Grant, Eric, Jon and many others. Catching up with the community from all around Australia is one of the big benefits of LCA.

The day was really a jump around the conference as I sat in on various miniconfs - Fedora for Eugene Teo's Writing System Tap Scripts which was excellent and made me realise that a whole class of difficult problems are now potentially solveable, Security for Guy Gershoni's Security Programming in Java and Damien Miller on OpenSSH which did nothing but increase my confidence in OpenSSH's design and team that are supporting it, and Debian for Martin Kraftt's Version Control Systems for Debian packaging. My brain is already full, and its only Monday :-)

The evening was spent out at the University Hotel with Eric, Dennis and Grant chatting about OCaml, writing yet another text editor, multi-national companies that move their software development offshore, Fourier transforms, low pass filters and music genres. Good food and company and a good time out!

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 29 Jan 2008 | #

It's not MS Comic Sans!

I can't let this accusation by Mary go. My presentation was using Marker Felt, not MS Comic Sans :-)

Sheesh :-)

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 29 Jan 2008 | #

Back In The Saddle Again

Yay! This morning, after a 2 week hiatus, I ran a slow 10km to dust off the cobwebs. The injury to my Lateral Collateral Ligament (LCL) in my left knee seems to have self-healed - the body feels pretty good after the run.

In the past week I did follow sjh's advice and do a little low impact cross-training, by getting back on the bike. Of course just exercising by itself is not enough - I have to geekify things - so I fitted a GSC-10 to my mtb so I could get cadence data. The mistake I made was to start Googling for target cadence ranges - let's just say I have some work to do in this area :-)

It's good to be back exercising again. A 2 week break was about 3 weeks too long.

exercise | 14 Jan 2008 | #

LinuxSA January 2008 - Running a business - the Linux Open Source Way

  Hi all,

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

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 15th January, 2008
   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:

   Laz Davila will be talking about "Running a business - the Linux
   Open Source way":

   Can Linux and Open Source tools "run a business"?

   What are the advantages and disadvantages?

   This talk presents the case study of Davtec, a local software
   development and IT support business.

   Davtec's "back-office" is made up of a collection of Linux servers -
   with staff using windows workstations and a variety of proprietary
   and open source tools.

   This presentation will give a quick rundown of the tools used to run
   the business (with interactive demonstrations of any tools of
   interest):

   - Samba / Openldap as the domain controller
   - Qmail / Clam AV / Spamassassin / Squirrelmail - Complete
     mail solution
   - Asterisk / PHP PBX interface - VOIP telephony
   - dotProject - Project Management
   - Twiki - Knowledgebase and Quality Management System 
   - Sugar - Client Relationship Management solution
   - Journyx - Timesheet system solution
   - OpManager - Network monitoring solution
   - SVN / WebSVN - Version Control
   - Eventum - Issue tracking

   Based on this, and on experiences setting up clients with Linux and
   Windows servers, the presentation will offer a set of "lessons
   learnt" - what works, what doesn't, and what we would do
   differently.

   Laz Davila is the director of Davtec, a small business he started
   four years ago, which focuses on providing systems and software
   engineering services, but also deals with IT solutions and support
   for local businesses.

   Since graduating in 1985 from Adelaide University, Laz has taken on
   many roles in software development and IT, including: software
   engineering; systems engineering; IT support and project management.

   Through his career, Laz has "grown up" with Unix and many of its
   variants, such as AT&T Sys V, BSD, SCO, Solaris, Minix and most
   recently Linux. With a "hands on" attitude and an appreciation of
   the elegance of Unix based operating systems, back in 2004 Laz
   decided to underpin his new business with a "Linux based
   back-office". His talk tonight presents lessons learnt from this
   exercise, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of
   introducing Linux into the business environment (where Microsoft is
   still "king").

  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 | 09 Jan 2008 | #

Day 4 of rest

I was a little silly recently in doing two 16km runs in 6 days - it all felt good at the time, but there were consequences. I ended up with a left-knee ligament strain, meaning that I'm taking a week or so off from running to let things return to normal (hoping that things return to normal by themselves so that I don't have to seek medical treatment :-). I'm finding it _really_ difficult to take a break - today is only day 4 - and I've got another 5 days of rest to go. I need those endorphins I get from running. Aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhhh :-(

exercise | 08 Jan 2008 | #

Planet linux.conf.au 2008 - Feeds welcomed!

LCA2008 Grand Pajamaran Donna Benjamin recently put out a call on [chat/mel8ourne] for LCA2008 attendees to add their feeds to Planet LCA 2008 by emailing planet at spanner linux dot org do au (just remove the spanner from the works).

I'd like to second that call, but also add that if you can provide a RSS/Atom feed that is LCA 2008-specific then please do so, e.g. my regular feed is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/index.rss, but the feed up on plca2008 is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/linux-australia/lca2008/index.rss (that's with pybloxsom, but a similar scheme should be applicable for your blogging system of choice).

Thanks, and see you at linux.conf.au 2008!

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 05 Jan 2008 | #

24 days until LCA2008

linux.conf.au 2008 is only 24 days away! That's 24 days until the security wisdom of Bruce can be heard in Melbourne, Australia.

But wait, there's more! :-) Have a look at the whole enchilada - another fun-filled, brain-exhausting, week-long party for the Australasian Free and Open-Source Community!

Bring it on.

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 03 Jan 2008 | #

Garmin Forerunner 305

This year for Christmas I received a Garmin Forerunner 305 from my lovely wife. It's a GPS receiver with built-in heart-rate monitor - it does just about everything my existing Polar F11 does, but gives me the added bonus of GPS data as well as Open-Source accessibility. Both GPSBabel and garmintools support my device through a pretty standard usb interface which is fantastic! (as opposed to the Polar which uses an audio interface, and is currently Windows-only :-(

The open-sourceness accessibility is very important to me, and now being able to extract the raw data easily is a huge win that justifies the changeover price by itself. I've already scripted up a nice interface, and am exploring some pre-existing solutions too - stay tuned for a later blog post. While it's early days - I've only been on 2 runs so far - the heart-rate monitor seems less susceptible to spikes which is a bonus - I don't like looking at the watch and seeing that it thinks that I'm working at 190bpm when I _know_ I'm only at 140bpm.

Getting fit is really quite a bit easier when you have gadgets to distract you :-)

exercise | 29 Dec 2007 | #

16km Run Goal - Completed

Yesterday I broke through a distance barrier that's hung over my head for 3 weeks - running 16kms. The barrier wasn't physical so much as mental - getting my head in the right place to run that distance. Just like golf, running is only 25% physical - the rest is keeping up the concentration.

24 hours after the run and the body has held up remarkably well. I'll take a couple of days off now for Christmas, before starting towards the next challenge.

GPS points plotted thanks to Gmaps Pedometer.

exercise | 24 Dec 2007 | #

World Domination, part 317

Cool, I've just been publicly called a shadowy underworld evil genius.
Now I just need to work on getting that on a business card :-P

tech/linux-australia | 18 Dec 2007 | #

Dead Drinking Bird

Sadly, office cricket, or over-zealous cleaners have resulted in this mess after the weekend:

:-(

tech/gadgets | 17 Dec 2007 | #

The latest addition to my desk

Ever since the days of Bugs Bunny cartoons I've wanted one of these :-)

tech/gadgets | 14 Dec 2007 | #

Biometric Insecurity

A very nice succinct blog about why we should be cautious about biometric authentication schemes. It's a useful read.

I've been discussing this with Ken for the last couple of years - security systems are only as secure as the weakest link in the system. If your biometric reader (fingerprint, retinal scan, DNA fingerprint, whatever) just dumps raw data over some data bus, who says you can't do a man-in-the-middle data capture and replay attack? How about your storage of the data? How about the security of that database? And the operating system on which that database sits? How about protection from unauthorised modification? How about that data falling into the hands of unauthorised users? We've already seen databases with the records of millions of citizens "disappear". Given that our judiciary holds biometric data in very high esteem, who will guarantee its integrity?

I'm all for improving security, but the illusion of security only harms the innocent. It seems to me that many biometric system proposals are susceptible to the Bribing the Doorkeeper on the Great Wall of China-kind of attack.

tech/code | 05 Dec 2007 | #

LinuxSA December 2007 -Christmas Dinner Breakup

 Hi all,

 As is the tradition, for the December meeting of LinuxSA we go
 somewhere for dinner (no meeting topic, no speaker).  Please register
 (see below) so I can let the restaurant know how many are coming.

 Last year we had it down south (Blackwood), so this year we'll be
 pleasing the northerners.

 The important info:

 When:   7:00pm on Tuesday, 18th December, 2007

 Where:  Mawson Lakes Hotel
         http://www.mawsonlakeshotel.com.au/
         10 Main Street, Mawson Lakes

 Who:    Any Linux-minded people who want to eat with us!

 RSVP:   Monday, 17th December, 2007
         http://www.linuxsa.org.au/meetings/

 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 | 05 Dec 2007 | #

Fourth Goal Reached

The fourth exercise goal has now been reached. Another 5% body weight reduction, but this time it took a quite a bit longer - 14 weeks. Partially I've been slack, and partially it's a lot harder once you approach goal weight.

But now I leave weight behind as a measuring stick and start setting goals based around my running speed. I have some big improving to do in this area :-)

exercise | 29 Nov 2007 | #

pyglet enters public beta

Ever since Richard Jones introduced pyglet at OSDC 2006, I've been waiting expectingly for it to get to beta. Well, that day has come!. As the webpage says, pyglet is a cross-platform python windowing and multimedia library for Python - something cool to play with. Congratulations to all involved!

tech/code/Python | 09 Nov 2007 | #

Mac OS X Leopard - fom a Developers Perspective

A couple of interesting links for information about Mac OS 10.5 Leopard for developers:

• Ars Technica
• Matt Gemmell's Overview

tech/mac | 30 Oct 2007 | #

Ubuntu 7.10 on a Mac Book Pro using Parallels

If you're attempting to get Ubuntu 7.10 running via Parallels on a Mac Book Pro, don't specify more than 512MB RAM for your VM. Unless of course you like modprobe failing on boot with mysterious hangs while CUPS tries to start.

tech/mac | 22 Oct 2007 | #

LinuxSA November 2007 - Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX)

  Hi all,

  Time for the November meeting announcement (it's over a month
  away!)...

  The usual details:

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

   Peter Hutterer will be talking about his research with the
   Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX).  MPX is a modification of the X server
   to support multiple mice and keyboards in X. It provides users with
   one cursor per device and one keyboard focus per keyboard. Each
   cursor can operate independently. MPX is the first multicursor
   windowing system and allows two-handed interaction with legacy
   applications, but also the creation of innovative applications and
   user interfaces.

   Peter is a PhD student at the Wearable Computer Lab at the
   University of South Australia.

  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 | 18 Oct 2007 | #

The Future of Software Development

Nice summary article on The Future of Software Development. Worth a read.

In summary, the article suggests that the future holds:

• Modern programming languages, with better abstraction,
• Awesome libraries allowing us to build systems quickly,
• Agile development methodologies, enabling quick development with certainty, while bringing the fun back for the developers.

Of course the thing that the article doesn't mention is open-source. That really adds to the libraries point well, but at a higher abstraction level. Building systems where dependable open-source components can be used for your infrastructure - allowing you to concentrate on your value-add - is a huge win for our industry. Commoditisation is allowing open-source systems to leap-frog proprietary offerings, and is better from an integration perpspective - tailor or fix to meet your requirements.

My new day job is far more about this than it has been previously - using open-source where it makes sense and building upon it. It's more than fresh air - it's a personal revolution!

tech/sweng | 18 Oct 2007 | #

Shell redirection

The standard idiom of redirecting stdout and stderr to /dev/null is of course:

          frobnicate 1>/dev/null 2>&1

What is lesser known is that this can be short-cutted to:

          frobnicate &>/dev/null

tech/code/shell | 09 Oct 2007 | #

Living in the 70's

Today's song of the day: I'm living in the 70's :-)

exercise | 08 Oct 2007 | #