Planet linux.conf.au 2008

Colin Charles: foss.my open for participation

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:55:25 +0000

What started as some chat about having a one-day event, after MyGOSSCon, on the 26^th of September 2008, about open source, has turned into a full-blown conference, to be pulled off in about a month, affectionately known as foss.my. Its being held at APIIT from November 8-9 2008, and is touted to be the most technical conference of its kind in South East Asia.

We want people to participate as speakers, delegates, sponsors, or volunteers. This is a grassroots event, and its purely non-commercial - no vendor talks, or marketing gimmicks are permitted. Largely the motto is very foss.in/linux.conf.au-ish - both community events I truly enjoy going to, and wouldn’t miss for the world.

The Call for Participation is open till midnight October 10 2008, so if I were you, I’d rush and submit some topics. If you’re nearby - Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, the rest of South East Asia, it would be silly not to show up, with all the budget carriers there are today (maybe next time, we’ll get an official airline ;)).

Conferences must have themes, and foss.my is no exception. We believe the world is just awesome, and there’s so much FOSS goodness that can be shared with others. So if you’re involved in something free and open source related, its only sensible that you submit a talk topic. Share the knowledge, foster more open source development growth and contributions.

There are expected to be talks on topics such as: hacking on phpMyAdmin (a Google Summer of Code Project, run under the MySQL project), MyMeeting (a Malaysian government open source project), Asterisk, Django, CSS, source control, OSS Development on OS X, PHP, open source databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.), and the list goes on. There will be four great keynotes, and lightning talk sessions (so everyone can share).

Just show us your awesomeness. Read more from Aizat, Khairil, and Izhar.

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: Linux users of Victoria - October 7

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:48:07 +0000

Linux users of Victoria October meeting is tomorrow night!

It snuck up on me what with Software Freedom day, International travel and the fog of jet lag!

2 excellent talks lined up

Stewart Smith talking about Drizzle - new database derived from the MySQL codebase.

Ben Balbo talking about streaming media in a sneak peak of his OSDC talk to be delivered at this year's OSDC conf in Sydney.

Our venue is the Evan Burge Lecture Theatre at Trinity College, Parkville.

Full details online: http://luv.asn.au/2008/10

Admission is Free, and all are welcome.

Various peoples tend meet to eat before or after the meeting

Before: 6pm - Classic Curry House, Elizabeth St, Melbourne

After: 9.15 pm-ish - Maria's Trattoria, Peel St, North Melbourne

Hugh Blemings

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:25:37 +0000

Detaching Kernel Drivers w/libusb

Done some tinkering with libusb this last week or so in order to get the USBmicro boards that Jeremy and I bought going.

More on the reason for the tinkering later but in the process I discovered the kernels HID driver happily seizes the device on plugin - not unreasonable as the device identifies itself as a HID device.

After unsuccessfully going down the route of trying to tell the kernel HID driver to ignore it, I found that libusb has a couple of functions that are intended to deal with this very situation.

It may be poor reading of the docs or search skills on my part, but I wasn't able to find a definitive reference on how to actually use them, so here's the sequence that worked for me, edited for brevity:

    struct usb_bus          *bus_list;
    struct usb_device       *dev = NULL;
    struct usb_dev_handle   *handle;


        /* Look for the first u4xx device we can find then try and open */
    if((dev = find_u4xx(bus_list)) == NULL) {
        return NULL; 
    }

        /* Try and get a handle to the device */
    if((handle = usb_open(dev)) == NULL) {
        return NULL;
    }

        /* The kernel's HID driver will seize the USBMicro device as it
           says it's a HID device - we need to tell the kernel to 
           let go of it */
    if (usb_detach_kernel_driver_np(handle, 0) < 0) {
          /* If this fails, usually just means that no kernel driver
             had attached itself to the device so just ignore/warn */
    }
    
        /* Set the configuration */
    if(usb_set_configuration(handle, 1) != 0) {
        usb_close(handle);
        return NULL;
    }
  
        /* Clain interface - gather would need to this for each
           interface if the device has more than one */
    if (usb_claim_interface(handle, 0) != 0) {
        usb_close(handle);
        return NULL;
    }

    /* etc. etc. */

I'll post the actual code shortly, want to clean it up a wee bit first. It'll end up here but I'll post to that effect when it's up.

Andrew Cowie: Wine your own business

andrew@operationaldynamics.com (Andrew Cowie) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:05:00 +0000

The things that drive you crazy…

There’s one (and only one) legacy Windows application that we have. We used to run it in VMware, which worked, but that was a pain, looked terrible, and of course was required us to have our copy of Windows 2000 installed there. Decrepit. But far worse, meant we had to use Windows. Yuk. And worst of all to have to keep switching in and out of it. Bah.

Life would be far better if we could run it on Linux under Wine — then it’d just be another app on running on the GNOME desktop and under the control of the window manager. We’d tried seeing if we could get this application to run in Wine a few times over the years; no joy. But somewhere along the line it started noticing list posts from other people reporting positive experiences. So {shrug} I gave it another try this month, and to my intense pleasure it installed cleanly and is running fine. Terrific! The people who hack on Wine are amazing.

So I started working away, only to suddenly realize that the dates were in American mm/dd/yy format. Gah. More searching, but none of the workarounds suggested (mostly to do with manually changing things with Wine’s regedit) seemed to work. Quote a pain.

I had come across a number of references saying that Wine and in turn the program in question would pick up the locale settings provided by your environment. I’d checked that, and tried various combinations. Nothing seemed to work.

I mostly run in en_CA, ie:

$ echo $LANG
en_CA.UTF-8
$

the impact of which you can see by running the locale command:

$ locale
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_NAME="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$

all as one would expect And yet it had no impact on running the program running under Wine [Setting LC_TIME to en_DK is an old trick for people in en locales to get proper 24-hour time formatting; yes, I tried unsetting LC_TIME; I tried dropping the UTF-8 settings; I tried LANG=en_AU. Nothing made any difference].

After a lot more frustration searching around, I finally came across a support article on CodeWeaver’s website that mentioned setting the locale environment variables. Yes yes, I thought, but then I looked more closely. They were setting LC_ALL. Wait a minute. LC_ALL is a special variable that “if set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.” You’re not supposed to set that… certainly one doesn’t set that at login — that’s what LANG is for. I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but I tried it anyway:

$ env LC_ALL=en_CA.UTF-8 WINEPREFIX="/home/andrew/.wine" wine "C:\Premier12\Myobp.exe"

and ta-da everything worked: I had dd/mm/yy date formatting just like we wanted. Yeay!

I immediately closed everything down and went out for a beer. Sometimes we forget to celebrate those brief moments when things actually work.

But talk about bitterness. I’m not sure if this was a Wine behaviour, a Windows behaviour, or just nonsense code in MYOB. I suspect the latter. But either way, I saw so many posts asking “how can I get the date format to behave under Wine” that I thought I should write about the workaround that did it for us.

AfC

Andrew Cowie: Congratulations Manly!

andrew@operationaldynamics.com (Andrew Cowie) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:58:00 +0000

There really is nothing better than being in your home town at a pub surrounded by several hundred screaming fans when the home side is playing in the Grand Final of its league and then watching them trounce the opposition 40 to 0.

Photo by Brendan Esposito, as presented on the League HQ website

Congratulations to the Manly Sea Eagles for winning the 2008 Rugby League premiership!

AfC

Hugh Blemings: Cheap Embedded Ethernet

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:25:47 +0000

I'm always interested in cheap ways of getting small embedded devices onto an Ethernet network. For some time now the cheapest options seemed to have bottomed out at the USD$40 mark (chip + magnetics + PCB ready to go) or so. Still not quite at the point where you'd sprinkle a dozen around the place and not think twice about it.

An article in this month's Circuit Cellar magazine about the WIZnet devices caught my eye. The chips in question are about USD$4 or you can get various eval boards starting from USD$12 for chip + magnetics + PCB. This is low volume pricing - one to ten pieces!

A quick dig through the data sheet of the part in question (iEthernet W5100) yielded the following;

SPI and MCU Bus interface options
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet MAC and PHY
Inbuilt TCP/IP stack
Onboard RAM for TX/RX buffers or "Socket" buffers

From an API standpoint you basically get a set of memory addressable registers where you set things like MAC address, IP address, Netmask and Gateway etc. Another part of the register space lets you configure the "Socket" mode where you can set the chip up to run as a TCP Client or Server. When a connection comes in you get an interrupt and take things from there.

On an initial read through they really do seem to have done the heavy lifting so you can read/write bytes from a socket (or UDP) connection as trivially as you would a simple UART.

Have added one of their boards to my "Buy and poke at" list, will write up what I discover once I get started on it. Must admit to a couple of other things needing sorting first tho, so feel free to beat me to it... :)

Colin Charles: how much for georgia?

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:10:12 +0000

spotted in riga, latvia, at the university, during software freedom day 2008.

Jeremy Visser: Jeremy

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:03:46 +0000

If you have a broken PyGTK in Gentoo after upgrading to Python 2.5, like what happened to me, try this:

emerge -1 pygobject pycairo pygtk

…which fixed it for me.

Apparently, running python-updater is supposed to take care of all of that for you, but running it did nothing for me.

If you’re encountering similar Python-based breakages in Gentoo after a Python upgrade, check your /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages directory. If you’ve removed Python 2.4 and installed Python 2.5, any files still lurking in your python2.4 directory are being very bad indeed.

Simply re-emerging the offending packages usually fixes it and places them in python2.5 instead. For example, if pyxslt broke after upgrading, you would find which package /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/libxslt.py belongs to by running:

$ equery belongs /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/libxslt.py

[ Searching for file(s) /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/libxslt.py in *... ]
dev-libs/libxslt-1.1.24 (/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/libxslt.py)

That would tell you the package (libxslt) to re-emerge.

Mary Gardiner: Writing helpful reviews

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:51:53 +0000

I outlined the style of good academic reviews to Jonathan in light of our impending OSDC review responsibilities, and it's worth noting here too.

For information's sake, my authority, such as it is, on reviewing comes from being the editorial assistant of Computational Linguistics, which is a journal with a hardworking editor and conscientious reviewers. Not all academic reviews are of the quality I discuss below. They should be.

Begin with stating the title of the paper you are reviewing. Then spend one to three paragraphs summarising its content, particularly what you perceive as its major findings and conclusions.

This has a couple of purposes. The first is that if the reviews have got mixed up in the system the author finds out as soon as possible and doesn't have to slog through a review that (perhaps) is a partial match for their paper and (especially in academic circles) a privacy problem to boot. The second is so that they know in what light to read the rest of the review. If they see that you have understood its fundamentals they will be inclined to take the entire review seriously. If they see you have misunderstood it, they can do one of two things. One is to realise that their paper is confusing, and to make its focus clearer. The other is to discount your review. The decision here may be affected by the following section.

The main body of the review is a discussion of how to improve the paper. Both the tone and discussion will vary considerably depending on certain factors:

is the paper already accepted?
is this the only reviewing round or will you or another reviewer be checking the changes?

For OSDC, both factors hold. For almost all conferences, there is only (at most) one reviewing round for full papers. This makes reviews more limited in scope than journal reviews, where substantial changes are often recommended even (or perhaps especially) to articles the reviewer fundamentally likes. Journal reviewers can have a role which is not far from being anonymous co-authors. (If a colleague did as much re-reading and suggestions of additional work and additional reading as Computational Linguistics reviewers do, many people would consider adding them to the authors list.)

In the event that the article has been accepted, or that this is the single reviewing round, you should limit the scope of your suggestions to much more cosmetic things. Someone who has had an article accepted is just going to be annoyed that you want it to have a whole new body of work incorporated, and they will ignore you. (And if it's rejected after a single reviewing round, they are probably ill-placed to revise much!) In the OSDC scenario, reviewers are going to be mostly limited to suggestions as to how to structure the argument and the paper better, and not really able to productively suggest changes to the argument or the work described in the paper.

As you write your review and this section in particular, keep in mind the key factor of providing useful critiques: how could this work be better on its own terms? That is, don't provide a review that is, fundamentally, about how the paper would have been better if you'd written it... about your pet topic. This is a subtle, tempting and common mistake, and if you have never caught yourself in it, you are likely to be the worst affected. Remember: What is the paper trying to do? How can it do it better? Avoid the temptation to suggest that it would be a better paper if it was doing something different from its current aim. (There is a little more leeway for this in journal reviews, but even in that case, generally what happens if a reviewer thinks this is that they review the article on its current form and recommend a fate suited to its current aims, and additionally comment that they would be interested in seeing further work in the additional direction should the authors choose.)

As a recipient of reviews, I do have a couple of things to add. One is to respect page limits. If you are reviewing for a work with a page limit, especially a conference, and you do really want to see a longer discussion of foo, please suggest which bar could be shortened or cut. Otherwise it is close to impossible for an author to consider your suggestion. Also, if you are making suggestions for future work that you think the authors should consider but which you do not actually want to see in the article, make this clear in the text of your review. I would probably recommend a whole separate section for this if you're going to do it.

A review may conclude with a list of typos, spelling mistakes, suggested rephrasings, etc. Mistakes that affect the reading of the paper (eg mislabeled figures and sections) go right at the start of this list. A sufficiently ill-proofread paper may go back with a suggestion that the authors find the mistakes themselves.

Hugh Blemings: Riding in Rochester,MN, Again :)

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:25:41 +0000

A work trip was once again going to see me in Rochester, Minnesota so I emailed ahead to Dave that I'd ridden with back in July to see if riding was an option this late in the year. He was keen so I made a point of packing my riding gear including several layers of thermals in anticipation of a chilly day.

A few days out I checked to see if the ride still looked like a goer, I'd been keeping an eye on the weather courtesy of weather.com and figured it could go either way - it had been in the twenties (fahrenheit) for much of the week I was in Austin so was by no means sure that we'd be on.

On the Saturday night I gave Dave a call and we agreed to meet at his place around half one in the afternoon. Turned out to be a glorious day - sunny for the most part but below freezing the whole time which for me was a real novelty. Dave once again kindly loaned me a bike and with a quick check of settings we were off.

Riding in the snow is really something else - the roads had been swept so they were only slippery on the edges, rest of the time it was pretty much like riding in wet weather. We did a 30mi loop through similar territory to the earlier ride and the whole experience was quite special - snow makes everything quiet and no better way to enjoy it I think than from a bike/trike. To someone like me unfamiliar with snow it was a delightful experience, if a bit chilly.

We took about two hours to cover the loop before returning to the suburbs, I had a few wobbly moments but was relieved to have no spills or even a need to put a foot down. My cold weather gear from Ground Effect did very well, though I'd have wanted another (3rd/4th) layer if we'd been out for longer, or in colder conditions.

Dave made the rather wry observation that the average temperature for my rides in Rochester was now a pleasant ~60F on the basis of the two rides so far (100F for the first, 20F for the second)...

Rest of my time in Rochester while brief was equally enjoyable, catching up with colleagues and getting some good work related stuff done too, but the ride was certainly the most unique bit!

Leon Brooks: Squirming the way to fame: Open Source stars yet again

noreply@blogger.com (Leon RJ Brooks) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:23:56 +0000

Customer requires a special-case redirect for the first use of a browser (each day) on a workstation. So much stuff almost does this, & in the closed-source world, it would be:

<GAME OVER> <PLAYER ONE>

Happily, adding one feature to Squirm will make this all possible, so customer will get functionality, plus also a little fame, & the rest of the world will get functionality as well, no extra charge.

As a sub-bonus, it’s an Aussie program, so we’re supporting local industry. Hooraw! (-: would be nice if I could really work, do this kind of stuff full-throttle :-)

Mary Gardiner: Back in 2001

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:22:31 +0000

(It used to be that I couldn't look back seven years. Then I could, but at least it was a different person I saw down there at the wrong end of the telescope. Now, I recall the me of 2001 and in most ways, she was me.

Google has their search index of 2001 up for playing. Crooked Timber is already collecting some fun stuff including searches for housing bubble and subprime mortgage lending. Instead, I would just like to observe that apparently 2008 wasn't looking so exciting back then.

Hugh Blemings: PowerStation

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:25:21 +0000

Our "prototype" is no longer a prototype - it has a name, a photo and somewhere to get one :)

Big thanks to everyone who has worked on this so tirelessly - all the good oil is here.

Leon Brooks: Micro-economics

noreply@blogger.com (Leon RJ Brooks) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:08:29 +0000

Problem: workplace is perennially unable to maintain a hot-drink mug that I can use.

Solution: spend a small amount of cash roughly equivalent to 20 seconds of my working time acquiring a mug from Crazy Clarks en route to work.

Benefit: problem solved, would have spent more time looking for (& failing to find) a mug than I did acquiring a new one (micro-economics), workmates quietly amused.

Problem: I acquired an extra can-opener in the course of replacing a damaged (DOA) one.

Solution: donate the opener to said office, which now has can manipulation facilities.

Benefit: more storage space for me. Loss: the opener cost $1.99 a week ago, would have fetched $3.49 if returnable stand-alone but needed a receipt I don’t have.

Comment: being disconnected from the Liar/Gross (LG) has many benefits (a pleasant Thai girl had me list them out), but has not yet overcome the physical/financial damage done by LG, so $1.50 makes a significant difference to basic items like what I eat (micro-economics).

André Pang: The Business of Development

ozone@algorithm.com.au (André Pang) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:03:05 +0000

After one of the longest road-trips of my life, I gave a presentation at DevWorld 08 in Melbourne, Australia, titled “The Business of Development”:

Coding is just one part of what makes a great product, but there’s always so much else to do and learn. So, what can you do to help ship a great product—besides coding—if you’re primarily a developer? In this talk, learn about important commercial and business issues that you, as a coder, can help to define and shape in your company, such as licensing and registration keys, adopting new technologies, software updates, handling support, your website, and crash reports.

The talk has a definite Mac focus and is geared towards people who are writing commercial software, but its arguably applies to all software on any platform, whether you’re a professional programmer or a hobbyist, working on open-source or not. The slides are now online; you can find it on my talks page or download them directly (40MB PDF).

Hugh Blemings: Going downhill

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 02:25:22 +0000

First, gentle reader, a confession. I have bought a bicycle. Yes, as a confirmed recumbent enthusiast I have recently been living a dual life sometimes puttering around on one of those two wheeled things that fall over when you stop. I've not yet had the heart to tell my Mob buddies, will have to fess up on Wednesday morning I guess.

There were a couple of motivators for this - when riding with Rachael and Lu a bike is a bit more convenient, I can go where they go without having to worry about jumping gutters etc. I fancied a bit of a change too - the GT3 is lots of fun and very comfortable but having a MTB adds a new dimension to riding around. Last and by no means least is that my commute will eventually involve a fire trail.

Got the bike from Trevor and the guys at Lonsdale St Cyclery who I can heartily recommend - very nice people and very knowledgeable.

So on Sunday chucked the MTB in the back of the car before we headed out to Carwoola. The intent was to try to find a path through the bushland between Captains Flat road and Queanbeyan, hence avoiding having to ride down the very perilous King Highway. A friend of ours, Simon, was keen to come along which was cool - was nice to have someone to bounce navigational decisions off as we rode around unfamiliar territory.

It ended up being quite a descent and I was very glad for having at least read a few articles on riding downhill on an MTB even if I hadn't actually done it before. Spent most of the time hanging off the back of the seat proceeding very carefully.

Thankfully we avoided any spills, riding all but one section of about 30m as it was just too steep and rough, at least for my/our riding skills. I suspect if I start doing this at all regularly I may have to consult an expert...

The hill thus conquered we rode into Queanbeyan and parted company there, 8km total over about 40 minutes. Shortly afterwards I had to stop in a side street for about 20 minutes to remove the bindis from my front tyre and fixing the associated puncture. Lady from the house opposite even kindly came out with a tub of water in case I needed to bubble for the holes. New tube did the trick instead but was nice to have the offer. Remainder of ride home was uneventful if warmish, only other stop was to get a couple more tubes and fill up water bottles.

Leon Brooks: Eco Irony

noreply@blogger.com (Leon RJ Brooks) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:16:26 +0000

Picture yourself whizzing by the Canning Bridge fuel station on your bicycle.

You are forced to cycle past a sign bidding you “Cycle Instead.”

Quod eratz demonstrandum? (-:

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: Sugar

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:02:43 +0000

Ok - so I didn't get around to installing sugar - but I did get a sugar livecd from david during walter's talk.

This is pretty cool - it is possible to turn almost any laptop into an XO by installing sugar - which has the potential to rapidly expand both the user and the developer base for the platform... but more than that - we can engage teachers in exploration of new pedagogy with this very special operating environment for children.

It's not perfect - it is in development, but it's a tidal wave for progressing the aims of the original olpc project.

Go to http://www.sugarlabs.org/ to find out more...

and those of you who received an XO at LCA this year - I'll be in touch soon to get a progress report on your puppy - and invite you to participate in our community of practice - working with teachers to explore applications for classrooms and learning.

Oh! And! Zareason - making laptops - ubuntu pre-installed... with an ubuntu key ;) Must get a piccie tomorrow. Also nice to note that Zareason is owned and run by linuxchick - Cathy Malmrose (and Earl) :) Very cool people doing very cool things.

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: k12openminds - The Open Road: highway to the future of technology in education

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:17:45 +0000

Less than an hour to showtime - and I'll be presenting to the K12 Open Minds Conference and I've posted my slides and references to cc.com.au/k12openminds

Yesterday I facilitated the National Roadmap summit - which was an absolute Joy! To be in a room with like minds, equally passionate about the place of free and open source software in schools was totally invigorating.

Here's some of the working output of our efforts. http://ncose.wikispaces.com/Summit

and... Squee! I met Walter Bender... who was sitting in the lobby running Sugar on Ubuntu. Shiny shiny. I'm going to apt-get install sugar after my talk!

heh.

Simon Lyall: Joel Spolsky: What have you done for me lately?

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:26:25 +0000

Recently Jurgen Appelo listed the Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers .

Now the list looks okay except for the first entry - Joel on Software. Now I've been subscribing to the site for a few years along with at least 100,000 other people ( about 10,000 times more than read this blog) but I really question it being number one anymore.

Sure there are great articles and Joel is a smart guy who creates things like Stackoverflow.com but I doing really think his blog deserves the Number 1 ranking anymore.

The main reason is that Joel doesn't really write any articles. Looking at his archive page we can see the recent history:

Year    Number of articles

2000    42
2001    23
2002    14
2003    12
2004    9
2005    22
2006    20
2007    12
2008    4 so far

Yes, just 4 articles this year so far and the last one was in May, over 6 months ago.

Now Joel is doing the odd smaller post, he podcasts and writes articles in Inc but the point of reading the blog is the content there, not somewhere else.

So really, you can't rate a blog that hasn't had a real post for 6 months as being the top blog in the world for software development managers. Even Paul Graham posts more often.

Clinton Roy: Structures

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:42:00 +0000

or why things don’t fall down - J.E Gordon

This lovely little book explains material and structural engineering with a very low maths content. The writing is personal and uses many anecdotes.

It is somewhat surprising to see so many examples of biomimicry in a book written well before the concept was large enough to receive its own label. The author praises feathers, trees, skeletons and similar throughout.

I’ve always been drawn to structures, photographically speaking, as the repeating structural elements have always had a calming, soothing, reassuring effect on me. The author really opened my eyes to the intrinsic properties of strength in many basic materials.

After building up the readers first principle knowledge of materials highly engineered structures are covered in great detail.

A really good book for the layman interested in learning more.

Jeremy Visser: Jeremy

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:47:19 +0000

For ages, I have been trying to get S-video output on my Mobility Radeon 7500 (driver radeon) in Linux with no success.

From some initial Googling, I nearly died when I found out I’d have to compile some GATOS driver to get some form of TV-out. Today, however, I stumbled across a set of three commands that worked for me with no such recompiling necessary:

xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600
xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600
xrandr --output S-video --set tv_standard pal

Those instructions only apply to RandR 1.2–powered boxes (i.e. Ubuntu 8.04 and above) — if you have an earlier version, I have no idea what to do. Upgrade.

The above code will set your TV-out to 800⨯600. For some reason, 640⨯480 does not work for me.

Tagged: ati, hardware, Linux, Ubuntu

Colin Charles: Infamy

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:06:55 +0000

Malaysia just gets crazier, and crazier, daily.

Its headlines to “commit a sinful act”, that is being provided with a woman. In fact, the accused has the statement that takes the cake:

“what is important is we did not ask for the women. He supplied them to us. If people sedekah (donate), don’t you want to accept the sedekah?”

However, there’s no cake, without egg. Politicians bickering over a statement about an egg.

The Seputeh Umno Youth division lodged a police report today against Seputeh MP Teresa Kok, claiming she had insulted the Royal Malaysian Police and the egg, which is an essential food of the underprivileged.

He said Kok had said the food she was served was “fit only for dogs”.

“By saying this, she had insulted the police and the poor. Eggs are an important food for low-income earners and the poor. As an elected representative of the people she should not have said that,” he said.

I love eggs. So much so, that I can say “chi dan” like its supposed to be said in Mandarin. I eat eggs everyday. Should I be lodging a police report against the Seputeh Umno Youth division as they just classified the egg as food of choice for the underprivileged? ;)

(there is after all, no caviar without eggs… tsk tsk… )

Colin Charles: You may be interrupting

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:44:56 +0000

From a UI perspective, Google got this right:

How thoughtful can you get? I mean, in a regular IM client, statuses mean next to nothing to many folk. They will still ping you anyway. Google’s interface actually tells you “You may be interrupting”. Smart.

Colin Charles: Obama wants LAMP developers

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:31:13 +0000

Its great to see that the Obama campaign in America are after folk that dig open source. They’re after folk that can write software for nation-wide voter contact and mobilisation (something like Twitter?), fund-raising, and social networking and online organising at My.BarackObama.

They’re a LAMP shop. They’re after:

Experience scaling large LAMP applications
Posses deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimisation

I once wrote:

If they can waste your ringgit on buying proprietary software licenses, when there are clearly open source alternatives, can you trust them with spending and budgeting for a country?

It may seem extremely naive to correlate the use of open source software to creating a better budget or spending wisely, but I think its a start.

Colin Charles: The Zeitgeist shows…

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:56:44 +0000

This is a picture with a lot of impact. This was from Seedcamp. The question asked was “What tools will you use?”.

Mårten pointed this out to us at the opening speeches at the Sun Database Group Developer’s Meeting. Its interesting to see what technologies are used. MySQL is by far, the most popular database server that all startups seem to use (though to be fair, I see CouchDB and PostgreSQL there too). PHP is about the most popular language (followed closely by Java, then Ruby). Its amazing to see what kind of technologies people are using to build the companies of tomorrow.

Find out more about it, at the Zeitgeist redux on the seedcamp blog.

Colin Charles: Rails… Fails… (sticker)

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:29:36 +0000

I had first seen the interesting Rails logo in a talk by Terry Chay, while I was at OSCON, a few months ago.

Now, my esteemed colleague Jay Pipes has it on his laptop. It seems they’re making stickers, even.

Otherwise, my next task is to revamp our Ruby content. Currently, it looks a little sad. It has to at least be as good as Using MySQL With Ruby, no?

Colin Charles: Switcher Guides

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:51:16 +0000

Recently, I had to futz with an Ubuntu server that was to run mail, web, and database services.

You slowly learn that Ubuntu as a desktop is easy to use, but as a server, its “different”, if you come from a Red Hat based background (especially if you’ve been using Red Hat-based distributions for the last thirteen years or so).

From example, while service httpd start works (well, the equivalent is service apache start), enabling things on boot using chkconfig (I wrote about it a while back) is replaced with update-rc.d.

In fact, if you’re an rpm aficionado, dpkg is a little different. I applaud the Ubuntu folk for creating an article such as Switching to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora. Impressive. Switcher guides :)

OpenSolaris needs switcher guides. svcadm/smf is different for someone who’s coming from Linux-land.

Mary Gardiner: Using forums

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:02:54 +0000

I suspect that Ten easy ways to attract women to your free software project will do the rounds pretty quickly, but I at least hadn't seen it until this morning. It's a list of project management decisions you can make that would arguably make it more likely that women will be involved in some kind of development. They're largely only 'easy' for a new project which is when many of these decisions are still open, but for what it's worth, some of them are:

Use forums instead of mailing lists
As much as possible, use wikis instead of version controlled archives
Don’t discount what women do ['what women do' here used as 'community management, documentation and similar activities', via Geek chicks: second thoughts]

The justifications are reasonably lengthy and are in the linked article. I'm not going to comment extensively on what I think of the article, except to wonder about whether these are women friendly measures or people friendly measures. (A loose analogy: writing prose in such a way as to be accessible to non-native or non-fluent readers of your language is actually very helpful to native speakers as a side effect. I am of course hardly the first person to make the point that changing environments to suit women's needs may suit men as well, it's commonly made for workplaces.)

Instead, I want to talk about forum software. I can't say whether women in general might prefer it, perhaps they do, but gosh, what a pain in the neck. I would never be casually involved in a project that ran over a forum. (If I liked the project enough, I might be deeply involved.) Here's what's involved in using a forum:

Thinking of a user name (very few have a tradition of mostly using full legal names, like email does, which means finding one that is unused etc etc)
Thinking of a password, storing it somewhere for later use etc (I haven't seen forum software supporting OpenID yet)
Picking some kind of avatar for myself.
Learning how to use this new piece of software, how do I search for things, how do I post new things, how do I reply to things, how do I find replies to my posts?
Having to use my web browser's text input tool as an editor. Argh, oh, my hands, my brain!
Dealing with the inevitably poor accessibility decisions of web forum software. (I don't know when people over the age of 50 will be targeted as the next under-represented demographic in Free Software development, but the time of the hyperopic will come.)
Not being able to deal with anything to do with the project when not connected to the Internet. (I am something of a last woman standing here, but I do a lot of offline email work, it's quite productive to sit on a train and plow through it.)

In my email client, I either don't have to deal with any of these things or I've overcome them already and I deal with them the same way for every bit of email I deal with. I can casually join 30 mailing lists. I can't casually lurk on 30 forums.

At the same time, the argument in the article is that forum software destroys the perception that everyone in the project is equally important, which both lessens the problem of one or two loud voices being perceived as in control, and motivates socially-oriented people by giving them some visible measure of reputation, etc. I hope at some point in the future forums, Usenet and email breed some kind of hideous yet effective love-child: protocols and software that allow more subtly moderated communities that nevertheless do not require that I use a different piece of software for every community I am in.

André Pang: Self-Reflection

ozone@algorithm.com.au (André Pang) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:57:45 +0000

R. A. Salvatore, Road of the Patriarch, p. 280:

The point of self-reflection is, foremost, to clarify and to find honesty. Self-reflection is the way to throw self-lies out and face the truth—however painful it might be to admit that you were wrong. We seek consistency in ourselves, and so when we are faced with inconsistency, we struggle to deny.

Denial has no place in self-reflection, and so it is incumbent upon a person to admit his errors, to embrace them and to move along in a more positive direction.

We can fool ourselves for all sorts of reasons. Mostly for the sake of our ego, of course, but sometimes, I now understand, because we are afraid.

For sometimes we are afraid to hope, because hope breeds expectation, and expectation can lead to disappointment.

… Reality is a curious thing. Truth is not as solid and universal as any of us would like it to be; selfishness guides perception, and perception invites justification. The physical image in the mirror, if not pleasing, can be altered by the mere brush of fingers through hair.

And so it is true that we can manipulate our own reality. We can persuade, even deceive. We can make others view us in dishonest ways. We can hide selfishness with charity, make a craving for acceptance into magnanimity, and amplify our smile to coerce a hesitant lover.

… a more difficult alteration than the physical is the image that appears in the glass of introspection, the pureness or rot of the heart and the soul.

For many, sadly, this is not an issue, for the illusion of their lives becomes self-delusion, a masquerade that revels in the applause and sees in a pittance to charity a stain remover for the soul.

… There are those who cannot see the stains on their souls. Some lack the capacity to look in the glass of introspection, perhaps, and others alter reality without and within.

It is, then, the outward misery of Artemis Entreri that has long offered me hope. He doesn’t lack passion; he hides from it. He becomes an instrument, a weapon, because otherwise he must be human. He knows the glass all too well, I see clearly now, and he cannot talk himself around the obvious stain. His justifications for his actions ring hollow—to him most of all.

Only there, in that place, is the road of redemption, for any of us. Only in facing honestly that image in the glass can we change the reality of who we are. Only in seeing the scars and the stains and the rot can we begin to heal.

For Rebecca, who holds that glass of introspection higher than anyone else I’ve ever known. Thank you for everything.

Colin Charles: MySQL Lists via NNTP

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:51:42 +0000

MySQL Lists are available via NNTP, so you can use your newsreader! If only all lists were like this.

Now for the real motivations…

After all acquisitions, things tend to change. We’ve been mostly nudged to migrate to using Sun’s email systems, and you can imagine its fun moving about three years worth of mail from one server to another. Especially, while you’re at the developer’s meeting, with lots of people sucking bandwidth.

The recommended method is to Ctrl+drag (OK, Command+Drag for me on the Mac) folders. This is called pain. My Sieve filters are also not importing without pain.

As a consequence, I’ve unsubscribed from all MySQL Lists. But that’s the point of this post - you can read all MySQL Lists using NNTP (with a newsreader of course - Thunderbird is a good one, as is Pan or slrn).

Point yourself to news://lists.mysql.com/ in your newsreader and have a good time. Less email. Still the same great lists.

Colin Charles: workbench-5.1.1-alpha on Fedora 9

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:27:07 +0000

So, you want to compile Workbench for Linux, on Fedora 9. You need to install the following packages:

autoconf automake libtool libzip-devel libxml2-devel libsigc++20-devel libglade2-devel gtkmm24-devel mesa-libGLU-devel mysql-libs mysql mysql-devel uuid-devel lua-devel glitz-devel glitz-glx-devel pixman-devel pcre-devel libgnome-devel gtk+-devel pango-devel cairo

I feel I’m being too liberal with dependencies, but I’m not about to strip it, I just want to get it working first :)

You need to have ctemplate and ctemplate-devel installed from updates-testing-newkey (relevant koji build log).

By default, configure.in in Workbench looks for “google-ctemplate”, as opposed to just “ctemplate” as Fedora calls it. You can fix this (easy), or “cheat” - in /usr/local/include you can do sudo ln -s /usr/include/ctemplate google. Take your pick.

Now for the fun. Fedora includes gcc-4.3. Ubuntu ships gcc-4.2. Let’s just say gcc-4.3 got stricter (its C++ header dependency streamlining related). So strict, they have a useful porting to gcc-4.3 guide. Just FYI, I believe OpenSUSE is also shipping a more modern GCC (I expect the next Ubuntu release in the coming month to do the same).

So, start getting used to doing the following in files that lead the compiler to fail:

#include <cstring>
#include <algorithm>
#include <memory>
#include <climits>
#include <cstdlib>

This will help get rid of error messages like: error: ‘memset’ was not declared in this scope. This stuff is already fixed in trunk (or the patch is being applied).

You will need to pick up cairo from source. Why? Because –enable-glitz isn’t on by default in the RPM spec file (similar with Ubuntu). The glitz backend is apparently still a release preview and doesn’t fully work yet. (I have spoken to Alfredo, and he says he’s just removed the requirement on glitz in trunk).

Now, once you’ve built cairo with glitz, before running ./autogen.sh, do: export PKGCONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig. Then go ahead and make it.

There are still plenty of warnings that spew by. I have this vague idea that once Workbench for Linux sits on Launchpad, we’ll run a janitorial tree that fixes warnings in the code. A great way to garner community contributions!

Anyway, a lot of this is either fixed or patches will be applied to trunk. I expect a mysql-workbench-5.1.2-alpha out sooner than you think to eclipse 5.1.1-alpha. Again, superb work Alfredo (and MikeZ and the rest of the GUI team).

Colin Charles: On corruption

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:28:23 +0000

A few weeks ago, I attended a fiduciary bootcamp. I didn’t even know what it meant.

“involving trust, esp. with regard to the relationship between a trustee and a beneficiary : the company has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.”

It was generally not a productive use of my time, but a choice quote through it all, caught my attention.

We need to recognize corruption for what it is. Officials who take bribes are stealing from their own people – not just money but governmental legitimacy and the hope of a better future. Their actions distort government decisions, waste scarce resources, and undermine public trust in political leaders and institutions. What’s more, corruption makes it more difficult for governments to implement laws and policies, and to attract and hold essential foreign investment.

Larry Fisher

This was presented at his keynote address at Rice University, in a talk titled “Taking a corporate stand against public corruption“. Choice reading (and I don’t normally consider reading stuff from a lawyer, choice reading).

Hugh Blemings: Tokyo

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:25:26 +0000

Was in Tokyo for work last week and was able to catch up with some friends based there ahead of things kicking off on Monday.

On the Saturday spent a thoroughly enjoyable few hours with Stuart, a friend of ours that is doing Japanese language studies there for six months or so. We took a trip to Akihabara and had a good geek out looking around. I was particularly impressed by Stu's faculties with Japanese - effortlessly ordering us up some nice Udon for lunch while texting a friend in Kanji on his mobile phone.

Akihabara has changed a little since I was last there (c.2002), couple of new buildings and a few less of the tiny hole in the wall places that I personally prefer. These latter are just amazing for anyone of a hardware hacking sort of background. By turns a great array of surplus/second hand odds and ends, just right for that next project, mixed with shops selling a tremendous array of small hand tools, test equipment and new components.

In the evening Ben, Arnd and I met up with Raster and Horms for a little sightseeing and food. We had a good wander around before having things cut short by a rain storm. Fortunately our guides were able to find us shelter in a nearby yakitori place which (obviously) sold beer and nibblies which allowed us to while away a couple of hours most comfortably.

Eventually the rain gave up and we went down to the Ginza district which was a bit of a eye opener - almost brighter by night than by day courtesy of the many signs and large LED screens around the place. Certainly gives Times Square in New York a good run for its money.

Went to a great place for dinner, it's good to the point where I want to write up how to get there etc. so that will have to follow presently. A really nice evening and great to be able to catch up with Horms and Raster IRL for a change.

Sunday hooked up with one of our hosts in the morning and he led us on a tour through Akihabara (as you'd have gathered, I don't mind repeat visits to the area at all) he kindly helped me bridge the language barrier and buy a couple of specific things. That afternoon I caught up with a mate of mine from IBM who's there on assignment - we only chat a few times a year but it's always a pleasure when we do.

Remainder of the week was throughly enjoyable both professionally and socially, our hosts were very gracious in taking care of us and the various technical discussions productive as well.

Did a final run out to Akihabara in the afternoon before we flew out and picked up an assortment of PIC microcontrollers and some neat little QFP probes made by Sunhayato. These latter are a particularly neat little tool as you can clip onto lead pitches down to 0.5mm which means you can get at most SMT parts in a hands free manner. The former are bound to come in handy at some point :)

A good trip, my only regret is that I don't get to Japan more often as its one of the more consistently enjoyable places I travel to.

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: Melbourne celebrates Software Freedom Day

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:12:46 +0000

we are soooo tired, but had an amazing day. The talks were fantastic - at least, people were buzzing as they came out of them, I didn't actually sit in and watch... the little cinema room was full to bursting at times. I hope some the video camera jiggery pokery results in vids online somewhere...

A full report will have to come later - but I did just want to get some of these pix online!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kattekrab/tags/sfdmelb/

Colin Charles: MySQL Conference 2009, Open Source Databases MiniConf at linux.conf.au

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:11:58 +0000

It is no secret that I am the Program Chair for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, and am truly excited about it (big shoes to fill in from Jay). I expect it to be a great conference, with over 2,000 attendees and lots and lots of great talks. The paper submissions have been coming through, the excellent voters have been voting, and the progress is impressive. Its a great learning experience.

Now, I’m excited to tell you that I’m also going to organise the Open Source Databases MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2009. Its going to be in Hobart, Tasmania, in January 2009, and again, I’m excited. Read the press release for more.

Why is this exciting? Because we’ll have a two-day mini-conference, as opposed to the usual one day. There might even be time for tutorials. And now, we’re combining all the great databases out there, not just focusing on MySQL or PostgreSQL (as we have in the past). Come discuss on anything from CouchDB, Drizzle, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Derby/JavaDB and many more. Next up is setting the wiki, and an appropriate e-mail address (we already have mysql-miniconf[at]mysql[dot]com, but maybe I’ll ask for osdb or something soon) to accept papers.

Lots of conference organising fun, coming right up!

Colin Charles: Workbench on Linux

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 08:46:09 +0000

I had the pleasure of sitting right across the MySQL GUI Tools Team, and decided to try my hand at Workbench (Workbench for Linux, that is). Congratulations to the entire team for the great work! I am excited.

First up, the things you need on Ubuntu 8.04 (I created a fresh install, and installed all the updates), if you’re downloading the binary:

liblua5.1-0
libglitz1
libzip1
libmysqlclient15off
mysql-common
libglitz-glx1

Workbench on Linux

It works. It starts up. Its exciting. Of course, when I try to edit a table name or even create a table, it fails by segmentation fault. Segfaults are annoying… so the best way to debug it, is of course to run catchsegv. After running catchsegv ./mysql-workbench 2>&1 >crashlog, I sent it over to Alfredo for him to debug.

Of course, as luck would have it, the build ships stripped binaries, so the segfaults can’t be debugged. Grr. Nevermind, I decided its time to build it (warm thanks to the Workbench team for staying around till like 7.30pm at the meeting room). As a consequence, Alfredo managed to also update the Linux Build Instructions page as we had learned some things along the way.

I built glitz, pixman and cairo from freedekstop.org (when building cairo, remember to do it as such: ./configure –enable-glitz), but from what I gather, this is now available via Ubuntu 8.04 and is sufficient. So the build dependencies are all in Ubuntu, which is useful (in terms of building a shippable DEB). The only thing that isn’t available in a packaged form is Google’s ctemplate library. I notice the instructions now don’t mention installing a few more packages I installed on Ubuntu (I’m not even sure now if they’re a hard dependency or not, I’ll check later). But if something fails, install libproc-dev libXtst-dev libdnet libdnet-dev.

Like magic, I can now edit and create tables, draw them even. No crashes, its pretty stable for an alpha release (provided you’re using a version you build!). I expect a healthy continuos release cycle, so if you encounter a bug today, it might be fixed before you know it… Of course, this doesn’t discount you from being good friends with our bugs system at http://bugs.mysql.com/.

My short term plan to assist Workbench on Linux:

Get it building on Fedora
There’s a patch floating around for OpenSUSE, get it building there too
Package DEBs and RPMs
Try to include missing packages (like google-ctemplate) upstream

Oh, if you have issues, hop on to IRC on freenode, and join #workbench. Sure, there won’t be great answers in the next week or so (while we’re all busy at the developers meeting), but usually there’s always someone awake on that channel.

Michael Davies: LCA2008 Days Four and Five

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:25:12 +0000

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!

Simon Lyall: Miniconf at LCA 2009

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:12:02 +0000

We got word a couple of days ago that the Sysadmin Miniconf had been accepted for Linux.conf.au 2009 and the media have been informed so I can can say so publicly.

It looks like the following Miniconfs have been accepted:

Open Source databases
Kernel
Sysadmin
Virtualisation
Linuxchix
Myth TV
Gaming
Mobile
Multimedia
Free As In Freedom
The business of open source software

I guess the main differences from previous years are the MySQL and PostgreSQL miniconfs have been merged. There is no Debian, Education or Gnome miniconfs and I guess Mobile has replaced Embedded. It's interesting to see the loss of the regulars, I guess in some cases it is because they have their own regular conferences.

The last two miniconfs ( "Free As In Freedom" and "The business of open source software" ) are also new, I guess they will be fleshed out.

We'll be updated the Sysadmin Miniconf website over the next few days and the call for papers should be out next week sometime.

I also posted an email to the NZNOG list asking about interest in a Sysadmin thing at NZNOG 09 ( in Auckland the week after LCA 09 ). have a quick look and pop me an email if you are interested.

Colin Charles: Software Freedom Day in Riga: Superstars galore

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:06:49 +0000

Tomorrow (Saturday, September 20 2008) is Software Freedom Day, and we’re taking Latvia by storm! We’re hosting it at the University of Latvia, and we have an awesome schedule.

Why awesome? Because we have exciting speakers like you wouldn’t believe.

Mårten Mickos, former CEO MySQL AB, current SVP Database Group, Sun Microsystems
Kaj Arno, VP Community, Database Group, Sun Microsystems
Mark Callaghan, Google Inc - he’ll be talking about running a database when your business depends on it - very cool stuff
Domas Mituzas, Wikimedia Foundation and Sun Database Group Support Engineer

There are many, many more, but just the list above is pretty impressive if you ask me.

There is to be free lunch at the university, and in the evening at 7.30pm, there is to be free buffet dinner and beer at the Radisson SAS Daugava Hotel. Come unwind with the rest of the Sun Database Group!

So, if you’re currently not in Riga, Latvia, consider coming. Take a flight in, or if you’re in Finland, there’s a ferry; if you’re in Estonia, there’s a train; and if you’re in Lithuania, there’s a bus!

As an aside, I find it funny, that I have traditionally never been in my own country when there has been a Software Freedom Day. Last year I was in Beijing, China delivering a speech on MySQL. This year, I’m in Riga, Latvia, with the rest of the Sun Database Group for our yearly developer’s meeting.

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: ... the times they are a changing ...

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:42:01 +0000

BobDylan.com oh yeah.... Thank You Drupal.

Dries Buytart, founder of Drupal, reported on his blog that bobdylan.com uses drupal... I can't think of a more poignant indicator that free and open source software is getting somewhere... and on the eve of Software Freedom Day too.

Nice.

Colin Charles: Microsoft blackouts… Software Freedom

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:24:56 +0000

Are you a user of Microsoft Windows? Are you a user of a non-licensed copy of Microsoft Windows? Does it happen to be Windows XP Professional? Have you seen “blackouts“?

Apparently, from about the end of last month (August 27 2008, to be precise), users of pirated copies of Microsoft Windows XP Professional that also happen to be connected to the Internet will see their screens go black, and have no icons visible.

The esteemed folk at Microsoft Malaysia seem to think that there are 8.6 million users of Windows XP Professional in Malaysia (seems like a huge number, considering the population), and about three million will suffer from these “blackouts”. Only 35% of Windows XP Professional users are pirates?

Its a most interesting tactic. Annoy the user by allowing them to change their background, and 60 minutes later, give them grief again. After all, an original copy of Windows XP Professional only costs RM580. That’s about 227 litres of unleaded petrol, at the current rate of RM2.55/L. Or nearly 6 tanks of petrol, in a more fuel efficient car. No wonder, people prefer paying RM5 for pirated media.

I don’t see why anyone in their right minds will be paying for last generation software, that already reached its end-of-life. Even industry pundits seem to think its a tactic to get people to upgrade to Windows Vista, which amongst corporations seems to have a slow uptake (read: massive failure for Microsoft’s coffers).

Software Freedom Day is this weekend (September 20 2008). Why not tell Microsoft to keep their software (and their “Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA)”), and go the open source route? There’s an alternative to almost everything they provide. I think the open source world might only be deficient for hardcore gamers (but even that’s being looked into, thanks to CodeWeavers).

Microsoft	Open Source
Windows (operating system)	Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSolaris
Office	OpenOffice.org
Outlook	Thunderbird
Internet Explorer	Firefox
MSN Messenger	Pidgin (supports Yahoo!, AIM, GTalk, etc.)

Tiny table of equivalents

That pretty much covers desktop productivity, I think. There are alternatives to IIS (Apache), MS SQL Server (MySQL), Visual Studio .NET (NetBeans, Eclipse), and the list just goes longer and longer. There is really no excuse in today’s world to be bogged down by Microsoft’s “Genuine Advantage”. Don’t even let me get started on open standards (which Microsoft flouts or doesn’t practice, period).

Don’t worry about piracy. Don’t bow down to another corporations silly moves. Think open standards. Think freedom. Just go open source.

Hugh Blemings: Lunch at the Daily Grind

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:25:27 +0000

Ended up at the Daily Grind for lunch yesterday with a couple of colleagues from another part of IBM. Most agreeable company and the food was very good.

The Grind is one of these sorta unexpected pleasures - tucked out of the way between two office blocks and pretty unassuming from the outside. Food is uniformally very nice, keenly priced and often of a calibre you'd not baulk at if it had cost you another couple of bucks per main.

They provide table service as well as takeaway - I find the former the real strength, good coffee too if that's your thing. Service is efficient, the guys run a tight ship and it's a great spot for dining outside on a sunny day.

One of the specials this week is a parmesan crumbed chicken with cream potatoes which Andrew and I had, both concluded it was pretty good stuff. Kaaren favoured the seafood risotto which also seemed to meet with approval. I know from past visits they do one of the better chicken caesar salads in town too.

If you're in the area give it a go - highly recommended :)

The Daily Grind Cafe, 10 National Circuit, Barton, ACT - +61 2 6273 9077 - Weekdays, breakfast, lunch, do coffee into afternoon, will take reservations, usual credit cards/EFTPOS.

Update: thanks to Steven for pointing out they do breakfast too :)

Colin Charles: Keeping the (content on the) Internet relevant

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:11:30 +0000

The Internet is a great tool, but the problem with the Internet is outdated information. I was looking to find the famous Foh San Restaurant in SS2, and while the Internet suggested it did exist, Foh San closed down in SS2 sometime in 2007. The only Foh San Restaurant that exists now is in Ipoh (not SS2), and from what I hear, they plan to open another one in SS2 or the surrounding areas sometime in 2009.

Now, back to the outdated information on The Internet. Look at dineMalaysia. It looks like it was last updated in 2004. A lot can change with regards to restaurants and bars in a period of four years. Their database is also shared with some Expat eatery site. Another catalogue site lists it, but I wonder how many restaurants on that list don’t exist anymore.

The importance of catalogue websites is that they need to be constantly updated. It has to be spurred by someone (maybe the tourism ministry?), and have the capability to be cool enough to have a community built around it. The way I see it, is it should be That’s Melbourne! with a community.

The only clue I got that Foh San in SS2 had closed was from this blog entry - “… the new Korean BBQ shop (formerly Foh San Restaurant branch)”.

This however, didn’t help me, as I had already spent time looking for it. Searching by relevancy, which can also suggest dated content, doesn’t help when there is a lack of information, does it? I see a book about Google’s search algorithms in the bookstore, but I’ve yet to pick it up. I’m just curious, how catalogue information can:

stay updated, constantly
be relevant

(1) is easy to solve… It has to involve a community. I guess that will fix (2) too… so how do you get a community involved in catalogue information? Shouldn’t be too hard considering its food and beverage related. Bottom-line is, there needs to be traction built around it…

Colin Charles: Malaysia stops censoring bloggers

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:01:39 +0000

So, the MCMC decided to come to their senses and scrap blocking websites. Internet censorship only lasted a few weeks (read previously Malaysia starts censoring bloggers). Of course, to control the victim of the latest censorship act, they used the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA), but that’s a whole other matter.

Its interesting to see how many people came around, and the amount of press/attention this whole censorship thing brought. Here’s a quick summary:

SKMM not ordered to block access to website in where we find out that there are 127 websites and blogs that have been blocked for contravening various sections of the Act.
MCMC - how to make a complaint - this is a useful website. Why? Because you can write complaints, or fax them, and get the MCMC to respond. They have to, I’m told, so if you feel strongly about an issue, this is the right place to hit up the next time such craziness hits.
Dr M slams ‘blocking’ of Malaysia Today in where he expresses his disgust (on his blog, nonetheless!) about the censorship of the Internet. Quote: “… action exposed “a degree of oppressive arrogance worthy of a totalitarian state”, and that the Government would soon lose credibility and respect among the people.” Well, under his rule, I’d not be surprised if the ISA was used sooner… but whole other matter, right?
Reporters without borders picked up on it.
The Edge reported on it, and this takes the cake, because they were accusing “comments” - “MCMC chief operating officer Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi was quoted as saying the regulator ordered the block because it found that “some of the comments on the website were insensitive, bordering on incitement”.”
Google, Go Away! - Rocky, tells Google to not build their multi-billion dollar data centre in Malaysia. Its been a long standing rumour that they planned to do this for a while
SKMM: M’sia Today block order stands, probe underway in where they are deciding which Section of the Act to pick on, and where The Star decides to be relevant and links to the mirror site!

Well, the dark days of Internet censorship are averted. Bloggers beware though, the use of claims of libel, sedition, or just the ISA, might be around the corner. I love how ABC news mentions “a journalist, a blogger and a Member of Parliament” when they cover the recent ISA arrests. A blogger.

Colin Charles: Video interviews of MySQL Developers

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:23:31 +0000

Its no secret that all the ~~MySQL~~ Sun Database Group developers are here in Riga, Latvia for the developer’s meeting. I have my video camera on hand, and plan to conduct bite-sized interviews.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. This is for you. Since you can’t be here, is there something you’d like to ask a MySQL developer with regards to a bug you filed? A new feature request? A worklog item?

Write a comment, or drop me email at colin[at]mysql[dot]com. Be quick though, as the Q&A sessions I imagine, will be fairly impromptu.

Leon Brooks: Public wireless in Perth CBD?

noreply@blogger.com (Leon RJ Brooks) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:09:01 +0000

Bind your card to channel 4, ESSID of ENABLEnet, no encryption, then go & sit across the plaza from the city-side entrance to the Alexander State Library, with your laptop.

Run DHCP on your wireless interface (e.g. dhclient eth1).

The nearest power socket is in the nook on the south-ish side of PICA, which is about 3m outside wireless range for this hp/Compaq nx9040 (I think because of environment shape rather than actual distance), so a fully-charged battery is a great place to start.

Fire up a web browser, click on OK, the world is now yours. I can ssh (so of course scp) including to weird ports, which allows me to upload photos to my webserver (at about 2MB/s) without any setup.

I was able (once) to briefly connect from on the other side of the train tracks (near the Blood Bank) but this is not reliable.

Was able to chat with friends in the USA & Thailand. Can’t complain about the price.

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: SFD2008 - HUGE!

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:21:39 +0000

Software Freedom Day - 20 September 2008 - Everywhere!

Check out some of the media coverage so far...

16th September 2008 - Kiel, Germany - Software Freedom Day 2008
16th September 2008 - Philippines - One Nation: Unity for Software Freedom. Celebrating Software Freedom Day 2008 in the Philippines (CP-Union)
16th September 2008 - Nicaragua - Presenting Software Freedom Day (TV Channel 2)
14th September 2008 - Nicaragua - Nos vemos en el Freedom Day (El Nuevo Diario)
14th September 2008 - Melbourne, Australia - Software Freedom Day 2008: Updated (ITwire)
13th September 2008 - Virginia, USA - He's fighting to free us from Microsoft (Paul Frields) (Fredericksburg)
13th September 2008 - Australia - Sun plans open source push (CRN Australia)
12th September 2008 - New Zealand - Unlimited Potential in open source software (Scoop Independent News)
12th September 2008 - Ghana - September 20 is ‘Software Freedom Day’ (My Joy Online)
12th September 2008 - USA - Sun Microsystems sponsors Software Freedom Day (Trading Markets)
11th September 2008 - Nicaragua - Radio Interview (Radio Futura)
11th September 2008 - Boston, USA - Software Freedom Day in Boston is a Wealth for the Commons: Saturday, September 20, 2008 (Open Media Boston)
11th September 2008 - Boston, USA - Software Freedom Day in Boston is a Wealth for the Commons
10th September 2008 - Tijuana, Mexico - Promocionan ventajas del software libre (El Mexicano)
9th September 2008 - Nicaragua - Promoting Software Freedom Day (TV Channel 2)
8th September 2008 - Australia - Australia gears up for Software Freedom Day (ITnews)
7th September 2008 - Nicaragua - Software Freedom Day Nicaragua 2008 (El Nuevo Diario).
5th September 2008 - Philippines - CP-Union's Software Freedom Tour and SMS Campaign for SFD 2008 (Inquirer.net)
5th September 2008 - Australia - Software Freedom Day 2008 (ITWire).
4th September 2008 - Nicaragua - Radio Interview (Rock FM)
2nd September 2008 - UK - Stephen Fry, the FSF and Software Freedom Day (Heise Online).

Over 500 teams in 120 countries across the planet have registered their events with Software Freedom International... The sfd-discuss mailing list is buzzing with tales of goodie packs arriving, press stories coming in, and team bloggers signing up for Planet SFD:

http://planet.softwarefreedomday.org/ .

Aussie teams have more CDs to give away than ever before thanks to Paul Wayper and Linux Australia... what else can I say... it's going to be HUGE! :) THREE MORE SLEEPS! Check out http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/australia

Colin Charles: learn2scale - what’s up with Malaysian news sites? Will the cloud work for them?

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 06:09:54 +0000

Seriously kids, what’s with the lack of scalability? I’ve never seen CNN or the NYTimes go down on “trimmed” versions.

Is it a question of bandwidth? Is it lack of hardware?

Take for example, Malaysiakini (the first alternative news source in Malaysia, with a subscription model built around it). It runs FreeBSD, uses PostgreSQL, and has a CMS on top of it (so almost a LAMP stack right there). There’s even use of Squid for caching. Yet there’s lacking load balancing? This is where the cloud can come into play, when there’s high traffic.

Next up, The Malaysian Insider. They’re the new kid on the block. Its probably Linux, Joomla, and MySQL is confirmed. No caching (hello, memcached at some stage?). Looks like a one server operation. Again, if you want to start lean, scale to the cloud…

Of course, what takes the cake, is one of the most famous dailies, The Star. The .asp tells me they’re on some kind of Microsoft platform, and I don’t know how scalable that is (maybe with their live.com/livemesh goo). But for a major newspaper (ala the NYTimes equivalent in Malaysia), I’m surprised they’re too busy to serve us content.

Is it the fault of the applications

Is the next wave, getting open source applications to act in a scalable fashion? A CMS like Drupal or Joomla, how ready is it for instant scaling? After all, EC2 has persistent storage (I don’t know if Sun’s network.com offers this or not?).

It seems like there’s a lot of OpenSolaris images for EC2 and web stuff, at OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. I see a Joomla AMI, for example. How easy is this to plug-in for something like The Malaysian Insider? How easy will it be for them to scale up their services (i.e. start more instances, but will Joomla load balance? What considerations must they make if they went this route?). Similar question for the Drupal AMI.

I’m thinking I need to spend some time playing with “the cloud” in due time… Any thoughts or pointers on this, are also graciously appreciated.

Martin Krafft: 35 years ago

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:19:54 +0000

Today, 35 years ago was a dark day for the human age. I mourn the deaths of 4 innocent children as a result of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Martin Krafft: Busting academics

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:54:05 +0000

As I crawl through the social science literature — a very painful endeavour, believe me — it fills me with disgust to see how much bullshit is being spread as authors randomly insert citations into their text to back up some claim they need to argue their case.

Often, the claim is something in which I am interested, so I go out and seek the reference they cite only to find that the referenced authors say nothing even remotely related to the claim for which they were cited. It is happening all over the place, and even in articles that appeared in “renowned” journals.

If we ever get to the point where all academic articles are properly interlinked so that references can be automatically checked — and I don’t mean just checked for correctness of the reference data, but for actual correctness of the reference — then the population of academics will probably shrink to single-digit percentages, at least for the social sciences; I don’t recall it being much different when I was researching artificial intelligence a few years ago though.

Until then, I am compiling a list. Whether I’ll publish it and point journal editors at, or just send it to the journals depends on my mood at the time.

NP: Guns ‘n’ Roses: Appetite for Destruction