Planet linux.conf.au 2008

Simon Lyall: Upgrading stuff

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:17:58 +0000

I’ve been spending most of today upgrading various bits and pieces on my external server. Since March 2007 I’ve had a dedicated server at Layered Technologies in the US. However with the change in the value of the dollar, a price rise they had a while back the cost has gone from around $NZ 100 to $NZ 200 ( $US 105 ) per month (with me paying a larger percentage of it) which is just a little too much for what I need.

So a couple of weeks ago I bought a $US 40/month VPS at Linode.com to replace it ( switch off of the old machine is the end of January ). So far I’ve been pretty happy, the box was provisioned in a few minutes, I got an extra IP no problem and it came with a nice minimal Ubuntu 7.10 install.

Today I’ve been moving over a few more service to the new machine and documenting it as I go.I’m also trying to get the config a little tidier than the previous one

DNS was pretty easy and I’ve tidied up my domains ( all 10 ) . I’m just waiting for people I secondary DNS for to make some changes before starting cut overs.
Some websites are move. The static sites ( like my homepage ) were easy and the wordpress ones were as well ( dump DB, scp , import DB ).
I upgraded Wordpress to 2.7 while I was at it which seems to have worked okay. Only thing I don’t like is the small fonts on the admin pages.But there is probably a way to fix that.
I had a few problems moving over one web-app since it was keeping old info somewhere (I checked the DB and the configs) but as luck would have it Ubuntu has recently fixed the package to work with non-apache Web installs (I am using lighttpd) so I just blew away the DB, grabbed a clean install and took 20 minutes to re-add the small amount of data.
Wiki sites are still to be moved and I’ve left off a couple of that are probably getting moved elsewhere.
I got the basic backups working also just in case something goes kaput.

Overall it’s been a fun day. I would hope I’ll be able to finish the rest of the move by the end of next weekend.

Jeremy Visser: Musings on copyright dates

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 06:16:28 +0000

In the context of a blog, with lots of posts from different years, how would copyright apply? Would each post on the blog have a separate copyright? Or would the blog have a copyright as a whole? Or is it up to the author how it should work?

Say I added a footer to the bottom of my blog in the year 2005, which reads:

Copyright © 2005 by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.

(Please note that the copyright notices in this post are purely for discussion and illustrative purposes, and are not intended to state the true copyrighted nature of any of the content on this website.)

Now, it’s the year 2009, so there seems to be two popular ways to update this kind of line:

So in the latter one, the copyright date is simply bumped up to 2009. Is it legal to arbitrarily bump the copyright expiration date like that without formal renewal?

In Australia, this is not a problem, as copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death — it has nothing to do with the publication date. In which case, it does not make sense to add a year to copyright declarations of Australian works. I think the following would do fine for me:

Copyright © by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.

It would then be up to somebody to look up the date of my death to find out if any of my works are in the public domain.

So why do we add dates to copyright notices? In the United States, the case is the same as Australia — copyright expires 70 years after the death of an author.

I could not find any information on how copyright expiration applies to a corporation in Australia (after all, a corporation cannot die), but in the United States, copyright on a work produced by somebody as part of their official duties while working for a corporation expires 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation (whichever is shorter). In this case, adding dates to copyright notices does make sense.

So, it seems to me that the reason we all add dates to our copyright notices is because we are all sheep and simply copy each others’ copyright notices. Ironic, eh?

Mary Gardiner: RAID is not a backup solution, times one million

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:28:49 +0000

Via slashdot.org (yes really, I still pull in the headlines, although the miracle of feed readers has allowed me to confirm that yes, Ars Technica is a better read), a site called Journal Space, which hosted weblogs, lost all their data. They only had a RAID setup as backup, that is, a system that mirrors content between two disks and is designed to protect against disk failure. If you've heard of RAID, you hopefully already know that it is not the same as a backup: if software error or an accident or a malicious act deletes data from one disk, the RAID setup faithfully mirrors it to the other disk. If not, imagine that you have two magical whiteboards. One is copied exactly to the other. If one magical whiteboard totally breaks down, excellent, you have a full copy of your meeting notes and doodles on the other. (Note for accuracy, not all RAID configurations produce a full mirror and sometimes the mirror is spread over more than one spare disk. But you get the idea.) However, if someone rubs something off the whiteboard, or falls over while holding a can of solvent and splashes it on the first whiteboard, everything on it is immediately deleted from the other.

Instead, for home machines you want, most likely, an incremental backup, that is, a separate disk/machine with several copies of your data going back in time. Your data as it was an hour ago. Your data as it was a day ago. Your data as it was a month ago. And so on. I have snapshots of my data for every three hours over the last two months. (Sensible backup programs will notice when data is the same across two or more time periods and only store it once, so your backup disk does not need to be so very much larger than your normal disk.)

For business systems you want both: the quick recovery from disk failure that mirroring systems such as RAID offer, and incremental backups. (I don't maintain business grade systems, ask someone else for best practices if you need them. Internally consistent database backups are something you want to pay particular attention to.)

I note this because in November I gave a talk on home backups for Linux at SLUG and there is one other point of interest: do not trust third party providers to have good backups. It is getting increasingly common to have a lot of your most interesting data on someone else's servers: your email on Google's, your blog over at wordpress.com, contact details for all your friends on Facebook, and so on. But your provider can make both their own catastrophically bad decisions, like Journal Space, and have their creditors suddenly sell their hard disks off in a fire sale, as happened to Digital Railroad.

Which is a big problem, because a lot of third party providers do not provide an easy way to get your data ('easy' would be both a documented API accessible from common programming languages and an installable application), and lots don't provide any way at all. (There's also a whole batch of interesting issues to do with your comments or Wall postings or whatever: you don't necessarily have the right to reproduce them and there would be privacy implications when allowing you to back them up and reproduce them on some other side. LiveJournal, for one, solves this problem by not allowing easy backups of comments left on your journal.)

If your email host, blog host, calendar host, documents host or social networking host failed or deleted your account, how would you fare?

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: to send or to receive?

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:32:28 +0000

Originally published at KatteKrab. Please leave any comments there.

linux.conf.au 2009 starts in a little over 2 weeks in Hobart Tasmania...

Will you be there?

David Moore: Happy New Year

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:19:12 +0000

Another year over and a new one just begun… Saw New Years in on top of Rangitoto Island again like last year.

Last year was better. The campsite was packed out. If I’d wanted crowds and sleep deprivation with loud music and vicious arguments I could have just stayed in my apartment. There were 260-something scouts having a jamboree there, though they weren’t a problem. (Even if the ad-hoc Halo or CnC game they played after dark the first night was a bit loud. You can take the children away from the video games, but you can’t stop them playing them.) The main problems was the rowing club with their 5-car-battery-operated sound system and the angry guy and his family problems we camped next to. Also there is only limited toilets for the almost 200 non-scouts, possibly the cause of an unsanitary situation. The less said the better, but Michelle has photos. The scouts were prepared with their own port-a-loos.

We stayed two nights this year. (A result of some grumping about so much walking in such a short time last year. Grumping by people who didn’t go in the end this year.) It meant two nights of little sleep, but we did get to see more of Motutapu Island.

We went for a walk around the coast, which ended up on the hills navigating through thistle patches, and had a swim at Mullet Bay. Then we checked out the old Coastal Defenses at Northern Junction. Explored the tunnels and ammo dumps there. One question I had was what are the narrow tunnels running round the underground rooms for? The answer I’ve discovered is these are Lamp Passages. Before electricity the tunnels were lit by lamps, but it was too dangerous to have lamps in the ammo store rooms. So instead there were thick windows and lamps were hung in the lamp tunnel around the outside of the room. The windows must have been blocked up when electricity was introduced.

Had scorching weather for most of the time (shade was a precious scarce resource at the campsite), but New Year’s Eve itself was a bit wet. Michelle needs to learn not to say things like “it’s not going to rain”, “it’s only going to drizzle”, “we’re almost at the top”. There was a big crowd on the Rangitoto summit, seemingly all from the Rangitoto batches. The Dutch woman with Oliebollen wasn’t there though :-(. This year the only fireworks we saw were the Sky Tower ones. There were glows over Waiheke, but the display must have been on the other side of their island.

Met up with Brian’s sister and bro-in-law who visited for New Year’s Day and caught the ferry back to Auckland with us. I went straight back home and promptly fell asleep.

Photo album

Kylie Willison: Inspiration From Elvis Presley???

noreply@blogger.com (Kylie Willison) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:28:45 +0000

As an Elvis fan and a fan of gospel music I borrowed a two dvd set from our local public library about Elvis' gospel music. This is where I came across this song, Walk A Mile In Their Shoes. I hadn't heard it before but it's terrific!!! Here's the lyrics

Elvis Presley Walk a Mile in my Shoes Lyrics:

(words & music by Joe South)

If I could be you, if you could be me

For just one hour, if we could find a way

To get inside each other's mind

If you could see you through my eyes

Instead your own ego I believe you'd be

I believe you'd be surprised to see

That you've been blind

Walk a mile in my shoes

just walk a mile in my shoes

Before you abuse, criticize and accuse

Then walk a mile in my shoes

Now if we spend the day

Throwin' stones at one another

'Cause I don't think, 'cause I don't think

Or wear my hair the same way you do

Well, I may be common people

But I'm your brother

And when you strike out

You're tryin' to hurt me

It's hurtin' you, Lord how mercy

Now there are people on reservations

And out in the ghetto

And brother there, but, for the grace of God

Go you and I,

If I only had wings of a little angel

Don't you know, I'd fly

To the top of a mountain

And then I'd cry, cry, cry

Walk a mile in my shoes

just walk a mile in my shoes

Before you abuse, criticize and accuse

Then walk a mile in my shoes

Lyrics: Walk a Mile in my S

I love the chorus especially! "Walk a mile in my shoes, just walk a mile in my shoes. Before you abuse, criticise and accuse, Then walk a mile in my shoes."

I've been working on a play, for a couple of years now, called Walk A Mile In Their Shoes. This song would be perfect for it! The play's about ordinary people telling their stories of drugs, abuse, addictions, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, mental illness etc. I don't want to have actors I want the actual people telling their own stories or have a group but they all swap stories. I will help them write their stories so that each one emphasises a different aspect. I've written notes but haven't got any further yet. I know it'll happen at the right time though and with the right people.

I love telling stories, seeing them come to life on a stage!! And these are stories which I believe really need to be told. All these things addictions, mental illness, domestic violence can affect anyone from any walk of life! Before we know what someone's situation is or has been we can't and shouldn't ever abuse, criticise or accuse them!

I've written a few plays which have been performed at churches I've been part of and I want to get into it more again. I've neglected my creative side too much but am slowly getting back to doing more creative stuff like my crafts, music, writing, photography, and graphics in between packing to move house that is.

On the dvd Elvis says this when he sings this song

You never stood in that man's shoes

or saw things through his eyes,

or stood and watched with helpless hands

while the heart inside you dies.

So help your brother along the way

no matter where he starts

For the same God that made you,

made him too

These men with broken hearts.

A lovely youtube video of Elvis photos and him singing this song.

Mary Gardiner: New Years' Encouragements

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:35:25 +0000

From RavenBlack:

New Year's Encouragements. Instead of making pressurey resolutions for yourself, make positive uplifting recommendations for other people. No negativity allowed, and try not to even imply something negative (eg. "eat better" implies you were eating poorly, but "make delicious home-cooked meals at least once a week" is pretty cleanly positive, and "make more delicious home-cooked meals because your cooking is great" is better still.)

Anyone with encouragements of this positive type may contact me via my preferred method or my LiveJournal, if you have access. (I am beginning, finally, to think about allowing comments on puzzling.org directly, but it's not likely to happen very soon.)

You are hereby invited to do this in your own weblog.

Mary Gardiner: 2009 plans

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:34:59 +0000

One year I'd like to do the same project Skud is doing for 2009, that is: a resolution a week. But this year is a finishing year for me, not a starting year.

A quick wrap-up on 2008 resolutions:

I dabbled in morning yoga, I am just not good at getting out of bed twenty minutes early for that reason, and Andrew is less good at it (and now has a fixed 9am work start time). I did some morning meditation practice when going through a very stressful period in April (after my DCS hospitalisation).
Tidiness. We got slightly better, but that one was actually Andrew doing it for me. Which is nice and all, but I have no claim to glory here.
Clothes shopping. Oh yes I did. The secret turns out, unfortunately, to be buying expensive clothes.
Reading and watching movies. Not so much.

The first half of 2008 was pretty difficult for me. In retaliation, Andrew and I screamed around the south island of New Zealand in August. I do recommend its recuperative powers.

Major goals for 2009:

Submit PhD thesis for examination.
Do PADI's Rescue Diver certification before my CPR qualification expires, that is, before March.

Other plans in 2009:

A short holiday in January in Tasmania.
With any luck, an international conference or two, and depending on my PhD timeline, a holiday around one of these.
A major party to celebrate my PhD submission.
Something meaningful in August to mark the 10th anniversary of my relationship with Andrew.
Stretching and strength work. If I can't get it together to do a full yoga routine, I do want at least to be working on contributing skills daily.
The odd SCUBA dive here and there.

Also, given the PhD submission thing, I will probably be looking for a job towards the end of 2009. I do not know yet if I am going to apply for postdoctoral positions, this will probably depend on achieving a couple of major conference acceptances in 2009. And on deciding whether I want to live in the northern hemisphere. Even if I am I may be looking for programming or similar work in the short-term to wait out my examination process. So, keep in touch, if you want to offer me work, or come to my submission party. Or both.

Jeremy Visser: Some logos

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 08:33:41 +0000

Okay, what do these logos have in common?

They all use stripes, and they’re ugly. Ugly, I tell you. I don’t know why, but I hate logos that use stripes like these. Please, just use gradients, drop shadows, or just go psycho with the gloss.

Colin Charles: Thai Airways, good for business travellers

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:19:45 +0000

Found a postcard, and decided that I should send it along to her. Called up the wonderful reception, and they said I should bring along the postcard to the concierge.

At the concierge, I was told that I would need to pay 20 THB for postage. I asked if they could charge it to my room, and they declined. I waved a USD$1 note, and they said I’d have to change it at the reception.

Walk along to the reception, and I ask if they can give me cash out, and charge it to my room. Highly obliging, the receptionist, starts processing to give me my 20 THB. Its taking far too long, and I think to myself, maybe its easier to do a FOREX conversion. Without realising, I was thinking aloud, and the receptionist insisted that it was no hassle at all.

Two paw prints later, I had a crisp 20 THB note in my hand. I walked back towards the concierge, and handed it over to them.

What’s ironic about this whole transaction? In a couple of hours, I will be going down to settle my hotel bill. It will cost a magical sum of only 20 THB, and I will settle it with my credit card :-)

And here’s why flying Thai Airways might make business sense. Their planes reach Thailand early in the morning (9am, had my flight made it previously, or about 3am when coming back earlier). Their planes leave Thailand for other destinations pretty late - generally, the layover is about ten to eleven hours. They provide you a hotel (the Novotel Suvarnabhumi), at a cost to them.

So lets say I have a ten hour layover. I might need sleep for about 4-4.5 hours. It still allows me to have business meetings in Bangkok for about 3 hours, without any issue. Maybe even more, if the meetings are held at the Novotel Suvarnabhumi!

Their flights are pretty cheap. So cheap, that the next time I fly them, and if I’m going to India, its business class, or no flight at all. And when planned properly, maybe have many a meeting at the Novotel.

Internet access isn’t cheap, but its typical of a hotel: 150 THB for half an hour, 200 THB for an hour, 500 THB for 12 hours, 700 THB for 24 hours.

I ask myself though, why bother? When I’m done, I can head over to the airport, check in early, and visit the beautiful Royal Silk Lounge in the airport. Emphasis, on beautiful - its much better, IMHO, than the Singapore Airlines Lounge, in Changi. The food (and magazine/newspaper selection) doesn’t seem to be, but the ambience, the chairs/sofas/couches, definitely are.

All this thinking, reminds me of the shrewd startup style thinking that business travellers in startups should have.

Colin Charles: Tab roundup for December 2008

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 09:25:50 +0000

Om Malik’s blog design, and themes as a business

I stumbled upon Om.Is.Me…, Om Malik’s private blog, and was taken away by the design. For one, its hosted at wordpress.com (something I’m thinking I might do at some stage, if it was less rigid). But more importantly, what I noticed was the design - I was really taken away by the blog theme. Its designed by GNV & Partners, and it looks snazzy.

Is there big business in Wordpress themes? If their website was in English, I’d be a little more interested… Largely because I have to theme at least two Wordpress sites in the near future, and I’m not looking forward to mastering CSS, etc.

What do custom Wordpress themes go for? How many folk pay for themes?

Hackerspaces

Found this via Twitter (thanks @achitnis), and it Hackerspaces reminded me a lot of coworking. When in Melbourne, I always pined of a co-working space (I believe, Joe’s Garage came close to it - upstairs, anyway). Now that I’m in Kuala Lumpur a lot more, I am wondering if a warehouse somewhere, might make sense…

Cybercafes in Japan, offering physical addresses to the homeless

Read Cyber cafe offers address to homeless. I didn’t know that cybercafe’s in Tokyo gave away a free email address (maybe they don’t, but they might give you access to one), but I was impressed that comic books and unlimited beverages were a norm. Kudos to Cyber @ Cafe offering long-term lodging and an official registered address (important, when PO BOXes aren’t acceptable or you’re homeless).

Takemitsu Karitachi, used to sleep on park benches, but he doesn’t have to anymore:

This simple service is vital for the 50 semi-permanent residents of the cafe, many of whom have taken refuge here after being laid off abruptly during the current recession.

Takemitsu Karitachi, a contract worker at a nearby factory, is one of the many people who have been sleeping at the cafe every night for the past two months since he lost his office job and his apartment.

Karitachi, who used to roam the streets and hopped between various Internet cafes for months, says he is now relieved to have found a more permanent home — even if it’s a cubicle just slightly bigger than the back seat of a car.

BMW India sales records

It stunned me when I found out that in 2007, BMW only sold 1,338 cars, and in 2008, plans to sell 2,800 units. The sales ratio between the BMW 5 and 3 series is 55:45 (so the one’s buying a BMW, actually have a lot more disposable income than one would think).

I don’t know the cost of a BMW in India, but if its prohibitively expensive as it is in Malaysia (what is it, up to 300% excise duty?), I’m surprised the numbers are a lot lower. Seeing a BMW (or a Mercedes) on the road in Malaysia is very common - yuppies are driving 3-series cars (BMW 320), straight into their first management job, willing to fork out RM220,000+, and paying it off over seven or nine years.

Lucky for me, I don’t think of a car as a status symbol (and think that people that do, are rather daft).

After Credentials

Read Paul Graham’s After Credentials. It is probably his best essay in recent time, and its very pertinent to those living in Asia.

Not only in South Korea, but in most parts of Asia, education is touted as being very important. Quotes like “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future,” don’t surprise me. Paul thinks its old fashioned - I tend to agree. Today’s universities are not more than cram universities.

The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children’s qualities.

…

Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.

…

This doesn’t work in small companies. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they’d soon be parted from you if your performance didn’t match, because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.

In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don’t care whether you’ve even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization.

The whole article is interesting. There is a good analysis of the big company versus small company paradigm, as well as the fact that people want instant (and not deferred) rewards.

I predict that within Asia, in the next two decades, hiring based on your after credentials (first bachelors, then masters, possibly doctorate eventually), are going to be a thing of the past.

Lawyers use Facebook to serve notices

Via The Age:

Canberra lawyers have won the right to serve legally binding court documents by posting them on defendants’ Facebook sites.

In a ruling that could make legal and internet history, a Supreme Court judge ruled last week lawyers could use the social networking site to serve court notices.

Email and even mobile phone text messages have been used before to serve court notices, but the Canberra lawyers who secured the ruling are claiming service by Facebook as a world first.

…

“The Facebook profiles showed the defendants’ dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,” a spokesman for the firm said.

On perfumes, and smell

This is interesting, The scent of a man. Very captivating, here are a few select quotes:

They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odour it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

…

They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. … What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.

…

Perhaps the greatest takeaway was: “The sexes themselves smell different, too, and women can glean information about a man’s social status from his smell alone.”"

Women can smell success?

Colin Charles: Amarok 2.0 uses MySQL

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 04:10:43 +0000

I’ve always been more of a GNOME guy, and when running Linux, I use Rhythmbox to play my music. However, Amarok 2.0 might just change that.

They’ve chosen their database - it is none other than MySQL. The release notes state:

Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn’t fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players.

If you want to know why the decision was made, read MySQL in Amarok 2 - The Reality. It has a lot to do with the fact that MySQL can be embedded, and performs well. Its a generally useful read to see why SQLite and PostgreSQL was not chosen.

MySQL… powering the music of today!

(wonder as I may, if we will ever get any Enterprise customers, who make heavy use of Amarok over many computers, etc… - I’m thinking modern night clubs, lounges, et al)

Kylie Willison: Blogs I'm Reading Today

noreply@blogger.com (Kylie Willison) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:53:27 +0000

Rellies and Bullies from the blog All About Olive.

When a 107 year old blogger orders your attendance, there is of course no saying no.

When this same blogger, reputedly the oldest in the world, says there’s a meeting not be missed and it’s blog related, well you just jump to it, don’t you?

Subjective Truths from Apple Leaf Blog.

I think the Biblical advice to take people's words lightly is wise. Don't worry when people criticise you or your work, because they are really only voicing their OWN opinion! It took awhile for me to learn this and sometimes I still forget. On the other hand, when others heap praise on us and tell us how great we are, we ought to take this lightly too, for the same reason. If we let this sort of thing get too deeply into our heads, it'll hit all the harder when the other sort of feedback comes, as it always will. I think the very best thing we can do is carry on faithfully doing what we are sure is our calling without letting people's words affect us much at all. Then we are probably in the best position for God to use our input.

When Holly Met Crystal from the blog Closing In On Heaven.

Holly sighed. Blood was seeping through her bandage. She was sick of her stitches. Remembering, her Mothers image flashed before her eyes and she shuddered. She heard the noise again; she decided to get off her bed. Holly grabbed her watch and started toward the noise, walking down the hall she put her watch on over her bandage. She stopped at the top of the stairs. Listening again, a door slammed shut.

Why Australian trials are important to the OLPC vision from Pia Waugh's blog.

Need in Australia - there are many children in Australia who are in serious need. Whether it be in remote Indigenous Australia, or living in poverty in metropolitan areas. Supporting projects for these children is a key goal of OLPC Friends for Australia, New Zealand and throughout the Pacific. The first Australian trial includes some children from extremely disadvantaged communities (including a remote Indigenous family) as well as typical kids to ensure that the technology meets both the specific needs of disadvantaged children as well as the typical education requirements of an Australian school.

Kylie Willison: Web Wandering

noreply@blogger.com (Kylie Willison) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:29:00 +0000

Went on an interesting web wander this morning. I started out at facebook.com looking at my friend Dana's profile. From there I went to her blog and read part of the novel she's writing called Closing In On Heaven. This reminded me of a favourite author of mine Paula Vince so I went to her website Apple Leaf Books. From there I found out that Paula has a blog too so I went there and read some great blog posts which encouraged me in my own writing and other creative pursuits! I emailed Dana about Paula's books and gave her the links to Paula's website and blog. I hope they encourage Dana too. :-)

Paula's Quenarden series is great! I received her first book Quenarden The Prophecies free at a homeschooling seminar. I couldn't put it down and when I finished it quickly rang her and ordered the next book from her website.

The same thing when I'd finished book two, I got the next one to find out the exciting finish of the series!

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: Felice Fiestas! Happy Holidays! Seasons Greetings!

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:34:14 +0000

Originally published at KatteKrab. Please leave any comments there.

Whilst it's not a holy-day for everyone, Christmas Day is a scheduled public holiday in Australia. For some people that just means time and a half, perhaps triple time for a few. Nurses, Police officers, system admins - slave on, while others gather with family and friends to share each others company, eat too much food and exchange gifts.

But it's a dark time for some people - everyone else's excess and good fortune is just salt for unspoken wounds. Whatever the faith (or lack there-of) behind your celebration take a moment to think outside your own experience. Hate a little less, criticise not, appreciate another point of view.

Observe some inner peace, and share tolerance and respect in the closing days of 2008. The future always seems close at this time of year. Ponder the possibilities for the future you want. Dream a little.

Love. Blessed Be.

Donna

Simon Lyall: Youtube comment filters waste of time?

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 10:15:51 +0000

Even now and then I get bored and look on youtube at the odd video. One thing I notice is that in the comments for a video you have the option of flagging comments as a “poor comment” or a “good comment”. You also have the option of filtering the comments you see to only show those with scores of greater than -10 , -5 , 0 , +5 or +10 ).

The problem appears to be that nobody ever rates comments as good. So this feature is completely useless. To check I had a look at the top 8 videos on the most viewed videos of all time page and even though most of the had thousands of comments not a single comment was rated better than +5 . In other words a complete rating system for video comments that is completely unused by anyone. Perhaps they should just remove the buttons.

I also noticed that the most viewed video on youtube ever ( Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend ) is “not available in your country” when I try to view it. I assume this says something about somebody’s business model.

Jeremy Visser: Takeaway lights script

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:14:18 +0000

I just stumbled across a simple yet fun script I wrote over a year ago to animate your keyboard LEDs:

#!/bin/sh

LED="setleds -L"
SLEEP="sleep 0.2s"

$LED -num -caps -scroll

if [ "$1" = "-c" ] ; then
	exit 0
fi

while [ 1 ] ; do
	$LED +num
	$SLEEP
	$LED +caps
	$SLEEP
	$LED +scroll
	$SLEEP
	$LED -num
	$SLEEP
	$LED -caps
	$SLEEP
	$LED -scroll
	$SLEEP
done

It will simply pulsate the keyboard LEDs from left to right. Note that this script only works while logged into a tty — it does not work under X11.

Andrew Cowie: Positive Y

andrew@operationaldynamics.com (Andrew Cowie) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:47:00 +0000

The excellent Cairo graphics library has a simple function to draw arcs; in C it’s cairo_arc(); from java-gnome it’s Context’s arc() method, etc.

Quite unsurprisingly they define increasing angles as going from the positive x axis on toward the positive y axis. Nothing unusual about that. The only thing that was surprising is that they even mention this in their documentation.

I should know better.

What I totally missed was the implication of this. I didn’t quite clue in that the positive y direction in screen positioning and page drawing is down, and so increasing angles go clockwise. Using cr.arc() to go from 0 to say π/3 radians does not give a rise of 60° like I expected; it gives this:

Whoa. This is not the counter-clockwise increasing θ like we’re all used to seeing in normal Cartesian or Polar co-ordinates. But it is indeed increasing toward the positive y axis. Oops. Oh well :)

So I made this illustration and added it to the documentation for Context’s arc() method. Really it’s mostly about pointing out which direction positive y is, but when I’ve learned something like this the hard way, I do my best to try and incorporate that knowledge into our public API. With any luck others can be spared my folly.

Drawn with Cairo, of course!

AfC

Update: Some people have pointed out that you can use a transformation matrix, and if you happen to (say) mirror across the horizontal axis then the clockwise notion would no longer apply. Fair enough; but if you have forgotten that +y starts out going down, then you’re not going to think to do such a flip in the first place.

Simon Lyall: Sysadmin Miniconf programme up

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 10:06:45 +0000

I’ve just posted the programme for the linux.conf.au 2009 Sysadmin Miniconf !

This year we were allocated 2 days by the programme committee so we have 15 full length talks by some great speakers on a wide variety of topics. Have a look for yourself to see which ones you are interested in.

I’ve not yet updated the lightning talks but we have a few already and are still looking for more, so contact lca09 @ sysadmin.miniconf.org is you are interested in presenting.

Andrew Cowie: You never know

andrew@operationaldynamics.com (Andrew Cowie) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 10:52:00 +0000

I was pleased to find a decent l’Entrecôte restaurant in east Berlin around the corner from where I was staying.

I ordered what looked like it might be a promising little Côte de Rhône. Somewhat to my chagrin, a bottle of Côte de Beaune showed up instead. Which turned out to be delightful.

Hautes-Côtes De Beaune 2005

“Clos De La Perrière”

Domaine Parigot Père et Fils

Meloisey

Which just goes to show that what you ask for has little to do with what’s actually going to work with the meal you’re having.

AfC

Colin Charles: On mobile readership, and partial RSS feeds

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:33:37 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write my thoughts down on this for a while. Its on RSS feeds, and mobile readers (two separate issues). Spurred, largely today, thanks to a post titled: You can’t afford to lose mobile readers. The author is right - you can’t.

Mobile readers

While I don’t think sites need to be optimised for 800×600, largely because I think we’ve moved from the days on the Web where this was a necessity (what’s next, going back to the colour safe web palette? ;-)), I do think a mobile alternative to a site should be available.

WordPresss has plugins - the author mentions MobilePress and WPTouch. I’ve never used either, but I use the WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King - in time, I’ll probably play with the other WordPress plugins.

Its nice to know that sites like Tumblr just have a mobile version available right there.

Note the bit about Flash. Most (if not all) Nuffnang ads tend to be flash based. You’ve just lost some ad readership.

RSS feeds

My pet peeve? Partial/excerpt RSS feeds. This is just plain silly. If you think people are going to click on to go and visit your site to view advertisements, you cannot be further from correct. If I’m savvy enough to be reading RSS feeds, I am almost certainly going to be using some form of ad blocker - if not via Adblock Plus, via some other method to not see ads.

If you’re worried about losing ad revenue, consider RSS feed ads. I don’t know what the click-through-ratio is, but I’m seeing more and more of them pop up nowadays. They’re a minor annoyance, I don’t block them, but I don’t actually click on them, either.

And why are partial RSS feeds bad? Because if I’m reading it on my mobile device (say, the E71 or an iPod Touch), I’m very unlikely to want to click to open another window and load your blog entry. I’ll just skip it. Skipping it is worse than showing full feeds…

Conclusions

Have a mobile optimised site
Have full RSS feeds. Run ads via Google if you need to. If your service of choice doesn’t support it, badger them
If you plan on posting lots of photos, ensure that your mobile theme resizes them to something more sensible (then again, posting original sized JPGs, and having 20 of them load in a page is play stupidity - if you’re lazy to resize it, use a service like Flickr)

More thoughts? Share them in the comments.

Jeremy Visser: VirtualBox 2.1.0 does OpenGL 3D acceleration

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:28:36 +0000

VirtualBox 2.1.0, released today (see the changelog), does OpenGL 3D acceleration, which is something I have been hanging out for for a very long time. It doesn’t yet do Direct3D acceleration, but OpenGL is sufficient to run many popular games, namely ones based on the id Tech 3 (Quake III Arena, Jedi Knight II, Jedi Academy, Alice, etc.), Half-Life, or Source engine.

The 3D acceleration works with a Windows guest (with guest additions installed), and works on any host operating system (including Linux).

The above screenshot shows me running Quake III Arena in Windows XP in VirtualBox 2.1.0 in Gentoo, which is running at 52fps.

It is quite ironic that VirtualBox only supports OpenGL acceleration. VMware has had 3D acceleration for a while now, but they have only supported Direct3D, not OpenGL. So I suppose in the meantime, you can use VirtualBox for OpenGL games, and VMware for Direct3D games. Everybody’s happy!

Colin Charles: A little MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 update

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:02:31 +0000

The one thing that has consumed my days (and nights) recently, has been the organising of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (hereinafter, referred to as the CE2009).

For starters, we’ve had 356 proposals. That basically provides a 1:3 acceptance:rejection ratio. So the voting committee had a really, really hard task to look at talks. Some even cross-referenced submissions with other submissions. Some even made suggestions of combining talks (successful, even). So my great thanks to the voting committee for the CE2009 - you guys all rock.

Then, once the voting committee has done the hard work, you’ve got to sanely schedule the talks. This is really, not an easy task. Very quickly, you realise that you want to be in all track, and you’ve got to split yourselves. This, being impossible, however, leaves room for the community (and in the past, Sheeri has done a great job at this, and I’m sure she’ll continue for the CE2009) to start making recordings. Good news is that we’re also looking into this, so it might be professionally done, for CE2009! Watch this space, for more details.

As of today, about 84% of the conference schedule is filled up. The tutorials are all 100% filled up. So come registration time, you can already be excited and start registering for your tutorials. And seeing most of the conference schedule, should be a positive thing, to help drive registrations.

Early registration is expected to open up sometime today. Early registrants, especially those that do so in December, I’m told will get a special gift.

The conference site even has features for you to now customise your own schedule. Even better, you can share this with others, if you choose (oh so, social networking :)). We also have a MySQL Conference & Expo Facebook Group.

Note: Some people are getting acceptance notes, and blogging, which is great. Some people are getting rejection notes, with discounts. And some people just aren’t getting any notes yet, because hey, we’ve got about 15% of the conference to fill up :-)

Anyway, this is your humble Program Chair, signing off for now.

Jeremy Visser: It’s not over yet

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:09:12 +0000

I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Telstra.

Simon Lyall: Server recovery first steps

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:16:53 +0000

At work last week we were looking at backups on a group of machines that had been installed by another company but which our team had recently taken over. I was interested in the backup system they had which involved doing a lvm snapshot of the boot partition and then rsyncing this to another machine is the group ( the rsync’s went around in a circle more or less).

This looked quite cute for quick machine recoveries ( we kickstart our servers but we are still at the stage of doing a fair bit of post install setup ) and we had a think about recovering machines by doing a simple kickstart, then netbooting the server, mounting the root partition under the netboot and rsyncing it back to the install. This seemed a promising idea which we thought would only take an hour or so per machine.

However over the weekend I had a bit of a think and it popped into my head that Mondorescue almost did this sort of thing out of the box already. So I’ve been playing around a it this week with it.

So what I have now ( testing using a scratch VM ) are a few commands that:

Backup the server to a NFS partition.
Make an differential backup since the previous backup

Which means I now have a directory on a NFS server with a couple of bootable ISOs sitting in it. One has the full backup of the machine ( it’s about a third of the size of the used space ) and the other has any changes made since the first was done. I do the differential since the full backup takes about 30 minutes of hard work for the server while the incremental only takes 3 minutes or so ( YMMV ). I’ll probably do full backups every week and differential backups nightly.

The fun bit is the recovery:

Remove console the server and boot it over the network
Use PXE to boot the full backup mondorescue image
Mondo boots and thee automatic restores the server to the state is was when the last backup was made (about 15 minutes) . I then have to hit enter a couple of times to reboot
Netboot the incremental mondo image.
Mondo now applies any changes between the last full and the last differential backup.
Reboot again to the hard drive
Finished, machine should be up and running.

A bit of testing shows this only takes about 20 minutes for my test VM ( 3 Gigabytes of default RHE 5 goodness ) and production servers shouldn’t be much slower ( more data but faster disks and CPUs ).

With a bit of luck I should have this ready to deploy in a few days ( although I’m a little short of NFS space to apply it to every machine ).

Overall a fun couple of days, depending on how it goes I might even do a lightning talk about it at the Sysadmin Miniconf next month although I’m not sure if it’s a little trivial since this is close to “out of the box” functionality for Mondorescue.

Michael Davies: linux.conf.au 2008 CFP closing soon

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:29:13 +0000

Are you planning on submitting a talk or tutorial for linux.conf.au 2008?

Get your submissions in by Friday 20th July.

And for those of you concerned about the video option - please don't worry. It's entirely optional. We are aware that many people don't have the means or expertise to make a video and get it online - but for those who do, for those who want to, go for it!

** please forward this message to friends and colleagues you believe should make a submission to present at linux.conf.au 2008 **

Colin Charles: House of Cards

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:20:25 +0000

This is a beautiful song. Its on replay through my speakers, a lot recently (you’ll know if you follow me on last.fm). That is, the single from Radiohead, titled the House of Cards. From the excellent album, In Rainbows (you know, complete download available DRM-free, for any price you want to pay for, even zero dollars.) Beautiful lyrics.

I don’t wanna be your friend

I just wanna be your lover

No matter how it ends

No matter how it starts

Forget about your house of cards

And I’ll do mine

lyrics

Of course, the video is equally interesting. Because no cameras or lights were used to generate it. Read more about the technology behind it (how to capture, and render 3D data). Joi Ito has a good post summarising the important bits: the data (not the music) used to make the video is under a Creative Commons license, the source code to make it happen is under the Apache license. Good stuff all around.

Colin Charles: Goodbye Mixwit, thanks for the online mixtape music revival

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:47:29 +0000

Today I found out that Mixwit, a site that allows you to make digital mix tapes, is closing its doors by December 21 2008.

We regret to announce that Mixwit will cease to exist at the end of the year. The website and profiles will be turned off around Dec 21st and all embedded widgets will stop playing before the end of December.

We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between rock and a hard place.” We’re very grateful to be have been part of the mixtape revival of ‘08 and are satisfied to be able to to bow out while things are still good.

I’ve had an account since about August, and made two mixes, which have received an OK number of plays (considering the mixes were really just meant for one person). The interface is easy to use, you can customise it with a graphic design of your choice (I’ve used photos), and if you want (or should I say can) to buy the MP3’s, you can do so via the iTunes or Amazon music stores. As long as you have unmetered bandwidth, Mixwit made a lot of sense.

For me, it was bringing me back memories of mix tapes, and why I created them. Mix CDs replaced mixed casette tapes, but seeing Mixwit’s interface brought back that nostalgia. If tapes were the originals, CD’s felt so mixtape 1.5 - Mixwit was mixtape 2.0.

Good bye Mixwit, and thanks for the mixtape revival of ‘08.

Songs to remember: Barry Manilow - Can’t Smile Without You, Michael Buble - Everything, Jet - Look What You’ve Done, Toploader - Dancing in the Moonlight, Ronnettes - Be My Baby, Jason Mraz - You and I Both, Oasis - Wonderwall, Wannadies - You & Me Song, Gwen Stefani - Cool, Starship - Sara, Hoobastank - The Reason, Bob Dylan - Sara, Winterpills - Pills for Sara, Eric Gale - Sara Smile, Fleetwood Mac - Sara.

André Pang: LittleSnapper and Mac Development Talky Talk

ozone@algorithm.com.au (André Pang) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:23:20 +0000

Four little announcements, all of them Mac-related:

First, myself and my comrades at Realmac Software are very proud to announce the release of LittleSnapper 1.0, our swiss-army-knife picture, screenshot and website organisation utility thingamijiggo. We’ve all worked hard on this for the past few months and sweated over a ton of details to try to make it a polished user experience and be a joy to use; we hope you agree. (You would not believe how long we spent figuring out how the blur and highlighting tools should work before they became their final incarnations, or how much pain was involved when we decided to add FTP and SFTP¹ support late in the development cycle.) If you’re a Mac user, give it a whirl; it’s a hard program to describe because it has a lot of different workflows, but between the quick annotation tools, easy Web sharing with QuickSnapper/Flickr/SFTP¹, website DOM snapping, and the iPhoto-like forget-about-what-folder-you-need-to-put-your-picture-in snapshot management, I’m sure you’ll find something useful for you in there. Hopefully our hard work can make life just a little easier for you!

¹ FTP must die.

I blogged earlier that I was speaking at MacDev 2009 in April, but didn’t mention exactly what I was talking about. Well, the talk abstract’s up now:

One reason for Mac OS X’s success is Objective-C, combining the dynamism of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. However, how does Objective-C work its magic and what principles is it based upon? In this session, we explore the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime, and see how a little knowledge about programming language foundations—such as lambda calculus and type theory—can go a long way to tackling difficult topics in Cocoa such as error handling and concurrency. We’ll cover a broad range of areas such as garbage collection, blocks, and data structure design, with a focus on practical tips and techniques that can immediately improve your own code’s quality and maintainability.

So, two sections: first, low-level hackery of the Objective-C runtime. Second, a different kind of low-level hackery, and one that’s arguably far more important: understanding the essence of computation and programming languages, and why I fell in love with both Haskell & Objective-C, two languages at completely opposite ends of the planet.

I’d like to point out that while the MacDev registration fee seems fairly expensive at £399, keep in mind that covers your accommodation and also meals, which easily covers £100-£150. Scotty’s done a lot of organising so that you don’t have to. There’s also a Christmas special on at the moment where a few applications are included in the registration price; check the MacDev 2009 website for details.

If you’re an imsoniac and are having trouble sleeping, you’ll hopefully enjoy a recent Late Night Cocoa episode where I talk to Scotty about Garbage Collection. (Actually, you probably won’t enjoy it so much after you find out exactly how -retain & -release are implemented under-the-hood. The words CFBag and “lock” should hopefully scare you enough.) It’s a bit of a long episode at over an hour and a quarter long, but next time I’ll say “um” a bit less which should shorten it to about half an hour. Have fun. And use GC! (LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver both aren’t GC yet, but you bet your ass they will be for the next major versions.)

I’ve had a pretty long exodus away from the fp-syd user group since I was off getting drunk overseas for about four months. That, of course, meant that somehow my brain was rather misplaced when I arrived back in Sydney, so I decided to give a talk at fp-syd upon my return… on the same day that LittleSnapper 1.0 was due to be released, leaving pretty much no margin for error. Oops. I’ll glad to say that the gusto prevailed, and that both the talk seemed to go OK (well, I wasn’t booed off the stage anyway), and LittleSnapper was released on time. (Just; thanks Alan and Danny!) My talk there was similar to the one I gave at Galois in Portland earlier this year: a whirlwind tour of the Objective-C programming language and Mac OS X technologies for a functional programming audience. In particular:

basics of the runtime system,
higher-order messaging and its analogy to higher-order functions in functional languages,
some details on the engineering marvel that is the Objective-C garbage collector, and
(updated!) information on Blocks, LLVM and Clang, and a wee tiny bit of info on Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

I’ve updated the talk with a few extra slides, since Apple have made a little more information to the public now. (In particular, brief information on Blocks, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.) Enjoy all!

André Pang: Interview with Marshall Kirk McKusick

ozone@algorithm.com.au (André Pang) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:00:08 +0000

A website named Neat Little Mac Apps is not the kind of place you’d expect to find an interview with a operating systems and filesystems hacker. Nevertheless, one of their podcasts was just that: an interview with UNIX and BSD legend Marshall Kirk McKusick. (He has his own Wikipedia page; he must be famous!)

There’s some great stuff in there, including the origin of the BSD daemon (Pixar, would you believe? Or, well, Lucasarts at the time…), and a great story about how a bug was introduced into the 4.2 BSD version of the pervasive UNIX diff utility. Marshall’s full of energy, and it’s a great interview; it’s a little amusing to see the stark contrast between the interviewer and McKusick, both of whom have rather different definitions of what constitutes an operating system.

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: Evaluating conference management systems (again)

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 04:19:25 +0000

Peter and I are sitting on the technical committee for ACEC 2010 - the Australian Computers in Education Conference scheduled to take place in Melbourne in April in 2010. That seems like a long time in the future, but, well it's not really - the organisers would like to open the call for papers in early March!

We've been looking at the following systems:

Expectnation
MyReview
OCS
OpenConf
Zookeepr
Drupalcon
Eventwax
Regonline
Easychair

And are in the process of finalising our feature wishlist. We'll be seeking expressions of interest in the next weeks for development/hosting.

We'll need call for papers, paper review and speaker management, including speaker profiles, registration and delegate management, delegate experience including links to social networking sites, and session selection. Payment gateway, financial reporting, and export to accounting software... A Tall order?

Do you have other suggestions?

Colin Charles: MustGoLah, the Malaysian event portal

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 04:13:03 +0000

Today I found Must Go Lah, a portal for events happening around Malaysia. Its a WordPress-based site (still 2.5), run gratis, by Orangedot Technologies.

I even disabled AdBlock Plus to look at the site and found no monetary business model (read: ads). I’m impressed - I wonder how long it will last. Do we really need another site for events listings, considering there already is Upcoming? Turns out of course that there are more events listed on MustgoLah, then there is on Upcoming. I’ve added it to my RSS reader.

Are there more event portals in Malaysia that you know of?

Colin Charles: New iPod Touch firmware allows over-the-air podcast downloads, but…

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:54:31 +0000

The new firmware (ok, its been out a few weeks) for the iPod Touch (and I presume the iPhone), allows one to download podcasts over the air - i.e. no need to sync with iTunes any longer, you can do it over the 3G network (on an iPhone) or the WiFi network (on an iPod Touch). Preetam was right when he said podcasts are really going to rule now.

I got the update, it took hours (some 200+MB took hours on a DSL connection), and was all excited, till I saw the following:

The iTunes Store is not supported in this country. What an amusing message. The AppStore definitely is. And podcasts are free - are there paid podcasts that I don’t know about?

I filed rdar://6443514, in disgust.

Colin Charles: On power outlets

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:17:07 +0000

Starbucks, Coffee Bean, and many other chains, aren’t afraid to let you use their electricity (and at some places, free WiFi), because they know you’ll be buying coffee, food, and more. I however, took offence to the Secret Recipe, in Plaza Mont Kiara - the management there find it offensive to allow people to plug their laptops in!

However, running a Christmas tree from another socket was fine. I think they’ve just lost my business, and probably every other laptop toting yuppie reading this.

Colin Charles: MySQL in a small town cafe

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 02:40:59 +0000

Via Ditesh:

Interesting aside: the bus stopped in a ${RANDOM} town in Johor for food, and at the cashier, I spotted the cashier using KC POS which had a prominent “Powered by MySQL” text and the Sakila logo. Very cool!

This was a small town coffee shop, using a cash register, powered by the mighty Sakila. Similar to the chain of restaurants, Old Town White Coffee.

The whole blog post from Ditesh itself is interesting, but knowing you can find MySQL just about anywhere, showing the ubiquity of the database, just makes you proud to know, you work at/on/with MySQL.

Mary Gardiner: Height grumble

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:22:10 +0000

Something that's been on my mind recently, of which I was reminded by Joshua Gans linking to a study about problems with high birth weight babies: did you know medical care is somewhat compromised by being extremely tall? How so, you might ask? Well aside from the fact that Jo(an) Public's sense of what a good weight is is seldom corrected for height, especially for women, actual doctors with actual charts have no idea what a healthy measurement is for me in terms of blood tests or, in some cases, actual organ size. I have over the last couple of years had several tests where the radiologists and/or pathologists were unable to give a firm reading because they do not have enough data for women at my height (or weight in fact). They can extrapolate, but appear unwilling to, it's different from having an actual sample. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised, I've been reading for years about how correct diagnoses are harder to obtain the further you get from the profile of people who participate in clinical trials. It's even justifiable in my case: it's not as though there's an overlooked population of very tall women out there to be studied. But it's still extremely irritating to be told that 'this result would be worrying in most women... for you, we simply don't know!'

Anyway, I'm never able to read the stuff about heavy babies (I was, I believe, a bit this side of 4.5kg, but not by much) without wondering if someone is correcting for parental/neonatal height in these measures. Are all babies really supposed to be the same size regardless of, to take a hypothetical case, having a mother sitting on the fifth standard deviation above the height average?

Jeremy Visser: Internode unmeters ABC iView

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:28:59 +0000

This is awesome: ABC iView is now unmetered for Internode customers.

In addition to their other unmetered services (including SourceForge), VoIP, and (relatively) gigantic download quotas, there is now absolutely nothing stopping us from switching to Internode from iiNet.

Kylie Willison: All About Olive

noreply@blogger.com (Kylie Willison) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:10:28 +0000

I was browsing youtube.com and came across videos of this amazing woman. From there I went to her blog, or blob as she called it.

www.allaboutolive.com.au

Olive Riley lived to 108 years old and is known as the world's oldest blogger. Through the blog she relives stories of living in Broken Hill (in outback New South Wales, Australia), raising her kids as a single mum, her son going to war and more.

Quotes from Olive's Blob

OLIVE’S FIRST POST

Good Morning everyone. My name is Olive Riley. I live in Australia near Sydney. I was born in Broken Hill on Oct. 20th 1899. Broken Hill is a mining town, far away in the centre of my native Australia.

My Friend, Mike, has arranged this blob for me. He is doing the typing and I’m telling the stories.

At the football

That was in Broken Hill in the Depression. I used to go to the game of a Saturday with a pram full of home made pies and pasties, and I’d be selling them to the crowd.

There's also a dvd of an ABC documentary which I'm very tempted to get because I'm a history lover and especially love stories of outback Australia and I've lived near Broken Hill for a short time too. My uncle used to tell great stories, I wish they'd been recorded like this before he died.

Jeremy Visser: Configuring a chrooted Ubuntu installation

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:54:53 +0000

Installing a chrooted Ubuntu installation (i.e. creating one from scratch) is quite easy. All it takes is a lot of bandwidth, because each chroot installation needs to download about 200MB from the internet. You can save bandwidth by setting up an apt proxy (I use approx, available in the Ubuntu repositories) on your computer or server first, but that’s another story.

When you manually install Ubuntu with debootstrap, the initial setup of the environment is quite different from when you install Ubuntu off the normal installer CDs. There are a few tweaks you have to make to get it out of its default state of insanity for most cases.

First of all, it’s quite easy to make a chroot. Syntax is like this:

sudo debootstrap --arch=i386 hardy \
    /wherever/you/want/to/put/the/chroot \
    http://your.isp.mirror/pub/ubuntu

When chrooting into the environment for the first time (and upon subsequent reboots of your computer, as well), you should run the following commands first outside the chroot, otherwise you can get quite strange errors. (Source: Ubuntu 6.06 Live CD customisation guide)

mount -t proc none path_to_chroot/proc/
mount -t sysfs none path_to_chroot/sys/
mount -o bind /dev path_to_chroot/dev/

Also, to get X apps working, type this outside your chroot:

xhost +
mount -o bind /tmp wherever_your_chroot_is/tmp/

I once had a problem with installing the dbus package. For some reason, the dbus-daemon process just bombed out. Eventually, I found the problem was related to forgetting to mount the /proc and /sys directories, so don’t forget to run the above lines.

If Perl complains while being invoked (for example, when installing packages), run the following commands:

export LC_ALL=C
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Your chroot environment may or may not be able to access the internet. In order for it to translate host names (www.google.com) to IP addresses (66.102.7.104) it needs to know about your DNS server.

From outside your chroot environment, run the following:

sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf wherever_your_chroot_is/etc/

resolv.conf is a configuration that simply contains the IP addresses of the DNS servers that the computer knows about. Normally, whenever you connect to a Local Area Network and use DHCP to get an IP address, the resolv.conf file is automatically updated. Because the chroot uses the already-existing network, it doesn’t have to use DHCP, but that means the resolv.conf doesn’t get updated automatically.

If you’re using approx to cache your packages, or your ISP mirrors Ubuntu, copy your local sources.list file into the chroot (be careful if your distro version is different to the distro inside the chroot) so as to download from the same location:

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list wherever_your_chroot_is/etc/apt/

Now, if you want to boot into the chroot later on, you’ll find that you have no way to log on. That’s because there is no root password set by default. You’ll want to set it from inside the chroot:

passwd root

That’s all I have for now. If anybody has any improvements they want to suggest, please tell me in the comments, so I can add it to the article!

Soon to come: a script I wrote which automates most of this!

Kylie Willison: Subtitles On Movies For The Hearing Impaired

noreply@blogger.com (Kylie Willison) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:47:26 +0000

RANT

All dvds need to have subtitles!!! Anyone who has a hearing loss, like me, would agree. Even with my hearing aid now it's still near impossible to hear ALL the words and I often miss the meaning of parts of the story then I have to ask my kids (or hit rewind) and they get fed up with me very quickly!

With subtitles I can happily follow the story and enjoy the movie instead of it becoming a frustrating experience trying to decipher what's being said. I only have a mild hearing loss but the things I find hardest are using the telephone and watching tv and movies. Hearing conversations in noisy places is difficult too but my rant here is about subtitles! When I'm at someone else's house I'm sometimes too embarrassed to say anything so if you're watching with friends it doesn't hurt to ask if they'd like the subtitles on.

RANT

Sometimes you can get a really good laugh from what's in the subtitles too. Often all of the music is described so in a particular seen you may have 'curious music', 'apprehensive music' etc and I've always wondered how can music be curious or apprehensive? :-)

Jeremy Visser: Ten things you didn’t know about me (and don’t really care about either)

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:30:53 +0000

I’m left-handed. (Although I still operate a computer mouse with my right hand.)
I love the art of typography. I’m not a typographist myself, but I appreciate reading material that is well laid-out, and special attention is paid to the line-spacing, font, whitespace, etc. When reading a book or sign, I’ll often discover that I didn’t take in any of the textual content, but I was trying to deduce the typeface name.
I’m obsessive about the selection rectangles that Firefox draws around hyperlinks. Whenever a link is selected (focused), it draws an ugly dotted selection rectangle around it. You can click somewhere else on the page to get rid of it. Even worse, when you middle-click a link to open it in a new tab, the selection rectangle is left behind. So, I have developed this awful habit of middle-clicking a link, then left-clicking near it to get rid of the rectangle. That’s twice as many clicks.
I’ve been overseas twice: once to Indonesia, and once to Spain. In August 2005, my two sisters and I toured with the BlueScope Steel Youth Orchestra to Yogyakarta, Indonesia to perform in an event called Gita Swarasisya Buwana, a benefit concert for victims of the Boxing Day Tsunami. Scarily, I went through Bali, in between the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings. In April 2008, we toured northern Spain through some pretty awesome cities, and performed in four concerts while over there.
Something about bureaucracy really turns me off. I don’t know what it is, and I know that in some cases, bureaucracy is the only way to get things done. However, I have an awful habit of attributing just about anything negative to bureaucracy.
I deliberately say words grammatically uncorrectly or emphasise words in strange ways (e.g. pronounce dangerous as dan-GEE-rers) every now and then. Not sure entirely what I do it. Often, if somebody I’m talking to is being lulled into a stupor by what I’m saying, inserting a few strangely pronounced words can jerk them back awake again.
I’ve never broken a bone in my body. When I was small, I was always scared off by people (usually older than me) taking risks and ending up with a cracked skull or broken arm. Because of that, I stay firmly in the sidelines. The closest I’ve got to breaking a bone was actually during packing up my bassoon one day while on my knees — my knee got momentarily dislocated. Very painful, although I could walk within a few minutes of that happening.
The highest high school year I have is year 9. I was homeschooled. For year 10, I started CGVE via OTEN, but that royally sucked because it was really not designed for 15-year-olds, and the support staff didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and didn’t give me the help I really needed. As a result, I dropped out of the course. Good riddance.
I have red hair, which means my skin is pale, and burn easily. As a result, I hate going out into the sun. I also have glasses, but rarely wear them, as I don’t find I need to see into the distance at great detail very often.
I have two scars on my chin; both of which I got when I was around two or three years old. One was from jumping on my bed, where apparently I fell and hit my chin on the bedhead and my teeth went through the skin. Ouch. The other was from jumping out of the side of our house, which I distinctly remember. I had called out to Dad something like “Hey Dad, catch me!”. As my luck would have it, Dad didn’t hear me, so when I jumped out, naturally, there was nothing but the ground to break my fall.

Kylie Willison: 19 Ways To Cope With Stress :-)

noreply@blogger.com (Kylie Willison) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:52:03 +0000

WARNING: do not attempt these at home.

1. Jam miniature marshmallows up your nose and sneeze them out. See how many you can do at a time.

2. Use your Mastercard to pay your Visa, and vice-versa.

3. Pop some popcorn without putting the lid on.

4. When someone says "Have a nice day", tell them you have other plans.

5. Make a list of things to do that you have already done.

6. Dance naked in front of your pets.

7. Put your toddler's clothes on backwards and send him to kindy as if nothing is wrong.

8. Fill out your tax form using Roman Numerals.

9. Tape pictures of your boss on watermelons and launch them from high places.

10. Leaf through "National Geographic" and draw underwear on the

natives.

11. Tattoo "Out to Lunch" on your forehead.

12. Pay your electric bill in 5 cent pieces.

13. Drive to work in reverse.

14. Polish your car with earwax.

15. Read the dictionary upside down and look for secret messages.

16. Braid the hairs in each nostril.

17. Write a short story using alphabet soup.

18. Stare at people through the tines of a fork and pretend they're in jail.

19. Make a language up and ask people for directions in it.

Have a Great Day!!! unless you have other plans.

Jeremy Visser: Bought an Eee PC

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:47:23 +0000

Well, today, I got an ASUS Eee PC 901. I’m totally jumping on this netbook bandwagon.

For me, I’ve found that I actually don’t need all that much power. In fact, I have a ~5-year-old laptop with a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 M processor. The Eee 901 has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom, which is (technically) 400 MHz slower. These days, speed is much of a muchness. It is more about making power usage more efficient, and becoming more mobile.

The laptop I currently have is a 15-inch Evo N610c, which I simply find too bulky to lug around. I find that when I’m going somewhere where I want to crunch bits but don’t want to be burdened with lugging a laptop around, I take my OLPC XO-1 with me, which powers on from standby in less than a second, and can instantly connect to a wireless access point. However, this is abuse of my XO, as it is not really practical as a mobile workstation, which I often use it as one (in addition to hacking on Sugar).

So, the Eee 901 fulfils my desire for increased mobility perfectly. I’ll find invaluable the Intel 945 graphics, solid state drive, webcam, Bluetooth, WiFi (802.11n), and the ginormous 8-hour battery life. It’ll be able to do everything I can do with my current laptop, and more.

I’ve installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix (referred to me by Jeff Waugh), which is a super-slick user interface for Ubuntu designed for small screens. I’ve already tried out the Remix on my existing laptop (though running it on a 15-inch screen is a bit of a waste), and it performs well, and looks awesome.

I’m totally impressed with this laptop’s performance. I connected it up to my VGA monitor, and ran a fullscreen video at 1280×1024 — perfectly smooth playback. Also, I was quickly able to start an Ekiga video chat using the in-built webam.

The things that didn’t work out of the box in Ubuntu were the function key shortcuts (e.g. brightness/volume controls), the WiFi, and the webcam. Getting the webcam working was easy — it is simply disabled in the BIOS by default (I presume to ensure user privacy). Getting the keyboard shortcuts and WiFI was fixed in one fell swoop by installing the linux-eeepc-lean kernel from the Array.org Eee PC Ubuntu Repository, which adds hardware support for the Eee’s devices.

Colin Charles: Google Reader translates foreign language blogs

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:36:55 +0000

Both Giuseppe and Kaj have blogs in languages that I don’t understand. In fact, even Planet MySQL has feeds for German, Spanish and French blogs.

Want to keep up with non-English based blogs? Happen to use Google Reader? Then use their nifty “Translate into my language” feature.

I can now read Giuseppe’s latest Italian blog. Current content is about MySQL 5.1 for the impatient - a feature overview of what’s new and cool.

Colin Charles: Flickr, and a GPS enabled camera phone

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 14:01:33 +0000

I have always been excited about location based services. I’ve found it daft that its taken so long to get a camera integrated with a GPS chip for this amount of time, considering how cheaply available GPS chips are.

Yes, its taken a while for me to go the GPS-phone route… Nokia has had a bunch for a year-18 months already I’m sure (their Navigator phones, the N95, etc.), but for me it all came with the E71 purchase.

I like photos. Its quite natural, that I like Flickr. Its also nice to know that EXIF has so many unused fields, that you can embed location data. Flickr takes the embedded location data and then pairs it with a map. Just look at the following photo of a garden.

The meta information includes Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, as well as GPS Time/GPS Date. The Time/Date fields seem inaccurate (or non-parsed), but the Latitude, Longitude and possibly the Altitude are very correct.

Unfortunately, when I click “map”, I am disappointed. “We’re sorry, the data you have requested is unavailable. Please zoom out to see more map information or refresh your browser to try again” is the sad message I see. Yahoo! Maps doesn’t work too well… but…. Google Maps does! I enter the latitude/longitude combination, and it shows me street level accuracy. In fact, the phone’s GPS picked up the data almost as accurately as a device from Garmin did.

Flickr (and by this I mean, Yahoo!) should tear down the walled garden, and allow people to let the “map” link point to Google Maps.

How does all this work?

In Flickr, make sure you allow it to Import EXIF location data.

On the E71, I installed Nokia Location Tagger. I run this application, allow it to auto-hide, and the camera does its thing. The only way I know Location Tagger is running, is when taking a photo, has a significant lag, as the GPS data is being written. This software can start in the background - just make sure you have a fairly sensible data plan.

I upload images either via Share Online (direct to Flickr from the camera) or via transferring the images to my laptop and then uploading them. The way it gets to Flickr is immaterial - the location data is embedded in the EXIF tags.

Other thoughts

Some say this is a violation of one’s privacy. Because now, people may know where you live, and stalkers may show up. Sure.

I’ve seen examples of this on Picasa (which integrates with Google Maps, and is cool), but I haven’t used the service myself.

Searching for Creative Commons photos, by location, can be a really useful technology for stock photography. Might this disrupt the industry? Might this help, enhance the industry for someone who harnesses it?

Donna 'LCA2008' Benjamin: Preparing to experience the joy of Inkscape

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:37:46 +0000

Originally published at KatteKrab. Please leave any comments there.

Deep into preparations for the Inkscape tutorial I'm giving at linux.conf.au in Hobart in January, I've been practicing techniques and recording them using RecordMyDesktop. It is a Linux application that does exactly what it says, screencast and audio recording of what's happening on screen. It works very well!

This was inspired by heathenx and rfguerin's fantastic screen casts. They've also followed these up by creating a group on flickr for people to post examples of the work they've done inspired by the screencasts. It's interesting to see how other people express their learning and apply their own creativity and perspective.

But the HeathenX screencasts and other online tutorials make me wonder about the value of a same-time, same-place tutorial in some random room, at some random conference, when one can learn so much from following step-by-step how-to's and watching videos on you tube.

Does the value lie in the quality of the learning environment? Is it the chance to collaborate with peers? We often learn just as much from the questions of fellow learners. During a recent interview Michael Wesch said something along these lines [1]. So I'm looking at resources such as Wikiversity's article on Instructional Design to see if there are tried and true methods I can build on.

I reckon there also has to be shortcuts - most people want to use a tool to accomplish a task, not spend hours scaling the rocky cliffs of the ugly end of the learning curve. So helping beginners get past that stage will be one of the major aims of this tutorial. But I also need to have something there for more experienced users of Inkscape. A couple of gurus and developers who could put my meagre knowledge to shame will be at the conference too, so if they come to heckle, I hope they'll get something out of this too, and perhaps learn something about learning inkscape they can take back to help build the world's best open source scalable vector editor.

Refs:

1. Interview with Michael Wesch

Note: This was posted at http://www.kattekrab.net/ and -fingers crossed- automatically posted back to LiveJournal