Planet Linux Australia

Andrew Pollock: [life] Zoe at 21 months

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:26:05 +0000

Wow, a lot happens in 3 months. I'm sure I've missed something...

I think the biggest achievement would be toilet training. Zoe's been using the toilet for some time now, but still wearing diapers, and just after Christmas (when she was sick and vomited on the carpet) we figured we had nothing to lose, so we ditched the diapers. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of accidents she's had since then. I'm really happy to have this out of the way so early. Using a toilet away from home is still more of a challenge, but she seems to have very good bladder control, and fairly predictable bowel movements.

Speaking of sick, she was the sickest she's ever been around Christmas time. It coincided with her top canines finally coming through. She had a cold, which progressed into an ear infection, and she had this dreadful persistent dry cough, which then progressed into a dreadful productive wet cough. You knew she was really sick because she was extremely cuddly and lethargic.

Since around that time, her sleep has gone completely to hell. We've had some really bad nights where she'll wake up after a couple of hours of going down for bed, or for a while, she was reliably waking up at 4am and taking a good couple of hours to settle back down. Lately she's been sleeping through again, but waking up at 6am instead of the usual 7-7:30am. We bought a clock that changes colour at programmable times, so we're trying to train her that if she wakes up and the clock isn't green yet, she should try and go back to sleep. Not a huge amount of success there yet.

Christmas itself was good, but fairly quiet because Zoe was sick. Sarah managed to get a fabulous photo with Santa, which just fills me joy every time I look at it. We had some friends around for Christmas dinner, and Zoe vomited all over her new Cabbage Patch Kid doll and I think she threw up a couple more times between that day and the day after, so that wasn't much fun.

She's becoming more and more independent. "Zoe do it" is the most frequent thing out of her mouth, but fortunately she still accepts help as well.

We've also been getting plenty of sneak previews of the Terrible Twos. Fortunately they're pretty short-lived, but it's definitely going to be a challenge to my patience.

We'd been intending to keep Zoe rear-facing in the car until she was 2, which is the current recommendation over here, but I caved in recently when she was getting in the car and refusing the sit down (she'd stand up facing forwards and it was next to impossible to rectify the situation). After she did this to me a few times when I took her out in the car, I had enough and turned the car seat around. It's improved things a bit, but she still has her moments.

We also changed her day care, from the one day a week at a home day care, to two days a week at a commercial place. We were becoming more and more unhappy with the existing day care, and so decided to move her. It's a lot more money, but after just a week, we were seeing a noticeable change (for the better) in Zoe's response to going to day care, and she seemed to have picked up a bunch of new skills as well (sitting crossing her legs, holding a crayon like a pencil). The place she's in now is pretty new and very shiny. There's a couple of kids in her class that she knows from the local park, so overall it's looking like money well spent and definitely a change for the better.

Zoe had her first hair cut last weekend, and it was fairly uneventful. We went to this cute place in Palo Alto called Snipits, which was ludicrously expensive and I'd only ever take Zoe there for her first haircut. There was another kid there who was screaming bloody murder, and I think that unsettled Zoe more than anything else, so she was a bit uncomfortable to start with, but once the hairdresser put an Elmo DVD on, it was all good.

Sarah's Mum is coming over to visit for a couple of weeks in a couple of weeks time, so Zoe will be very happy to see her Nana. They're going to go on a cruise out of New Orleans down to Mexico and part of the Caribbean. Unfortunately I'm too busy at work at the moment to burn a week, so I'll just take a four-day weekend and check out New Orleans with them when they get back from the cruise.

Michael Still: Wow, qemu-img is fast

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:30:05 +0000

I wanted to determine if its worth putting ephemeral images into the libvirt cache at all. How expensive are these images to create? They don't need to come from the image service, so it can't be too bad, right? It turns out that qemu-img is very very fast at creating these images, based on the very small data set of my laptop with an ext4 file system...

mikal@x220:/data/temp$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 10g
Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=10737418240 

real	0m0.315s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.004s

mikal@x220:/data/temp$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 100g
Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=107374182400 

real	0m0.004s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s

Perhaps this is because I am using ext4, which does funky extents things when allocating blocks. However, the only ext3 file system I could find at my place is my off site backup disks, which are USB3 attached instead of the SATA2 that my laptop uses. Here's the number from there:

$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 100g
Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=107374182400 

real	0m0.055s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.004s

So still very very fast. Perhaps its the mkfs that's slow? Here's a run of creating a ext4 file system inside that 100gb file I just made on my laptop:

$ time mkfs.ext4 disk 
mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
disk is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
warning: Unable to get device geometry for disk
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
6553600 inodes, 26214400 blocks
1310720 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
800 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
	4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872

Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 36 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

real	0m4.083s
user	0m0.096s
sys	0m0.136s

That time includes the time it took me to hit the 'y' key, as I couldn't immediately find a flag to stop prompting.

In conclusion, there is nothing slow here. I don't see why we'd want to cache ephemeral disks and use copy on write for them at all. Its very cheap to just create a new one each time, and it makes the code much simpler.

Tags for this post: openstack qemu ephemeral mkfs swap speed canonical

Related posts: Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Openstack compute node cleanup; Taking over a launch pad project; Speed limit; Slow git review uploads?; My machine was thrashing a lot; Large inodes = faster samba; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Linux USB quandary

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Donna Benjamin: Drupal Association Elections

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:28:46 +0000

I'm running for election as an "At Large" board member of the Drupal Association.

"Meet the candidates" forums were scheduled so members of the Drupal community could ask questions of the nominees. We were all asked to do a brief introduction, then respond to questions either by voice, or by IRC, and then were all asked to make a final statement.

Rather than adding to the already lengthy wiki summary of the candidate meetings, I'm posting the edited version of my responses here instead. See the full IRC transcript, and others summaries here:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/207398

My formal candidate statement is here:

https://association.drupal.org/node/14388

Further information on the election, as well as details on voter eligibility, and how to vote is here:

https://association.drupal.org/2012-elections-voting

General Intro

I'm in Melbourne, Australia. Run my own small business, called creative contingencies. Been using Drupal for about 5 years. I'm really passionate about open source and the fact it enables people to do things they would not otherwise be able to do.

In terms of Drupal and the Drupal association, I'd like to be a voice for the 'small voices'. Small drupal shops, amateurs, hobbyists, non-profits, students and tinkers. Sometimes we get caught up in the commercial opportunities, and forget that Drupal has been an enabler for many people that aren't using it to make a living.

It's important the Drupal Association develops a more global perspective, and that we work together to invite and embrace more people into the Drupal community.

I just helped run Drupal Downunder in Melbourne a couple of weeks back, it was a great success, and like many other camps around the world was driven by the local community to fulfil a need that can't be filled by DrupalCon, because DrupalCon happens on the other side of the world. The DA has already expressed an interest in seeing DrupalCon South America and DrupalCon Asia Pacific - which is fantastic, but I have concerns.

Response to Questions

Harley (Hyperglide)

Regarding emerging markets in asia. Wants to know if any of the candidates have an idea on how to handle outreach to those markets to solve the talent shortage?

Emerging markets are really important for Drupal's growth. There's a pretty critical Drupal skills shortage. Everyone is hitting that. China and India are both huge countries with lots of developers - finding a way to encourage them to participate in the community could help with the global skills shortage. But we also have to acknowledge the economic reality that participating in an open source project as a volunteer doesn't pay the bills. We need to connect with other open source communities in the region, and encourage and support local groups to create and grow their own events, meetups, mentoring, and community learning programs.

The DA can help with some of that, but we're also going to run into some issues. We're going to have address the tension between commercial interests in training and certification with the broad based need for more people to learn Drupal.

tsvenson: What do you see as the biggest obstacles for new Drupal users, especially non coders with small or no budgets, often leading to them quickly going elsewhere? And what will you do to change that?

We need to tackle the issues identified by the documentation team. They are the front line for new users. Our online help and support is where new users and new developers go to learn. Infrastructure bottle necks are a real issue holding us back. That is definitely something the DA should address. Even better, it's on the roadmap for 2012 - which is great. I'd support and champion that element of the 2012 roadmap.

We also need to find how to support documentation translations, and better multi-lingual support, on drupal.org

webchick: For those who want to promote international diversity, explain how a position on the DA helps you do that more effectively.

Actually, this is the core of my platform. International diversity has been identified as a key goal for the DA. Yet the makeup of the current board is largely homogenous. With one exception, all 8 of the current board members lives in North America. One is in Europe.

No doubt these people have an international perspective, but it's one thing to think about, it's another thing to live it. The heated discussion about the need to travel was educational to say the least.

As an example, the 2nd candidates meeting was scheduled at 4am Melb/Sydney time. We weren't expected to be there, but I wondered how failing to show up would hurt our candidacy? I decided to bite the bullet, get up early to be on the call.

If elected, I'll be noisy, opinionated and irritating. I'll reach out to communities in Oceania, Asia and Africa, and encourage them to engage in the community, participate on groups.drupal.org, share their experiences of running local camps, and national associations - as I've started to try and do so with a BoF at London DrupalCon, and International Drupal Associations on G.D.O

Crell: Currently Drupal's face in the world is a mix of face-less Drupal.org and Acquia. Acquia is the face of Drupal, rightly or wrongly, in many eyes, moreso with the new Office of the CTO. Drupal of course is far far more than Acquia. What if anything do you feel the DA can or should do to counter-balance that, or is that even an appropriate role for the DA?

I think the DA needs to look at the apache and gnome foundations. Acquia is incredibly important and powerful - but as far as the DA concerned - Acquia should just be one of many ddrupal companies. The DA needs to focus on the community and the infrastructure the community needs to make drupal better.

tsvenson: We just had a live usability test that showed we have still very much to do. How do you propose we can put more efforts into making Drupal, including contib projects, more user friendly and intuitive?

Continue to improve the infrastrucuture... and invest in the tools we use... eg D.O Conduct further public live streamed usability sessions just like that. Very useful. But the next step is spreading knowledge of what to do with that information amongst the developer community, and ignite their passion to focus on usability challenges.

Slurpee: How many candidates have been to Drupal events outside of their own continent? And can you speak more than 1 language fluently?

I have been to drupalcon sanfrancisco and london - I can't speak another language fluently... but I speak a little bit of Dutch.

Crell: Several of you listed things yo want to do or accomplish. The DA, however, has shifted from a staff board to a policy board, so board members are not directly doing anything, but managing, strategizing, coordinating, etc. Those of you who want to "do", isn't the board the wrong place for what you're describing?

This is exactly why I want to get involved and be a voice for under represented parts of the Drupal community because all too often the policy gets driven without those things being considered.

If you're not loud and you don't put your voice in when the policies being formed, it's much harder to move in that direction afterwards.

rfay: In 30 seconds or less, what are the roles of the DA and what are not the roles?

The DA can amplify the work of local communities and also support and give credibility to them!

The DA has no involvement in driving the Drupal project itself. It is primarily and administrative entity to manage the affairs of a series of large international conferences. Potentially taking over some of the legal intellectual property issues around the trademark which belongs to Dries Buytaert, and employing staff to help ensure DrupalCons happen, and the hardware and Drupal infrastructure keeps working.

Crell: Several candidates said they want to better represent or be a voice for "small shops" and independents. In what way does the DA currently not adequately serve small shops, and what would a better service for small players mean in practice? Be as specific as possible.

I don't know that the DA is failing small shops, I just don't see those voices represented in the current makeup of the board. most are from NA and large organizations so it's not necessarily that there's a huge gap, but there is potentially a huge gap. I have a sense that this is a problem more than specific criticisms.

But we're not just talking about small drupal shops... but people using Drupal who don't have a commercial interest in it... Hobbyists, non-profits staffed by volunteers, clubs and amateurs, and community groups. Tinkerers and students. Many of our contributors have come from this kind of background, it's a valuable proving ground for future Drupal talent.

tsvenson: When do you think the first Asian DrupalCon should be held? Also, should that mean 3 cons/year or should they alternate with 2/year?

DrupalCon Asia?

I was concerned about the idea of "drupalcon asia pacific" somehow being "the rest of the world" except Africa. The AsiaPacific region contains 3 of the 5 most populous nations on earth: India, China and Indonesia. They are all incredibly culturally and linguistically diverse. Trying to create a single event for both continents (ASIA and OCEANIA) is going to be an enormous challenge.

DrupalCon Mumbai, DrupalCon Shanghai, DrupalCon Bali, DrupalCon Manila, DrupalCon Wellington might all happen one day. When? Yes, well that's a very good question. This year? unlikely. Next year? Maybe. And then 2 years after that.

A DrupalCon in our region is going to happen pretty infrequently, I'm more interested in local communities building their own capacity to serve their needs with local events, than sit around waiting for the blessing of the Drupal Association.

Perhaps the US Drupal community should adopt the North American DrupalCon as it's National event? And the Drupal Association should shift it's focus toward developing one International UberDrupalCongress which is on a different continent each year, more like the olympics, and focus all of its attention on that. I don't know. I just think we should question all our assumptions.

jredding: In 30 seconds or less, what would you say is the most important skillset, expertise, or experience that a board member should bring to the Association.

One of the most important things is to bring a sense of collaboration and wilingness to work with the rest of the board on important topics. To try to reach consensus, and ensure we all bring our slightly different perspectives to the table when we're making decisions. People often think consensus is all happy families but you only get there considering many differnt perspectives and figuring out what you can agree on, rather than focussing on what you can't agree on.

carsonblack: Q: What are some (or one) way that DA can help the small user groups throughout the world better serve their local markets?

Perhaps put together an info pack? How to build and grow your local community. How to engage with local businesses, authorities and educational institutions. Often what's holding people back, is just knowing where to begin.

jredding:

When the DA board member is out n the community how would that member represent themselvs in the community? Would they have a title of board member and use that?

I don't know. I think it's an interesting question and would be keen to explore ideas on how best to do this.

Crell: The DA is officially banned from "directing the development of Drupal". What does that mean to you? Are there ways the DA could "support" development without "directing" development? What would you want to do in that regard? Again, be specific as possible.

I like the idea of funding sprints... not directing what happens at them, but helping them happen. Putting effort into the tools the project relies on is borderline... but it's something that needs doing....

tsvenson: Question: Should the DA take a more proactive role about the d.o infrastructure and its improvement needs. Especially in regards to for example content management tools for doumentation and giving better cred/visibility to all those that puts in amazing work that is not project/code related? If so how and what is needed?

Yes! We expend effort and resources on ensuring DrupalCon happens, and that the servers keep running. We should be expending effort on the real heart of the community, drupal.org and groups.drupal.org.

We urgently need to address bottle necks frustrating key community initiatives, such as documentation, support, prairie, some of these have lost momentum because of infrastructure bottlenecks, and the fact we can no longer really innovate on D.O.

Final Statement

I'd like to finish off by saying Drupal is awesome. The community is what makes that true.

I am desperate to give back to this project and this commnuity in the best way I can

I'm not a coder, designer, documenter, but I am good at being committees, organising events. Following through.

I will put in all my energy and efforts to be a useful productive, engaged member of the board.

It's the first time the DA has run broad based elections like this. It is the beginning of a new chapter in terms of how org is structured. There's a a lot of work to do in the future around consolidating the work that's been done and becoming a more open/transparent organization. I'd love to be part of seeing that happen and working for the community by being on the board.

I'd like to add, my fellow nominees are all awesome. Even if not elected, the DA should find a way to co-opt them onto other committees. They've all indicated a willingness to serve - let's harness their commitment, competence and energy.

Russell Coker: A Computer Conference on a Cruise Ship

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:27:43 +0000

After LCA [1] there was a discussion about possible locations for future conferences, most of the messages in the discussion were jokes or suggestions that don’t seriously apply to LCA. So I’ll add my suggestion for conferences other than LCA.

I’ve previously written generally about the issue of conferences at sea [2]. I don’t think that LCA would be suitable for running at sea because delegates have specific expectations for LCA which are quite different to what a cruise ship can offer, so I don’t think it makes sense to change LCA which is working well as it is. However there are lots of other possible computer conferences which could suite a cruise ship.

Price

Price is a major factor in running a conference, so obviously getting a cheap cruise price is very important. Here is a link for Vacations To Go which shows cruises from the Australia/NZ region which are of at least 5 nights and cost no more than $800 [3]. The cheapest entry at this moment is $609 for 5 nights and the cheapest on a per-night basis is an 8 night cruise for $779. The cheapest cruise currently on offer which allows a conference similar to LCA is 7 nights for $699. The prices should be regarded as rough approximations as some cruises have some mandatory extra fees and the prices are quoted in US dollars and subject to currency fluctuations. Note that those prices are for dual-occupancy cabins, this can be a “double” or a “twin” configuration. Some cruise ships have cabins for 3 or 4 people that are cheaper, but if you have a cabin for a single person then the rate is almost the same as for having two people.

The price for LCA accommodation including breakfast was $78 per night for a single room or $92 for a double room. Then lunch cost a minimum of $10 and for dinner there was $80 for the penguin dinner and probably about $20 for dinner every other night. That gave an overall cost for a 6 night stay (which is probably the minimum for someone who lives further away than Melbourne) in Ballarat of 6*78+6*10+5*20+80==$708. For a double room that would be 6*92+6*10+5*20+2*80==$872.

Even if we don’t count the fact that the Australian dollar is worth more than the US dollar it is obvious that on the basis of accommodation and food two people sharing a twin cabin on a cruise ship could pay LESS than two people in single rooms at the Ballarat University dorms! Now sharing a cabin isn’t so great, but the upside is that cruise ships have excellent food and lots of other entertainment options. I previously reviewed the food on the Dawn Princess and determined that it’s better than the food I would expect to get if I spent the cost of the cruise on dinner at land based restaurants [4].

I have been led to believe that the use of ship conference facilities is typically free for any organisation that books a sufficient number of cabins. So there’s no reason why the conference admission fees should be any greater than for a land based conference.

Advantages

A common problem with conferences is finding suitable dining options. Most people want to eat with other delegates but finding restaurants that have sufficient space and which are conveniently located is difficult at best and often impossible. On a cruise ship everything is within a short walk and the restaurants are big, usually be at least one restaurant will hold 500 people. The fact that you have to reserve times for the “Main Dining Room” makes it more difficult to miss one’s colleagues.

Everything on a cruise ship is luxurious.

There are lots of good locations for BoFs, pools, cafes, restaurants, and bars. Basically the ship is filled with comfortable places for groups of people to sit down.

A cruise ship typically has a main theater with more than 700 seats – more than large enough for most conferences I’ve attended. It’s common for the size of a conference to be limited to the size of the main theater that is used, for a cruise ship this will probably be less of a problem than for most other conference venues.

Disadvantages

The first disadvantage of running a computer conference on a cruise ship is the almost total lack of net access. The costs for net access are more expensive than most delegates will pay. Probably many delegates would check their email but it wouldn’t be practical for people to download source code, browse Wikipedia, and use the Internet in other ways related to the conference. It would be practical to have mirrors of Wikipedia, the source of several distributions of Linux, and other big things of common interest.

Another possible problem is the fact that you need to book it well in advance to avoid the risk of selling out (there is no option to stay at a different hotel). An established conference with financial backing could just pay to reserve the cabins. But when starting a new conference this could be a problem.

Alcohol is rather expensive on cruise ships. But getting really drunk isn’t compatible with learning about computer science anyway.

Finally the requirement to have at least two people in a cabin for good rates is a serious issue. The upside of this is that people travelling with their SO would find that it works really well (regardless of whether the SO is a delegate or not). But anyone who’s not travelling with their SO and doesn’t want to share with a friend will have to either pay a lot more or skip the conference.

Conclusion

I think that there is a good potential for running a computer conference around the Australia/NZ region on a cruise ship. It won’t be overly expensive for delegates and the facilities that are provided are good. The trade-off for solitary travelers of having to share a cabin (or pay more) for getting much better food and leisure facilities will be appreciated by many people (and admittedly hated by some).

Some people won’t appreciate the option of swimming, but even if you consider the cruise ship to be just a floating collection of restaurants and cabins it’s still fairly luxurious and beats the heck out of most conferences I’ve attended.

If you are considering the possibility of running a conference then I think that a cruise ship should be considered. VacationsToGo.com is the best site I’ve found for cheap cruise prices, their large group department has experience handling groups of more than 500 people so I think that anyone who wants to run a new conference in/around Australia should give them a call.

Also cruise ships travel around the world, so the same thing can be done in other countries but at a different time of year. The economic factors will differ by country though. Cruise ships probably aren’t a cheap option for a conference in some other countries.

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Michael Still: Slow git review uploads?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:29:46 +0000

jeblair was kind enough to help me debug my problem with slow "git review" uploads for Openstack projects just now. It turns out that part of my standard configuration for ssh is to enable ControlMaster and ControlPersist. I mostly do this because the machines I use at Canonical are a very long way away from my home in Australia, and its nice to have slightly faster connections when you ssh to a machine. However, gerrit is incompatible with these options as best as we can tell.

So, if your git reviews are taking 10 to 20 minutes to upload like mine were, check that you're not using persistent connections. Excluding review.openstack.org from that part of my configuration has made a massive difference to the speed of uploads for me.

Tags for this post: openstack git review gerrit ssh canonical

Related posts: More reviews; Book reviews; Taking over a launch pad project; Working on review comments for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 tonight; A ssh quickie; Review; Andrew's SSH filtering causes me pain; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Twisted conch; The Wild Palms Hotel; Wow, qemu-img is fast; Status of the book; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; clusterssh; Openstack compute node cleanup

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Sridhar Dhanapalan: Creating an Education Programme

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:28:44 +0000

OLPC Australia had a strong presence at linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat, two weeks ago.

I gave a talk in the main keynote room about our educational programme, in which I explained our mission and how we intend to achieve it.

Even if you saw my talk at OSDC 2011, I recommend that you watch this one. It is much improved and contains new and updated material. The YouTube version is above, but a higher quality version is available for download from Linux Australia.

The references for this talk are on our development wiki.

Here’s a better version of the video I played near the beginning of my talk:

I should start by pointing out out that OLPC is by no means a niche or minor project. XO laptops are in the hands of 8000 children in Australia, across 130 remote communities. Around the world, over 2.5 million children, across nearly 50 countries, have an XO.

Investment in our Children’s Future

The key point of my talk is that OLPC Australia have a comprehensive education programme that highly values teacher empowerment and community engagement.

The investment to provide a connected learning device to every one of the 300 000 children in remote Australia is less than 0.1% of the annual education and connectivity budgets.

For low socio-economic status schools, the cost is only $80 AUD per child. Sponsorships, primarily from corporates, allow us to subsidise most of the expense (you too can donate to make a difference). Also keep in mind that this is a total cost of ownership, covering the essentials like teacher training, support and spare parts, as well as the XO and charging rack.

While our principal focus is on remote, low socio-economic status schools, our programme is available to any school in Australia. Yes, that means schools in the cites as well. The investment for non-subsidised schools to join the same programme is only $380 AUD per child.

Comprehensive Education Programme

We have a responsibility to invest in our children’s education — it is not just another market. As a not-for-profit, we have the freedom and the desire to make this happen. We have no interest in vendor lock-in; building sustainability is an essential part of our mission. We have no incentive to build a dependency on us, and every incentive to ensure that schools and communities can help themselves and each other.

We only provide XOs to teachers who have been sufficiently enabled. Their training prepares them to constructively use XOs in their lessons, and is formally recognised as part of their professional development. Beyond the minimum 15-hour XO-certified course, a teacher may choose to undergo a further 5–10 hours to earn XO-expert status. This prepares them to be able to train other teachers, using OLPC Australia resources. Again, we are reducing dependency on us.

: Certifications

Training is conducted online, after the teacher signs up to our programme and they receive their XO. This scales well to let us effectively train many teachers spread across the country. Participants in our programme are encouraged to participate in our online community to share resources and assist one another.

: Online training process

We also want to recognise and encourage children who have shown enthusiasm and aptitude, with our XO-champion and XO-mechanic certifications. Not only does this promote sustainability in the school and give invaluable skills to the child, it reinforces our core principle of Child Ownership. Teacher aides, parents, elders and other non-teacher adults have the XO-basics (formerly known as XO-local) course designed for them. We want the child’s learning experience to extend to the home environment and beyond, and not be constrained by the walls of the classroom.

There’s a reason why I’m wearing a t-shirt that says “No, I won’t fix your computer.” We’re on a mission to develop a programme that is self-sustaining. We’ve set high goals for ourselves, and we are determined to meet them. We won’t get there overnight, but we’re well on our way. Sustainability is about respect. We are taking the time to show them the ropes, helping them to own it, and developing our technology to make it easy. We fundamentally disagree with the attitude that ordinary people are not capable enough to take control of their own futures. Vendor lock-in is completely contradictory to our mission. Our schools are not just consumers; they are producers too.

As explained by Jonathan Nalder (a highly recommended read!), there are two primary notions guiding our programme. The first is that the nominal $80 investment per child is just enough for a school to take the programme seriously and make them a stakeholder, greatly improving the chances for success. The second is that this is a schools-centric programme, driven from grassroots demand rather than being a regime imposed from above. Schools that participate genuinely want the programme to succeed.

: Programme cycle

Technology as an Enabler

Enabling this educational programme is the clever development and use of technology. That’s where I (as Engineering Manager at OLPC Australia) come in. For technology to be truly intrinsic to education, there must be no specialist expertise required. Teachers aren’t IT professionals, and nor should they be expected to be. In short, we are using computers to teach, not teaching computers.

The key principles of the Engineering Department are:

Technology is an integral and seamless part of the learning experience – the pen and paper of the 21st century.
To eliminate dependence on technical expertise, through the development and deployment of sustainable technologies.
Empowering children to be content producers and collaborators, not just content consumers.
Open platform to allow learning from mistakes… and easy recovery.

OLPC have done a marvellous job in their design of the XO laptop, giving us a fantastic platform to build upon. I think that our engineering projects in Australia have been quite innovative in helping to cover the ‘last mile’ to the school. One thing I’m especially proud of is our instance on openness. We turn traditional systems administration practice on its head to completely empower the end-user. Technology that is deployed in corporate or educational settings is typically locked down to make administration and support easier. This takes control completely away from the end-user. They are severely limited on what they can do, and if something doesn’t work as they expect then they are totally at the mercy of the admins to fix it.

In an educational setting this is disastrous — it severely limits what our children can learn. We learn most from our mistakes, so let’s provide an environment in which children are able to safely make mistakes and recover from them. The software is quite resistant to failure, both at the technical level (being based on Fedora Linux) and at the user interface level (Sugar). If all goes wrong, reinstalling the operating system and restoring a journal (Sugar user files) backup is a trivial endeavour. The XO hardware is also renowned for its ruggedness and repairability. Less well-known are the amazing diagnostics tools, providing quick and easy indication that a component should be repaired/replaced. We provide a completely unlocked environment, with full access to the root user and the firmware. Some may call that dangerous, but I call that empowerment. If a child starts hacking on an XO, we want to hire that kid

Evaluation

My talk features the case study of Doomadgee State School, in far-north Queensland. Doomadgee have very enthusiastically taken on board the OLPC Australia programme. Every one of the 350 children aged 4–14 have been issued with an XO, as part of a comprehensive professional development and support programme. Since commencing in late 2010, the percentage of Year 3 pupils at or above national minimum standards in numeracy has leapt from 31% in 2010 to 95% in 2011. Other scores have also increased. Think what you may about NAPLAN, but nevertheless that is a staggering improvement.

In federal parliament, Robert Oakeshott MP has been very supportive of our mission:

Most importantly of all, quite simply, One Laptop per Child Australia delivers results in learning from the 5,000 students already engaged, showing impressive improvements in closing the gap generally and lifting access and participation rates in particular.

We are also engaged in longitudinal research, working closely with respected researchers to have a comprehensive evaluation of our programme. We will release more information on this as the evaluation process matures.

Join our mission

Schools can register their interest in our programme on our Education site.

Our Prospectus provides a high-level overview.

For a detailed analysis, see our Policy Document.

If you would like to get involved in our technical development, visit our development site.

Credits

Many thanks to colleagues Rangan Srikhanta (CEO) and Tracy Richardson (Education Manager) for some of the information and graphics used in this article.

Michael Fox: NetworkManager on CentOS 6.2

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:31:17 +0000

Seems NetworkManager is driving everyone bonkers still and not just me. I did a GUI install and disabled the use of NetworkManager yet the stupid thing still seems to blow away my resolv.conf and better still not populated it even though I have things defined in ifcfg-eth0.

Grrr.

See here. I’ve experienced these exact same issues as the folks posting on the thread. I remember having this issue back on CentOS 6.0, guess it’s still not fixed.

Paul Wayper: Going from zero

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:26:49 +0000

A friend of mine and I were discussing cars the other day. He said that he thought the invention of the electric motor was a curse on cars, because it meant you wouldn't have a gearbox to control which gear you were in. A suitable electric motor has enough power to drive the car from zero to a comfortable top speed (110km/hr) at a reasonable acceleration using a fixed gear ratio - the car stays in (in this case third) gear and you drive it around like that. He maintained, however, that you needed to know which gear you were in, and to change gears, because otherwise you could find yourself using a gear that you hadn't chosen.

I argued that, in fact, having to select a gear meant that drivers both new and experienced would occasionally miss a gear change and put the gearbox into neutral by mistake, causing grinding of gears and possible crashes as the car was now out of control. He claimed to have heard of a clever device that would sit over your gearbox and tell you when you weren't in gear, but you couldn't use the car like that all the time because it made the car too slow. So you tested the car with this gearbox-watcher, then once you knew that the car itself wouldn't normally miss a gear you just had to blame the driver if the car blew up, crashed, or had other problems. But he was absolutely consistent in attitude towards electric motors: you lost any chance to find out that you weren't in the right gear, and therefore the whole invention could be written off as basically misguided.

Now, clever readers will have worked out that at this point my conversation was not real, and was in fact by way of an analogy (from the strain on the examples, for one). The friend was real - Rusty Russell - but instead of electric motors we were discussing the Go programming language and instead of gearboxes we were discussing the state of variables.

In Go, all variables are defined as containing zero unless initialised otherwise. In C, a variable can be declared but undefined - the language standard AFAIK does not specify the state of a variable that is declared but not initialised. From the C perspective, there are several reasons you might not want to automatically pre-initialise a variable when you define it - it's about to be set from some other structure, for example - and pre-initialising it is a waste of time. And being able to detect when a variable has been used without knowing what its stage is - using valgrind, for example - means you can detect subtle programming errors that can have hard-to-find consequences when the variable's meaning or initialisation is changed later on. If you can't know whether the programmer is using zero because that's what they really wanted or because it just happened to be the default and they didn't think about it, then how do you know which usage is correct?

From the Go perspective, in my opinion, these arguments are a kludgy way of seeing a bug as a feature. Optimising compilers can easily detect when a variable will be set twice without any intervening examination of state, and simply remove the first initialisation - so the 'waste of time' argument is a non-issue. Likewise, any self-respecting static analysis tool can determine if a variable is tested before it's explicitly defined, and I can think of a couple of heuristics for determining when this usage isn't intended.

And one of the most common errors in C is use of undefined variables; this happens to new and experienced programmers alike, and those subtle programming problems happen far more often in real-world code as it evolves over time - it is still rare for people to run valgrind over their code every time before they commit it to the project. It's far more useful to eliminate this entire category of bugs once and for all. As far as I can see, you lose nothing and you gain a lot more security.

To me, the arguments against a default value are a kind of lesser Stockholm Syndrome. C programmers learn from long experience to do things the 'right way', including making sure you initialise your variables explicitly before you use them, because of all the bugs - from brutally obvious to deviously subtle - that are caused by doing things in any other way. Tools like valgrind work around indirectly fixing this problem after the fact. People even come to love them - like the people who love being deafened by the sound of growling, blaring petrol engines and associate the feeling of power with that cacophany. They mock those new silent electric motors because they don't have the same warts and the same pain-inducing behaviour as the old petrol engine.

I'm sure C has many good things to recommend it. But I don't think lack of default initialisation is one.

Paul Wayper: Critical Thinking

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:26:17 +0000

In the inevitable rant-fest that followed the LWN story on the proposal to have /lib and /bin point to /usr/lib and /usr/bin respectively (short story), I observe with wry amusement the vocal people who say "Look at PulseAudio - it's awful, I have to fight against all the time, that's why we shouldn't do this". The strange, sad thing about these people is that they happily ignore all those people (like me) for whom PulseAudio just works. There's some little concieted part of their brain that says "I must be the only person that's right and everyone else has got it wrong." It's childish, really.

And in my experience, those people often make unrealistic demands on new software, or misuse it - consciously or unconsciously, and with or without learning about it. These people are semi-consciously determined to prove that the new thing is wrong, and everything they do then becomes in some way critical of it. Any success is overlooked as "because I knew what to do", every failure is pounced on as proof that "the thing doesn't work". I've seen this with new hardware, new software, new cars, new clothes, new houses, accommodation, etc. You can see it in the fact that there's almost no correlation between people who complain about wind generator noise and the actual noise levels measured at their property. Human beings all have a natural inclination to believe that they are right and everything else is wrong, and some of us fight past that to be rational and fair.

This is why I didn't get Rusty's post on the topic. It's either completely and brilliantly ironic, or (frankly) misguided. His good reasons are all factual; his 'bad' reasons are all ad-hominem attacks on a person. I'd understand if it was e.g. Microsoft he was criticising - e.g. "I don't trust Microsoft submitting a driver to the kernel; OT1H it's OK code, OTOH it's Microsoft and I don't trust their motives" - because Microsoft has proven so often that their larger motives are anti-competition even if their individual engineers and programmers mean well. But dmesg, PulseAudio, and systemd have all been (IMO) well thought out solutions to clearly defined problems. systemd, for example, succeeds because it uses methods that are simple, already in use and solve the problem naturally. PulseAudio does not pretend to solve the same problems as JACK. I agree that Lennart can be irritating some times, but I read an article once by someone clever that pointed out that you don't have to like the person in order to use their code...

Michael Still: Announcement video

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:29:47 +0000

I imagine that most people saw this at the conference closing. However, for completeness and because I feel that if we're going to put videos of other speakers online then I should suffer the same fate, here is the LCA 2013 announcement from Ballarat:

Tags for this post: conference lca2013 announcement video canonical canberra

Related posts: linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; LCA 2007 Video: CFQ IO; ScobleShow only available as MP4?; Two more weeks to go; The What-If-Microsoft-Did-The-iPod-Box video done by Microsoft; Procrastination; Very funny; The new way of converting JPEGs to MPEGs; Taking over a launch pad project; Speed limit; Mirror traffic during the last day of LCA 2007; Avoidance behaviour, or, wanted: video RSS feeds; In Canberra; Mont 24 hour race; Most novel traffic jam cause goes to... Canberra!; "Thriller" as performed by inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center; Slow git review uploads?; So, what on earth was I doing up at 4:30 am anyways?; Tomcat first flight tribute video; MythNetTV beta 4

Comment

Brendan Scott: brendanscott

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:30:54 +0000

MegaUpload: Some IP is more equal than others

Last week, the FBI raided and shut down MegaUpload, a site which allowed people to share their files. Apparently, no one has so far bothered to think of the millions of users of MegaUpload whose data is now inaccessible on the MegaUpload servers. Moreover, MegaUpload’s funds have been frozen, so it can’t pay to continue to house the data that has been uploaded to it. Apparently it will start getting deleted later this week.

Imagine a scenario where the Feds raid a warehouse, which is alleged to hold stolen property belonging to some media magnate. No one disputes that the warehouse also holds other people’s property. The Feds seize the building and ask what should be done with it. “Raze it, destroy it all” – so they do, everything, including the property of innocent third parties.

In those circumstances, could anyone seriously argue that the Feds were standing up for “property” in the abstract? Similarly here, how can an issue of principle be argued when the copyright works of so many innocent people have been sacrificed – now by lack of access, later by destruction?

Michael Fox: Ubuntu 11.10 iscsi setup

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:31:22 +0000

If you need to setup Ubuntu 11.10 host as an iscsi client, check out the documentation here on how to do it.

All very easy to perform. Great to see some excellent documentation from the Ubuntu documentation teams.

Colin Charles: MariaDB/MySQL users in Paris & Brussels

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:26:56 +0000

I’m about to head to Paris to present at the February meetup of the MySQL User Group in Paris, France. It happens 1st February from 6-8pm at the Patricks Irish Pub. Its free to attend, and I understand that SkySQL keeps this event afloat.

I’m also heading to my first FOSDEM right afterwards and will definitely hang out at the MySQL & Friends Devroom. There is an amazing lineup of speakers, with all talks being about 25-30 minutes, it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. To boot, Michael “Monty” Widenius will also be there, so expect lots of Salmiakkikossu.

If you want to keep track of where Monty Program folk are going to be to talk about MariaDB, make sure you’re subscribed to our news page, which also includes important release information. Pretty much every conference that we plan to attend (and have attended) is at the conference page.

I am looking forward to meeting & learning from many MariaDB/MySQL users!

Rodney Gedda: x86 tablet distro?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:27:15 +0000

I’ve been tinkering with a few options for Linux on an x86 (Atom) touchscreen tablet. I successfully booted up:

from a USB thumbdrive. I’m not yet convinced which one to go with as they each have their pros and cons. Android (ICS) was definitely the most touch-friendly and tablet-wise interface so that may be the one to go with.

The Ubuntu image I used was not strickly the tablet distribution – which I believe is on its way – but the Unity interface scaled down quite well to screen size. The desktop 12.04 release is not really suitable for touchscreens as one false touch and you have libreoffice staring at you and no software keyboard appears when you click on an input form. When the Unity-driven Ubuntu tablet arrives, it will be definitely one to watch.

The dark horse is Plasma Active which I could boot, but the liveUSB was too slow to be usable so I will have to commit to an installation before I can test it properly. The Plasma Active project announced its first commercial tablet product this week. It looks promising as it is an open Linux distribution specifically engineered for touch interfaces.

Would be good to hear what others are using given MeeGo never quite made it out the door…

Gabriel Noronha: Getting ClearOS to work with Atheros Communications AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet (rev c0)

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:28:12 +0000

ClearOS formally Clarkconnect based of Centos…

Start by enabling the Tim S repo

To install the repo first install the public key (yes all RPM’s will now be signed)

rpm --import ftp://timburgess.net/RPM-GPG-KEY-TimB.txt

Then install the release RPM (by default the ‘timb’ and ‘timb-testing’ repo’s will be disabled)

wget ftp://timburgess.net/repo/clearos/5.2/os/timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm rpm -Kv timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm

ref http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/howtos/adding_tim_s_repo

yum --enablerepo=timb install kmod-atl1e

ref http://www.clearfoundation.com/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,232/catid,28/func,view/id,24438/limit,10/limitstart,50/

last you need to edit the /etc/modprobe.conf

it need to contain an alias for every network card in my case I have a TP-link installed as well so

alias eth0 r8169 alias eth1 atl1e

if you fail to get this to work ifconfig -a will have a odd tmp interface.

Michael Fox: Router issues sorted

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:30:45 +0000

After playing around with the Billion 7800NL I managed to sort out something that solved my problem.

It appears the default setup doesn’t include any sort of QoS, so I played around and managed to create some rules which see to be performing what they should.

It wasn’t running out of connections, it seems to have just been starved of bandwidth at various times. Post those QoS rules being done, it’s now been stable for over 5 days. So that’s made me quite happy.

Ben Martin: ODF+RDF coming soon to an abiword near you!

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyiq) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:50:00 +0000

Although all the talks are up on youtube, the ogv "free" version is also now available from linux.org.au.

Note that all the talks from LCA 2012 are up there too.

Andrew Cowie: My sound hardware didn’t vanish, honest

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:28:04 +0000

I’ve been having intermittent problems with sound not working. Usually restarting (ie, killing) PulseAudio has done the trick but today it was even worse; the sound hardware mysteriously vanished from the Sound Settings capplet. Bog knows what’s up with that, but buried in “Sound Troubleshooting” I found “Getting ALSA to work after suspend / hibernate” which contains this nugget:

The alsa “force-reload” command will kill all running programs using the sound driver so the driver itself is able to be restarted.

Huh. Didn’t know about that one. But seems reasonable, and sure enough,

$ /sbin/alsa force-reload

did the trick.

That wiki page goes on to detail adding a script to /etc/pm/sleep.d to carry this out after every resume. That seems excessive; I know that sometimes drivers don’t work or hardware doesn’t reset after the computer has been suspended or hibernated, but in my case the behaviour is only intermittent, and seems related to having docked (or not), having used an external USB headphone (or not), and having played something with Flash (which seems to circumvent PulseAudio. Bad). Anyway, one certainly doesn’t want to kill all one’s audio-using programs just because you suspended! But as a workaround for whatever it is that’s wrong today, nice.

AfC

Jeremy Malcolm: sadlittlewebjournal 3.0.1 released

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:31:25 +0000

Another week, another release of sadlittlewebjournal. The main change: table-free CSS layout and centering.

Chris Samuel: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-29

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:27:33 +0000

Exhibition of my black+white photos at Cafe Have Ya Bean, Upwey http://t.co/rO5IMuHr mostly from this set http://t.co/7QUS5oIL #
How do I check usage of equal cost routes to a destination (say for load balancing across multiple 10G-IB routers) ? #
Forgot to say – that question about equal cost routing is about #Linux #HPC compute node (RHEL5.7/CentOS5.7 FWIW) #
The #hwloc developers are trying to find people to test 1.4rc2 on #AIX can anyone help them out? http://t.co/RvCLbA3p #
RT @r_netsec: Blu-ray encryption keys leaked, enable VLC playback [xpost from /r/technology] – http://t.co/ikqThYIT #
US Defence Secretary on Iran – Sunday 22nd Jan "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No." http://t.co/AaEtgQKE #
4 trains cancelled this evening already on the Belgrave line – what's going on @metrotrains ? #
Vendor replaced motherboard with dead IPMI controller. Now node boots, but only sees half the RAM. Try again Friday.. #
#HHGTTG fans in UK – this is for you – http://t.co/wu4sxCwO – radio show cast perform show live on stage! #hitchhikers #
Today is my 4th anniversary of becoming an Australian citizen. #
Attempting to install Android SDK on Arch Linux via AUR and ABS. Not as painful as it sounds! #
Spent part of yesterday at the Survival Day celebration at Belgrave – lovely atmosphere! #WeNeedFirstAustraliansDay #
#Symantec #pcAnywhere remote exploit only fixed when stolen source published, 6 years after theft, vulnerable all that time. #
Info about #pcAnywhere remote exploit from #Symantec http://t.co/FhLEszgh #
NB: the duck farms quarantined in Melbourne for LPAI do *NOT* have H5N1.. #
OK Android wizards, how do I find out who does OTA updates for 4.0 build yakjzus? @google don't respond to queries. #
Person here http://t.co/UMAuGSOU told by @Samsung + @Google OTA updates for yakjzus Galaxy Nexus not up to them /cc @MobiCity #
RIP Freddy the Fighting Fish, after a short illness. #
Power gone out here, slowly cooking. #

This item originally posted here:

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-29

Chris Samuel: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-29

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:27:32 +0000

Exhibition of my black+white photos at Cafe Have Ya Bean, Upwey http://t.co/rO5IMuHr mostly from this set http://t.co/7QUS5oIL #
How do I check usage of equal cost routes to a destination (say for load balancing across multiple 10G-IB routers) ? #
Forgot to say – that question about equal cost routing is about #Linux #HPC compute node (RHEL5.7/CentOS5.7 FWIW) #
The #hwloc developers are trying to find people to test 1.4rc2 on #AIX can anyone help them out? http://t.co/RvCLbA3p #
RT @r_netsec: Blu-ray encryption keys leaked, enable VLC playback [xpost from /r/technology] – http://t.co/ikqThYIT #
US Defence Secretary on Iran – Sunday 22nd Jan "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No." http://t.co/AaEtgQKE #
4 trains cancelled this evening already on the Belgrave line – what's going on @metrotrains ? #
Vendor replaced motherboard with dead IPMI controller. Now node boots, but only sees half the RAM. Try again Friday.. #
#HHGTTG fans in UK – this is for you – http://t.co/wu4sxCwO – radio show cast perform show live on stage! #hitchhikers #
Today is my 4th anniversary of becoming an Australian citizen. #
Attempting to install Android SDK on Arch Linux via AUR and ABS. Not as painful as it sounds! #
Spent part of yesterday at the Survival Day celebration at Belgrave – lovely atmosphere! #WeNeedFirstAustraliansDay #
#Symantec #pcAnywhere remote exploit only fixed when stolen source published, 6 years after theft, vulnerable all that time. #
Info about #pcAnywhere remote exploit from #Symantec http://t.co/FhLEszgh #
NB: the duck farms quarantined in Melbourne for LPAI do *NOT* have H5N1.. #
OK Android wizards, how do I find out who does OTA updates for 4.0 build yakjzus? @google don't respond to queries. #
Person here http://t.co/UMAuGSOU told by @Samsung + @Google OTA updates for yakjzus Galaxy Nexus not up to them /cc @MobiCity #
RIP Freddy the Fighting Fish, after a short illness. #
Power gone out here, slowly cooking. #

This item originally posted here:

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-29

Pia Waugh: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-29

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:25:13 +0000

I'm watching sane show RT @PriceyJohnDoe: Sadly, until now, I didn't know tin + copper makes bronze. The things you learn watching SBS! #
Yay RT @MolksTVTalk: All the talk about #XMenOriginsWolverine - women say yes, men say no. Guess Hugh gets his shirt off once or twice. #
. @MsRisq DM song http://t.co/9YPcxKrs, Iron http://t.co/3TK8YN8s & 1 of mine http://t.co/65DT9AZC #music See my soundcloud profile #
. @CaptainInnovate totally. I look forward to learning much I need my sith face paint #
Walking through the rain, I find a sense of comraderie with those around me. The cute little smiles of shared martyrdom #notametaphor #
Aww RT @KateLundy: @piawaugh Hey Pia I will miss you! It has been fantastic working with you and I know you will shine in your new role! #
. @wombat1974 S'not public yet Finalising contracts still. Patience grasshopper #
Haha! ACK #geekjokes RT @CameronWatt: @piawaugh @jaqpants @jamezpolley @chrisjrn Surely it would be a NAT ball and not a masquerade ball? #
Thx @renailemay for nice writeup RT @Leroy_Lynch: @piawaugh quits as Senator @KateLundy policy advisor http://t.co/SGZK22Kh @delimiterau #
. @Mortythemouth why limit yourself to six words? #sixwords #
Agree with the issue, but solution is skills devel RT @venessapaech: Uberpaper aims to kill echo chamber of social news http://t.co/LzWlr8s8 #
Reading the IETF "Architecture of the Internet", just for fun and research. http://t.co/ByZ02pBL #society5 #
Listening to "Karate" by Tenacious D for 1 minute 5 seconds of lulz. #
Wow! RT @CaptainInnovate @PSInnovate: We are looking for a CEO for new pilot Centre: Excellence in Public Sector Design http://t.co/IsoAr0Sp #
These are a few of my favourite things Perfect start to the day. Going to do some writing. #noms http://t.co/XewB420B #
Fascinating RT @anonops: #Polish Parliament members wear #Anonymous masks to protest #ACTA in chambers >> http://t.co/7IpsBOxT #
<grin> RT @jclacherty: @piawaugh @wired MPAA trying to do it old school, just like their business model. #
Interesting but predictable RT @wired: SOPA from other side: The Hollywood Reporter gets the story from inside the MPAA http://t.co/BAMWJFT8 #
A swim, amazing home cooked meal, great company & beautiful multicultural environment. What more could you ask for #australiaday hugs all #
Jealous. Have fun RT @rosiex: @alexburns and I are off to see Underworld: Awakening 3D. Lycans rock! #geekgirl #
Was her answer "make me"? RT @mashable: Judge Orders Woman to Decrypt Her Own Laptop for Evidence - http://t.co/qbXzF1Qc #
Mwah ha ha! RT @chrisjrn: A photo of @piawaugh from #lca2012 http://t.co/fLYjGxFl . Caption: "Waugh is Inevitable". Thanks, @stilgherrian #
Driving an automatic car is hilarious. Like being in a dodgem car, in all respects #
There are many ways to engage in democracy RT @OurSayPeoplesQ Got a qn for Parliament? http://t.co/kw1KXejY. Follow @OurSayAust #PeoplesQ #
As promised, a picture of my awesome cast #fb http://t.co/NIydeO6R #
.@lukehopewell And A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer plz #diamondage /cc @j_hutch #
.@j_hutch We have distribution of publishing, monitoring & force. 3D printers is the distribution of property /cc @lukehopewell @TLohman #
I got a black cast for my wrist! Feeling just a little bit hardcore #fb #
Argh, have waited at hospital for 1.5 hrs to get fracture looked at. Nearly there. Stupid scaphoid Doesn't it know I have stuff to do! #
Silly lols RT @scenariogirl: “ what do you call an alligator in a vest? An investigator.” v @brucel #
Interesting and thought provoking RT The questions Rachel Hills didn't ask Melinda Tankard Reist http://t.co/AlUgoKb6 via @NoPlaceforSheep #
Who else is going to Barcamp Canberra 2012? Looking forward to discussing a new project I'm working on! http://t.co/AR66ElVy #gov2au #
Xin nian kuai le my excellent peeps! Enjoy the year of the dragon! #fb #
$5 million in grants funding available for ppl/orgs who help w community understanding of science http://t.co/1AUMPz6R /cc @tribalscientist #
.@groovyren Ah, that was a REALLY old tweet, sorry peeps. My mistake! #gov2au Not used to checking time stamps on recent tweets. #
Ooh, url? Who else is there? RT @groovyren: @Gov2Aus conference has kicked off! #gov2au #
.@renailemay @pauljaycomic Or, possibly more correctly, everything matters exactly how much you choose it to. #
Haha! #twitterfail RT @aguidodavis @piawaugh What's that? I can't hear you…? *cups hand to ear* #
Anyone else spend the last 15 minutes attempting to Tweet "ARGH, the twitters are down, the sky is falling!" #fail #
Wow, and $20m of grants available for telehealth services too. RT @ARNnet Online doctors a new reality http://t.co/qp6gFVnP #gov2au #
Interesting, broad & quite informative government consultation currently open: "Australia in the Asian Century" http://t.co/uuhdyzhG #gov2au #
.@benpobjie I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus. Obviously. #howsongslie #
Nice! RT "Everything dies" remix by nardz via #soundcloud http://t.co/wJFy3Sc3 #music #
$5 million in grants funding available for ppl/orgs who help with community understanding of science http://t.co/1AUMPz6R /cc @tribalscience #

Pia Waugh: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-29

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:25:13 +0000

I'm watching sane show RT @PriceyJohnDoe: Sadly, until now, I didn't know tin + copper makes bronze. The things you learn watching SBS! #
Yay RT @MolksTVTalk: All the talk about #XMenOriginsWolverine - women say yes, men say no. Guess Hugh gets his shirt off once or twice. #
. @MsRisq DM song http://t.co/9YPcxKrs, Iron http://t.co/3TK8YN8s & 1 of mine http://t.co/65DT9AZC #music See my soundcloud profile #
. @CaptainInnovate totally. I look forward to learning much I need my sith face paint #
Walking through the rain, I find a sense of comraderie with those around me. The cute little smiles of shared martyrdom #notametaphor #
Aww RT @KateLundy: @piawaugh Hey Pia I will miss you! It has been fantastic working with you and I know you will shine in your new role! #
. @wombat1974 S'not public yet Finalising contracts still. Patience grasshopper #
Haha! ACK #geekjokes RT @CameronWatt: @piawaugh @jaqpants @jamezpolley @chrisjrn Surely it would be a NAT ball and not a masquerade ball? #
Thx @renailemay for nice writeup RT @Leroy_Lynch: @piawaugh quits as Senator @KateLundy policy advisor http://t.co/SGZK22Kh @delimiterau #
. @Mortythemouth why limit yourself to six words? #sixwords #
Agree with the issue, but solution is skills devel RT @venessapaech: Uberpaper aims to kill echo chamber of social news http://t.co/LzWlr8s8 #
Reading the IETF "Architecture of the Internet", just for fun and research. http://t.co/ByZ02pBL #society5 #
Listening to "Karate" by Tenacious D for 1 minute 5 seconds of lulz. #
Wow! RT @CaptainInnovate @PSInnovate: We are looking for a CEO for new pilot Centre: Excellence in Public Sector Design http://t.co/IsoAr0Sp #
These are a few of my favourite things Perfect start to the day. Going to do some writing. #noms http://t.co/XewB420B #
Fascinating RT @anonops: #Polish Parliament members wear #Anonymous masks to protest #ACTA in chambers >> http://t.co/7IpsBOxT #
<grin> RT @jclacherty: @piawaugh @wired MPAA trying to do it old school, just like their business model. #
Interesting but predictable RT @wired: SOPA from other side: The Hollywood Reporter gets the story from inside the MPAA http://t.co/BAMWJFT8 #
A swim, amazing home cooked meal, great company & beautiful multicultural environment. What more could you ask for #australiaday hugs all #
Jealous. Have fun RT @rosiex: @alexburns and I are off to see Underworld: Awakening 3D. Lycans rock! #geekgirl #
Was her answer "make me"? RT @mashable: Judge Orders Woman to Decrypt Her Own Laptop for Evidence - http://t.co/qbXzF1Qc #
Mwah ha ha! RT @chrisjrn: A photo of @piawaugh from #lca2012 http://t.co/fLYjGxFl . Caption: "Waugh is Inevitable". Thanks, @stilgherrian #
Driving an automatic car is hilarious. Like being in a dodgem car, in all respects #
There are many ways to engage in democracy RT @OurSayPeoplesQ Got a qn for Parliament? http://t.co/kw1KXejY. Follow @OurSayAust #PeoplesQ #
As promised, a picture of my awesome cast #fb http://t.co/NIydeO6R #
.@lukehopewell And A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer plz #diamondage /cc @j_hutch #
.@j_hutch We have distribution of publishing, monitoring & force. 3D printers is the distribution of property /cc @lukehopewell @TLohman #
I got a black cast for my wrist! Feeling just a little bit hardcore #fb #
Argh, have waited at hospital for 1.5 hrs to get fracture looked at. Nearly there. Stupid scaphoid Doesn't it know I have stuff to do! #
Silly lols RT @scenariogirl: “ what do you call an alligator in a vest? An investigator.” v @brucel #
Interesting and thought provoking RT The questions Rachel Hills didn't ask Melinda Tankard Reist http://t.co/AlUgoKb6 via @NoPlaceforSheep #
Who else is going to Barcamp Canberra 2012? Looking forward to discussing a new project I'm working on! http://t.co/AR66ElVy #gov2au #
Xin nian kuai le my excellent peeps! Enjoy the year of the dragon! #fb #
$5 million in grants funding available for ppl/orgs who help w community understanding of science http://t.co/1AUMPz6R /cc @tribalscientist #
.@groovyren Ah, that was a REALLY old tweet, sorry peeps. My mistake! #gov2au Not used to checking time stamps on recent tweets. #
Ooh, url? Who else is there? RT @groovyren: @Gov2Aus conference has kicked off! #gov2au #
.@renailemay @pauljaycomic Or, possibly more correctly, everything matters exactly how much you choose it to. #
Haha! #twitterfail RT @aguidodavis @piawaugh What's that? I can't hear you…? *cups hand to ear* #
Anyone else spend the last 15 minutes attempting to Tweet "ARGH, the twitters are down, the sky is falling!" #fail #
Wow, and $20m of grants available for telehealth services too. RT @ARNnet Online doctors a new reality http://t.co/qp6gFVnP #gov2au #
Interesting, broad & quite informative government consultation currently open: "Australia in the Asian Century" http://t.co/uuhdyzhG #gov2au #
.@benpobjie I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus. Obviously. #howsongslie #
Nice! RT "Everything dies" remix by nardz via #soundcloud http://t.co/wJFy3Sc3 #music #
$5 million in grants funding available for ppl/orgs who help with community understanding of science http://t.co/1AUMPz6R /cc @tribalscience #

Donna Benjamin: Storify Drupal Downunder 2012

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:28:01 +0000

Playing about with Storify for the first time as a way of shaping the post event report for Drupal Downunder. It claims to have an export to Drupal site feature (or tumblr, or wordpress, or posterous or mailchimp) but I couldn't get that to work. Instead - I've used the embed code. On balance, I'd say Storify is a pretty nifty web app.

This post is very long, mostly cos it has lots of pix, embedded vids of each of the the keynotes and is interspersed with tweets and other snippets about the conference. Hopefully, it gives a taste of the event and the fun that was had.

[View the story "Drupal Downunder" on Storify]

Rusty Russell: Why Everyone Must Oppose The Merging of /usr and /

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:30:35 +0000

As co-editor of the last edition of the File Hierarchy Standard before it merged into the Linux Standard Base, I’ve been following the discussion about combining the directories /bin, /sbin and /lib into /usr/bin, /usr/sbin and /usr/lib respectively. You can follow it too, via the LWN discussion.

To summarize, there are two sides to the debate. The “pro” side points out:

Nothing will really change for users, as symlinks will make old stuff still work.
There are precedents in Solaris and Fedora.
The weak reasonings used previously to separate / and /usr no longer apply.
Separate /usr has become increasingly unsupported anyway.
Moving to /usr will enable genuine R/O root filesystem sharing.

The “anti” side, however, raises very salient points:

Lennart Poettering supports it.
Lennart Poettering is an asshole.

Fellow Anti-mergers, I understand the pain and anguish that systemd has caused you personally, and your families. Your hopes and dreams crushed, by someone with all the charm of a cheese grater across the knuckles. Your remaining life tainted by this putrescent subhuman who forced himself upon your internet.

Despite the privation we have all endured, please find strength to stop this nightmarish ravaging of our once-pure filesystems. For if he’s not stopped now, what hope for /usr/sbin vs /usr/bin?

Donna Benjamin: DDU2012 Keynotes

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:27:53 +0000

Photos by Tim Miller - Dreamcoat Photography - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Jon Oxer: Walktime Blog #19: No dominant Open Source home automation projects?

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:29:13 +0000

If you're just getting into home automation and go searching for Open Source HA projects, you'll discover there aren't any obviously dominant players - more a mix of partly-developed personal projects that aren't very portable. Why is that?

View or comment directly on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywulcl_PCUM

Links for this ep:

* Allison Randal: www.twitter.com/allisonrandal

* Desktop Home Hacks: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8asl5SsGy4

* Mister House: misterhouse.sourceforge.net

* Open Remote: www.openremote.org

* SuperHouseTV: www.superhouse.tv

David Rowe: linux.conf.au (LCA) 2012

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:30:26 +0000

Well, it’s that time of year again – my annual geek-week at linux.conf.au. Every day there were many interesting talks to attend and many I had to miss. I am currently catching the ones I missed by watching the LCA 2012 videos.

Keynotes and Open Source DSP

The Bruce Perens keynote had many good points on why open source is becoming essential to our security and well-being in the 21st century. These themes were expanded by the other keynote speakers. Bruce stated that “open software is the only credible producer of software”, we can choose to be “slaves to tools or the people who control the tools”. Watch the talk for more information on these memes.

I am interested in “the art” of presentation (as distinct from the content) so was also interested in Bruce’s presentation style from that perspective. He appeared on stage in a suit, which is uncommon in a geeky crowd. It raised a few eyebrows. However Bruce then explained that “a suit at LCA” was a theatrical device to underscore the point that we, as an open source community, should be facing outward. Open source communities are good at talking to people within our community, but our image outside of that community is poor and misunderstood (e.g. not many people understand their email is relayed via open source, or how it helps security problems and can help preserve democracy). Our external image must be improved.

Another great point by Bruce was how Open Source is now solving tough, previously opaque problems that were traditionally considered too hard due to patents or specialised knowledge. All you need is one guy to really get into and understand the problem. Suddenly the voodoo evaporates. People then know it’s possible – a problem that our peers have solved always appears easier. This one guy publishes source and shares what he has learnt. Others start to hack the code. Bruce, much to my embarrassment (!), actually cited my DSP work as an example, for example Oslec for echo cancellation and projects like Codec 2. When Oslec started I had many people tell me “it can’t be done”, “you need a DSP chip to do it in hardware”, or “it’s all covered by patents”. The truth is that Open Source DSP algorithms are now out performing closed source competitors. For example the Opus guys have developed a world-beating open source audio and voice codec. More on that below.

Actually I really enjoyed all of the keynotes. Paul Fenwick spoke on how our mind works, including topics like “decoy choices” and the “planning fallacy”, and how playing Tetris can help with traumatic experiences. I also recommend you watch the keynotes by Jacob Applebaum and Karen Sandler.

It was great to see Jean-Marc Valin and Timothy B. Terriberry in person, presenting on the Opus Codec. I wonder if this will be the “last” audio codec. It’s open source, royalty and patent free, will be an IETF standard, codes speech and music signals from 6,000 bit/s up, and outperforms other codecs like MP3.

Codec 2 talk

As I mentioned above I am interested in how conference presentations work. Like a lot of my work, I am inclined to experiment. Try something different. Hack it. A presentation on Codec 2, like many presentations at LCA, has a strong technical component that is hard for the average LCA attendee to follow. My Codec 2 work is an extension of my PhD research in speech coding. It took me 3 years to get my head around speech coding for the PhD. So how do I communicate Codec 2 topics to a smart, but non-speech-coding aware audience?

One way to handle this is “tutorial” style. You spend about half the talk bringing people up to speed on your technical topic. Enough to explain in the second half how you applied Linux or open source to this field. This is a common approach at LCA. It can work well, but also means a lot to absorb for the audience. This can be a challenge after a day (let alone a week) of great ideas and intellectual stimulation at a conference like LCA.

Instead of the tutorial approach I hit on a different idea. Rather than confine my talk to Codec 2 and DSP theory, I tried approaching Speech Coding from a variety of tangential topics that matter to LCA attendees. I talked about codec patents, how Ham radio relates to Open Source, and finally a really easy to grasp graphical explanation of how the sinusoidal model used in Codec 2 works. I left out a bunch of DSP topics, and didn’t even put up a block diagram of the codec. I wanted the audience to walk away knowing 3 or 4 things about speech coding really well, rather than try to cover the entire, technically deep, acronym rich subject at a shallow level.

This worked well. Really well in fact – my Codec 2 talk was voted the best of the conference and I was asked to repeat it later in the week. Wow! This was especially amazing for me as the voting is done by the attendees. A nice way to start 2012 for me, after working through some tough personal issues in 2011. Here are the slides for my Codec 2 LCA 2012 talk in Open Office format.

How Good Was Your Conference Talk?

It is important to me that my talks are well received. For me it’s part of my job and I take it seriously. Here is what I look for. This applies mainly to conferences with multiple parallel threads where people have a choice in what they attend:

Did I fill the room (or nearly so)?
Were people still asking questions at the end of your allocated time? Extra points if people come up to you afterwards and ask more questions. Even better if you get hustled off by the conference organisers because the next speaker is overdue to start.
Did some of the more popular speakers/major contributors to the conference attend the talk?
Was the applause loud and enthusiastic?

Oh, and I also like to make my talks short and leave more time than usual for questions. For example in a 50 minute slot I will time my talk to be 30 minutes rather than the nominal 40, allowing 20 minutes for questions. I feel strongly that the audience should drive a good chunk of the talk through their questions. This feels much better to me than running over time and not allowing enough time for questions.

21 Second Lightning Talk

Lightning talks are a fun part of LCA. These usually last 5 minutes. I had an idea for a lightning talk on my Electric Car that I wanted to try. I figured I could get my talk done in 10-15 seconds. Yes, I was experimenting with presentation styles again. I wanted to use lots of slides connected with just a few words (normally we are encouraged to do it the other way around). This year I managed to get a lightning talk slot and presented the talk. You can see it on the lightning talk video starting at 50:20. From when I start to when I stop talking is 21 seconds, not quite the sub-15 seconds I was aiming at. I always was a bit talkative. However the applause was pretty loud so I think the idea worked!

Codec 2 Hacking

While at LCA Jean-Marc did some great LSP vector quantiser work for Codec 2 and explained some of the techniques involved. This was very useful, and will be part of Codec 2 soon. Thanks Jean-Marc!

At the end of the conference Bruce Perens (left), Timothy and Jean-Marc (right), came to stay for a few days at Nuria’s (centre) house. It was really nice to have them all, we did some good work on Codec 2, and the dinner-time conversation (fuelled by Nuria’s fine lasagne and BBQ) was fascinating. As Bruce pointed out, there is great value in the small number of open source speech coding guys meeting face to face.

I was a bit nervous travelling in the same car with Jean-Marc and Timothy. People working on open source voice codecs are rare – so we figured we had 60% of the world’s open source codec guys in one car!

Ian Wienand: pylint and hiding of attributes

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:26:45 +0000

I recently came across the pylint error:

E:  3,4:Foo.foo: An attribute affected in foo line 12 hide this method

in code that boiled down to essentially:

class Foo:

    def foo(self):
        return True

    def foo_override(self):
        return False

    def __init__(self, override=False):
        if override:
            self.foo = self.foo_override

Unfortunately that message isn't particularly helpful in figuring out what's going on. I still can't claim to be 100% sure what the message is intended to convey, but I can construct something that maybe it's talking about.

Consider the following using the above class

foo = Foo()
moo = Foo(override=True)

print "expect True  : %s" % foo.foo()
print "expect False : %s" % moo.foo()
print "expect True  : %s" % Foo.foo(foo)
print "expect False : %s" % Foo.foo(moo)

which gives output of:

$ python ./foo.py 
expect True  : True
expect False : False
expect True  : True
expect False : True

Now, if you read just about any Python tutorial, it will say something along the lines of:

... the special thing about methods is that the object is passed as the first argument of the function. In our example, the call x.f() is exactly equivalent to MyClass.f(x). In general, calling a method with a list of n arguments is equivalent to calling the corresponding function with an argument list that is created by inserting the method’s object before the first argument. [Official Python Tutorial]

The official tutorial above is careful to say in general; others often don't.

The important point to remember is how python internally resolves attribute references as described by the data model. The moo.foo() call is really moo.__dict__["foo"](moo); examining the __dict__ for the moo object we can see that foo has been re-assigned:

>>> print moo.__dict__
{'foo': <bound method Foo.foo_override of <__main__.Foo instance at 0xb72838ac>>}

Our Foo.foo(moo) call is really Foo.__dict__["foo"](moo) -- the fact that we reassigned foo in moo is never noticed. If we were to do something like Foo.foo = Foo.foo_override we would modify the class __dict__, but that doesn't give us the original semantics.

So I postulate that the main point of this warning is to suggest to you that you're creating an instance that now behaves differently to its class. Because the symmetry of calling an instance and calling a class is well understood you might end up getting some strange behaviour, especially if you start with heavy-duty introspection of classes.

Thinking about various hacks and ways to re-write this construct is kind of interesting. I think I might have found a hook for a decent interview question :)

Jon Oxer: Walktime Blog #18: Interview with Marco Ostini at LCA2012

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:29:34 +0000

Despite Australia's strong involvement in the early history of space exploration, we're now lagging way behind many far smaller nations in our commitment to the industry. At linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart, Marco Ostini gathered together a group of like-minded people to create Lunar Numbat: a project to develop Open Source space technology as part of the White Label Space team competing for the Google Lunar X-Prize. At linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat I managed to pin him down long enough to film this interview.

View or comment directly on YouTube: youtu.be/6PQ6mIEmKfc

Links for this ep:

* Marco Ostini: www.twitter.com/marcoostini

* Lunar Numbat: www.lunarnumbat.org

* White Label Space: www.whitelabelspace.com

* Google Lunar X-Prize: www.googlelunarxprize.com

Jon Oxer: Walktime Blog #17: Interview with Matt Evans at LCA2012

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:28:51 +0000

At linux.conf.au 2012 I had the good fortune of meeting up with old friends and also making new ones, including the amazingly talented Matt Evans. Matt did a great talk called "Hack Everything: Re-Purposing Everyday Devices", so I caught up with him briefly afterwards to talk to him about it.

View or comment directly on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIQl0u-YZ5s

James Purser: Sigh, so that happened

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:25:58 +0000

So two things happened today.

The first was a near riot that necessitated the evacuation of the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader from an awards ceremony meant to highlight the work of emergency workers.

The second was WIN Television blowing it again.

If you haven't caught up on the events today then I heres a brief timeline I've put together from various sources:

Earlier today in Sydney, Tony Abbott made comments indicating that he thought it was "time to move on" from the thinking that led to the Aboroginal Tent Embassy being set up forty years ago.
Tony Abbott travels to Canberra to attend the awarding of the inaugeral National Emergency Medal along with the Prime Minister.
People at the Tent Embassy hear of Tony Abbotts comments and are, it could be said, greatly miffed. They are then told that he is actually in Canberra, not far from the Tent Embassy itself.
A number of people decide that they're going express their anger at the Opposition Leader and Prime Minister. They surround the restuaraunt, a glass walled building and start yelling and slamming on the glass.
Police are called and the Prime Ministers security detail advises her that the situation is getting dangerous and that she should leave. The PM agrees and also indicates that they should escort the Opposition Leader as well, as he doesn't have his own security detail.
The PM and Opposition leader are rushed out of the building surrounded by the biggest scrum of security personel. The PM trips on the way out and it appears the opposition leader is helped along by the security personel via the method of grabbing his belt and pushing.

That's it in a nutshell I think. I've probably missed something but that's what I've managed to pull out of the media.

Needless to say as I watched the tweets fly by with all sorts of claims and details (the original tweets I had seen claimed that the PM had been crash tackled by a protester), I waited for any sign that the MSM had picked up the story. It didn't take long for the papers to run with it, and the TV networks at least squeezing in an extra news bulletin to cover the basic details.

Well, most of the networks.

WIN Television's Wollongong station couldn't even be bothered following channel 9 by putting on an extra news bulletin after Wriddhiman Saha lost his wicket. Instead WIN simply continued on with it's pre-planned ads and it wasn't until it broadcast the 9 news bulletin at 6pm that the news finally reached the airwaves.

I basically have three things to say:

To Tony Abbott, on this day of days, a day which a large part of the indigenous community views as the day they started losing their rights, to suggest that perhaps the Tent Embassy wasn't needed was either a dog whistle of epic proportions, or simply a case of shoving both feet in at the speed of sound.

Oh and as for the snide little raised eye brows and snark when Gillard offered to remove you from the situation, that just makes you look like a petulant little child.

To the protesters, you did yourself and your cause no favours today. You managed to rise to the bait and make yourselves look like a rabble. And getting cute by offering to give the PM back her shoe tomorrow if she comes by the Embassy just really doesn't help.

Finally, to WIN Television. Convergance is coming, and it's not going to be nice to those who aren't ready for it. You've known about this for years now, unless you start doing something soon, you will be left behind.

Anyway, that was my Australia day, how was yours?

Blog Catagories:

Politics

media

convergance

Michael Still: Shadow of a Dark Queen

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:29:22 +0000

ISBN: 9780006480266

LibraryThing

I read this book before LCA 2012, but never had a chance to mention it here. It was the first return to Midkemia for me since I read the Krondor's Sons books. This book is set a lot later, and there is very little reuse of characters between The Riftwar Saga or even Krondor's Sons. The only real overlap is the presence of Pug briefly. This book over does its "dirty dozen" aspects, with much of the book focusing on the military training of criminals. The rest of the book feels like a rushed military adventure in a far land, and could have done with some more attention. However, the book isn't terrible, and I thought it was ok overall.

Tags for this post: book raymond_e_feist midkemia combat crime fantasy sword_and_sorcery

Related posts: Daughter of the Empire; The King's Buccaneer; Servant of the Empire; The Riftwar Series; Silverthorn; A Darkness at Sethanon; Mistress of the Empire; Prince of the Blood; Magician: Master; Magician: Apprentice; Raymond E Feist's Empire Trilogy; Polar City Blues; Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood; Caves of Steel; Currency; Tipping point: windscreen washers; You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat; Belgarath the Sorcerer; The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat; Mona Lisa Overdrive; Zodiac

Comment Recommend a book

Jeff Waugh: QotD: Jon Corbet on linux.conf.au and Linux Australia

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:52:19 +0000

In summary, LCA remains unique in its combination of strongly technical talks, freedom-oriented and hands-on orientation, wide variety of topics covered, and infectious Australian humor. There is a reason some of us seem to end up there every year despite the painful air-travel experiences required. Linux Australia has put together a structure that allows the conference to be handed off to a new team in a new city every year, bringing a fresh view while upholding the standards set in the previous years.

– LWN’s Jon Corbet on linux.conf.au, An LCA 2012 Summary

Leon Brooks: DeVeDe on Perfect Pangolin

noreply@blogger.com (Leon Brooks) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:58:00 +0000

This currently seems a little confused about the version numbering of the libblah-extra-number packages, so...

apt-get --ignore-hold install devede libavcodec-extra-53 libavdevice-extra-53 libavfilter-extra-2 libavutil-extra-51 libavformat-extra-53 libpostproc-extra-52 libswscale-extra-2 apt-get download libav-tools apt-get download ffmpeg apt-get download devede dpkg -i --force-depends-version libav-tools_0.8-1ubuntu1_i386.deb dpkg -i --force-depends-version ffmpeg_0.8-1ubuntu1_all.deb dpkg -i --force-depends-version devede_3.21.0-0ubuntu2_all.deb

Donna Benjamin: Congratulations Colin Benjamin - and Thank you

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:28:12 +0000

Update: Media mentions

Nic Price Tributes: Melbourne Residents Honoured Melbourne Leader 30 Jan 2012

I have ambivalence about Australia Day - and the often unquestioned celebration of an invasion of Australia at the expense of the indigenous nations who made this continent their home. But Australia Day has also become an opportunity to celebrate the contributions of today's citizens.

I'm excited and honoured to see my dad, Colin Benjamin, in today's honours lists "for service to the community through roles with social welfare organisations, and to business". He follows in the footsteps of my grandfather, Eric Benjamin, who was awarded the same medal in 1988 "in recognition of service to social welfare". Ruth and Eric, my grandparents, were refugees. They came to Australia with assisted passage aboard the TSS Jervis Bay, escaping Europe and the rise of fascism before the start of World War II. They were incredibly lucky. Most other members of their families did not survive the war. Eric's mother and sister ended up in Sobibor, his father ended up in the Polish Ghetto at Lodz.

Ruth was arrested and spent months in solitary confinement, before being transferred to the Moringen concentration camp. She was released and fled to the Netherlands, which is where she met Eric. They married and headed to Australia, and were watched by our security agencies. I don't know what happened to the rest of her family in Europe, except her brother survived, only to die in the spanish civil war. At university I had the opportunity to create a short video documentary about her.

Service to the community. Seem such simple, innocuous words. When we give safe harbour to people fleeing persecution and war, we give them a chance to make a difference to their new world. Our new world, Australia, has benefited from the efforts of these people. So while we must acknowledge the wrong done to the indigenous peoples of the great southern continent, we should also speak out against those who seek to demonise refugees and asylum seekers - who also come on boats, as my grandparents did.

Dad sometimes talks about "degrees of freedom" and the role entrepreneurship and business plays in people having control over their lives. When society has a systemic bias against you and your circumstances, or institutionalises barriers for your personal advancement and freedom, then creating your own work is crucial.

Thanks Dad!

Here's the citation.

MEDAL (OAM) OF THE ORDER OF AUSTRALIA IN THE GENERAL DIVISION Dr COLIN BENJAMIN

For service to the community through roles with social welfare organisations, and to business.

Director-General, ‘Life. Be in it’ International, since 1993;

Director, from 1983. Co-Chairman, ‘Life. Be in it’ Australia Ltd, since 2007.

Director, ‘Life. Be in it’ Health Promotion Institute, 2011.

Director, Victoria Branch, Australian Association of Social Workers, since 2011.

Founder and Chairman, Australian Register of Counsellors and Psychotherapists, 2009-2010.

Former Chief Executive Officer, Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia, 2007-2010.

Member, Association of Professional Futurists.

Federal President, Australian Social Welfare Union, 1976.

Federal President, Australian Association of Social Workers, 1975.

Executive Director, Victorian Council of Social Service, 1973-1975.

Director of Education and Welfare, City of Sunshine, 1969-1972.

Senior Social Worker, Sunbury Mental Hospital, 1966-1969.

Deputy Director-General, Department of Employment and Training, Victoria, 1980-1982.

Director of Regional Services, Department of Community Welfare Services, 1977-1979.

Director of Research and Social Policy, Department of Social Welfare, 1975-1976.

Chairman, Marshall Place Associates, since 2004.

Chief Executive Officer, The Horizons Network, since 1990.

Director, Futures Division, Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide, 1983-1989.

Russell Coker: Links January 2012

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:26:59 +0000

Cops in Tennessee routinely steal cash from citizens [1]. They are ordered to do so and in some cases their salary is paid from the cash that they take. So they have a good reason to imagine that any large sum of money is drug money and take it.

David Frum wrote an insightful article for NY Mag about the problems with the US Republican Party [2].

TreeHugger.com has an interesting article about eco-friendly features on some modern cruise ships [3].

Dan Walsh describes how to get the RSA SecureID PAM module working on a SE Linux system [4]. It’s interesting that RSA was telling everyone to turn off SE Linux and shipping a program that was falsely marked as needing an executable stack and which uses netstat instead of /dev/urandom for entropy. Really the only way RSA could do worse could be to fall victim to an Advanced Persistent Attack… :-#

The Long Now has an interesting summary of a presentation about archive.org [5]. I never realised the range of things that archive.org stores, I will have to explore that if I find some spare time!

Jonah Lehrer wrote a detailed and informative article about the way that American high school students receive head injuries playing football[6]. He suggests that it might eventually be the end of the game as we know it.

François Marier wrote an informative article about optimising PNG files [7], optipng is apparently the best option at the moment but it doesn’t do everything you might want.

Helen Keeble wrote an interesting review of Twilight [8]. The most noteworthy thing about it IMHO is that she tries to understand teenage girls who like the books and movies. Trying to understand young people is quite rare.

Jon Masters wrote a critique of the concept of citizen journalism and described how he has two subscriptions to the NYT as a way of donating to support quality journalism [9]. The only comment on his post indicates a desire for biased news (such as Fox) which shows the reason why most US media is failing at journalism.

Luis von Ahn gave an interesting TED talk about crowd-sourced translation [10]. He starts by describing CAPTCHAs and the way that his company ReCAPTCHA provides the CAPTCHA service while also using people’s time to digitise books. Then he describes his online translation service and language education system DuoLingo which allows people to learn a second language for free while translating text between languages [11]. One of the benefits of this is that people don’t have to pay to learn a new language and thus poor people can learn other languages – great for people in developing countries that want to learn first-world languages! DuoLingo is in a beta phase at the moment but they are taking some volunteers.

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for the Publishers Weekly titles “Copyrights vs Human Rights” [12] which is primarily about SOPA.

Naomi Wolf wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the “Occupy” movement, among other things the highest levels of the US government are using the DHS as part of the crackdown [13]. Naomi’s claim is that the right-wing and government attacks on the Occupy movement are due to the fact that they want to reform the political process and prevent corruption.

John Bohannon gave an interesting and entertaining TED talk about using dance as part of a presentation [14]. He gave an example of using dancerts to illustrate some concepts related to physics and then spoke about the waste of PowerPoint.

Joe Sabia gave an amusing and inspiring TED talk about the technology of storytelling [15]. He gave the presentation with live actions on his iPad to match his words, a difficult task to perform successfully.

Thomas Koch wrote an informative post about some of the issues related to binary distribution of software [16]. I think the problem is evenm worse than Thomas describes.

Links January 2011 Halla Tomasdottir gave an interesting TED talk about her financial...
Links January 2010 Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria...
Links January 2009 Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the...

Peter Lieverdink: Amateurish Astronomy

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:27:20 +0000

... in which I log my astronomickal adventures around linux.conf.au in Ballaarat. Verily.

Monday 16 January 2012

On monday evening I was invited to a property about an hour north of Ballarat to do some observing from a hill-top in an area without (much) light pollution. The evening was perfect and much was to be seen even without any optical augmentation. M45, the milky way, the coal sack & magellanic clouds were perfectly visible with the naked eye. Sadly the southern cross was pretty low on the horizon.

I'm happy to say the winning entry in the LCA photo competition was taken at this place :-)

^{Photo by David Basden, showing the milky way, coal sack and small magellanic cloud.}

I took a series of photos of the Orion nebula, but haven't had the time to try some of the photo stacking apps with them yet.

Thursday 19 January 2012

Weather and ~~drinking~~social engagements didn't really allow for much in the way of observation until thursday night, when I dragged my scope out onto the cricket field on campus. It was pretty late, so we didn't managed to see Venus before it disappeared behind the treeline.

Conditions were less than ideal, with flood lights on the other end of the field messing with night vision and a cold southwestern blowing in cloud and causing dew. I got a cold. (Achievement unlocked!)

Photo by David Basden.

Still, Jupiter and the Orion nebula were blingy enough to be able to see through my scope and they duly impressed some of the gathered. One other person (self confessed noob, never used scope) brought a 6" motorised schmidt-cassegrain scope and we managed to successfully align it via Jupiter, Betelgeuse and Sirius then and found various things to look at through holes in the cloud cover.

We played a bit with the various eyepiece sizes when looking at Jupiter, but cloud made the image hazy-ish regardless. I am now in envy of a motorised scope :-) We also spotted about 5 sattelites zooming along, one of which passed directly in front of Jupiter and was observed through both scopes simultaneously, so I'll call that a confirmed sighting!

I became a lot more adept at aligning the scope and generally managed to get what it was I wanted to look at into view within a few minutes or so. Except the horse head nebula, that is. I could not for the life of me even find Alnitak that evening!

However, it turns out that with a Celestron 130 you can easily see Jupiter through a layer of cloud, though not in focus.

As we packed up and walked back, the cloud cover disappeared. (Achievement unlocked!)

Friday 20 January 2012

On Friday, an LCA organiser kindly offered me a reserved spot on the Ballarat Observatory tour, which I of course accepted. There was come scattered cloud when we arrived, but the observatory volunteers managed to get everyone to catch a glimpse of Jupiter and its moons through the Oddie and Federation telescopes.

As cloud rolled in (Achievement unlocked!) we were ushered inside for a few 3D videos, which worked about half the time for me but made me squint quite badly. They were a bit daggy for the LCA geek audience, but considering the goal of the observatory and the intended audience I think they're alright.

Still, I didn't feel like squinting uncomfortably for an hour so I nicked off out the back and stood around outside for a little while, getting a short tour of the Jelbart telescope from one of the volunteers. As that concluded, I noticed the cloud cover had completely disappeared and everyone was still inside, watching the videos.

I snuck off to the Oddie telescope and had it to myself for a good 20 minutes. I now have giant 80" telescope envy as well :-) I did some eyeballing of Jupiter and the Orion nebula and found that my own telescope is really badly in need of collimation. The Oddie, on the other hand was wonderfully sharp, and the bands on Jupiter were lovely and well-defined.

The other finished their video at that point and discovered the sky was clear, so they came up and had a sticky-beak around the sky, before being ushered back on the bus and driven back to the campus. I drove myself up, so hung around the observatory for a little while afterward, deflecting attempts by the volunteers to have me provide free IT support for Windows XP (Achievement unlocked!)

We had a quick look at the Rosette nebula before packing up the Oddie and closing the roof. On the way out, a member of the observatory beckoned us to have a look through his telescope, in which the two main components of α-Crucis were separately visible. Lovely :-)

What next?

There are a few things I would like to do to make observing with my own telescope a more enjoyable experience.

Collimate the telescope properly (well, need not want)
Obtain more varied eyepieces, as I currently only have two
Make a carry case for the telescope, as carrying a dodgy cardboard box is sucky
Obtain some filters, as I have none
Obtain a motorised mount, to aid photographing faint objects
Obtain a higher magnification barlow lens for the camera adapter, but this is useless without the motorised mount or proper collimation
Obtain a spotting scope to aid aiming the telescope
Obtain a focuser with finer control

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James Purser: On Bogans and Racism

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:25:55 +0000

So, last night I got into one of those twitter arguments that I tend to (I have a bad case of "Someones wrong on the Internet").

In this case it was triggered by the following tweet:

Redglitterx: how do you know if youre an elitist, smug, over-priviledged racist? you make bogan jokes

Now, if you're not sure what a bogan joke is, a bogan is a name for someone who is considered ill-educated, with low income and not only ignorant, but revelling in their ignorance. As you may have noticed, this is actually a stereotype, a cardboard cutout that people use to mentally slot a group of people into the social heirachy. In this way, calling someone a bogan is very much LIKE racism.

However I have never considered the term itself to be racist.

This may be one of those cases where a term is whatever anyone wants it to be, but I really think that it doesn't help anyone to try and conflate anti-boganism with racism. If nothing else, "bogans" don't face the same extreme issues as those who suffer from racism. Bogans are not likely to be physically attacked because they are bogans, there is not a continual low level campaign by large sections of the media to seperate them out from the rest of the population, and let's be honest, there is a hell of a lot of government policy that is aimed at placating and winning the votes of those who might be called bogan.

As I said at the beginning, calling someone a bogan is like racism in that you are using a stereotype to mentally sort that person, just like calling someone an eastern sububs nancy boy, or a north shore soccer mum.

Sridhar Dhanapalan: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-25

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:28:28 +0000

Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes http://t.co/F0ojnKxD #
Allow me to express my gratitude to the #lca2012 organisers for a brilliant conference! #
Sick of Sydney? http://t.co/JewJPoIv #
Interview with OLPC CTO about XO-3

http://t.co/zmh6VOkz #olpc #
Fuseproject Unwraps The Third-Gen One Laptop Per Child: A $100 Tablet http://t.co/jzuqqBSn #olpc #
Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class http://t.co/AK1b7Ogm #
@threethirty it means a tablet based on standard Linux — Fedora, GNOME, Sugar, etc. See the talk at http://t.co/dYbj5ECb #olpc #olpcau in reply to threethirty #
@kattekrab you can probably do 70, but we don’t want to push it #olpc #olpcau in reply to kattekrab #
@kattekrab have you seen http://t.co/IjsGlYVN ? Happy to chat if you have further questions! #olpcau #olpc in reply to kattekrab #

Jeremy Visser: LeoStick with seven-segment display

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:28:27 +0000

In my LCA2012 schwag bag I got a LeoStick from Freetronics.

I’m hopelessly bad at electronics, but I managed to wire it up to a seven-segment LED display from an electronics kit I used to use as a kid.

Using just a few lines of C++ (or whatever the heck the language is that Arduino uses — I haven’t fully worked it out ) results in this video (and scroll down for the code):

Watch video

/*
LED segment mappings
Note that this is specific to the way I wired it
This will be different for you!
 
Top          = 0x01
Top left     = 0x02
Bottom left  = 0x04
Bottom       = 0x08
Top right    = 0x10
Middle       = 0x20
Bottom right = 0x40
Dot          = 0x80
*/
 
/* here we combine the above segments to produce a complete digit */
unsigned char digits[] = {
  0x5F, /* zero  */
  0x50, /* one   */
  0x3D, /* two   */
  0x79, /* three */
  0x72, /* four  */
  0x6B, /* five  */
  0x6F, /* six   */
  0x51, /* seven */
  0x7F, /* eight */
  0x7B  /* nine  */
};
 
void display_digit(unsigned char d)
{
  int i;
 
  /* examine each bit and determine if segment needs to be lit */
  for (i=0; i<8; i++) {
    digitalWrite(i, (d >> i & 0x01 == 0x01) ? HIGH : LOW); 
  }
}
 
void setup()
{
  int i;
 
  /* set pins 0-7 to output */
  for (i=0; i<8; i++) {
    pinMode(i, OUTPUT);
  }
 
  /* show all segments on bootup */
  display_digit(0xFF);
  delay(1000);
}
 
void loop()
{
  int i;
 
  /* display each digit one by one */
  for (i=0; i<10; i++) {
    display_digit(digits[i]);
    delay(500);
  }
}

Any tips on optimising the above code? Being fairly crap at C–like languages, and with no knowledge of the ATmega32U4 processor, I have no idea how efficient the bit shifting is (in the display_digit() function).

Russell Coker: SE Linux Status in Debian 2012-01

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:27:06 +0000

Since my last SE Linux in Debian status report [1] there have been some significant changes.

Policy

Last year I reported that the policy wasn’t very usable, on the 18th of January I uploaded version 2:2.20110726-2 of the policy packages that fixes many bugs. The policy should now be usable by most people for desktop operations and as a server. Part of the delay was that I wanted to include support for systemd, but as my work on systemd proceeded slowly and others didn’t contribute policy I could use I gave up and just released it. Systemd is still a priority for me and I plan to use it on all my systems when Wheezy is released.

Kernel

Some time between Debian kernel 3.0.0-2 and 3.1.0-1 support for an upstream change to the security module configuration was incorporated. Instead of using selinux=1 on the kernel command line to enable SE Linux support the kernel option is security=selinux. This change allows people to boot with security=tomoyo or security=apparmor if they wish. No support for Smack though.

As the kernel silently ignores command line parameters that it doesn’t understand so there is no harm in having both selinux=1 and security=selinux on both older and newer kernels. So version 0.5.0 of selinux-basics now adds both kernel command-line options to GRUB configuration when selinux-activate is run. Also when the package is upgraded it will search for selinux=1 in the GRUB configuration and if it’s there it will add security=selinux. This will give users the functionality that they expect, systems which have SE Linux activated will keep running SE Linux after a kernel upgrade or downgrade! Prior to updating selinux-basics systems running Debian/Unstable won’t work with SE Linux.

As an aside the postinst file for selinux-basics was last changed in 2006 (thanks Erich Schubert). This package is part of the new design of SE Linux in Debian and some bits of it haven’t needed to be changed for 6 years! SE Linux isn’t a new thing, it’s been in production for a long time.

Audit

While the audit daemon isn’t strictly a part of SE Linux (each can be used without the other) it seems that most of the time they are used together (in Debian at least). I have prepared a NMU of the new upstream version of audit and uploaded it to delayed/7. I want to get everything related to SE Linux up to date or at least with comparable versions to Fedora. Also I sent some of the Debian patches for the auditd upstream which should reduce the maintenance effort in future.

Libraries

There have been some NMUs of libraries that are part of SE Linux. Due to a combination of having confidence in the people doing the NMUs and not having much spare time I have let them go through without review. I’m sure that I will notice soon enough if they don’t work, my test systems exercise enough SE Linux functionality that it would be difficult to break things without me noticing.

Play Machine

I am now preparing a new SE Linux “Play Machine” running Debian/Unstable. I wore my Play Machine shirt at LCA so I’ve got to get one going again soon. This is a good exercise of the strict features of SE Linux policy, I’ve found some bugs which need to be fixed. Running Play Machines really helps improve the overall quality of SE Linux.

[1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/10/31/selinux-status-2011-10/

Status of SE Linux in Debian LCA 2009 This morning I gave a talk at the Security mini-conf...
SE Linux in Debian I have now got a Debian Xen domU running the...
Debian SE Linux Status At the moment I’ve got more time to work on...

Michael Still: Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:29:02 +0000

Canberra was announced as the host for LCA 2013 at the close of LCA 2012. As part of that closing, we handed out postcards and laptop stickers to delegates. However, we deliberately had extra printed on the theory that groups like LUGs, university computer societies and so forth would be interested in having promotional materials for their groups. For those of you not lucky enough to attend the excellent LCA2012, the stickers looked like this:

And the postcards look like this:

All credit for the excellent art should go to the very capable Jenny Cox. So, if you're interested in having some stuff to hand out at your next LUG or computer society meeting, please drop us a line at contact@lca2013.linux.org.au. Don't forget to include the name of the group and a mailing address.

Tags for this post: conference lca2013 promotion postcard sticker canonical canberra

Related posts: Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Scoble, I'll buy the damn book, just put your clothes back on; Two more weeks to go; Taking over a launch pad project; In Canberra; Mont 24 hour race; Most novel traffic jam cause goes to... Canberra!; Slow git review uploads?; So, what on earth was I doing up at 4:30 am anyways?; What are we doing with the pets?; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Wow, qemu-img is fast; Electric shadows has a RSS feed!; Travel details so far; Frank Arrigo discovers Steve Walsh's free wireless; On a bunker kick; Calling Tate Needham, or, Hiring in Canberra; LCA weather; Openstack compute node cleanup; Back in Canberra again

Comment

Pia Waugh: Moving on – the journey continues

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:25:06 +0000

Today is a complicated day. I’m both sad and excited in equal measure about what this year may hold in store.

I’m sad because this is my last day working for Senator Kate Lundy as her IT Policy Advisor and inhouse geek. Kate headhunted me almost 3 years ago at BarCamp Canberra, though we had known each other for a few years beforehand from when she was the Shadow Minister for IT. I was quite wary of going to work in a political office, but my curiosity about how the machine works combined with a desire to help make good tech policy and an immense amount of respect for Kate brought me into one of the most interesting, fun and challenging jobs I’ve ever had.

I particularly wanted to better understand the legislative and executive arms of government. How ideas turn into policy and policy into implementation. As a result, along with doing my job I’ve spent time researching the history of democracy, of Australian politics, of the ideological and historical premise of all the major Australian parties and the interaction between party politics and democracy over the years. I’ve also spent time coming to understand some of the layout, responsibilities and challenges of a multi-tiered system of government.

I have learnt a great deal in this job about government, but also about human nature. Working in an electoral office gives one some insight to the difficulties faced by many, but also some insight to the challenge in maintaining a constructive and respectful dialogue. I think it is human nature to try to boil issues down to black and white. But we are essentially grey creatures with enormous complexity, and I think democracy is about finding ways to have a transparent, informed, respectful and constructive dialogue with all the people on complex policies and implementation, so governments can best implement the best policies for the communities they serve.

I have been lucky to work for a politician who is passionate and knowledgeable about technology and good policy. She has been a valuable teacher and mentor. I shall always be thankful for the wisdom, patience, compassion, critical thinking, strategy and policy development I have learnt in this role and from Kate. I’m sure these skills will continue to serve me well.

My work on Kate’s website, the Public Spheres, Open Government, assisting Kate in linking together different tech policies across a variety of portfolios are all things I am proud of. I also feel very lucky to have met and worked with such inspirational people from many different walks of life through this role and in Kate’s office.

Meanwhile, having developed some understanding of the legislative and executive arms of government, I realised that I wanted to have more experience in the administrative arm of government. I had done some tech work in a previous life within departments but always as the outsourced person. I knew I wanted to really get in and contribute to the public service, as well as learn more about the implementation of policy and the delivery of government services to citizens.

As such, I’m excited to say I am hopefully moving into a role in the APS in the coming weeks and I hope my efforts there will be broadly useful to others in the APS. I can’t say more at this stage as it is being finalised at the moment, but I’ll update this post in the weeks ahead with more information.

By working within the APS, I hope to get a better personal understanding of the specific challenges facing the APS with regards to technology, and hopefully assist in developing strategies to be a more agile, responsive and citizen-centric public service. I will also continue helping to move the Open Government agenda ahead both in my own time and, where appropriate, within my new role. My commitment to Open Government (and Gov 2.0) lies in my understanding that it provides a path to a public service and democracy that is most relevant to, engaged with, responsive to, representative of and accountable to its citizens.

I’ll finish by saying that after three years in her office, my respect for Kate has only grown. She is a person who has engaged fully in her role with integrity, responsibility, grace and a firm grip on her own principles. She is a politician that makes me believe politics isn’t just a dirty word and I wish we had more like her. Even in spite of the fact the last time I socialised with her, I ended up with a fractured scaphoid! I have learnt a keen respect for the torque of a 2 stroke, especially on a motocross track.

My shiny black carbon fibre cast. Shiny!

So, I’m diving into the deep end and I look forward to seeing how well I swim. Wish me luck

Stewart Smith: TextSecure – secure SMS for Android

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:27:32 +0000

So… having secure SMS really isn’t hard. Onec upon a time you may have been forgiven to think that your SMS messages weren’t recorded forever by telecommunications companies or various government agencies, but those times have long passed. At the very least you should be concerned about somebody getting hold of your phone and going through all your SMSs (phones no longer just store 20 messages).

TextSecure (Free and Open Source Software up on github) does both local encryption (messages are encrypted on your phone) and over the wire encryption. That’s right kids – you can send encrypted text messages to each other.

It’s a drop-in replacement for the built in Android text messages application, so it all “just works”.

Go install it now.

This is the app that Jacob Appelbaum mentioned in is Keynote at lca2012.

Chris Neugebauer: LCA2012: “Android is Not vi – User Experience for Geeks”

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:26:07 +0000

Paris Buttfield-Addison and I co-presented a talk at Linux.conf.au in Ballarat recently. The topic was on designing mobile apps that don’t suck on Android. The talk was pretty well received, the audience attentive and engaged (as evidenced by the fact that they heckled), and it was probably one of the better talks that Paris and I have co-presented.

The video of the talk is available as an ogv movie file, alternatively, the YouTube version is embedded below.

Jeremy Malcolm: sadlittlewebjournal 3.0 released

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:31:14 +0000

sadlittlewebjournal, the Perl-based software that powers this site (and a few others) celebrates is 10th anniversary this year! To celebrate, I'm finally bumping the major version up to 3.0, with a swag of new features...

Chris Samuel: A Week or so with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:26:46 +0000

After a couple of good years with my Nokia N900 I’ve come to the sad conclusion that there’s no future for that platform due to the combined actions of Nokia and Intel – Nokia for dumping Linux and going with Windows Mobile for their smart phones after getting a new CEO (ex-Microsoft) and then Intel through dumping Meego and setting up a partnership with Samsung for yet another mobile Linux platform called Tizen (which at least went for the code first, hype second path, unlike Meego). Intel are now on their third mobile Linux project as there was their Moblin project which was merged with Nokia’s Maemo to form Meego (announced less than 2 years ago) so they have form here as a serial abandoner.

Looking at what is left in the mobile space it was really a no-brainer as neither Windows Mobile nor Apple’s iOS appealed at all, so it had to be an Android phone. The timing was pretty good as Samsung and Google had just started shipping their jointly designed Galaxy Nexus with Android 4 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich or ICS). It has the advantage of apparently being a phone recommended for the AOSP (Android Open Source Program) should I feel the need once my warranty expires – though I can’t find a reference to that now! I ordered an unlocked Galaxy Nexus with 2 year warranty from Mobicity as I didn’t fancy the rubbish that carriers tend to put onto their phones, nor get handcuffed into a contract I didn’t want. As an added bonus Mobicity let you pick from 3 optional accessories for free – I picked the screen protector (the other were either a charger or a bluetooth headset from memory).

As an amusing aside I did try and see if Dick Smith Electronics would price match with Kogan for the Galaxy Nexus as Kogan was far cheaper and DSE was only selling them online, but with a manufacturers warranty (unlike Mobicity or Kogan). Unfortunately DSE declined to do so on the grounds that Kogan didn’t have a physical retail outlet which was a bit rich given that neither does DSE for these phones. But then I found out they are now owned by Woolworths and so I didn’t fancy supporting the largest owners of poker machines in Australia.

Despite the best efforts of UPS (who said it would take 6 days to cross Melbourne having taken 24 hours from Hong Kong – it actually arrived the following morning) I received it intact and on time.

I’ve now been playing with it, er, using it in anger for over a week now and so far I’m very happy. I’d have to say the best description of the overall experience is “smooth”. Android 4 seems light years ahead of Android 2.3.3 on my wifes Huaewei Sonic, though part of that will be the fact that it’s just a much more capable phone with a larger screen and much more powerful processor.

Good bits:

Auto-language select – it started up in Chinese characters but before I could really wonder how I’d fix that it detected it had an Australian SIM in it and autoconfigured the locale to match.
No extra cruft – I’ve not spotted any “extras” from Samsung on the phone – the Market is the standard Android Market, etc.
Good size screen – the phone feels much smaller in the pocket than my old N900 due to its narrowness despite it having a much wider screen.
Android Market – heaps of apps, though the usual criticism of it not being easy to search for open source applications applies here.
Camera – it’s “only” 5 megapixels, but it’s still pretty good (though I’ve not yet figured out how to turn the flash off).
NFC – OK, a little bit of a toy at the moment, but there are a couple of apps that will read it and confirm that the reason my Myki and Uni ID card interfere is that they’re the same type of technology and so interfere with each other. As do my credit card and my bank card (same tech again).
Compass – my N900 had GPS and accelerometers (as does the Galaxy Nexus of course) but the compass allows neat things like Google Sky where you can just point your phone at the sky and have it show you a labelled view of planets stars and constellations.
IPv6 works on Wifi – I know people say IPv6 has worked on Wifi since Android 2.2, but it certainly doesn’t on my wifes Android 2.3 phone. But the Galaxy Nexus seems quite happy on my home network with native dual stack IPv6 courtesy of Internode.

Of course nothing is ever perfect, so here’s my feelings on the bad bits:

No real keyboard – I really miss the N900′s physical keyboard, it made typing easy. The on-screen keyboard that Android has is good, and quite usable for SMS, Twitter, etc, but for things like the Connectbot SSH client you can’t beat a real keyboard
No NTP synchronisation possible – you can get root on the phone (and void your warranty) but this *really* shouldn’t be necessary!
NITZ sucks – whilst it gets the time right the timezone is out by an hour. Probably a carrier issue but I don’t think phones should be relying on it. Had to set it by hand to fix it up.
Short notification sounds – a minor nit but the default notification sounds that are used for things like SMS, etc, are really short and quite easy to miss.
Not entirely open source – whilst the N900 wasn’t either it does seem to have been more open than Android, and it didn’t try and avoid GPL code at all costs like Android does.
No update to Android 4.0.2 available (yet) – so far it appears that Samsung haven’t pushed an Android 4.0.2 update to the region my phone was intended for – though other Galaxy Nexus owners around the world have reported getting updates at other times (including someone at Mobicity where I bought it). I suspect this is just an organisational delay and nothing more serious, but it is annoying. If it wasn’t for the warranty issue I’d consider reflashing the phone with the stock Google firmware for the Galaxy Nexus and pick the updates up directly from them in future.

To finish it off here are three images taken with the camera in the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (as I said I was happy with it), the first one was used on the weather slot as a background by the ABC News people last week!

This item originally posted here:

A Week or so with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Robert Thomson: An Extensible Puppet ENC with class & parameter overrides (& more)

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:24:33 +0000

Puppet (http://www.puppetlabs.com/)'s a great tool for system automation - out of the box it comes with most of the functionality that you'll ever need, and a DSL that's easy enough to let junior sysadmins and developers maintain their own recipes. But, depending on the kind of workhorse you want puppet to be, it's possible to hit a wall. For my company, we had too many developers, many system administrators, multiple releases in production simultaneously, and a change control to rule them all (but managed nothing). We also had the odd typo in node definitions causing incidents.

One possible answer to this is to employ an External Node Classifier, which in simple terms means an external script that Puppet calls to get the node definition, or at least the classes and parameters (and the environment, but don't rely on that due to an outstanding bug). An ENC cannot call definitions or puppet functions directly however - it can just pass in classes, class parameters, and global parameters. It's therefore up to you to make your ENC more intelligent.

I think Dan Bode of Puppet Labs gave me the idea of using YAML at first, over a year ago, and I whipped up a basic version in a couple of hours.

Over my long weekend, I decided to write a new ENC library from scratch that would provide the basics that one might want in an ENC, but allows it to be extended with plugins. You instantiate it for a node with some seed data, pass in a loader object, and then include one or more input/override files. It will take care of class, parameter, and substitution-variable overrides, and will spit out a nice Puppet 2.6+ ENC-compatible hash.

The test_puppetenc.rb file is the best source of documentation.

The Code: https://github.com/rmt/puppetenc-ruby

Paul Wayper: Private Stupidity

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:26:07 +0000

Kate and I heard a talk on the radio the other day in which a German-sounding American professor, or pundit, or something, tried to establish that actually we needed a society where everything is owned. Obviously it's hard for me to know his full thesis, because we started listening in the middle of the talk and switched off in disgust less than a minute later. But of the bit we heard all of it was, basically, complete rubbish.

His idea seemed to be that public property was a real problem - that it made things difficult because then you had to have laws and police and you had people sponging off the public good and abusing public property. Then you had to pay all these taxes to keep everything going and it was all very draining and stopped people just doing whatever they wanted with their stuff. Yes, a nice straw man argument, but then the alternative completely baffled me. According to him, in addition to owning your own property you'd also have to be a kind of shareholder in the road in front of your street, and the footpath, and the fences between your neighbours and yourself.

What baffles me here is that he clearly didn't see this going much further. Presumably he stays in his own street, grows all his own food, has an amazing naturally-occurring spring of fresh water in his back yard, and doesn't use electricity or the internet. Because as soon as you start looking at where all those things come from, you realise that they're all some kind of shared property. Once you drive outside your street, you need to be a shareholder in the company that owns that street, and so forth. I can only assume the pundit doesn't have any friends, because they moment they come and visit him they're going to have to pay a fee to his street-ownership-company to get there and park. He may well never use a public hospital, gone to a public school, gone to a public park, flown in public airspace, used the public radio spectrum, or have to claim unemployment benefits, but only because he's most probably a well-off white male.

I'll hopefully save my readers the tedium of reading through the first course in a standard lecture on Government and Democracy. It's just incredibly irritatingly bizarre to hear someone spout this kind of nonsense which almost naturally disproves itself. He probably even thinks the world will be a better place if they followed his philosophy. I'd like to invite him, publicly, to stop using all our public resources and only use the ones he actually privately owns. Then, when the oxygen starts running out in a couple of hours, he may like to reconsider. Meanwhile, get off my public broadcasting network and pay for your own publicity yourself.

Erik de Castro Lopo: Benchmarking and QuickChecking readInt.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:52:00 +0000

I'm currently working on converting my http-proxy library from using the Data.Enumerator package to Data.Conduit (explanation of why in my last blog post).

During this conversion, I have been studying the sources of the Warp web server because my http-proxy was originally derived from the Enumerator version of Warp. While digging through the Warp code I found the following code (and comment) which is used to parse the number provided in the Content-Length field of a HTTP header:

  -- Note: This function produces garbage on invalid input. But serving an
  -- invalid content-length is a bad idea, mkay?
  readInt :: S.ByteString -> Integer
  readInt = S.foldl' (\x w -> x * 10 + fromIntegral w - 48) 0

The comment clearly states that that this function can produce garbage, specifically if the string contains anything other than ASCII digits. The comment is also correct that an invalid Content-Length is a bad idea. However, on seeing the above code, and remembering something I had seen recently in the standard library, I naively sent the Yesod project a patch replacing the above code with a version that uses the readDec function from the Numeric module:

  import Data.ByteString (ByteString)
  import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as B
  import qualified Numeric as N

  readInt :: ByteString -> Integer
  readInt s =
      case N.readDec (B.unpack s) of
          [] -> 0
          (x, _):_ -> x

About 3-4 hours after I submitted the patch I got an email from Michael Snoyman saying that parsing the Content-Length field is a hot spot for the performance of Warp and that I should benchmark it against the code I'm replacing to make sure there is no unacceptable performance penalty.

That's when I decided it was time to check out Bryan O'Sullivan's Criterion bench-marking library. A quick read of the docs and bit of messing around and I was able to prove to myself that using readDec was indeed much slower than the code I wanted to replace.

The initial disappointment of finding that a more correct implementation was significantly slower than the less correct version quickly turned to joy as I experimented with a couple of other implementations and eventually settled on this:

  import Data.ByteString (ByteString)
  import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as B
  import qualified Data.Char as C

  readIntTC :: Integral a => ByteString -> a
  readIntTC bs = fromIntegral
          $ B.foldl' (\i c -> i * 10 + C.digitToInt c) 0
          $ B.takeWhile C.isDigit bs

By using the Integral type class, this function converts the given ByteString to any integer type (ie any type belonging to the Integral type class). When used, this function will be specialized by the Haskell compiler at the call site to to produce code to read string values into Ints, Int64s or anything else that is a member of the Integral type class.

For a final sanity check I decided to use QuickCheck to make sure that the various versions of the generic function were correct for values of the type they returned. To do that I wrote a very simple QuickCheck property as follows:

  prop_read_show_idempotent :: Integral a => (ByteString -> a) -> a -> Bool
  prop_read_show_idempotent freader x =
      let posx = abs x
      in posx == freader (B.pack $ show posx)

This QuickCheck property takes the function under test freader and QuickCheck will then provide it values of the correct type. Since the function under test is designed to read Content-Length values which are always positive, we only test using the absolute value of the value randomly generated by QuickCheck.

The complete test program can be found on Github in this Gist and can be compiled and run as:

  ghc -Wall -O3 --make readInt.hs -o readInt && ./readInt

When run, the output of the program looks like this:

  Quickcheck tests.
  +++ OK, passed 100 tests.
  +++ OK, passed 100 tests.
  +++ OK, passed 100 tests.
  Criterion tests.
  warming up
  estimating clock resolution...
  mean is 3.109095 us (320001 iterations)
  found 27331 outliers among 319999 samples (8.5%)
    4477 (1.4%) low severe
    22854 (7.1%) high severe
  estimating cost of a clock call...
  mean is 719.4627 ns (22 iterations)

  benchmarking readIntOrig
  mean: 4.653041 us, lb 4.645949 us, ub 4.663823 us, ci 0.950
  std dev: 43.94805 ns, lb 31.52653 ns, ub 73.82125 ns, ci 0.950

  benchmarking readDec
  mean: 13.12692 us, lb 13.10881 us, ub 13.14411 us, ci 0.950
  std dev: 90.63362 ns, lb 77.52619 ns, ub 112.4304 ns, ci 0.950

  benchmarking readRaw
  mean: 591.8697 ns, lb 590.9466 ns, ub 594.1634 ns, ci 0.950
  std dev: 6.995869 ns, lb 3.557109 ns, ub 14.54708 ns, ci 0.950

  benchmarking readInt
  mean: 388.3835 ns, lb 387.9500 ns, ub 388.8342 ns, ci 0.950
  std dev: 2.261711 ns, lb 2.003214 ns, ub 2.585137 ns, ci 0.950

  benchmarking readInt64
  mean: 389.4380 ns, lb 388.9864 ns, ub 389.9312 ns, ci 0.950
  std dev: 2.399116 ns, lb 2.090363 ns, ub 2.865227 ns, ci 0.950

  benchmarking readInteger
  mean: 389.3450 ns, lb 388.8463 ns, ub 389.8626 ns, ci 0.950
  std dev: 2.599062 ns, lb 2.302428 ns, ub 2.963600 ns, ci 0.950

At the top of the output is proof that all three specializations of the generic function readIntTC satisfy the QuickCheck property. From the Criterion output its pretty obvious that the Numeric.readDec version is about 3 times slower that the original function. More importantly, all three version of this generic function are an order of magnitude faster than the original.

That's a win! I will be submitting my new function for inclusion in Warp.

Update : 14:13

At around the same time I submitted my latest version for readInt Vincent Hanquez posted a comment on the Github issue suggesting I look at the GHC MagicHash extension and pointed me to an example.

Sure enough, using the MagicHash technique resulted in something significantly faster again.

Update #2 : 2012-01-29 19:46

In version 0.3.0 and later of the bytestring-lexing package there is a function readDecimal that is even faster than the MagiHash version.

Tim Riley: Render Single-Line Markdown Text with Redcarpet

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

At Icelab, we love Markdown. We use it wherever we can for text formatting. In a web app, the obvious place for it is in large text areas, where we can allow complete freedom of formatting. Headers, paragraphs, lists, it’s all good.

What about the formatting of text in single-line text fields? If our form entry is a single line, that’s usually how its text will be displayed in our interface. In this case, we probably want to avoid all the block-level elements that Markdown will let the user create.

This is easy to do using Redcarpet, a fantastic Markdown renderer for Ruby. It is fast and, importantly, it is modular: it allows us to define our own custom renderers. We can use this to create a renderer that ignores all the block-level Markdown elements. Put this somewhere in your Rails app (e.g., lib/redcarpet_renderers.rb):

module Redcarpet
  module Render
    class HTMLWithoutBlockElements < HTML
      include SmartyPants

      def initialize(opts = {})
        opts[:tables] = false
        super(opts)
      end

      # Regular markdown, just ignore all the block-level elements

      def block_code(code, language)
        code
      end

      def block_quote(quote)
        quote
      end

      def block_html(raw_html)
        raw_html
      end

      def header(text, header_level)
        "#{text} "
      end

      def hrule
        " "
      end

      def list(contents, list_type)
        " #{contents}"
      end

      def list_item(text, list_type)
        "* #{text}"
      end

      def paragraph(text)
        text
      end

      # Span-level calls

      def linebreak
        " "
      end

      # Postprocessing: strip the newlines

      def postprocess(document)
        document.gsub("\n", ' ').strip
      end
    end
  end
end

Now we can safely render the content from our single-line text fields using markdown. The user can still make things _emphasised_ or **bold** or even [linked](http://icelab.com.au/) and we don’t have to worry about unwanted block elements messing up our page layouts.

To use this renderer, just throw something like the following into your app/helpers/application_helper.rb file:

module ApplicationHelper
  def markdown(text)
    renderer = Redcarpet::Render::HTML.new({
      :filter_html => true,
      :hard_wrap => true
    })
    markdown = Redcarpet::Markdown.new(renderer, {
      :autolink => true,
      :no_intra_emphasis => true
    })

    markdown.render(text).html_safe
  end

  def markdown_line(text)
    renderer = Redcarpet::Render::HTMLWithoutBlockElements.new({
      :filter_html => true,
      :hard_wrap => true
    })
    markdown = Redcarpet::Markdown.new(renderer, {
      :autolink => true,
      :no_intra_emphasis => true
    })

    markdown.render(text).html_safe
  end
end

And it’s now a helper ready for use in our page templates. For example:

<div class="item">
  <h3 class="name"><%= markdown_line(item.name) %></h3>
  <div class="description">
    <%= markdown(item.description) %>
  </div>
</div>

The more Markdown we can use, the happier we are!

Michael Davies: Flickr photos for LCA2012 now online

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:29:44 +0000

All my linux.conf.au 2012 photos have been uploaded to Flickr, within a week of the conference. (that's gotta be a record! :-)

Stewart Smith: MySQL and PostgreSQL Cloud Offerings – linux.conf.au 2012 miniconf talk by myself and Selena

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:27:37 +0000

Selena and I gave a talk on the various issues of running databases “in the cloud” at the recent linux.conf.au in Ballarat. Video is up, embedded below:

Matthew Oliver: Identically partition disks.. the easy way!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

Was just looking into a software RAID howto.. for no reason really, but kinda glad I did! When you set up software raid you want to make sure all disks are partitioned the same, right. so check this out:

3. Create partitions on /dev/sda identical to the partitions on /dev/sdb:

sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sfdisk /dev/sda

That’s a much easier way

This gem is thanks to: http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-create-a-raid1-setup-on-an-existing-centos-redhat-6.0-system

Matthew Oliver: NTLM Authentication in Squid using Winbind.

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

Some old windows servers require authentication through the old NTLM protocol, luckily with the help from squid, samba and winbind we can do this under Linux.

Some URLs a much of this information was gathered from are:

http://wiki.squid-cache.org/ConfigExamples/Authenticate/NtlmCentOS5
http://wiki.squid-cache.org/ConfigExamples/Authenticate/Ntlm

HOW TO

In order to authenticate through winbind we will be using that and samba to connect to a windows domain, so you will need to have a domain and the details for it or all this will be for naught. I’ll use some fake credentials for this post.

Required Packages

Let’s install all the required packages:

yum install squid krb5-workstation samba-common ntp samba-winbind authconfig

NTP (Network Time Protocol)

Kerberos and windbind can be a little thingy about date and time, so its a good idea to use NTP for your network, I’ll assume your domain controller (DC) will be also your NTP server in which case lets set it up.

Comment out any lines that begin with server and create only one that points to your Active Directory PDC.

# vim /etc/ntp.conf server pdc.test.lan

Now add it to the default runlevels and start it.

chkconfig ntpd on /etc/init.d/ntpd start

Samba, Winbind and Kerberos

We will the use the authconfig package/command we installed earlier to configure Samba, Winbind and perform the join in one step, this makes things _SO_ much

easier!!!

NOTE: If you don’t have DNS set up then you will need to add the DC to your hosts file, and it is important to use the name the DC machine knows itself as in AD.

authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5 --passalgo=md5 --krb5kdc=pdc.test.lan \ --krb5realm=TEST.LAN --smbservers=pdc.test.lan --smbworkgroup=TESTLAN \ --enablewinbind --enablewinbindauth --smbsecurity=ads --smbrealm=TEST.LAN \ --smbidmapuid="16777216-33554431" --smbidmapgid="16777216-33554431" --winbindseparator="+" \ --winbindtemplateshell="/bin/false" --enablewinbindusedefaultdomain --disablewinbindoffline \ --winbindjoin=administrator --disablewins --disablecache --enablelocauthorize --updateall

NOTE: Replace pdc.test.lan with that of your FQDN of your DC server, TESTLAN with your domain, TEST.LAN with the full name of the domain/realm, and make sure you set ‘–winbindjoin’ with a domain admin.

If that succeeds lets test it:

# wbinfo -u # wbinfo -g

If you are able to enumerate your Active Directory Groups and Users, everything is working.

Next lets test that we can authenticate with winbind:

# wbinfo -a

E.G:

# wbinfo -a testuser Enter testuser's password: plaintext password authentication succeeded Enter testuser's password: challenge/response password authentication succeeded

Great, we have been added to the domain, so now we can setup squid for NTLM authentication.

SQUID Configuration

Squid comes with its own ntlm authentication binary (/usr/lib64/squid/ntlm_smb_lm_auth) which uses winbind, but as of Samba 3.x, samba bundle their own which is the recommended binary to use (according to the squid and samba projects). So the binary we use comes from the samba-winbind package we installed earlier:

/usr/bin/ntlm_auth

Add the following configuration elements to the squid.conf to enable NTLM authentication:

#NTLM auth_param ntlm program /usr/bin/ntlm_auth --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp auth_param ntlm children 5 auth_param ntlm keep_alive on

acl ntlm proxy_auth REQUIRED

http_access allow ntlm

NOTE: The above is allowing anyone access as long as they authenticate themselves via NTLM, you could use further acl's to restrict this more.

The ntlm_auth binary has other switches that might be of use, such as restricting users by group membership:

auth_param ntlm program /usr/bin/ntlm_auth --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp --require-membership-of=EXAMPLE+ADGROUP

Before we are complete there is one more thing we need to do, for squid to be allowed to use winbind, the squid user (which was created when the squid package was installed) needs to be a member of a wbpriv group:

gpasswd -a squid wbpriv

IMPORTANT!

NTLM authentication WILL FAIL if you have "cache_effective_group squid" set, if you do then remove it! As this overrides the effective group and squid then isn't seen as part of the 'wbpriv' group which breaks authentication!!!

/IMPORTANT!

Add squid to the runlevels and start it:

# chkconfig squid on # /etc/init.d/squid start

Trouble shooting

Make sure you open the port in iptables, if squid is listening on 3128 then:

# iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 3128 -j ACCEPT # /etc/init.d/iptables save

NOTE: The '/etc/init.d/iptables save' command saves the current running configuration so the new rule will be applied on reboot.

Happy squid-ing.

Matthew Oliver: Reverse proxy using squid + Redirection

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

Squid – Reverse Proxy

In computer networks, a reverse proxy is a type of proxy server that retrieves resources on behalf of a client from one or more servers. These resources are then returned to the client as though it originated from the reverse proxy itself. While a forward proxy is usually situated between the client application (such as a web browser) and the server(s) hosting the desired resources, a reverse proxy is usually situated closer to the server(s) and will only return a configured set of resources.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy

Configuration

Squid should already be installed, if not then install it:

yum install squid

Then we edit squid config:

vim /etc/squid/squid.conf

Add we add the following to the top of the file:

http_port 80 vhost https_port 443 cert=/etc/squid/localhost.crt key=/etc/squid/localhost.key vhost

cache_effective_user squid

cache_effective_group squid

cache_peer 1.2.3.4 parent 80 0 no-query originserver login=PASS name=site1-http

cache_peer 1.2.3.5 parent 443 0 no-query originserver login=PASS ssl sslflags=DONT_VERIFY_PEER name=site2-ssl

cache_peer_domain site1-http site1.example.lan

cache_peer_domain site2-ssl site2.anotherexample.lan

acl bad_requests urlpath_regex -i cmd.exe \/bin\/sh \/bin\/bash default\.ida?XXX insert update delete select

http_access deny bad_requests

Now I’ll walk us through the above configuration.

http_port 80 vhost https_port 443 cert=/etc/squid/localhost.crt key=/etc/squid/localhost.key vhost

This sets the http and https ports squid is listening on. Note the cert options for https, we can get squid to use https up to the proxy and unencrytped link to the last hop if we want.. which is cool. If for some reason the server doesn’t support https.

cache_effective_user squid cache_effective_group squid

Set the effective user and group for squid.. this may not be required, but doesn’t hurt.

cache_peer 1.2.3.4 parent 80 0 no-query originserver name=site1-http cache_peer 1.2.3.5 parent 443 0 no-query originserver ssl sslflags=DONT_VERIFY_PEER name=site2-ssl cache_peer_domain site1-http site1.example.lan cache_peer_domain site2-ssl site2.anotherexample.lan

This is the magic, the first two lines, tell squid which peer to reverse proxy for and what port to use. Note if you use ssl the ’sslflags=DONT_VERIFY_PEER’ is useful otherwise if your using a self signed cert you’ll have certificate errors.

IMPORTANT: If you want to allow http authentication (auth handled by the web server, such as htaccess) then you need to add ‘login=PASS’ otherwise squid will try and authenticate to squid rather than the http server.

The last two lines, reference the first two and tell squid the domains to listen to, so if someone connects to squid looking for that domain it knows where to go/cache.

acl bad_requests urlpath_regex -i cmd.exe \/bin\/sh \/bin\/bash default\.ida?XXX insert update delete select http_access deny bad_requests

NOTE: The acl line has been cut over two lines, this should be on one. There should be the ACL line and the http_access line.

These lines set up some bad requests to which we deny access to, this is to help prevent SQL injection, and other hack attempts, etc.

That’s it, after a (re)start to squid you it will be reverse proxying the domains.

Redirect to SSL

We had a requirement to automatically redirect to https if someone came in on http. Squid allows redirecting through a variety of ways, you can write a redirect script at get squid to use it, but there is a simpler way, using all squid internals and acls.

Add the following to the entries added in the last section:

acl port80 myport 80 acl site1 dstdomain site1.example.lan http_access deny port80 site1 deny_info https://site1.example.lan/ site1

acl site2 dstdomain site2.anotherexample.lan

http_access deny port80 site2

deny_info https://site2.anotherexample.lan/ site2

We create an acl for the squids port 80 and then one for the domain we want to redirect. We then use "http_access deny" to cause squid to deny access to that domain coming in on port 80 (http). This causes a deny which is caught by the deny_info which redirects it to https.

The order used of the acl's in the http_access and the deny_info is important. Squid only remembers the last acl used by a http_access command and will look for a corresponding deny_info matched to that acl. So make sure the last acl matches the acl used in the deny_info statement!

NOTE: See http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/deny_info/

Appendix

The following is the configuration all put together now.

Reverse proxy + redirection:

http_port 80 vhost https_port 443 cert=/etc/squid/localhost.crt key=/etc/squid/localhost.key vhost

cache_effective_user squid

cache_effective_group squid

acl bad_requests urlpath_regex -i cmd.exe \/bin\/sh \/bin\/bash default\.ida?XXX insert update delete select

http_access deny bad_requests

acl port80 myport 80

acl site1 dstdomain site1.example.lan

http_access deny port80 site1

deny_info https://site1.example.lan/ site1

acl site2 dstdomain site2.anotherexample.lan

http_access deny port80 site2

deny_info https://site2.anotherexample.lan/ site2

Matthew Oliver: Posfix – Making sense of delays in mail

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

The maillog

The maillog is easy enough to follow, but when you understand what all the delay and delays numbers mean then this may help really understand what is going on!

A standard email entry in postfix looks like:

Jan 10 10:00:00 testmtr postfix/smtp[20123]: 34A1B160852B: to=, relay=mx1.example.lan[1.2.3.4]:25, delay=0.49, delays=0.2/0/0.04/0.25, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent

Pretty straight forward: date, email identifier in the mailq (34A1B160852B), recipient, which server the email is being sent to (relay). It is the delay and delays I’d like to talk about.

Delay and Delays

If we take a look at the example email from above:

Jan 10 10:00:00 testmtr postfix/smtp[20123]: 34A1B160852B: to=, relay=mx1.example.lan[1.2.3.4]:25, delay=0.49, delays=0.2/0/0.04/0.25, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent

The delay parameter (delay=0.49) is fairly self explanatory, it is the total amount of time this email (34A1B160852B) has been on this server. But what is the delays parameter all about?

delays=0.2/0/0.04/0.25

NOTE: Numbers smaller than 0.01 seconds are truncated to 0, to reduce the noise level in the logfile.

You might have guessed it is a break down of the total delay, but what do each number represent?

Well from the release notes we get:

delays=a/b/c/d: a=time before queue manager, including message transmission; b=time in queue manager; c=connection setup time including DNS, HELO and TLS; d=message transmission time.

There for looking at our example:

a (0.2): The time before getting to the queue manager, so the time it took to be transmitted onto the mail server and into postfix.
b (0): The time in queue manager, so this email didn’t hit the queues, so it was emailed straight away.
c (0.04): The time it took to set up a connection with the destination mail relay.
d (0.25): The time it took to transmit the email to the destination mail relay.

However if the email is deferred, then when the email is attempted to be sent again:

Jan 10 10:00:00 testmtr postfix/smtp[20123]: 34A1B160852B: to=, relay=mx1.example.lan[1.2.3.4]:25, delay=82, delays=0.25/0/0.5/81, dsn=4.4.2, status=deferred (lost connection with mx1.example.lan[1.2.3.4] while sending end of data -- message may be sent more than once)

Jan 10 testmtr postfix/smtp[20123]: 34A1B160852B: to=, relay=mx1.example.lan[1.2.3.4]:25, delay=1092, delays=1091/0.2/0.8/0.25, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent

This time the first entry shows how long it took before the destination mail relay took to time out and close the connection:

delays=0.25/0/0.5/81 Therefore: 81 seconds.

The email was deferred then about 15 minutes later (1009 seconds [delays - <total delay from last attempt> ]) another attempt is made.

This time the delay is a lot larger, as the total time this email has spent on the server is a lot longer.

delay=1092, delays=1091/0.2/0.8/0.25

What is interesting though is the value of ‘a’ is now 1091, which means when an email is resent the ‘a’ value in the breakdown also includes the amount of time this email has currently spend on the system (before this attempt).

So there you go, those delays values are rather interesting and can really help solve where bottlenecks lie on your system. In the above case we obviously had some problem communicating to the destination mail relay, but worked the second time, so isn’t a problem with our system… or so I’d like to think.

Matthew Oliver: Use xmllint and vim to format xml documents

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

If you want vim to nicely format an XML file (and a xena file in this example, 2nd line) then add this to your ~/.vimrc file:

" Format *.xml and *.xena files by sending them to xmllint au FileType xml exe ":silent 1,$!xmllint --format --recover - 2>/dev/null" au FileType xena exe ":silent 1,$!xmllint --format --recover - 2>/dev/null"

This uses the xmllint command to format the xml file.. useful on xml docs that aren’t formatted in the file.

Matthew Oliver: Debian 6 GNU/KFreeBSD Grub problems on VirtualBox

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

Debian 6 was released the other day, with this release they not only released a Linux kernel version but they now support a FreeBSD version as well!

So I decided to install it under VirtualBox and check it out…

The install process went smoothly until I got to the end when it was installing and setting up grub2. It installed ok on the MBR but got an error in the installer while trying to set it up. I jumped into the console to take a look around.

I started off trying to run the update-grub command which fails silently (checking $? shows the return code of 1). On closer inspection I noticed the command created an incomplete grub config named /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new

So all we need to do is finish off this config file. So jump back into the installer and select continue without boot loader, this will pop up a message about what you must set the root partition as when you do set up a boot loader, so take note of it.. mine was /dev/ad0s5.

OK, with that info we can finish off our config file. Firstly lets rename the incomplete one:

cp /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Now my /boot/grub/grub.cfg ended like:

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_kfreebsd ### menuentry 'Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, with kFreeBSD 8.1-1-amd64' --class debian --class gnu-kfreebsd --class gnu --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2

set root='(hd0,1)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set dac05f8a-2746-4feb-a29d-31baea1ce751 echo 'Loading kernel of FreeBSD 8.1-1-amd64 ...' kfreebsd /kfreebsd-8.1-1-amd64.gz

So I needed to add the following to finish it off (note this I’ll repeat that last part):

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_kfreebsd ### menuentry 'Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, with kFreeBSD 8.1-1-amd64' --class debian --class gnu-kfreebsd --class gnu --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 insmod ufs2

set root='(hd0,1)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set dac05f8a-2746-4feb-a29d-31baea1ce751 echo 'Loading kernel of FreeBSD 8.1-1-amd64 ...' kfreebsd /kfreebsd-8.1-1-amd64.gz set kFreeBSD.vfs.root.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/ad0s5 set kFreeBSD.vfs.root.mountfrom.options=rw }

Note: My root filesytem was UFS, thus the ‘ufs:/dev/ad0s5′ in the mountfrom option.

That’s it, you Debian GNU/kFreeBSD should now boot successfully

Matthew Oliver: Fedora preupgrade from local mirror

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

If you have a local mirror and want to use it as the mirror for preupgrade then follow the these normal steps EXCEPT do the following BEFORE you run the preupgrade(-cli) command:

Download the releases.txt file used:

wget http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/releases.txt
Modify the releases.txt file, I changed the Fedora 14 (what I’m upgrading to) options to:

[Fedora 14 (Laughlin)] stable=True preupgrade-ok=True version=14 baseurl=http://localmirror/fedora/linux/releases/14/Fedora/$basearch/os/ installurl=http://localmirror/fedora/linux/releases/14/Fedora/$basearch/os/ #mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-14&arch=$basearch #installmirrorlist=

Note: I commented out the ‘mirrorlist’ and ‘installmirrorlist’ options and added the ‘baseurl’ and ‘installurl’ options.
Finally run the preupgrade command from this directory, as one of the locations it looks for the releases.txt file is ./ (current directory).

For more places you can put the releases.txt see here or see the same info at the end of this post.

Happy upgrading.

preupgrade - tool to help you update a fedora system from one distro to the next. Pre-resolves dependencies and sets up the system to be upgraded via anaconda License: GPLv2 or above URL: https://fedorahosted.org/preupgrade/

= NOTES =

== Cleanup ==

preupgrade modifies data in ~3 places:

/var/cache/yum/preupgrade*

/boot/upgrade

/etc/grub.conf

If you want to clean up manually, you can do:

preupgrade --clean

Or, if you really want to be sure, do it by hand:

grubby --remove-kernel=/boot/upgrade/vmlinuz

rm -rf /var/cache/yum/preupgrade* /boot/upgrade

== Remote Headless Upgrades ==

Use preupgrade-cli --vnc=VNCPASSWORD.

See preupgrade-cli --help for more info.

The upgrade will start a VNC server on port 5901, requiring the given password.

The upgrade will proceed whether you connect the VNC client or not.

--> IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT VNC INSTALLS <--

If something goes wrong or the installer needs more info, it will hang forever,

waiting for you to tell it what to do. So you should probably connect a VNC

client and monitor its progress.

== Adding Custom Distributions ==

preupgrade searches the following locations for release data, in order:

./releases.txt

./data/releases.txt

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/releases.txt

If you want to add your own distribution to preupgrade: download releases.txt,

edit it to your liking, then run preupgrade from that dir - or save it to

~/releases.txt to make it work when preupgrade is run normally.

Please note that /usr/share/preupgrade/releases.list is ignored and is only

being shipped for compatibility reasons. Use ~/releases.txt for customization.

Matthew Oliver: Bind the bash history methods

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

Bash is an awesome shell and also very configurable. Some of bash’s build-in functions are not binded to keys, some of which REALLY should be!

Bash has two very useful functions used for searching your bash history:

history-search-backward
history-search-forward

So the question is how do we bind them. I bound them to Control-<up> and Control-<down>. To do this add the following lines to your ~/.inputrc file:

"\e[1;5A": history-search-backward "\e[1;5B": history-search-forward

Note: To test it out you can use the bind command for your current shell:

bind "\e[1;5A": history-search-backward

If you want to use a different key combination then you can use the ‘read’ command to print it out, for example runnding the command read, then hitting control-<up>:

matt@wks1005847 ~ $ read ^[[1;5A

When we bind the key we replace the ‘^[‘ with a ‘\e’ as ‘^[‘ can match the <Escape> key.

Matthew Oliver: Git remote ssh syntax

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

Git makes it easy to add remote repositories to push to, best part is you can use ssh.

The ‘git remote add’ command takes in a html URL like parameter for even SSH like:

ssh://<user>@<host>/<path to git repo>/

NOT the standard ssh scp syntax:

ssh://<user>@<host>:<path to repo>/

Which allows you to base the location from the users home directory or specify a full path:

matt@notrealhost.com:<repo in home directory>/ matt@notrealhost.com:/home/matt/<repo in home directory>/

NOTE: Just put a full path after the ‘:’, or if you want something from the home directory the just assume your in the homedir with out a starting ‘/’.

OK so git doesn’t seem to like that syntax, which is a shame because those of us who use ssh are SO used to it.

The good news is you can specify from the home directory with the git URL style syntax as you do with the standard URL sytax and it looks like:

ssh://matt@notrealhost/~/<repo in home directory>/

Those Linux/Unix guys will recognise the ‘~’ as a shortcut to home in bash, which means the same thing here!

So putting it all together I can add a remote to a git repository which exists in my home directory on that server by:

git remote add notrealhost ssh://matt@notrealhost.com/~/code/myRepository/

This post was written because I keep trying to use the scp syntax when dealing with ssh + git.. So its being filled away here for my own reference.

Matthew Oliver: Git clean

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:27:12 +0000

Sometimes I find myself saying WTF, why isn’t something behaving the way I expect it do, and then get frustrated. “This is not how I’d have designed it, if I was writing it”, I guess you can call this the mantra of the OSS developer

But as normal, when you blaming something like git or Linux, it just means your doing something wrong or you don’t have a complete understanding of the situation. A lesson I have learnt time and time again, you’d think I’d learn but I don’t.

He’s what happened, we use git at work. Git has some very useful commands.

To return ALL repo tracked files to the state they were in at last checkout:

git reset --hard

To remove all untracked files:

git clean -df

Usually running these two allows out to go back to the point you were at last checkout, removing all compiled files, logs, etc. This is extremely useful for testing.

Also as most revision control systems have, git allows you to create ignore files (.gitignore), so you can tell git try and add certain files or folders to the repository.

OK, so for most people who use git, you’d be saying yeah of course. Well some of my work colleagues noticed that the ‘git clean’ wasn’t actually cleaning all untracked files. It was ignoring the compiled .class files and a heap of other stuff. This seemed weird, we could go to the root directory of the repository create a file, and ‘git clean’ would remove it, put it a few subdirectories down and nope wouldn’t be removed.

In fact running a dry run would return nothing.. so why wasn’t git removing these untracked files.

Well it turns out, and if you haven’t guessed by the fact I mentioned ignore files in the lead up, git is smarter then we gave it credit for. We have ignore files, so what does git do? …it ignores them!

It turns out the ignore files don’t just stop git from adding or wanting to add (telling us about hundreds of untracked files) certain files to the repo, but also, and the file suggests, ignores them in other git commands. This behaviour actually makes sense, if you wanted to keep some notes, wanted to keep them with your code, but not delete them during a ‘git clean’, then just add your notes directory to a .gitignore file.

Turns out ‘git clean’ has another switch, created to solve the “problem” we were having:

-x: Don’t use the ignore rules. This allows removing all untracked files, including build products. This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git reset) to create a pristine

working directory to test a clean build.
-X: Remove only files ignored by git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.

So all we needed to do is run:

git clean -dfx

NOTE: git clean, cleans from the current directory, so if you want to clean the entire repo then make sure your in the root folder of it.

This is actually an awesome feature, so yup, lesson learned again. It wasn’t a problem with git, it was a problem with my understanding! Maybe this time I’ll remember

Chris Samuel: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-22

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:26:47 +0000

Melbourne summer morning – grass blowing in the wind at Lincoln Square in Carlton, on the way to work at VLSCI. http://t.co/fgC13ZcF #
Why can't Android 2.3.3 phone see the CFA FireReady app my Galaxy Nexus can? Link from CFA site gives not found error too #
Fact for the day: Papua New Guinea has 1 in 7 of the planets languages (@newscientist, 10th Dec 2011) #
Why doesn't the IBM XL C++ compiler for BlueGene/P obey the CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH environment variable? It's meant to.. #hpc #
"Do not edit below this line" – I laugh in the face of your pitiful warning Makefile! (Just needed to change -O3 to -O2) #
anyone know if OVCC (Open Visual Communications Consortium – which @AARNet just joined) is pushing real open standards? #
Or is OVCC just another vendor club pushing encumbered "open" standards? Their website is content free.. #
Rumour is that #VLSCI will be on a segment on the @abc730 program tonight.. #
Swanston St Skyline http://t.co/WA92agMK #
#Linux kernel 3.3-rc1 now tagged in git.. #
A shame that the @CFA_Updates FIreReady app for Android crashes whenever it gets a push notification /cc @naturallybeing #
Interesting @abcnews story about crackers using owned accounts to sell shares at high price to others http://t.co/siaAYWvV #
Apparently the @abcnews weather people used this photo yesterday – shame I missed it! http://t.co/fgC13ZcF #
RT @ScienceCalendar Jan. 22, 1561-Birthday of philosopher Francis Bacon, formulated the principles of the scientific method. #
At Fed Square waiting for @mikekuiper to arrive to go see Star Voyager at ACMI #
The Light Side and the Dark Side http://t.co/UotAzd2l #
Is it just me or is Google's AGPS system being particularly random this arvo? Keep popping up in Europe! #
Played Quake at ACMI – did pretty well after not playing for many years + without keyboard config – fragged @mikekuiper #

This item originally posted here:

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-22

Chris Samuel: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-22

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:26:47 +0000

Melbourne summer morning – grass blowing in the wind at Lincoln Square in Carlton, on the way to work at VLSCI. http://t.co/fgC13ZcF #
Why can't Android 2.3.3 phone see the CFA FireReady app my Galaxy Nexus can? Link from CFA site gives not found error too #
Fact for the day: Papua New Guinea has 1 in 7 of the planets languages (@newscientist, 10th Dec 2011) #
Why doesn't the IBM XL C++ compiler for BlueGene/P obey the CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH environment variable? It's meant to.. #hpc #
"Do not edit below this line" – I laugh in the face of your pitiful warning Makefile! (Just needed to change -O3 to -O2) #
anyone know if OVCC (Open Visual Communications Consortium – which @AARNet just joined) is pushing real open standards? #
Or is OVCC just another vendor club pushing encumbered "open" standards? Their website is content free.. #
Rumour is that #VLSCI will be on a segment on the @abc730 program tonight.. #
Swanston St Skyline http://t.co/WA92agMK #
#Linux kernel 3.3-rc1 now tagged in git.. #
A shame that the @CFA_Updates FIreReady app for Android crashes whenever it gets a push notification /cc @naturallybeing #
Interesting @abcnews story about crackers using owned accounts to sell shares at high price to others http://t.co/siaAYWvV #
Apparently the @abcnews weather people used this photo yesterday – shame I missed it! http://t.co/fgC13ZcF #
RT @ScienceCalendar Jan. 22, 1561-Birthday of philosopher Francis Bacon, formulated the principles of the scientific method. #
At Fed Square waiting for @mikekuiper to arrive to go see Star Voyager at ACMI #
The Light Side and the Dark Side http://t.co/UotAzd2l #
Is it just me or is Google's AGPS system being particularly random this arvo? Keep popping up in Europe! #
Played Quake at ACMI – did pretty well after not playing for many years + without keyboard config – fragged @mikekuiper #

This item originally posted here:

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-22

Pia Waugh: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-22

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:25:07 +0000

Saw the US Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie. Apart from the gratuitous (but beautiful) intro, it was fantastic. Really well done #
Yays! RT @gavintapp: RT @maxious: Linux.conf.au 2013 Canberra (successful) bid website @ http://t.co/1xZykNtS #lca2012 #
#lca2012 was amazing. So many wonderful, inspiring, thought provoking, awesome ppl & discussions. Thx organisers, LA & every person there #
Yes. I wanna red one RT @emmajeans: @piawaugh This! http://t.co/rjCdKzUP #
Great point from @ioerror, encrypting data before you store it online helps with privacy/security issues of trusting the #cloud #lca2012 #
"I have nothing to hide" is a fallacy or a matter of privilege. — @ioerror #lca2012 #
.@ioerror talking about the panopticon and how people tend to self censor when they are under surveillance. See also Foucault. #lca2012 #
.@ioerror just took a photo of the crowd. Obviously to identify ALL THE PEOPLE. #lca2012 #gettingparanoid #
For those interested, the book ref'd last night is War on the Internet by @BernardKeane. I highly recommend. http://t.co/mltRTFp0 #lca2012 #
Last night I had a dream. A dream my cast was on the wrong hand. I woke up trying to pull it off *over* fractured scaphoid. Ouch #lca2012 #
.@nurhussein thanks, it's fantastic! Great content, ppl, discussions. It is wonderfully inspiring. #lca2012 #
I didn't mean it quite like how it came out RT @mibus: "With a name like Rusty, we had to get some type of tool…" — @piawaugh #lca2012 #
Cool RT @willozap: @piawaugh Ok, new way to start: Fun + Sarkozy: #society5 http://t.co/cVdh02nm http://t.co/t9d0dLbm http://t.co/sWaVur5L #
Interesting article by @dannolan on the scope creep (im)balance of policing http://t.co/QiUsXlmZ #
Elizabeth Garbee giving gr8 talk on astronomers trying to measure gravitational waves using millisecond pulsars. Ref'd Au SKA #lca2012 #
RT @kim_weatherall: Paper shows patents impact scientific research http://t.co/7Kb3xYGd (scientists avoid projects impacted) #lca2012 #
RT @kim_weatherall: This paper finds patents don't significantly help commercialization of inventions: http://t.co/Z5egwKiq #lca2012 #
In open data BoF @aimee_maree talked about Got Gastro, great website. http://t.co/sOtiQTK1 #lca2012 #gov2au #
Achieving open data: step 1) just publish, step 2) quality data (compliant systems, etc), step 3) collaborate #lca2012 http://t.co/x6EBDucM #
Hey @kim_weatherall, @felix42 said you have some research/stats around patents in Australia. Anything you can share? #lca2012 #
The Free Software Act, interesting idea. http://t.co/jJcvMe9U #lca2012 #
Tridge says independent invention as a defense & interoperability as fair use are two mods that would improve patents system #lca2012 #
Grin RT @patentology: FOSS headlines you will never see? What abt 'Blackburn decline Samba transfer request' http://t.co/2MIKrp2G #truestory #
Powerful statement on #SOPA from xkcd. Nice. http://t.co/YIglzRMQ #
Ta RT @trevclarke: @joshgnosis @j_hutch @gusworldau Slowest search ever, results for "open source" Herald Sun: http://t.co/UZ41UbkP #lca2012 #
Handy tip from @gusworldau: press releases are useful but personalise them, tell the journo why they'd be interested #lca2012 #
Handy tip for dealing with the press, press releases are useful but personalise them, tell the journo why they'd be interested #lca2012 #
Point from @gusworldau on falsity of broad assumption ads always dictate content in tech media. #lca2012 #
Linus' response to a media question from @gusworldau on how much it'd cost to get him to come to a geek party. #lca2012 http://t.co/Ypig34cD #
"journalists like free speech, they like free beer, but don't always want to get into the complexities in between." @gusworldau #lca2012 #
Fascinating, the top 10 tech media websites in Australia by @gusworldau #lca2012 http://t.co/9a7kxqIK #
I think we have a good community of tech journos in Australia. Doesn't always translate to coverage says @gusworldau #lca2012 #
Totally, voting now RT @chrisjrn: Hey, @gusworldau's talk on tech journalism is fantastic. #lca2012 #
Angus' talk about FOSS & media. Hilarious & informative. Gets my vote "The only way Linux would make the Sun Herald" http://t.co/Anqa5YCZ #
.@chrisjrn Hah! "With all due respect…" http://t.co/G4IEoSmp #talledaganights #lca2012 #
Whenever people start effectively with "no offense, but…" I am entertained and mildly annoyed. Thanks audience member #lca2012 #
Haha, jokes OH in @allisonrandal's talk: "man house", "apropos flush" #lca2012 #
Accidentally stumbled across this surprisingly interesting article on "Australian egalitarianism", starting w language http://t.co/anAwrkvn #
Karen's talk this morning has reminds me to turn off bluetooth/wireless on my phone now, and on my heart monitor later #lca2012 #
Cool, RT to #lca2012 @lukeweston: @piawaugh: http://t.co/kAccnvxj #
.@Alegrya Big difference between striving for great user experience (similarity) & lock-in Apple imposes vs what FOSS tries to do #lca2012 #
.@ioerror Cool, thanks. Hey @supersat @aczeskis, is there a blog post or something about your car hacks? /cc @lukeweston #
Scary RT @ej_butler: @hackuador @piawaugh Did you see this story last year? Insulin Pump hacked http://t.co/if6ngxwD #medtronic #lca2012 #
Really enjoying the talk by Karen Sandler at #lca2012 Bring home the importance of software freedom to everyday life, esp health apps. #
Hand is aching today. Too much typing & Tweeting Retiring early to write blog & prepare for Martial Arts BoF tmrw morn at #lca2012 #fb #
Thanks @chrisjrn @kathyreid & @jaimekristene #
OK, I've forgotten and can't quickly find this on the wiki, how do I vote for talks for the "Best Of" slots at #lca2012 #
Fantastic talk by Bdale Garbee about FreedomBox, a great idea to make privacy easy for people online. This gets my vote #lca2012 #
Wikipedia has gone dark to protest SOPA. Fascinating. Be great to get stats after the blackout on how many click throughs & such #lca2012 #
For those I've chatted to about #society5 I've some early thoughts in my blog last year http://t.co/CWgkLcZt #lca2012 More coming v soon #
Hey @paulzee, you can see most tech related stuff from the last federal budget here http://t.co/HhJVwtrt #lca2012 #
OMG PWNIES! #lca2012 @caseopaya: @piawaugh link for you http://t.co/lEVUHaym #
If ppl want to read great book on critical thinking & failure (even in science!) read @tribalscientist's book http://t.co/q7sOuFAX #lca2012 #
Actually, bridge experiment isn't taking into account the variable of person type choosing to take a scary bridge vs safe bridge. #lca2012 #
Playing Tetris interferes with long term memory, scientifically proven apparently. Wow. That will be useful #lca2012 #
Listening to @pjf reminds me of Gladwell's Tipping point. Recognising different traits helps your project "connectors, mavens & salespeople" #
Hey @tribalscientist, @pjf is giving kenote (now) at #lca2012 & referencing the chicken and shovel split brain experiment You might enjoy #
Interesting analogy between taxes and club membership. Comments are quite diverse too. http://t.co/CPqmRWLz #
Also for @chrisjrn, other #lca2012 peeps may enjoy the Glenn Beck Conspiracy Theory Generator http://t.co/5d1UxIHM #
Yo @chrisjrn, you can find that song in my soundcloud favs http://t.co/Z5lhNzm3 "Burn (Angel of Destruction Mix) by TweakerRay" #
POLICY CIRCLES is interesting (made for Pacific consultation). Ppl might also be interested in #publicsphere http://t.co/zvI5NUPu #lca2012 #
Hearing about Pacific Institute of Public Policy http://t.co/V5XK93fL & Policy Circles http://t.co/Ky9UinMB Interesting projects #lca2012 #
Excited about the mix of martial arts lined up for the Martial Arts BoF. Come along if you are interested http://t.co/Ar5Y3aPi #lca2012 #
Interesting point from POLICY CIRCLES talk at #lca2012 "People are torn between the desire for peace and desire for justice". #
.@purserj Ah, BOFH culture, it is a dangerous and seductive path to darkness. Resist the user-hate people! /cc @shorebuck #
I think there's something in that for all of us. RT @shorebuck as a user you can hate an editor. As tech support you can hate all of them (: #
Whenever I use OpenOffice I am reminded how annoying it can be. For the smug out there MSOffice is no better. I should stick to vim #lca2012 #
For @ajtowns, this is stunning! Manual 3D printing of fish -> painted layers between layers of resin. http://t.co/VVAXyEy5 #lca2012 #
Interesting read "APS employees have the same right to freedom of expression as other members of the community" http://t.co/aneyG1gd #gov2au #
Just linking to the Sarkozy speech for ppls interest, which I'm going over again for research. http://t.co/tA6y0EDM /cc @willozap #society5 #
Yes! RT @kattekrab: RT @rillian: #lca2012 remains an awesome group of people. #
Watching movie reader that describes video content as it plays. Demo is Elephants Dream which is hard to understand regardless #lca2012 #
Really excited about @ioerror's talk Friday. Might feed into a project I'm working on atm so hoping to chat. Watch this space #lca2012 #
Martial arts geeks at #lca2012 - Come to the Martial Arts BOF Thurs morn to train & share http://t.co/bjjOzUyY #
In multimedia miniconf. Jan makes a good point: DRM fundamentally flawed because limiting access to content you want ppl to access. #lca2012 #
Relevant to Haecksen #lca2012 RT @PennySharpemlc: From US: why women don't want to run for elected office. Worth a read http://t.co/5WjeEQmP #
Stunning RT @neerav: wow 1 of my photos (full moon last wk) http://t.co/ao3RR66Z was featured on the Flickr "Interesting" page. 1515 views #
Awesomes RT @BronyRT: RT @nekonoir: Linux + Bronies = all the squee #lca2012 #mylittlepony http://t.co/30RPmfV7 #
Tmrw I will bring my pwnies tshirt RT @Tempestrix: Why are there ponies? #lca2012 #sysadminconf #
.@weezmgk ah, thanks and to the rest of you too #
In Haecksen miniconf at #lca2012 listening to stats on female representation at lca & of speakers. We have gone from 0% to 23% speakers #
Arrived at #lca2012 in time for the conf opening. Yays! I'll be tweeting this week about the conf, mostly just thoughts/links/blogs #
Interesting. Kind or kid? RT @bengrubb: Aussie wunderkind gets $US250k for technology that could revolutionise web http://t.co/1ds0Qtsr #
Hah! RT @linuxconfau: @piawaugh Safe travels Pia! We'd say break a leg, but we don't want to risk it #
One for @johnf Moosli from the plane. http://t.co/O1ynQDPo #
One for @johnf Moosli from the plane. null #
Now just a bus ride away from #lca2012 Woot! #
On my way to #lca2012 Early start but it's a long way to Ballarat Will blog the week as usual. #

Pia Waugh: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-22

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:25:06 +0000

Saw the US Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie. Apart from the gratuitous (but beautiful) intro, it was fantastic. Really well done #
Yays! RT @gavintapp: RT @maxious: Linux.conf.au 2013 Canberra (successful) bid website @ http://t.co/1xZykNtS #lca2012 #
#lca2012 was amazing. So many wonderful, inspiring, thought provoking, awesome ppl & discussions. Thx organisers, LA & every person there #
Yes. I wanna red one RT @emmajeans: @piawaugh This! http://t.co/rjCdKzUP #
Great point from @ioerror, encrypting data before you store it online helps with privacy/security issues of trusting the #cloud #lca2012 #
"I have nothing to hide" is a fallacy or a matter of privilege. — @ioerror #lca2012 #
.@ioerror talking about the panopticon and how people tend to self censor when they are under surveillance. See also Foucault. #lca2012 #
.@ioerror just took a photo of the crowd. Obviously to identify ALL THE PEOPLE. #lca2012 #gettingparanoid #
For those interested, the book ref'd last night is War on the Internet by @BernardKeane. I highly recommend. http://t.co/mltRTFp0 #lca2012 #
Last night I had a dream. A dream my cast was on the wrong hand. I woke up trying to pull it off *over* fractured scaphoid. Ouch #lca2012 #
.@nurhussein thanks, it's fantastic! Great content, ppl, discussions. It is wonderfully inspiring. #lca2012 #
I didn't mean it quite like how it came out RT @mibus: "With a name like Rusty, we had to get some type of tool…" — @piawaugh #lca2012 #
Cool RT @willozap: @piawaugh Ok, new way to start: Fun + Sarkozy: #society5 http://t.co/cVdh02nm http://t.co/t9d0dLbm http://t.co/sWaVur5L #
Interesting article by @dannolan on the scope creep (im)balance of policing http://t.co/QiUsXlmZ #
Elizabeth Garbee giving gr8 talk on astronomers trying to measure gravitational waves using millisecond pulsars. Ref'd Au SKA #lca2012 #
RT @kim_weatherall: Paper shows patents impact scientific research http://t.co/7Kb3xYGd (scientists avoid projects impacted) #lca2012 #
RT @kim_weatherall: This paper finds patents don't significantly help commercialization of inventions: http://t.co/Z5egwKiq #lca2012 #
In open data BoF @aimee_maree talked about Got Gastro, great website. http://t.co/sOtiQTK1 #lca2012 #gov2au #
Achieving open data: step 1) just publish, step 2) quality data (compliant systems, etc), step 3) collaborate #lca2012 http://t.co/x6EBDucM #
Hey @kim_weatherall, @felix42 said you have some research/stats around patents in Australia. Anything you can share? #lca2012 #
The Free Software Act, interesting idea. http://t.co/jJcvMe9U #lca2012 #
Tridge says independent invention as a defense & interoperability as fair use are two mods that would improve patents system #lca2012 #
Grin RT @patentology: FOSS headlines you will never see? What abt 'Blackburn decline Samba transfer request' http://t.co/2MIKrp2G #truestory #
Powerful statement on #SOPA from xkcd. Nice. http://t.co/YIglzRMQ #
Ta RT @trevclarke: @joshgnosis @j_hutch @gusworldau Slowest search ever, results for "open source" Herald Sun: http://t.co/UZ41UbkP #lca2012 #
Handy tip from @gusworldau: press releases are useful but personalise them, tell the journo why they'd be interested #lca2012 #
Handy tip for dealing with the press, press releases are useful but personalise them, tell the journo why they'd be interested #lca2012 #
Point from @gusworldau on falsity of broad assumption ads always dictate content in tech media. #lca2012 #
Linus' response to a media question from @gusworldau on how much it'd cost to get him to come to a geek party. #lca2012 http://t.co/Ypig34cD #
"journalists like free speech, they like free beer, but don't always want to get into the complexities in between." @gusworldau #lca2012 #
Fascinating, the top 10 tech media websites in Australia by @gusworldau #lca2012 http://t.co/9a7kxqIK #
I think we have a good community of tech journos in Australia. Doesn't always translate to coverage says @gusworldau #lca2012 #
Totally, voting now RT @chrisjrn: Hey, @gusworldau's talk on tech journalism is fantastic. #lca2012 #
Angus' talk about FOSS & media. Hilarious & informative. Gets my vote "The only way Linux would make the Sun Herald" http://t.co/Anqa5YCZ #
.@chrisjrn Hah! "With all due respect…" http://t.co/G4IEoSmp #talledaganights #lca2012 #
Whenever people start effectively with "no offense, but…" I am entertained and mildly annoyed. Thanks audience member #lca2012 #
Haha, jokes OH in @allisonrandal's talk: "man house", "apropos flush" #lca2012 #
Accidentally stumbled across this surprisingly interesting article on "Australian egalitarianism", starting w language http://t.co/anAwrkvn #
Karen's talk this morning has reminds me to turn off bluetooth/wireless on my phone now, and on my heart monitor later #lca2012 #
Cool, RT to #lca2012 @lukeweston: @piawaugh: http://t.co/kAccnvxj #
.@Alegrya Big difference between striving for great user experience (similarity) & lock-in Apple imposes vs what FOSS tries to do #lca2012 #
.@ioerror Cool, thanks. Hey @supersat @aczeskis, is there a blog post or something about your car hacks? /cc @lukeweston #
Scary RT @ej_butler: @hackuador @piawaugh Did you see this story last year? Insulin Pump hacked http://t.co/if6ngxwD #medtronic #lca2012 #
Really enjoying the talk by Karen Sandler at #lca2012 Bring home the importance of software freedom to everyday life, esp health apps. #
Hand is aching today. Too much typing & Tweeting Retiring early to write blog & prepare for Martial Arts BoF tmrw morn at #lca2012 #fb #
Thanks @chrisjrn @kathyreid & @jaimekristene #
OK, I've forgotten and can't quickly find this on the wiki, how do I vote for talks for the "Best Of" slots at #lca2012 #
Fantastic talk by Bdale Garbee about FreedomBox, a great idea to make privacy easy for people online. This gets my vote #lca2012 #
Wikipedia has gone dark to protest SOPA. Fascinating. Be great to get stats after the blackout on how many click throughs & such #lca2012 #
For those I've chatted to about #society5 I've some early thoughts in my blog last year http://t.co/CWgkLcZt #lca2012 More coming v soon #
Hey @paulzee, you can see most tech related stuff from the last federal budget here http://t.co/HhJVwtrt #lca2012 #
OMG PWNIES! #lca2012 @caseopaya: @piawaugh link for you http://t.co/lEVUHaym #
If ppl want to read great book on critical thinking & failure (even in science!) read @tribalscientist's book http://t.co/q7sOuFAX #lca2012 #
Actually, bridge experiment isn't taking into account the variable of person type choosing to take a scary bridge vs safe bridge. #lca2012 #
Playing Tetris interferes with long term memory, scientifically proven apparently. Wow. That will be useful #lca2012 #
Listening to @pjf reminds me of Gladwell's Tipping point. Recognising different traits helps your project "connectors, mavens & salespeople" #
Hey @tribalscientist, @pjf is giving kenote (now) at #lca2012 & referencing the chicken and shovel split brain experiment You might enjoy #
Interesting analogy between taxes and club membership. Comments are quite diverse too. http://t.co/CPqmRWLz #
Also for @chrisjrn, other #lca2012 peeps may enjoy the Glenn Beck Conspiracy Theory Generator http://t.co/5d1UxIHM #
Yo @chrisjrn, you can find that song in my soundcloud favs http://t.co/Z5lhNzm3 "Burn (Angel of Destruction Mix) by TweakerRay" #
POLICY CIRCLES is interesting (made for Pacific consultation). Ppl might also be interested in #publicsphere http://t.co/zvI5NUPu #lca2012 #
Hearing about Pacific Institute of Public Policy http://t.co/V5XK93fL & Policy Circles http://t.co/Ky9UinMB Interesting projects #lca2012 #
Excited about the mix of martial arts lined up for the Martial Arts BoF. Come along if you are interested http://t.co/Ar5Y3aPi #lca2012 #
Interesting point from POLICY CIRCLES talk at #lca2012 "People are torn between the desire for peace and desire for justice". #
.@purserj Ah, BOFH culture, it is a dangerous and seductive path to darkness. Resist the user-hate people! /cc @shorebuck #
I think there's something in that for all of us. RT @shorebuck as a user you can hate an editor. As tech support you can hate all of them (: #
Whenever I use OpenOffice I am reminded how annoying it can be. For the smug out there MSOffice is no better. I should stick to vim #lca2012 #
For @ajtowns, this is stunning! Manual 3D printing of fish -> painted layers between layers of resin. http://t.co/VVAXyEy5 #lca2012 #
Interesting read "APS employees have the same right to freedom of expression as other members of the community" http://t.co/aneyG1gd #gov2au #
Just linking to the Sarkozy speech for ppls interest, which I'm going over again for research. http://t.co/tA6y0EDM /cc @willozap #society5 #
Yes! RT @kattekrab: RT @rillian: #lca2012 remains an awesome group of people. #
Watching movie reader that describes video content as it plays. Demo is Elephants Dream which is hard to understand regardless #lca2012 #
Really excited about @ioerror's talk Friday. Might feed into a project I'm working on atm so hoping to chat. Watch this space #lca2012 #
Martial arts geeks at #lca2012 - Come to the Martial Arts BOF Thurs morn to train & share http://t.co/bjjOzUyY #
In multimedia miniconf. Jan makes a good point: DRM fundamentally flawed because limiting access to content you want ppl to access. #lca2012 #
Relevant to Haecksen #lca2012 RT @PennySharpemlc: From US: why women don't want to run for elected office. Worth a read http://t.co/5WjeEQmP #
Stunning RT @neerav: wow 1 of my photos (full moon last wk) http://t.co/ao3RR66Z was featured on the Flickr "Interesting" page. 1515 views #
Awesomes RT @BronyRT: RT @nekonoir: Linux + Bronies = all the squee #lca2012 #mylittlepony http://t.co/30RPmfV7 #
Tmrw I will bring my pwnies tshirt RT @Tempestrix: Why are there ponies? #lca2012 #sysadminconf #
.@weezmgk ah, thanks and to the rest of you too #
In Haecksen miniconf at #lca2012 listening to stats on female representation at lca & of speakers. We have gone from 0% to 23% speakers #
Arrived at #lca2012 in time for the conf opening. Yays! I'll be tweeting this week about the conf, mostly just thoughts/links/blogs #
Interesting. Kind or kid? RT @bengrubb: Aussie wunderkind gets $US250k for technology that could revolutionise web http://t.co/1ds0Qtsr #
Hah! RT @linuxconfau: @piawaugh Safe travels Pia! We'd say break a leg, but we don't want to risk it #
One for @johnf Moosli from the plane. http://t.co/O1ynQDPo #
One for @johnf Moosli from the plane. null #
Now just a bus ride away from #lca2012 Woot! #
On my way to #lca2012 Early start but it's a long way to Ballarat Will blog the week as usual. #

Michael Fox: Internet Routers

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:30:29 +0000

It would appear our household really hammers the router, in fact so badly it doesn’t seem to cope after a few days.

I’ve got an old Pentium 4 here, so after running up pfsense on it for a 2nd time, it seems to handle things so much better. Plan is to use this machine for the next 6 or so months, while I continue to eye off a lovely ALIX 2-3 unit to take over from it. It’s just a matter of time before I buy one, as pfsense certainly seems to handle things nicely. I guess future purchases will be smart switch again to make use of the VLAN tagging (which will go nicely with our Ubiquiti UniFi Access Point too).

Will post picture of the ALIX 2-3 and other details when I do actually purchase one, it’s just a matter of timing on my part.

James Purser: Talks to catchup on

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 02:25:54 +0000

Okay so I missed #lca2012 this year. However because the LCA team is awesome (continuing the grand tradition of awesome LCA teams), the talks have started appearing on the linuxconfau2012 youtube channel.

Squeeee.

Now I have a number of talks to watch on the googletv thing:

Tux in Space: High altitude ballooning - Joel Stanley,Mark Jessop

Lego + Kids + Arduino - James Muraca

Making video streaming interactive, heckling user groups from the clouds!

Android Accessories Made Easy With Arduino - Philip Lindsay

Desktop Home Hacks - Allison Randal

Now these are just the one's I want to watch immediately. If you have a love of hackery, FOSS and all things shiny then I think you need to go through those talks and queue them up on your device of choice.

Also remember, the videos will be made available on the Linux Australia Mirror shortly, so you will be able to grab all of the talks and watch them whether you're online or not.

As I said before: Squeeee

Andrew Pollock: [debian] Bits from the ISC DHCP Maintainer

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:26:13 +0000

I really should write these a bit more often.

Wow, I can't believe it was over 4 years ago that I started having occasional face to face meetings with the ISC DHCP folks.

The entire ISC DHCP team (of 5) was in town for an all-hands meeting, and Larissa Shapiro, the Product Manager for DHCP (and BIND) suggested it would be a good opportunity for another catch up. Given the current (bad) state of DHCP 4.2 in unstable, I thought this was an excellent idea, and so we all had lunch on Tuesday.

I pretty much set the agenda, and it was

general state of 4.2.2 in Debian
situation with GNU/Hurd and their patch to fix an FTBFS (#616290)
the current FTBFS issues with kFreeBSD (#643569)
the embedded BIND sources in the DHCP source
removal of the RFCs from the embedded BIND source (#645760)

The general state of 4.2.2 in Debian

In a nutshell, it's a bit of a mess. We've got release critical bugs, build failures, the whole cat and kaboodle. It makes me very sad, because 4.2.2 was the first 4.2 series that I had a chance to upload, and I was very excited to do so, because it contains the hotly desired LDAP patches merged upstream. Unfortunately, it's also got the beginnings of the BIND/DHCP merger that's going to be BIND 10, and that is all a bit of a mess. It's directly responsible for the kFreeBSD FTBFS and the introduction of the RFCs, which are both keeping 4.2.2 out of testing.

I gave the ISC folks a high-level overview of how Debian development works, and the normal progression of packages from unstable to testing to stable, and the release process and whatnot, and impressed upon them the implications of the current release critical bugs. I also showed them how Ubuntu development fitted into the picture. Finally, I showed them the popcon statistics for DHCP. I think they found it useful.

FTBFS issues on kFreeBSD

This was a good segue to #643569. The issue is actually with the embedded BIND sources. I'd already forwarded this bug upstream when it first happened, but I don't know what had happened to it. They seemed to act as if this was the first they'd heard of it. I'm hoping that they can get this fixed in 4.2.3, which is due around the end of the quarter.

Embedded BIND sources

Since we were already talking about an issue caused by the embedded BIND sources, we moved on to talking about #645760 and the existence of the embedded BIND sources in general. It should be pretty straightforward for them to strip the RFCs out of the source. They've already done it in the past for the DHCP sources, so I'm also hopeful that this will get resolved in 4.2.3.

The issue of the embedded BIND sources is apparently a bit more complicated, although the day before our meeting, Michael Gilbert filed #643569 and #645760, so I hope that the ISC folks can take a look at these patches and see if it's feasible to adopt them.

Patches for GNU/Hurd

Finally we talked about #616290, which I know is near and dear to the GNU/Hurd porters' hearts.

We probably spent the most time talking about this. The DHCP developers have concerns about accepting a patch for an OS that they do absolutely no testing on, and also questioned the viability of the OS in general. They stressed that they're fairly thin in numbers relative to what they have on their plate to achieve this year, and so pushed back pretty firmly on accepting the current patch.

I relayed the frustration that the Hurd folks were having about a lack of dialogue around the patch (most of the interaction has been via an ISC support person). There was actually a bit of a split between the developers, with one of them appreciating that the Hurd was unlikely to go anywhere as a platform without a working DHCP client, so in some regards, they were condemning the platform by taking the position they were taking.

They're going to go away and take another look at the patch and try to come back with some actionable feedback on what needs to change to make it more acceptable to them, so we'll see what comes of this. I'm not particularly optimistic that anything acceptable to the GNU/Hurd folks is likely to happen any time soon, but maybe if the patch gets cleaned up a bit more, I'll just bite the bullet and start applying it to the Debian package.

BIND 10

One of the guys is more involved in BIND 10 than DHCP, and asked if I could help out with the packaging of a build dependency for BIND 10. It seemed like #578387 was languishing so I offered to pick it up. I've not packaged a library before, mainly because the library packaging guide has scared me off it (I feel I lack the deep C fu that seems necessary), but I figured that this would be a good learning opportunity, so I'm going to dive in.

Michael Still: linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:29:50 +0000

I am incredibly pleased to announce that linux.conf.au 2013 will be hosted by Canberra, Australia between 28 January 2013 to 2 February 2013. As the director for 2013 I have been blessed with a simply incredible team who has done fantastic work during the bid process, and I am confident that we will pull off a fantastic event. 2013 is Canberra's centenary year, so I think its appropriate to have a conference with a bit of a party atmosphere. We're working hard already on making 2013 a conference to remember.

For those who were unable to see the announcement at the conference, you might find the following interesting:

Our media release post reveal: http://lca2013.linux.org.au/media-release-entries/linux.conf.au-returns-to-canberra-in-2013
Call for papers: June 2012
Early bird registrations open: October 2012
Conference: 28 January 2013 to 2 February 2013

linux.conf.au is one of the foremost open source conferences in the world, and is considered the most prestigious in the southern hemisphere. Many of the team that brought you linux.conf.au 2005 are coming back to help with the 2013 effort, and we're cognizant of the extremely high standard left by previous conferences, especially the astounding job that Josh's 2012 team did.

The web site for the conference http://lca2013.linux.org.au is already live, and we'll be keeping it up to date as details are locked in.

Tags for this post: conference lca2013 announcement canonical canberra

Related posts: Announcement video; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Two more weeks to go; Taking over a launch pad project; In Canberra; Mont 24 hour race; Most novel traffic jam cause goes to... Canberra!; Slow git review uploads?; So, what on earth was I doing up at 4:30 am anyways?; Announcing early results of my survey of SMTP servers; What are we doing with the pets?; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Wow, qemu-img is fast; Electric shadows has a RSS feed!; Travel details so far; Frank Arrigo discovers Steve Walsh's free wireless; On a bunker kick; Calling Tate Needham, or, Hiring in Canberra; Historical revisionism; LCA weather; Openstack compute node cleanup

Comment

Jeremy Visser: LCA2012: Over for another year

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 08:39:53 +0000

I’m way too exhausted to write a full debriefing of linux.conf.au 2012, but I would like to share a few random thoughts, sorted equally randomly:

Pretty much all the talks I attended were great in their own way. David Rowe’s Codec 2 talk was one of my favourites, and Chris Neugebauer’s Open Programming miniconf was also educational. (Also, Joel Stanley mentioned me in his iviewiir talk!)
All the keynotes were great in their own way. In particular, Paul Fenwick proved that he can deliver a great talk on anything — his talk was topically psychological. All of the keynote speakers hung around for most of the conference, which was awesome! (Even got to meet Jacob Appelbaum, who is actually a surprisingly normal, cool, and friendly guy.)
The conference, overall, ran really smoothly. Most attendees I spoke to explicitly said they noticed no issues whatsoever all week. That, to me, says job well done. Of course, nothing is perfect, and when things did happen — particularly issues that were well handled and mitigated by the organisers behind the scenes — I was reminded of software engineering, in that you should judge quality based on how failures are handled, not just a measurement of success.
Really happy to hear that Canberra is hosting linux.conf.au 2013. I’ll probably not be volunteering in 2013 — doing it in 2011 and 2012 was quite enough. But never say never.
Wish me well for the long drive home!

Simon Lyall: LCA2012 – Friday after lunch

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:29:57 +0000

Codec 2 – David Rowe

Open speech Codec. Low bitrate 2400 b/s down to 1400 b/s
Applcations for digital radio
Fills <5000 b/s gap
http://rowetel.com/codec2.html
Not a DSP talk
Can send 45 calls inside 64 kb/s chanel
Not useful for VOIP due to IP/UDP overhead of 8kb/s on 1400b/s data
Main use radio spectrum. Less data = less power required since your power gets concentrate on less bits
doesn’t matter too much if odd packet dropped
proprietary codecs slowing digital voice over radio
Proprietary codes: hardware or licensed software form, difficult to distribute, can’t modify
Example g729 license $40k. Doesn’t believe closed source codecs benefit society
Authors of propriety/patented codecs borrowed heavily from public domain. perhaps 5% is original. Good news is only 5% needs to be replaced
Speech coding: eg 16bit samples at 8kHz, comprss to 1400-2400 b/s . What can we thrown away, retain intelligible speech, retain natural speech. Use a model of speech, send model parameters, for effecient than coding waveform
Model: example is pitch, humans 50-500 Hz , can be represented with 7 bits, updated every 20ms 7/0.02 = 350b/s to represent pitch
Codec 2 uses Sinusoidal speech coding. Multiple Sine waves added togeather
Bit allocation: 56bits every 40ms. Of these: Amplitude 32 , Frame energy 10 , voicing 4, pitch 10
Developing Codecs: complex DSP algorithms, run codecs in non-realtime, dump values from codecs every “frame” ( 80 samples, 10 ms of speech) . Gnu Octave
Banned exports list includes ” Speech codecs below 2400 b/s ” . Have been advised by DECO that Codec 2 has “assessed as not controlled” but waiting for certificate

UEFI and Linux – Matthew Garrett

Replacement for PC BIOS
BSD licensed core
Adds standardized support for new hardware features
Platform init
EFI image load – loaded drivers
EFI OS loader load – oot from ordered list of EFIOS loaders
Boot services terminate -> OS handover
Boot services – memory allocation, timers, image loading, GUIDs.
Runtime services – non-volatile variable store, boot data, system information, crash dumps (already in Linux 3.2)
Able to update firmware by reset and grab new firmware out of variables on bootup
GPT – GUID partition table – no practical restrictions on size and number – more metadata about partition type and service
That all sounds good …. but ….
TianoCore – Open Intel reference UEFI reference implementation, 7061 files, >100MB of code, 10% of size of Linux kernel. Bigger than Linux core kernel
Large codebase, some bugs
UEFI is poorly tested in the real world. UEFI contains a lot of code. UEFI contains a lot of bugs
Some problems with secure boot

Simon Lyall: LCA2012 – Friday Morning

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:30:23 +0000

Bloat: How and Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out) – Matt Evans and Rusty Russell

Cool projects: spark, plover, Homebrew Cray-1A
Compare PDP-11 Unix vs Modern Ubuntu 11.10
Binary sizes: cat 152 bytes vs 531k KB
grep command: 2176 bytes vs 687 KB
ls command: 4904 bytes vs 628 KB
V6 cat command just 12 lines of assembler, 2 * 512bytes buffers, a.out 16 bytes overhead
Binaries 30% because we chose speed over size. ~9% speed gain
V6 Runtime coverage: cat 99% , grep 78%, ls 85%
V7 has reduced coverage. some commands converted from assembler to C
x86 runtime with dietlibc coverage: cat 11% , grep 23% , ls 39%
x86 static cat has 700k of libc dependencies, 17% of libc, 313 objects it depends on
libc 1.7M but widely shared among hundreds of processes
dynamic ls accesses 90k of libc but 476kB paged in.
For sample system. libwebkit 8.5MB , 5MB wasted, 33MB wasted real RAM
What about a 64Bit version of a PDP-11 – a PDP-11 . Various assumptions on how binary size would increase
PDP-44 – binaries around 50% larger
32 bit ubuntu binaries are 9% smaller than 64 bit ubuntu
Forward port V6 binaries to x86 . V6 cat almost same size as dietlibc version
More work to forward port V6 ls, lots of assumptions not longer true. Code tricks no longer work. 20% larger cause of ELF and nmap. 120% penalty due to modern infrastructure (eg malloc realloc)
Backport x86 “ls” and “cat” to V6. Only backport some options
cat: remove old options and error reporting. Kept some features.
ls: remove lots of options.
Binaries 60% larger due to flexibility
440% bloat due to new features
Asmutls – reimplementation of current Linux utils in x86 assembler.
The talk is online, hard to do notes since it jumped around a lot and graphs hard to read

Open vSwitch – Simon Horman

Switch contains ports, ports has one of more interface, packets are forwarded by flow
Flows may be identified by lots of combos, address, vlan, ports, TOS
1st packet in flow gets sent to userspace controller, controller makes decision, tells datapath what to do with future packets, resends first packet back to datapath. Later packets the datapath knows what to do (from hashtable lookup) and handles itself
Configured by JSON database, persists across restarts
database controlled via Unix socket or via TCP. Change action won’t return until database update performed
cute ” –may-exist ” options when creating stuff that does nothing if what you are requested already exists
He did some demos of standard sort of stuff, truck interfaces, port mirroring, fairly simple commands to do
Does VXLAN and GRE tunnels
Oracle looking to put in Oracle Linux soon to replace current bridging code
Can do millions of packets per second. Some bottlenecks in tunneling code

Tim Riley: New Relic, Heroku and Rails Streaming Responses

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

For Ticketscout’s payment processing, we use a custom Rails action with an HTTP streaming response. It shows the user a spinner and a “please wait” message, then periodically sends empty strings to the browser until the credit card transaction is completed. This streaming response keeps the request connection alive longer than the 30 second timeout period that is the default on the Heroku Cedar stack. The technique works well and ensures we don’t ever lose track of any slow-to-process credit card payments.

During development, we found that the streaming responses on Heroku did not work if we had the New Relic add-on enabled. Instead of seeing the page content incrementally delivered while the request ran, we’d see nothing until the request completed, then all the content delivered at once.

To deliver the feature on time, we simply disabled the add-on and released. Everything worked smoothly, but it was unnerving to run the app “blind” without New Relic’s useful metrics. This became especially problematic now that we’re wanting to pay some more attention to improving the app’s performance. I finally contacted New Relic support, and it turns out that a working solution is fairly simple: disabling the real user monitoring.

Turns out that the real user monitoring is currently incompatible with streaming responses. I disabled the automatic instrumentation in my newrelic.yml config file:

browser_monitoring:
  auto_instrument: false

I also switched off the “Enable end user monitoring” setting in the “Settings > Application” page. Then, after fresh deploy to Heroku, I re-enabled the add-on and we had both the metrics collection and streaming responses working together!

Granted, we’ve lost access to some useful real user metrics (like network load, page rendering and DOM processing times), but it’s better to have some metrics than none at all!

Down the track, we can probably get the best of both world’s by manually enabling the real user monitoring instrumentation in all the pages layouts except those used for the streaming responses. Hopefully further down the track, the automatic instrumentation will be compatible with streaming responses out of the box. In the meantime, it’s good to have our charts back!

Simon Lyall: LCA2012 – Thursday last session

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:29:28 +0000

Challenges for the Linux plumbing community – Jonathan Corbet

Good news is boring, so how about some “high quality problems”
Security
Stuxnet , kernel.org , RSA hack , DigiNotar
Scary ones are there must be others we haven’t heard about
The bad guys are: motivated, capable, well funded. Not just script kiddies
Not just about money anymore, with governments hacking lives are at stake
We are on the front line. Not just security software, all code security critical
Is your code secure? Who reviews it? What sort of testing? Plans for dealing with vulnerabilities?
Is your infrastructure secure? – Who has access, who can change files? Are security updates applied? What are your plans in case of a breach?
Are your processes secure? Who can commit? What can sign releases? Can you detect tampering? What do they know about the codes provenance?
Tools
Lockdep, valgrind, fault injection, sparse, smatch
GCC python plugin, MELT, LLVM static analyzer
and need to actually use the tools that exist
Hardware
hardware complexity leads to software complexity
Complex interfaces: example V4L3 media controller interface.
Control over our hardware
Life is okay (could be better, could be worse)
What is our influence over manufacturer?
Example: Chasing tablet manufactures , no influence on design, have to port after device launched
Example: By the time “Rock Box” runs on a device device is obsolete and not in shops
How can we be more involved in conception and design of hardware in the first place?
Linux Only
Once upon a time we depended heavily on portability
The DRM tree deemphasized BSD support, This hurt BSD but… would we rather do without kernel mode settings
Might be inevitable but try not to be too arrogant
The platform problem
Code you control vs Black box
The kernel’s ARM subtree (re-implements stuff from elsewhere in kernel)
XFree86 (tried to keep everything in user space)
Opportunistic suspend (Andriod decided “too hard” to fix rest of kernel)
Async I/O (implemented multiple times, no comprehensive implementation)
Example: wireless devices had own 80211 implementation. replaced with max80211
Example: PowerTop used to find wide range a random things causing high power usage in laptops
Ongoing examples: Bufferbloat, marvell-cam drivers, User-Space TCP, Control groups, Andriod

What is in a tiny Linux installation? by Malcolm Tredinnick

Skipping bootloader portion
Kernel is big – 9.6M lines of C, 250k lines of assembler
Booting the kernel
“make allnoconfig” , smallish, 222 “y” ‘s. 842KB bzimage, build time under 15s, no file systems, no fancy hardware, ISA, no PCI
“make allyesconfig” , 5177 y options. 39MB bzimage, over 1h to build, includes drivers/staging
booting allnoconfig via qemu-kvm . Gets to “unable to mount root file system”
Kernel components – hardware arch, drivers, subsystems, others
need roto filesystem in memory, initrd / initramfs . init process just in cpio archive, can just be hello world
need initrd, initramfs , RAM disk block device, ELF binary support. 889KB bzimage (up 50kb)
Now boots, use “rdinit=/hello” option in qemu , just prints out hello world
Transition to userspace
initrd loads some modules etc, runs pivot_root , run startup scripts
Userspace
Why are you doing this? Single purpose system, usb stick (rescue, puppy linix, Damn Small Linux) , tiny memory, tiny storage usage, fast power on. Trade-off of options
We have to run something, need some binaries, shared libraries, large binaries with multiple purposes (busybox)
Busybox – one binary – acts differently depending on calling name, installed as symlinks
Busybox: fairly small, default utilities, 2MB without networking, easy to test
C libraries – glibc (probably not a good idea), eglibc (easier to build, binary compatible with glibc, can take things out), uClibc (alternative, very small, some overlap with busybox, source code compatible with glibc)
Device and Proc mngt will need: procfs, sysfs, tmpfs, udev, cgroups
Build environments: you are cross compiling (build root), binutils, C libraries & cross compiling, Test, x86 instead x86 is harder
See links in slides for some help
mdebian is something to look at

Simon Lyall: LCA2012 – Thursday after lunch

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:29:22 +0000

Women in Open Technology & Culture – Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner

Very umbrella term including fan fiction, open data, wikipedia, open access
Why – important areas – women’s participation (especially in charge) very low
Important for women to be in charge, creating, designing, building, not just as users
5 kinds of groups – project specific (debian women), feminist activism, teaching technical skill, networking, majority women projects.
Community / project specific
Linuxchix, owoot, pyladies, wikichix, etc ( linuxchix spawned several)
low participation, poor replacement rate of leaders (often after they get FT jobs), low communication between, sometimes tension between.
Feminist advocacy
geek feminism, ada initiative, mind the gap
growing and active – the new hotness, sharing best practices, paid work more common, some conferences
Teaching women technical skills
usually one day or evening courses.
Growing hugely, vary widely in topics and skills, sharing best practises
In person networking socialization
Women in code, girl geek coffees, girl geek dinner
try not to be dominated by marketing women ( use of “geek” term helps)
Growing, easy to start local chapters
Majority Women Groups
Dreamwidth, Organisation for transformative works
Often fan-fiction support, protect against takedown, let author control commercialisation
Survey
In person vs Online
Activist vs non-activist
Community vs technical
Focussed vs broad topics
Projects with broad focus within a narrow group seem not to work
Projects with very technical focus but accoess different technologies seem not to work either (lack common language)
Why Start – recruit and retain, networking, role models, safe space, feel normal
Lessons on starting
Don’t – join an existing one
If you are a man, don’t do on behalf – “Nothing about us without us”
Don’t expect women to start a group
Find 3 or more women to start a group
Don’t use girl/chix/ladies – use women
Go broad instead of narrow on topic
have clear defined goals and scope
Start small, be realistic about work
Consider one-off event rather than group
Avoid NIH , reuse best practices
be prepared to moderate any public forums you create
Failure modes
Become “the nice place” that everybody goes to
Loses focus on women
Safe Space moderation too many hours
Ran low on time, slides will be online

Hacking Everything – Matt Evans

Reuse things , not just hacking things like audrino that are supposed to be hacked
reuse, need, art & design
Gambiarra – brazilian art of an improvised fix
1940s radios and TV owners could fix their gear. today people are more passive
wants people to tinker with things.
Save resources
Save money
take apart things, learn by example
Low cost manufacturing makes hacking hard ( solid state everything )
Cheap development makes hacking easier ( reuses common technology, extra bits on devices unused )
Some products are open hardware designs
Things to look for – similar to ref design, debug code left in, unused features, factory test points/ports
Ports that are wired up but unused often serial ports
“My CD player has a serial port” , common on many devices
Acquire a “logic level”USB-serial cable
Other ports – JTAB , In-System programming
Example: Picture frame, derived from sample board for camera, serial interface, built in CLI
Old Wifi, ADSL boxes good with OpenWRT
Don’t just consume – re-consume
Teach others and tell the world
Collaborate at a local hackerspace
support companies that make things hackable

Brendan Scott: brendanscott

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:30:07 +0000

Stop Taking Our Rights And Calling Us Thieves Act

STORACUTA

There are manifold problems with the way the legalization of monopolies operates around the world. One of those problems is the continual pushing of extremist positions on legal monopolies, in order for a not quite as extreme “compromise” position to be reached, which is just pushed further out in the next round of lobbying. Instead of just opposing the SOPA, it would be more appropriate to propose alternative legislation as a counter balance to attempt to achieve a moderate position.

Provisions which could be included might be:

* express limitation of damages in monopoly infringement cases to damages actually incurred, abolition of presumed or statutory damages – per Tim O’Reilly (and many others, but Mr O’Reilly has been noteworthy recently);

* repeal of any provision which enables geographical market segmentation;

* prohibition on the use of monopolies to restrict speech;

* repeal of any provision which enables aftermarket control of goods – eg rental rights and DRM;

* an offence for a public official to call the infringement of any monopoly “theft”

* prohibition on claiming lack of sale as losses

* express application of anti-trust law to the exercise of any monopoly?

Ideas? What would you like to see included in STORACUTA?

Note:

Tim OReilly, is The Man, by the way. A few years ago I figured I wanted to learn Python. I googled around for what resources were out there and, in the course of so doing, I stumbled across “free” downloads of some of the O’Reilly Python books. I didn’t actually use the “free” versions – I bought them from O’Reilly anyway, largely because O’Reilly e-books were DRM free. Strangely, buying those first ebooks from O’Reilly was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I have since almost gone out of my way to buy stuff from them (Algorithms in a Nutshell? WtH?), this, despite being aware I could probably pick up a “free” copy somewhere.

Simon Lyall: LCA2012 – Thursday Morning

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:29:10 +0000

Desktop Home hacks – Allison Randal

Just a hobby product, must be fun, open,
Wanted computer to be available when away from desktop, but not be disruptive and uncomfortable
Affordable, approachable to hobbyist, there are more expensive alternatives
nodes – jeenode, audrino clone, tiny, easy to hid, cheap ( $20 including wireless RFM12B vs $20-30 + 30 for wifi for more conventional audrino )
RFM12B – 66 bytes
Server – pandaboard ~$200 . ARM processor with full Ubuntu install
Server – aggregates data from all notes and sends commands to all it’s nodes. Contains services for system, json data feeds from nodes, web client interface, interface for sending commands to system
Client(s) – several machines in house used from
client – jquery mobile , small applet , on desktop , chromium app mode
Inputs: Temperature , Humidity , motion sensor (lights on/off)
Input: RFID reader (disappointed at short range, <1m , one was in doorways to trace path of wallet)
Input: touch sensor ( simple controls, in pillow ) , small keyboard (bluetooth, usb)
Output: Glowing egg ( multi colour, hand sized ) , Power Tail (power extension, turns on/off)
Output: Hollowed out candle with LEDs inside , Instamorph & super Sculpey to create “solid” objects
Tools: Soldering iron, misc tools, wax carving kits
Lesson: Need better camera with macro lens and better light to document
software not currently release, not really in releasable format, thinking of making some as audrino shields
Resources: adafruit.com , sparkfun , parallax.com , digikey.com (bad interface) , optopart.com , makershed.com , freetronics.com (Australia) ,
Tools: Talk in inkscape/sozi , Also use: vala (webserver) , jquery mobile

Cheap Tabloid tricks – Angus Kidman

Journalists have secret lawyer fantasies, they have wrung the information out of the sources
Is the IT media biased?
no coverage of lca2012 in main Aus IT press
more coverage in 2nd tier
Only 3% pageviews on lifehacker use Linux
Not many IT journalists these days, One on FT on lifehacker, more to do (websites, blogs, video, podcasts)
Freelancers – can be an option. Freelance rates not good, getting worse, competition from bloggers, etc. Hard to convince editor that story is worthwhile.
IT news driven by fashion. In early 2000s belief among publications that Linux stories would drive traffic from slashdot etc
Current fashion is facebook and Apple. Stories about them in demand
Eg Lifehacker did apple angle on LCA keynote
Open source Projects lack definitive spokesperson
Media obsessed with cult of Trivia, Celebrity . eg Linus
Media not influenced by advertisers
Does Linux need media? Yes if want to reach more than the 3%
Identify the Audience. right publication
Be Fashionable. eg mention facebook or apple
Be Concise.
Be contactable. email, phone if in a hurry

Sridhar Dhanapalan: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-18

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:28:55 +0000

Spilt my mocha on the keyboard. Lucky it is an XO #olpc #
@LGnome funny you mention that. Wait for my talk at #lca2012 #olpcau in reply to LGnome #
The writing’s on the wall for pen and paper (specific mention of OLPC AU) http://t.co/ZckDOTrh #olpc #olpcau #
@danjonharris happy to chat in reply to danjonharris #
I support #wikipediablackout Show your support here http://t.co/eHryy8Zo #

Colin Charles: SCALE 10x – there’s lots of MySQL there!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:26:09 +0000

I’m just about to get on a plane to head to my inaugural SCALE event. It’s their tenth year running!

In a world filled with NoSQL related media, its kind of nice to see that on Friday January 20 2012, we have a MySQL room right next to the PostgreSQL room (schedule). It is awesome to see that the track will have participation from Oracle, Monty Program Ab, and SkySQL Ab.

On Saturday for the main tracks, I’ve got a talk about the growing MySQL diaspora (just got larger this year in case you haven’t paid attention to the packaged up Galera product!). This one is a constant work in progress and I’m hoping to complete research closer towards March ’12.

Monty Program and SkySQL are also sharing a booth in the expo hall, so come by booth #65 for some interesting schwag (t-shirts, poppers, etc.). Looking at the schedule lineup, I’m surprised I’ve never ever been to a SCALE before – looks totally awesome. See you in LAX (well, we’re so close-by the Los Angeles Airport :P)

Tim Connors: An open letter to Peter Ryan regarding police treatment of cyclists

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:27:27 +0000

Hon Peter Ryan,

I am writing because I am concerned at the number of recent incidents where a driver has collided with a cyclist, and the case hasn't been followed up by the police. Such incidents and the publicity surrounding them does nothing to encourage road users to obey the law when they realise that they will most likely get away with not doing so.

A week ago in Ballarat, a 13 year old boy was hit by a car, and the police said the boy had the right of way[1]. Despite this, the article linked states that the police will not charge the driver. This, despite her having broken Australian Road Rule 67 to 72, 84 or 86 depending on circumstances at the stated intersection, or perhaps 140 to 144 if travelling in the same direction. She was likely negligent in allowing the collision to happen in the first place, which, by my understanding, is a criminal offence, especially since there was serious injury involved. If she used the usual excuse that "she didn't see him", then that's an admission of guilt in failing to obey ARR 297 - driver having proper control of vehicle.

Also recently, there was a highly publicised case where Shane Warne had an altercation with a bicycle rider. In that case, the fact that Warne hit the cyclist from behind (ARR 126) after overtaking unsafely (ARR 144) is undisputed[2]. The fact that details were not exchanged following the collision is also undisputed (ARR 287). It is also well established that Warne was stopped unnecessarily in a bike lane (ARR 125; 153)[3]. And yet the police will not investigate[4].

Going back a number of years, I also have not had good experiences getting the police to follow up on cases. In my most recent case (11/10/2005; I do not know the case number sorry, all I know was that I was attended to by Angove & Auchterlonie from Boroondara police), the driver also failed to obey ARR 287 (as well as a slew of other offences, such as ARR 46 and 148 - changing lanes without indicating sufficiently and without due care). The police refused to prosecute the driver, and also would not hand over the driver's details or insurer details, based on some misguided privacy policy, asking me instead to fork out for a freedom of information request. Given that I was a broke student at the time, this was not a feasible thing to do and I never did receive compensation from the driver for damage to my bicycle, clothes, and large out of pocket expenses for travel to medical care for several years that the TAC didn't cover. The police also displayed a lack of knowledge of the law, initially thinking that I had broken ARR 141.

I can't imagine why the police aren't investigating these cases, because in each case, clear evidence is at hand, and not disputed. The identities of all parties are known. It should be an open and shut case. Without the police making charges, the rider in each case will have a much harder time claiming from the driver's insurance (if the boy was not admitted overnight, his TAC excess will be an enormous burden to his family). The driver in each case will not be discouraged from driving in a similar fashion next time. And other drivers also know that they will most likely get away with any offences they commit if a bicycle is involved. This is a perverse reversal of the situation that we should have, in which drivers should be encouraged to take due diligence around cyclists. It almost seems that the police always assume a cyclist is at fault unless proven otherwise in Australia, whereas most other countries with an established bicycling culture assume that the driver is at fault unless proven otherwise as they hold the burden of driving the more deadly vehicle and so should be required to take due care.

If the laws weren't adequate enough to prosecute to the driver in the above cases, has your department been contacted to update the laws, and what is being done? Keep in mind that cyclists have no protection other than by the law, and as the more vulnerable road user, the laws should focus on their safety and ensuring that transgressions are dealt with effectively.

Can you please encourage the police in each of these cases to follow them up to the full extent that the law currently allows.

Sincerely,

[1]

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/teen-cyclist-struck-by-car-20120110-1ps85.html

[2]

http://theage.drive.com.au/motor-news/warnes-tirade-triggers-bike-rego-call-20120118-1q5k0.html

[3]

http://www.cyclingtipsblog.com/2012/01/cyclist-versus-warnie-the-cyclists-story/

[4]

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/warne-blasts-cyclists-on-twittershane-warne-clashes-with-cyclist-on-way-home-from-training-session/story-fn7x8me2-1226246735306

Michael Fox: Synology DS109+

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:30:48 +0000

So far I am very impressed with the Synology DS109+ that I purchased. It’s currently running with a 2Tb WD Green drive.

Seems to do exactly what it was advertised to do too.