Jonathan Oxer
[Blog]
>> Linux Australia President's update
Fri, Apr 29th 9:48am 2005 >> Linux
[Pasted from the email I sent to the linux-aus list]
Hello World,
When the new Committee had our first face-to-face meeting in Sydney in February we resolved to make some procedural changes that would make the operation of the organisation more transparent. I hoped that with those changes it wouldn't be necessary to do regular "From The President" updates since everyone would know what was going on already, but talking to a bunch of people at LCA has shown that many of the things LA does are still rather behind-the-scenes so I thought I'd take this opportunity to do a brief status report. I know that personally I had no idea of the true extent of LA activity until I joined the Committee, and I suspect many other members aren't aware of many of these initiatives either.
Turns out the list of things LA is involved with is quite long (grab yourself a coffee and a biscuit, you'll need it!) so I'll just touch on each item briefly. People involved with each specific item should feel free to elaborate, and if you're at all interested in any of these areas please say so.
linux.conf.au 2005
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As expected, LCA totally rocked! Steven Hanley and his team pulled off an awesome conference that fully lived up to the expectations built up by previous years. They maintained the high standard in relation to top notch speakers and threw in a couple of fantastic twists, including a 1GB memory stick given away in every session, an IBM X40 laptop given away each day, hot-air balloon flights for any speakers who felt so inclined, video recording and streaming from all sessions, and a very well run wireless network that covered the entire venue. The showbags were packed with more schwag than anyone expected and generally a great time was had by all.
Rusty did his traditional and very entertaining T-shirt auction at the conference dinner with over $2000 raised for Sids And Kids, and was himself made the inaugural winner of the annual "Rusty Wrench" award, dreamed up by Jeff Waugh to honour those who make outstanding contributions to the FOSS community. Eben Moglen received a standing ovation for his "footnote" presentation on intellectual property, Tridge demonstrated how to implement a BitKeeper client in a single line of shell without any prior knowledge of the protocol, Mark Shuttleworth made us all jealous with tales of his trip to the space station, and Rasmus worked tirelessly to deliver an entire day of PHP wisdom before easily winning a beer-chugging competition (much to jdub's amusement, who commented "ah, *now* I understand PHP!").
I'd like to publicly thank Steven and the rest of his team (lca2005.linux.org.au/people.php) for all the time and effort they put in over the last 14+ months to deliver such a great conference experience.
I could write a whole report just on LCA, but there has been plenty of coverage in the media already so I won't go on now. Feedback and comments from those who attended is welcome: please share photo gallery URLs and stories with the list, or you can direct specific feedback to feedback@lca2005.linux.org.au.
linux.conf.au 2006
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mike Beattie is the man with the mission, and he's working hard to get everything ready for LCA in Dunedin next year. He's rounded up a bunch of volunteers and booked the venue, and next month representatives of LA and several previous LCAs will meet his team in Dunedin for the annual Ghosts Of Conferences Past session where he'll learn the painful reality of the hot water he's got himself into ;-)
There's not much up yet, but keep an eye on lca2006.linux.org.au to see how things are coming along. Personally I'm itching to get there and with LCA being held later than usual this year we now have an unusually short gap until Dunedin. January 2006 is not that far away, so I hope you've got your skates on Mike!
Community Code
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Community Code is an initiative to allow those receiving Newstart unemployment benefits to work on FOSS projects and have the time they spend counted toward their Mutual Obligation benefit, while also building up experience and references that can be used when applying for jobs.
Matthew Palmer did a well-received lightning talk at LCA explaining what it's all about, with his talk receiving media coverage in The Australian and other places. A very motivated team of FOSS developers has been working to put the scheme into place for a little while but in order to fulfil the requirements of the Federal "Community Work" placements for the Newstart allowance it needed a legal identity and insurance cover. Linux Australia is providing that structure with the Community Code group forming a sub-committee under LA, allowing them to make use of our insurance cover and other benefits.
It's early days yet but this looks like a great scheme and I'm really excited to see where it goes. Check out www.communitycode.org for more info.
Grant Scheme
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The LA Grant Scheme has been around for a while now but it's been fairly inefficient so far in giving away money. The concept of the scheme is for LA to provide funding for specific projects related to furthering the interests of the local FOSS community. That sounds fine in theory, but in practice it's remarkably hard to decide who is a worthy recipient of the funds and at what level to set the requirements.
In our current budget we have $2000 / month allocated to the Grant Scheme but we've fallen way short of disbursing the budgeted amount. I feel this is a scheme which has fantastic potential but at the moment is not being utilised as well as it could be, and perhaps we need to open up discussion about what the scheme is intended to achieve and what the guidelines should be for acceptable recipients. More info can be found at www.linux.org.au/projects/grants and if you know of a cause that could benefit from LA funding please speak up.
Planet Linux Australia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
linux.conf.au 2004 head honcho and past LA Committee member Michael Davies recently put together a Planet blog aggregator which includes feeds from many Australian FOSS developers, and it's a great way to keep track of what's going on in the local developer community. If you want to know what people are up to I highly recommend you head on over to http://planet.linux.org.au and take a look.
Open Source Forums
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LA Vice-President Pia Waugh (congrats on the wedding Pia and Jeff!) has been busily rounding up speakers and delegates for a series of very successful Open Source Forums which focus on specific topics of interest to the business community.
The first forum examined the issue of software patents, and was followed up by a forum regarding Linux on the desktop. Pia is very enthusiastic (is she ever anything else?) about continuing the forums with other topics such as open-source business methods. If you'd like to see an Open Source Forum come to your city make sure you get in touch with Pia (pia@linux.org.au) and check the project status at www.linux.org.au/projects/forums/.
The Open Source Forums are a great way for LA to make contact with businesses and make them aware of the issues that face the FOSS community.
"Free" Trade Agreement
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh my, where to begin with this one? Rusty Russell has put in a huge amount of work wading through the changes wrought by the AU-US FTA, and has spent more time learning lawyer-speak than any self-respecting programmer should have to. However, this is an issue that won't just go away if we stick our heads in the sand so it's critical that we understand how it will impact our community and what, if anything, we can do about it.
As FOSS developers we should already be well attuned to the importance of personal freedom, and legal changes that threaten to reduce our freedom to develop software should be recognised as a challenge to the very basis of our community. This is an area which I personally know far less about than I should and I'm sure many other developers feel overwhelmed by it as well. LA has an information page at www.linux.org.au/projects/fta/ which provides a good introduction to the issues and includes a number of suggestions for specific things you can do to help fight for your freedom.
This is an area which really gets under my skin. The idea that I could be legally prevented from sitting down at my computer and writing whatever code comes into my head seems to me very much like an erosion of the right to free speech. If I'm not copying someone else's code or writing software to do something illegal, why should I be stopped from writing it? Why should I have to spend thousands of dollars to do a patent search to find out if I'm even allowed to write a piece of code? Rather than foster innovation as they were intended to do, patents are having the opposite effect within the software industry and are crippling our ability to be creative.
Software patents and associated IP nastiness is very bad news for the entire software industry, and I strongly encourage you to learn more about the issues and get involved in the ways suggested on the information page.
Media Training
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As FOSS moves further into the mainstream the development community is coming under more media scrutiny than ever. To help high-profile members of our community do a good job of representing us to the press LA has funded a couple of media training courses for a number of interested people including LCA organisers, some LA committee members, and various FOSS developers. The latest training day was run last Wednesday during LCA and was a great success.
We're now considering running more media training courses to allow other FOSS developers to take part, and are also considering running advocacy courses as well. If you're interested in taking part in a future media training or advocacy course please start jumping up and down now. Oh, and maybe send an email to the list as well ;-)
AGM [!]Success
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want to go into this in detail right now, but something we need to do some work on in coming months is an examination of the election process that was followed at the last AGM. The objective of moving to an online process was to allow greater community participation but due to a couple of teething problems such as lack of a reminder at the start of the voting period there were very few votes cast.
My personal feeling is that we should continue with an online election process after making some procedural changes to ensure everyone is clearly informed each step of the way, and there were some good suggestions made at LCA about ways to get the best of both approaches: the personal contact possible through having the AGM and election at LCA, combined with the accessibility of an online election process. I'll seek feedback on this in the coming months but it's not a burning issue right at this moment. Getting it sorted out before the next AGM is important, but we've got a lot of time left yet and other burning issues to concentrate on.
State Reps
~~~~~~~~~~
Each state has been assigned an LA Committee member who is responsible for maintaining contact with LUGS and representing them to the rest of the Committee. Since there was a bit of doubling-up of locations the assignments don't all follow the state of origin of each member. Details of the state-reps program are on the LA website at www.linux.org.au/australia/lug-comms.php but the names are out of date so if someone with sufficient access (ie: not me!) to make changes to the site could make the necessary changes to the list I'd appreciate it.
Donation Processing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark Tearle and Anthony Towns have been working on a project to allow LA to accept donations on behalf of Australian FOSS projects and developers. LA is already holding funds on behalf of Debian and Samba, and many FOSS projects have no legal structure within Australia or the facilities to accept donations online so Mark and Anthony have put in place a system to allow LA to accept donations on their behalf and disburse the funds as the project directs. The system is still in early stages but if you are interested in having LA accept donations on behalf of your project please check out the details at www.linux.org.au/projects/donations/
LPI
~~~
At LCA this year we had the honour of a visit from Mark Miller of Linux Professional Institute. LPI is a community-driven organisation that provides multi-level professional certification for Linux developers and sysadmins worldwide, and LA has partnered with LPI as their local representative. Last year LA paid for a number of Aussies to be certified as proctors, allowing them to oversee the testing process and making LPI exams more easily accessible to local developers and sysadmins.
As Linux moves further into the mainstream we are going to see increased demand for certified practitioners as organisations look to hire Linux experts. No matter what the sceptical among us may think of the ability of certification to demonstrate actual skill or knowledge, the reality is that certification is relied on very heavily by recruitment agencies and non-technical employers since they have no other way to separate the real experts from the wannabees. Having some form of Linux certification will become increasingly important in coming years and from what I've seen the LPI examination process is very well done, providing a real test of ability rather than just a rubber-stamp approval of memorised answers like some other certifications. The examination content has been developed in collaboration with the FOSS community and is a real test even for experienced sysadmins. A large part of the reason for Mark's visit was to recruit local developers interested in providing input into the next round of revisions of the examination material, making sure the exams really do accurately represent what the community thinks should be tested.
You can find out more about LPI at www.lpi.org, and if you're interested in taking an exam, becoming a proctor, or just finding out more about it please make yourself heard.
Task Tracker
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Linux Australia task tracker has been running for a little while now at www.linux.org.au/tasks. There are categories for a bunch of things such as Grant Proposals, LCA2006, LPI Certification, and Accounts, so it's a great way to see what things the organisation is up to. As we go on more issues will be added to the task tracker and it will start to provide a more comprehensive overview of LA operations. The system allows users to attach comments to specific tasks so please register yourself and get involved if there's anything there that grabs your
attention.
There are other topics I could talk about as well but I think I need to rest my fingers for a while! If any of the topics above has caught your attention *please* say so on the list. I'd love to see this update spark discussions about every single topic I've raised, and if there are any other areas you think LA should become involved in I'd welcome your input on that as well.
[Pasted from the email I sent to the linux-aus list]
Hello World,
When the new Committee had our first face-to-face meeting in Sydney in February we resolved to make some procedural changes that would make the operation of the organisation more transparent. I hoped that with those changes it wouldn't be necessary to do regular "From The President" updates since everyone would know what was going on already, but talking to a bunch of people at LCA has shown that many of the things LA does are still rather behind-the-scenes so I thought I'd take this opportunity to do a brief status report. I know that personally I had no idea of the true extent of LA activity until I joined the Committee, and I suspect many other members aren't aware of many of these initiatives either.
Turns out the list of things LA is involved with is quite long (grab yourself a coffee and a biscuit, you'll need it!) so I'll just touch on each item briefly. People involved with each specific item should feel free to elaborate, and if you're at all interested in any of these areas please say so.
linux.conf.au 2005
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As expected, LCA totally rocked! Steven Hanley and his team pulled off an awesome conference that fully lived up to the expectations built up by previous years. They maintained the high standard in relation to top notch speakers and threw in a couple of fantastic twists, including a 1GB memory stick given away in every session, an IBM X40 laptop given away each day, hot-air balloon flights for any speakers who felt so inclined, video recording and streaming from all sessions, and a very well run wireless network that covered the entire venue. The showbags were packed with more schwag than anyone expected and generally a great time was had by all.
Rusty did his traditional and very entertaining T-shirt auction at the conference dinner with over $2000 raised for Sids And Kids, and was himself made the inaugural winner of the annual "Rusty Wrench" award, dreamed up by Jeff Waugh to honour those who make outstanding contributions to the FOSS community. Eben Moglen received a standing ovation for his "footnote" presentation on intellectual property, Tridge demonstrated how to implement a BitKeeper client in a single line of shell without any prior knowledge of the protocol, Mark Shuttleworth made us all jealous with tales of his trip to the space station, and Rasmus worked tirelessly to deliver an entire day of PHP wisdom before easily winning a beer-chugging competition (much to jdub's amusement, who commented "ah, *now* I understand PHP!").
I'd like to publicly thank Steven and the rest of his team (lca2005.linux.org.au/people.php) for all the time and effort they put in over the last 14+ months to deliver such a great conference experience.
I could write a whole report just on LCA, but there has been plenty of coverage in the media already so I won't go on now. Feedback and comments from those who attended is welcome: please share photo gallery URLs and stories with the list, or you can direct specific feedback to feedback@lca2005.linux.org.au.
linux.conf.au 2006
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mike Beattie is the man with the mission, and he's working hard to get everything ready for LCA in Dunedin next year. He's rounded up a bunch of volunteers and booked the venue, and next month representatives of LA and several previous LCAs will meet his team in Dunedin for the annual Ghosts Of Conferences Past session where he'll learn the painful reality of the hot water he's got himself into ;-)
There's not much up yet, but keep an eye on lca2006.linux.org.au to see how things are coming along. Personally I'm itching to get there and with LCA being held later than usual this year we now have an unusually short gap until Dunedin. January 2006 is not that far away, so I hope you've got your skates on Mike!
Community Code
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Community Code is an initiative to allow those receiving Newstart unemployment benefits to work on FOSS projects and have the time they spend counted toward their Mutual Obligation benefit, while also building up experience and references that can be used when applying for jobs.
Matthew Palmer did a well-received lightning talk at LCA explaining what it's all about, with his talk receiving media coverage in The Australian and other places. A very motivated team of FOSS developers has been working to put the scheme into place for a little while but in order to fulfil the requirements of the Federal "Community Work" placements for the Newstart allowance it needed a legal identity and insurance cover. Linux Australia is providing that structure with the Community Code group forming a sub-committee under LA, allowing them to make use of our insurance cover and other benefits.
It's early days yet but this looks like a great scheme and I'm really excited to see where it goes. Check out www.communitycode.org for more info.
Grant Scheme
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The LA Grant Scheme has been around for a while now but it's been fairly inefficient so far in giving away money. The concept of the scheme is for LA to provide funding for specific projects related to furthering the interests of the local FOSS community. That sounds fine in theory, but in practice it's remarkably hard to decide who is a worthy recipient of the funds and at what level to set the requirements.
In our current budget we have $2000 / month allocated to the Grant Scheme but we've fallen way short of disbursing the budgeted amount. I feel this is a scheme which has fantastic potential but at the moment is not being utilised as well as it could be, and perhaps we need to open up discussion about what the scheme is intended to achieve and what the guidelines should be for acceptable recipients. More info can be found at www.linux.org.au/projects/grants and if you know of a cause that could benefit from LA funding please speak up.
Planet Linux Australia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
linux.conf.au 2004 head honcho and past LA Committee member Michael Davies recently put together a Planet blog aggregator which includes feeds from many Australian FOSS developers, and it's a great way to keep track of what's going on in the local developer community. If you want to know what people are up to I highly recommend you head on over to http://planet.linux.org.au and take a look.
Open Source Forums
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LA Vice-President Pia Waugh (congrats on the wedding Pia and Jeff!) has been busily rounding up speakers and delegates for a series of very successful Open Source Forums which focus on specific topics of interest to the business community.
The first forum examined the issue of software patents, and was followed up by a forum regarding Linux on the desktop. Pia is very enthusiastic (is she ever anything else?) about continuing the forums with other topics such as open-source business methods. If you'd like to see an Open Source Forum come to your city make sure you get in touch with Pia (pia@linux.org.au) and check the project status at www.linux.org.au/projects/forums/.
The Open Source Forums are a great way for LA to make contact with businesses and make them aware of the issues that face the FOSS community.
"Free" Trade Agreement
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh my, where to begin with this one? Rusty Russell has put in a huge amount of work wading through the changes wrought by the AU-US FTA, and has spent more time learning lawyer-speak than any self-respecting programmer should have to. However, this is an issue that won't just go away if we stick our heads in the sand so it's critical that we understand how it will impact our community and what, if anything, we can do about it.
As FOSS developers we should already be well attuned to the importance of personal freedom, and legal changes that threaten to reduce our freedom to develop software should be recognised as a challenge to the very basis of our community. This is an area which I personally know far less about than I should and I'm sure many other developers feel overwhelmed by it as well. LA has an information page at www.linux.org.au/projects/fta/ which provides a good introduction to the issues and includes a number of suggestions for specific things you can do to help fight for your freedom.
This is an area which really gets under my skin. The idea that I could be legally prevented from sitting down at my computer and writing whatever code comes into my head seems to me very much like an erosion of the right to free speech. If I'm not copying someone else's code or writing software to do something illegal, why should I be stopped from writing it? Why should I have to spend thousands of dollars to do a patent search to find out if I'm even allowed to write a piece of code? Rather than foster innovation as they were intended to do, patents are having the opposite effect within the software industry and are crippling our ability to be creative.
Software patents and associated IP nastiness is very bad news for the entire software industry, and I strongly encourage you to learn more about the issues and get involved in the ways suggested on the information page.
Media Training
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As FOSS moves further into the mainstream the development community is coming under more media scrutiny than ever. To help high-profile members of our community do a good job of representing us to the press LA has funded a couple of media training courses for a number of interested people including LCA organisers, some LA committee members, and various FOSS developers. The latest training day was run last Wednesday during LCA and was a great success.
We're now considering running more media training courses to allow other FOSS developers to take part, and are also considering running advocacy courses as well. If you're interested in taking part in a future media training or advocacy course please start jumping up and down now. Oh, and maybe send an email to the list as well ;-)
AGM [!]Success
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want to go into this in detail right now, but something we need to do some work on in coming months is an examination of the election process that was followed at the last AGM. The objective of moving to an online process was to allow greater community participation but due to a couple of teething problems such as lack of a reminder at the start of the voting period there were very few votes cast.
My personal feeling is that we should continue with an online election process after making some procedural changes to ensure everyone is clearly informed each step of the way, and there were some good suggestions made at LCA about ways to get the best of both approaches: the personal contact possible through having the AGM and election at LCA, combined with the accessibility of an online election process. I'll seek feedback on this in the coming months but it's not a burning issue right at this moment. Getting it sorted out before the next AGM is important, but we've got a lot of time left yet and other burning issues to concentrate on.
State Reps
~~~~~~~~~~
Each state has been assigned an LA Committee member who is responsible for maintaining contact with LUGS and representing them to the rest of the Committee. Since there was a bit of doubling-up of locations the assignments don't all follow the state of origin of each member. Details of the state-reps program are on the LA website at www.linux.org.au/australia/lug-comms.php but the names are out of date so if someone with sufficient access (ie: not me!) to make changes to the site could make the necessary changes to the list I'd appreciate it.
Donation Processing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark Tearle and Anthony Towns have been working on a project to allow LA to accept donations on behalf of Australian FOSS projects and developers. LA is already holding funds on behalf of Debian and Samba, and many FOSS projects have no legal structure within Australia or the facilities to accept donations online so Mark and Anthony have put in place a system to allow LA to accept donations on their behalf and disburse the funds as the project directs. The system is still in early stages but if you are interested in having LA accept donations on behalf of your project please check out the details at www.linux.org.au/projects/donations/
LPI
~~~
At LCA this year we had the honour of a visit from Mark Miller of Linux Professional Institute. LPI is a community-driven organisation that provides multi-level professional certification for Linux developers and sysadmins worldwide, and LA has partnered with LPI as their local representative. Last year LA paid for a number of Aussies to be certified as proctors, allowing them to oversee the testing process and making LPI exams more easily accessible to local developers and sysadmins.
As Linux moves further into the mainstream we are going to see increased demand for certified practitioners as organisations look to hire Linux experts. No matter what the sceptical among us may think of the ability of certification to demonstrate actual skill or knowledge, the reality is that certification is relied on very heavily by recruitment agencies and non-technical employers since they have no other way to separate the real experts from the wannabees. Having some form of Linux certification will become increasingly important in coming years and from what I've seen the LPI examination process is very well done, providing a real test of ability rather than just a rubber-stamp approval of memorised answers like some other certifications. The examination content has been developed in collaboration with the FOSS community and is a real test even for experienced sysadmins. A large part of the reason for Mark's visit was to recruit local developers interested in providing input into the next round of revisions of the examination material, making sure the exams really do accurately represent what the community thinks should be tested.
You can find out more about LPI at www.lpi.org, and if you're interested in taking an exam, becoming a proctor, or just finding out more about it please make yourself heard.
Task Tracker
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Linux Australia task tracker has been running for a little while now at www.linux.org.au/tasks. There are categories for a bunch of things such as Grant Proposals, LCA2006, LPI Certification, and Accounts, so it's a great way to see what things the organisation is up to. As we go on more issues will be added to the task tracker and it will start to provide a more comprehensive overview of LA operations. The system allows users to attach comments to specific tasks so please register yourself and get involved if there's anything there that grabs your
attention.
There are other topics I could talk about as well but I think I need to rest my fingers for a while! If any of the topics above has caught your attention *please* say so on the list. I'd love to see this update spark discussions about every single topic I've raised, and if there are any other areas you think LA should become involved in I'd welcome your input on that as well.
>> A phone with >2 mins talktime?
Tue, Apr 12th 3:52pm 2005 >> Tech Toys
That would be a miracle for me! My current phone is totally dodgy - fully charged it can be on standby for about 2 days, but as soon as a call is connected it thinks the battery is flat and I get about 2 minutes talk time. If I'm lucky. Then it just cuts out. So I get just about enough time to tell the other person that I'll have to call them back on a landline, and then "beeeeep", then silence. Grrrrrrr! The really annoying thing is that after turning the phone back on it thinks the battery is fine again and is happy to once again be on standby for a day or so. It's like it doesn't mind being turned on, it just really doesn't like it when I talk to people.
Hmmm, maybe the problem is that I've got an antisocial phone. That would explain it.
This morning I got so pissed at it that I ordered a new phone. Nothing flash, in fact just about the cheapest I could find, but if it lets me have an entire conversation without having to switch to a landline I'll be ecstatic. Maybe now my current phone will get scared and start working, like the Exim setup that mysteriously started working again last week when an email was sent to it threatening to replace it with Postfix. Tech toys are cranky like that sometimes.
That would be a miracle for me! My current phone is totally dodgy - fully charged it can be on standby for about 2 days, but as soon as a call is connected it thinks the battery is flat and I get about 2 minutes talk time. If I'm lucky. Then it just cuts out. So I get just about enough time to tell the other person that I'll have to call them back on a landline, and then "beeeeep", then silence. Grrrrrrr! The really annoying thing is that after turning the phone back on it thinks the battery is fine again and is happy to once again be on standby for a day or so. It's like it doesn't mind being turned on, it just really doesn't like it when I talk to people.
Hmmm, maybe the problem is that I've got an antisocial phone. That would explain it.
This morning I got so pissed at it that I ordered a new phone. Nothing flash, in fact just about the cheapest I could find, but if it lets me have an entire conversation without having to switch to a landline I'll be ecstatic. Maybe now my current phone will get scared and start working, like the Exim setup that mysteriously started working again last week when an email was sent to it threatening to replace it with Postfix. Tech toys are cranky like that sometimes.
>> Vintage Macs free to good home. Or the tip.
Sat, Apr 9th 3:27pm 2005 >> Tech Toys
Cleaning out the office this morning got me fired up and I've been busily pulling out old computers at home to throw them out. Among them are a bunch of "grey box era" macs including a Centris 650, several IIvxs, and various varieties of LC-series pizza boxes. I'm keeping all the really old stuff (Mac 128k, some 512ks, etc) but the grey-boxes are going to the tip unless someone wants to collect them. They work fine, it's just I'm not as obsessive about old Macs as I used to be.
Cleaning out the office this morning got me fired up and I've been busily pulling out old computers at home to throw them out. Among them are a bunch of "grey box era" macs including a Centris 650, several IIvxs, and various varieties of LC-series pizza boxes. I'm keeping all the really old stuff (Mac 128k, some 512ks, etc) but the grey-boxes are going to the tip unless someone wants to collect them. They work fine, it's just I'm not as obsessive about old Macs as I used to be.
>> Woohoo! Triple head LCDs!
Wed, Apr 6th 12:55pm 2005 >> Tech Toys
Ah, the joy. We had another bunch of LCDs delivered this morning so I switched out my two side monitors (19" CRTs) for a pair of 17" LCDs. Triple head LCD goodness, yay! And running x2x I can do kinda-quad-head with my laptop (which is running all these screens anyway, via an XDMCP session through another box hiding under my desk). I've got to set my sights higher now. Flame pointed me at a place that does hex-head LCD stands. Niiiice.
Ah, the joy. We had another bunch of LCDs delivered this morning so I switched out my two side monitors (19" CRTs) for a pair of 17" LCDs. Triple head LCD goodness, yay! And running x2x I can do kinda-quad-head with my laptop (which is running all these screens anyway, via an XDMCP session through another box hiding under my desk). I've got to set my sights higher now. Flame pointed me at a place that does hex-head LCD stands. Niiiice.
>> VoIP: much better with a decent connection!
Tue, Apr 5th 3:16pm 2005 >> Tech Toys
After last night's terrible results with the Grandstream phones Flame and I tried again this morning. Pings last night were averaging around 160ms which is really bad, but today it's only about 35ms and worked *much* better. Voice quality was pretty good. Turning off silence suppression helped too, choppy speech is bad enough but when you lose the first syllable of every word it's even worse. But bandwidth + low latency + no silence suppression = great voice quality, so I'm happy.
After last night's terrible results with the Grandstream phones Flame and I tried again this morning. Pings last night were averaging around 160ms which is really bad, but today it's only about 35ms and worked *much* better. Voice quality was pretty good. Turning off silence suppression helped too, choppy speech is bad enough but when you lose the first syllable of every word it's even worse. But bandwidth + low latency + no silence suppression = great voice quality, so I'm happy.
>> VoIP choppiness
Mon, Apr 4th 5:34pm 2005 >> Tech Toys
Flame and I have just been playing around with our Grandstream VoIP phones, using Simtex temporarily as a provider. I've got an Asterisk box here too which has a 4-port FXO card in it but it's not quite ready to go yet, so Flame signed us up with Simtex so we could try the phones.
Problem is the voice quality is terrible. We're getting really bad ping times and some packet loss which totally explains it, so we'll try again in the morning and see if net conditions are any better. I'm getting about 5ms ping times to the Connect.com core which is pretty good, but pings to him up in Queensland are around 120-190ms which is pretty crap.
Flame and I have just been playing around with our Grandstream VoIP phones, using Simtex temporarily as a provider. I've got an Asterisk box here too which has a 4-port FXO card in it but it's not quite ready to go yet, so Flame signed us up with Simtex so we could try the phones.
Problem is the voice quality is terrible. We're getting really bad ping times and some packet loss which totally explains it, so we'll try again in the morning and see if net conditions are any better. I'm getting about 5ms ping times to the Connect.com core which is pretty good, but pings to him up in Queensland are around 120-190ms which is pretty crap.
>> Book price?
Sun, Apr 3rd 6:39pm 2005 >> Web Development
I'm absolutely convinced that the high sticker price of $69.95 on How To Build A Website And Stay Sane is really slowing down sales. It's been downloaded as a PDF over 2000 times which is pretty impressive (reading an entire book as a PDF would have to be a painful experience for most people!) and I've had fantastic feedback, but there haven't been many hard copy sales yet. There's one library supply company in particular, James Bennett, that just keeps ordering more copies. That's way cool, but it's hardly selling in enough quantity to let me upgrade my transportation from bipedal locomotion to an RX-8. Or even a skateboard, for that matter. What to do? Sell it cheaper? I dunno. Personally I think it needs to be selling at $39.95 retail to be hitting its market, but I don't know how practical that is. Retailers and distributors want about a 40% cut off retail so that leaves pretty much nothing for little old me between production costs and the wholesale price. Wholesalers are currently getting it at $44 inc GST, so if the retail went to $39.95 the wholesale price would go to about $23. Which would kinda suck. I think I'd get somewhere in the vicinity of 3 cents / copy then.
I'm absolutely convinced that the high sticker price of $69.95 on How To Build A Website And Stay Sane is really slowing down sales. It's been downloaded as a PDF over 2000 times which is pretty impressive (reading an entire book as a PDF would have to be a painful experience for most people!) and I've had fantastic feedback, but there haven't been many hard copy sales yet. There's one library supply company in particular, James Bennett, that just keeps ordering more copies. That's way cool, but it's hardly selling in enough quantity to let me upgrade my transportation from bipedal locomotion to an RX-8. Or even a skateboard, for that matter. What to do? Sell it cheaper? I dunno. Personally I think it needs to be selling at $39.95 retail to be hitting its market, but I don't know how practical that is. Retailers and distributors want about a 40% cut off retail so that leaves pretty much nothing for little old me between production costs and the wholesale price. Wholesalers are currently getting it at $44 inc GST, so if the retail went to $39.95 the wholesale price would go to about $23. Which would kinda suck. I think I'd get somewhere in the vicinity of 3 cents / copy then.
>> Future of web applications
Sun, Apr 3rd 6:21pm 2005 >> Web Development
A recent IVT News email that I sent out was a little essay about how the "AJAX" approach in Google Maps and Google Suggest has the potential to totally change the web development industry, making web apps look and feel just like desktop apps. I got some good comments from that and it looks like I might be presenting a session about it at an Innovation Week event in a couple of months. In the meantime though it's been picked up and carried by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers. Thanks Sam!
A recent IVT News email that I sent out was a little essay about how the "AJAX" approach in Google Maps and Google Suggest has the potential to totally change the web development industry, making web apps look and feel just like desktop apps. I got some good comments from that and it looks like I might be presenting a session about it at an Innovation Week event in a couple of months. In the meantime though it's been picked up and carried by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers. Thanks Sam!
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