Jonathan Oxer
[Blog]
>> Open Source halts the ICT brain drain
Mon, Jul 25th 10:32am 2005 >> Linux
Last week while sitting at home sick and thinking idle thoughts in between coughing and sneezing I wrote up a little opinion piece on how FOSS can be leveraged to build up the local ICT industry, and Sam Varghese was kind enough to stick it in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald today. Woot!
Last week while sitting at home sick and thinking idle thoughts in between coughing and sneezing I wrote up a little opinion piece on how FOSS can be leveraged to build up the local ICT industry, and Sam Varghese was kind enough to stick it in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald today. Woot!
>> Saving podcast bandwidth
Thu, Jul 21st 4:46pm 2005 >> Linux
Podcasting is cool, but it can chew up lots of bandwidth. Not enough to break the bank if you only listen to a couple of casts each week and have a reasonable quota available from your ISP, but it can start to become a pain when you've got a bunch of people all tracking the same podcasts through the one connection. Sure, you can proxy it, but Squid just doesn't cut it when you're dealing with 20 to 50MB files. It's just not designed or tuned for that sort of thing. So with a few people at IVT now following the same podcasts I thought I'd try making it easy on everyone and save ourselves some bandwidth at the same time by pre-downloading the casts and sticking them in a read-only 'podcasts' share on an internal fileserver. Turns out it actually works very well. What I've done is installed BashPodder in a special user account on the fileserver, and set it up to track all the podcasts that people here care about. I also modified it so that instead of creating a new date-based directory each time you run it, it uses the same download directory each time, then added a wrapper script that: - runs BashPodder - looks in the download dir for filenames matching certain patterns - moves those files into directories on the fileserver for each podcast - generates an updated m3u file for each podcast directory The wrapper script is launched in the early hours of each morning so by the time staff arrive their favourite podcasts have been freshly primed and are waiting on the server. Then they can just copy the mp3s off the server to their player at local ethernet speeds. Best of all, we don't have each 50MB podcast downloaded a dozen individual times off the net.
Podcasting is cool, but it can chew up lots of bandwidth. Not enough to break the bank if you only listen to a couple of casts each week and have a reasonable quota available from your ISP, but it can start to become a pain when you've got a bunch of people all tracking the same podcasts through the one connection. Sure, you can proxy it, but Squid just doesn't cut it when you're dealing with 20 to 50MB files. It's just not designed or tuned for that sort of thing. So with a few people at IVT now following the same podcasts I thought I'd try making it easy on everyone and save ourselves some bandwidth at the same time by pre-downloading the casts and sticking them in a read-only 'podcasts' share on an internal fileserver. Turns out it actually works very well. What I've done is installed BashPodder in a special user account on the fileserver, and set it up to track all the podcasts that people here care about. I also modified it so that instead of creating a new date-based directory each time you run it, it uses the same download directory each time, then added a wrapper script that: - runs BashPodder - looks in the download dir for filenames matching certain patterns - moves those files into directories on the fileserver for each podcast - generates an updated m3u file for each podcast directory The wrapper script is launched in the early hours of each morning so by the time staff arrive their favourite podcasts have been freshly primed and are waiting on the server. Then they can just copy the mp3s off the server to their player at local ethernet speeds. Best of all, we don't have each 50MB podcast downloaded a dozen individual times off the net.
>> Amelia the schoolgirl (almost!)
Sun, Jul 10th 8:02pm 2005 >> Family
Fantastic news: we just received a letter offering Amelia a place in prep next year at a school not too far from here. This particular school is really hard to get into (waiting lists years in advance, and very few places available unless you're a sibling of a student or child of an ex-student) so it's a relief that she got in. She did really well at the interview: communicated well, did very well at the numeracy and literacy tests, and just generally seemed way too old to be only 4 and a bit years old :-0
She can't wait to go to school, she keeps talking about how she'll be allowed to go after she turns 5. What really gets to her though is that they have a place called a 'library', where they have walls full of books and she can borrow any book she likes, and then when she takes them back she can borrow even more! Heaven for her. It's so cool looking at the world through the joyful eyes of a child, seeing how amazing some things are that as adults we take for granted.
Fantastic news: we just received a letter offering Amelia a place in prep next year at a school not too far from here. This particular school is really hard to get into (waiting lists years in advance, and very few places available unless you're a sibling of a student or child of an ex-student) so it's a relief that she got in. She did really well at the interview: communicated well, did very well at the numeracy and literacy tests, and just generally seemed way too old to be only 4 and a bit years old :-0
She can't wait to go to school, she keeps talking about how she'll be allowed to go after she turns 5. What really gets to her though is that they have a place called a 'library', where they have walls full of books and she can borrow any book she likes, and then when she takes them back she can borrow even more! Heaven for her. It's so cool looking at the world through the joyful eyes of a child, seeing how amazing some things are that as adults we take for granted.
>> The sky is not falling
Tue, Jul 5th 8:28am 2005 >> Linux
In light of the interpretation that's been put on things recently I need to clarify my thoughts on a couple of things. Linux Australia *will* survive. In fact, it will flourish. It's becoming stronger and more relevant all the time, and despite the negative inferences from recent discussions it's probably one of the most successful national Linux associations in the world. My original post was in no way meant to suggest that we all give up and go home, it was intended to point out that due to the growth and success of the organisation we have to think very carefully about how we want it to operate. If it was just meandering along in second gear it wouldn't matter, but it's not - we're accelerating rapidly, and *that's* why we need to take stock of the way things are done. Thanks to everyone who has provided constructive feedback and I hope you continue to do so. This is after all a *community* organisation!
In light of the interpretation that's been put on things recently I need to clarify my thoughts on a couple of things. Linux Australia *will* survive. In fact, it will flourish. It's becoming stronger and more relevant all the time, and despite the negative inferences from recent discussions it's probably one of the most successful national Linux associations in the world. My original post was in no way meant to suggest that we all give up and go home, it was intended to point out that due to the growth and success of the organisation we have to think very carefully about how we want it to operate. If it was just meandering along in second gear it wouldn't matter, but it's not - we're accelerating rapidly, and *that's* why we need to take stock of the way things are done. Thanks to everyone who has provided constructive feedback and I hope you continue to do so. This is after all a *community* organisation!
>> Can Linux Australia survive?
Fri, Jul 1st 9:53am 2005 >> Linux
AJ has just emailed notes from the face to face Linux Australia committee meeting held two weeks ago in Adelaide, and last week Stewart posted some thoughts about the sustainability of the organisation. I think it's an unfortunate confirmation of the problem that Stewart's post didn't get much (any?) response. Right now Linux Australia is at a difficult size - you could almost think of it as being at the "teenager" stage of development. It has grown well beyond a small organisation that exists solely to facilitate a conference, but it's not yet big enough or well resourced enough to support a paid executive to handle day to day chores. It's involved in far more things than almost anyone outside the committee would be aware of, but doesn't have staff to delegate chores to. So it's doing lots of things, but the responsibility for making those things happen falls on the (voluntary) committee. That's dangerous. As Stewart said in his post, Michael Davies made the astute comment that LA currently survives by burning people out and replacing them with fresh blood. The committee is refreshed annually with an influx of new suckers to jump on the treadmill, but as activity in the organisation increases the burnout rate will no doubt increase proportionally. So what do we do about it? Is it time to restructure the organisation? And why are we here anyway? At the meeting we discussed a number of extreme options as ways of exploring the bounds of the reasonable. For example, maybe Linux Australia should downsize its operations and just be an organisation that exists to provide a legal structure for LCA. In that case it would become not much more than a shell which gets passed on from year to year, with a process in place for determining the next host group but not much more. Personally I think that option totally sucks and would be a fundamental failing of the organisation, and I think I can safely speak for the rest of the committee in saying they feel the same way. Or the other extreme is to hire an executive, perhaps in the form of a CEO or a secretariat to undertake all the jobs it's hard to find volunteers for. That would easily chew up an extra $100k / year, which would require making the organisation work hard just to make enough money to stay alive. We'd have to chase direct corporate sponsorship, push LCA to make more money, diversify income streams, the whole box and dice. Personally I think that's all a bit much right now too. But as I said, these are examinations of extreme positions. They're very useful things to think about even just as mental exercises to frame our own concepts of the bounds of reasonableness. So where from here? Assuming we want to follow a middle-ground course, what should that be? At the end of the discussion the committee basically decided to leave it up to me to set a course since there was no clear consensus among the group. Oh well, I suppose this is where the burden of responsibility comes in! Time to be Presidential. Or something. Over the last two weeks I've been thinking about it a lot and I'm formulating some ideas but I'll leave that for another post. In the meantime, if you've got things to say about LA and the way it's run, *now* is the time to start making yourself heard.
AJ has just emailed notes from the face to face Linux Australia committee meeting held two weeks ago in Adelaide, and last week Stewart posted some thoughts about the sustainability of the organisation. I think it's an unfortunate confirmation of the problem that Stewart's post didn't get much (any?) response. Right now Linux Australia is at a difficult size - you could almost think of it as being at the "teenager" stage of development. It has grown well beyond a small organisation that exists solely to facilitate a conference, but it's not yet big enough or well resourced enough to support a paid executive to handle day to day chores. It's involved in far more things than almost anyone outside the committee would be aware of, but doesn't have staff to delegate chores to. So it's doing lots of things, but the responsibility for making those things happen falls on the (voluntary) committee. That's dangerous. As Stewart said in his post, Michael Davies made the astute comment that LA currently survives by burning people out and replacing them with fresh blood. The committee is refreshed annually with an influx of new suckers to jump on the treadmill, but as activity in the organisation increases the burnout rate will no doubt increase proportionally. So what do we do about it? Is it time to restructure the organisation? And why are we here anyway? At the meeting we discussed a number of extreme options as ways of exploring the bounds of the reasonable. For example, maybe Linux Australia should downsize its operations and just be an organisation that exists to provide a legal structure for LCA. In that case it would become not much more than a shell which gets passed on from year to year, with a process in place for determining the next host group but not much more. Personally I think that option totally sucks and would be a fundamental failing of the organisation, and I think I can safely speak for the rest of the committee in saying they feel the same way. Or the other extreme is to hire an executive, perhaps in the form of a CEO or a secretariat to undertake all the jobs it's hard to find volunteers for. That would easily chew up an extra $100k / year, which would require making the organisation work hard just to make enough money to stay alive. We'd have to chase direct corporate sponsorship, push LCA to make more money, diversify income streams, the whole box and dice. Personally I think that's all a bit much right now too. But as I said, these are examinations of extreme positions. They're very useful things to think about even just as mental exercises to frame our own concepts of the bounds of reasonableness. So where from here? Assuming we want to follow a middle-ground course, what should that be? At the end of the discussion the committee basically decided to leave it up to me to set a course since there was no clear consensus among the group. Oh well, I suppose this is where the burden of responsibility comes in! Time to be Presidential. Or something. Over the last two weeks I've been thinking about it a lot and I'm formulating some ideas but I'll leave that for another post. In the meantime, if you've got things to say about LA and the way it's run, *now* is the time to start making yourself heard.
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