Planet Maclab

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

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:04:08 +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.

Alex B: Tokyo and Trains (東京と電車)

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:26:23 +0000

I went to Japan and Korea over Christmas for a bunch of reasons. In short it was really, really awesome.

I stayed in 2 different capsule hotels. Capsules are two to a column (one top, one bottom). They come with a TV and you close them with a blind (but if people snore you can still kinda hear). It costs around $35 a night.

The first was aimed solely at Japanese businessmen and I probably couldn’t get in without asking in Japanese. This was quite good but annoying that lockers were not reserved during the day so I had to transfer my stuff to a different coin locker and back. The second was more touristy, bookable in english, had westerners but in return was louder, more expensive, and weirdly slightly smaller so I didn’t quite fit. There’s only public baths at both. Male only.

I found a banana vending machine.

Bananas.

I filled in some gaps in Tokyo from my last trip, where I walked all the way around the edges of central Tokyo. I walked to Yotsuya, in the center of that. It feels like the middle of nowhere though – as much as inner Tokyo can. Only 3 hours walking this time -_-.

Some of my friends from Tasmania were going to a comic, anime, and cosplay event in Tokyo called Comiket which attracts about half a million people. This turned out to be really awesome. I wasn’t brave or dedicated enough for the 5 hour lines for popular items, but I still found it really awesome wandering around taking pictures and searching for things.

Me + a small part of Comiket

Cosplay!

I got to try working at a Tokyo office, stayed at a Japanese home (my friends are awesome), went drinking with other foreigners in Shibuya, caught up with many friends, met new ones, missed out on meeting some I really wanted to, did much karaoke, saw Mount Fuji from the center of Tokyo, caught a single whiff of falling snow in Andong, got through some basic conversation in Korean, and had a bunch of other unforgettable experiences.

Frozen stream in Korea

Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

Kamakura, near Tokyo

Kamakura Shrine

Hovo: Email Scam

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:53:01 +0000

Email Scammers are getting cunning,
This one almost got me the other day and I consider myself to able to spot a fraudulent email from a mile away.
To prevent others falling into the same trap I thought I would write a short piece on the events that almost got me.

This attack started with a Facebook instant message.

Friend –
Hello
How are you doing??

Me –
yea, getting there.. yourself?

Friend –
Glad you are here luke
Am in some king of deep mes here

Me –
huh?

Friend –
Facebook is acting up here…Please can i have your email

Me –
–insert email address here–

Friend –
I will send you an email now and explain what am going through
OK?

Friend –
My email is blue_green00998
Ok?

Me –
ok, about to leave work, will read it soon though

This is what the email said..

Hi,
How you doing?my family and I made a trip to Philippine unannounced some days back,Unfortunately for us we got messed up in another country,stranded in Philippine,fortunately passport was back in our hotel room. It was a bitter experience and i was hurt on my right hand,but would be fine.I am sending you this message because i don’t want anyone to panic,i want you to keep it that way for now.

our return flight leaves in a few hours but we are having troubles sorting out the hotel bills, wondering if you could loan us some money to sort out the hotel bills and also take a cab to the airport about (1,550 dollars).

I have been to the police and embassy here,but they aren’t helping issues,I have limited means of getting out of here,i have canceled my credit cards already and made a police report,I won’t get a new credit card number till I get back home! So I really need your help.

You could wire whatever you can spare to my name and location via Western union:

Name: –Removed For Privacy–
Location :Location :54B Banawe Street:City:Manila:Country:Philippine
Amount:(1,000 pounds)

Get back to me with the details,would def refund your money once i get back you can count on that,below are the details needed for me to pick up the money with my passport

MTCN:
Amount Sent:

I await your prompt response.

After checking out the exchange rate and starting some background checking, I was about to ring a few people to see if the story held any water when I received another message from Facebook.

Friend –
hey mate.
wtf is going on here? looks like my page might have got hacked or something. disregard anything that was said in this. weird as.

hope all is well otherwise tho.

So what do you do when you have a scammer on the other end..
Well I though I would have a bit of fun..

So I email him back..

Me –
Hi mate,
I have transferred the money into your bank.
It should arrive instantly as we are with the same bank of course

Have a safe trip home..

Him –
Luke thanks for the mail I need you to go to the western union to get the money transfer How soon as you get the money done you can email me the western union details (MTCN)

Me –
Can you transfer the money back then?
I will create a transfer when it arrives..

Cheers

Him –
Thanks for the mail. Luke i have not getting any Money here I can get any money through bank here is only transfer they do here in Manila

I will refund your money as soon as i get back tomorrow.

I owe you a lot Luke

Ok so by now I think he has wised up a bit (one would hope) and he wont be getting my money..
If you do get something like this, report it..
Though I lost nothing besides time someone else could fall for the same trap.

Here are two links that I used to report the case to the authorities..
https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/tag/reportascam/
http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/reporting_to_ISPs.php

Take Home Message.

Do some research, call friend and relatives to see if the message holds waterSuss out the spelling and grammar. Look at the example above it’s all over the placeDONT transfer money to unknown places or Bank accounts.KEEP YOUR PASSWORDS PRIVATE! – Dont type your password into a box that looks like Facebook for example, this is a easy way for scammers to gain access to your account. Creating a fake facebook login page is easy and they gain access to your username and password. If you find you did type your password in a unknown site, PLEASE PLEASE change your password.

I have become a bit more wiser with this scam, I hope people can learn from my experience and become wiser with online security..

The account running this scam is
blue_green00998@yahoo.com
I have found out by talking to the scammer that he uses the same account but changes the name frequently to match the person his impersonating..

Chris: PyCon Australia 2012 – Call for Topics now open

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:38:38 +0000

In case you missed the news, PyCon Australia is being held on August 18th and 19th in Hobart, Tasmania. Like the first two PyCon Australia conferences, 2012 hopes to be full of presentations, tutorials and panel sessions from experts and core developers of the Python programming language, as well as the Python libraries and frameworks that you rely on for your work.

It’s time for us to start shaping the conference programme for 2012, and we need your help. We want to know what topics you want to see covered at PyCon Australia, or which presenters you think can help make our conference perfect for you.

If you’re already convinced, pop over to http://tinyurl.com/pyconau2012-cft and fill out our Call for Topics form. If not, read on!

Oh, still reading? Let see…

PyCon Australia is running a Call for Topics. This is like the reverse of a traditional Call for Proposals: instead of proposing a presentation, you can propose a topic that you’d like to see a presentation on at the conference, or possibly a presenter that you really want to see present. PyCon US have been doing this for a long time, it helps ensure that their conference attracts the best possible presenters. There’s a couple of reasons why you should help us out:

See the presenters you want to see

We’re planning on putting out our usual call for proposals in February 2012, but we need to make sure that the best possible presenters submit proposals to PyCon Australia. Our delegates, like you, want to enhance their skills in Python with every session that they attend. Our CfP can’t reach everyone, and even then not everyone who sees the CfP will think that they’re good enough to present at a conference — getting an invitation to present can be a pretty good motivator!

Learn about the tools that you want to use

One great reason to come to a Python conference is to increase your skillset in the tools and frameworks that you use in your day-to-day work. Perhaps there’s a new library that you’re considering using? Nominating it as a presentation topic for PyCon Australia will increase the chances it being covered in the conference. If you don’t know of an expert in the field, don’t worry. We can find one.

Heard enough?

Great! We can’t want to hear your suggestions. Just head over to our call for Topics form, and send in your ideas. Every idea can help make this conference perfect for you.

Josh: The Accumulation of Stuff, and the Souls of Objects

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:48:32 +0000

Exhaustion of resources has got to be the most annoying facet of having All Of The Irons In The Fire.

Things I want that are at a premium right now:

Time
Space

That’s mostly it. Health is back up, and I have good feelings about future romance.

Here’s how I propose to acquire space: spend time shedding belongings. The less I have, the less I have to move around and care for. The other half of the equation is time. I can spend the time now, it seems, because of imminent criticality: not so much imminent travelling as imminent desire to grab a hold on the reins of change yet again.

So what to do with all my old stuff?

Garage sale? Donations? Storage?

How could possibly I do that to my precious belongings?!

These things have history. Everything. Every tiny scrap of paper, every useless outmoded electrical component, every sidelined project and every broken thing that’s not too broken for me to bin it in a fit of sensibility. These aren’t just objects, possessions or belongings. They’re Objects With Souls. Especially the heavy, bulky, cumbersome, fiddly, irregular, broken, storage-challenging, fragile, or delicate items. Annoyingly, they seem to have the most character of all.

Perhaps there’s some kind of Hoarders Anonymous I could go to. But alas, I’m out of time. Publish!

Chris: PyCon Australia 2012 starts here

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:00:08 +0000

So one thing I forgot to mention on this blog is that I’ve taken over the reins of PyCon Australia for the 2012 and 2013 conferences. After spending two formative years in Sydney, under the direction of Tim Ansell, Richard Jones et al., we’re taking the conference south to Hobart, Tasmania. We’ve got a great team, consisting of myself, Joshua Hesketh and Matthew D’Orazio, and our papers committee is being led up once again by Richard Jones.

So, what can you look forward to? Well, here’s what we know so far.

We’re holding PyCon Australia around the weekend of August 18 and 19 2012. Our venue is the Wrest Point Convention centre in Sandy Bay. We’re really excited about our choice of venue — as well as offering us perfectly-sized rooms for our conference, the wide variety of spaces in the complex allow us to bring all of the traditional PyCon Australia events — CodeWars, the sprints and the conference itself — under the same roof for the first time.

Wrest Point is situated on the shoreline of the River Derwent, and this not only admits excellent views from the conference venue, but will also enable us to run some truly memorable social events, including the conference dinner, which we hope to share more details about shortly.

Our venue also lets us offer accommodation across a very wide range of budgets (starting around $124/room/night) to our delegates — this is not just a nominated conference hotel, it’s in the same building complex as the conference venue. This means that delegates can stay on-site for the entirety of the conference. We think this will prove very popular, especially amongst delegates sticking around for the conference sprints.

For students and those travelling on a budget — we plan on keeping the conference affordable: there’ll still be heavily discounted student tickets, and we’ll announce budget accommodation options when registration opens.

Finally, you might be wondering how you can help make PyCon Australia the perfect conference for you? Well, in the coming week, we’ll be opening a Call for Topics. This is an opportunity for you, as a potential PyCon Australia delegate, to nominate both topics and presenters that you’d like to see at the conference. By nominating presentations, you can help ensure that PyCon Australia can help you enhance your skills and increase your knowledge of Python.

Of course, if you have something that you could present at PyCon Australia, we’d love to hear from you as well. We’ll be opening a traditional call for presentations during February.

So, that’s it for now. I’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on our progress as we seek to put on the best Python Conference that Australia can offer. If you’ve got something to ask, feel free to drop a comment, either here, on Twitter, or on our Google+ page — we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible!

(Photos: “Wrest Point” by JJ Harrison, CC-BY-SA; “View of Hobart CBD” by Aaroncrick, CC-BY-SA)

Hovo: Woodford Folk Festival

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:42:56 +0000

My first Woodford Folk Festival, the shear size of the festival alone made it a worth while event!
There were many artists playing at any one time so choosing the type of music you wanted to listen to was sometimes a challenge.
Anyways I will have to go again and next time take more pics.
Here are a few I took of some of the stages and the closing ceremony (There are some weird creatures roaming around)
[Show as slideshow]

Bnut: Setting XCode 4.0 Environment Variables from a Script

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:08:33 +0000

I have struggled for quite a while with XCode 4, it is excellent for Cocoa development, but if you’re trying to do anything lower level I often find myself pining after XCode 3.x or wanting to use a Makefile or something instead. However there are many advantages to an IDE, like code completion and integrated debugging tools, so it’s always nice to use things how they are designed. However there are some things XCode 4 does not do nicely, this article describes one such thing and the solution I’ve come up with. I don’t think XCode 3.x did this particular thing well either, so perhaps my solution might actually be useful to someone else.

The Problem

Often I want a bit more control over how I compile and link things than XCode allows. Tools like llvm-config allow you to get the compiler settings for your local build of llvm api, which is very useful. If I run something like:

llvm-config --ldflags

Then the command will output something like:

-L/usr/local/lib -lpthread -lm

To use this with XCode what you might consider doing is setting the OTHER_LD_FLAGS environment variable (“Other Linker Flags” in the Build Settings) to something like this:

`llvm-config --ldflags`

However if you look in the build transcript (Expanding the link section in the Navigator Log, command+7), you will find that it puts double quotation marks around the space separated parts of the command and ld is forced to interpret it as a file. I have tried for hours to fix this, on many different occasions, but I could not find a satisfactory portable solution. That is until now.

The Solution

The solution in short is to create an Xcode Configuration file from a script build phase and then set that as the base configuration for all of your targets dependent on the build settings. You can do this in “5 Simple Steps”!

Step 1

This script will create the xcode configuration file in your project directory, place it in a script build phase in your project. Make sure that you do this before the “Compile Sources” phase so it is made before the settings are needed.

Automatically Generating the XCode Configuration File

Of course this script only applies to llvm, but I will put it here in case anyone wants it:

LLVM_XCCONFIG="llvm.xcconfig"
LLVM_CFLAGS=`/usr/local/bin/llvm-config --cflags`
LLVM_LDFLAGS=`/usr/local/bin/llvm-config --ldflags`" "`/usr/local/bin/llvm-config --libs cbackend jit x86 linker`
echo "// Configuration file for LLVM settings, generated as a build phase." > $LLVM_XCCONFIG
echo "LLVM_CFLAGS = $LLVM_CFLAGS" >> $LLVM_XCCONFIG
echo "LLVM_LDFLAGS = $LLVM_LDFLAGS" >> $LLVM_XCCONFIG

Step 2

Build the project and the XCode Configuration file should be created, add this file to the project. If you’re not sure how to do this you can find it in Finder and then drag it into the project’s file navigator (Or by pressing command+option+a, and selecting the file).

Add the XCode Configuration file to the project

Step 3

Now you have to set this configuration file as the base configuration of each target that uses it, to do this select the project in the file navigator. Selecting the project if the target is selected and then go to the Info tab. Within the info tab set the configuration file to the file you just added for each relevant target.

Setting the Target's base Configuration File

Step 4

Now all you need to do is use the new environment variables in your project settings, of course you could have called them OTHER_LDFLAGS or similar to avoid this step, but I thought it was cleaner to do it this way.

Using the new Environment Variables in the the Build Settings

Step 5

Build your project and hopefully everything is working as you wanted it to.

Dave: Rivendell

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 06:51:43 +0000

See the full gallery on Posterous

Ordered this early in 2011.. Finally arrived today, it's an awesome model. I think it's the biggest WETA have produced so far.

Planet Maclab

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

Alex B: Tokyo and Trains (東京と電車)

Hovo: Email Scam

Chris: PyCon Australia 2012 – Call for Topics now open

See the presenters you want to see

Learn about the tools that you want to use

Heard enough?

Josh: The Accumulation of Stuff, and the Souls of Objects

Chris: PyCon Australia 2012 starts here

Hovo: Woodford Folk Festival

Bnut: Setting XCode 4.0 Environment Variables from a Script

The Problem

The Solution

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Dave: Rivendell

Paris: Hello

Dave: 50 Words For Snow

Dave: XMas lights

Dave: Another Star Wars book - art of Star Wars Comics

Dave: Star Wars books

Dave: Hangzhou's West Lake (and no food)

Dave: Final food

Dave: Chinese TARDIS

Dave: Tintin & Qiantang river

Dave: Lots of food

Dave: City God temple

Dave: Day starts with a sunrise

Dave: University (ZUT) library

Dave: Hefang St and Drum tower

Dave: Costa coffee

Dave: China food

Dave: Taxi ride of death

Dave: Coffee with milk

Dave: China food

Dave: Teaching trip in Hangzhou, China

Chris: Linux.conf.au 2012

Chris: Google Reader obit.

Tony's WWDC Photos: 2009-06-11 WWDC Bash

Chris: RIP Dennis Ritchie

Dave: Star wars collection is now complete..

Dave: Birthday acquisition

Dave: Akira

Hovo: River Fire 2011

Hovo: River Fire 2010 (Start of Brisbane Festival)

Chris: Linux.conf.au 2012 Open Programming Miniconf — Call for proposals now open

Dave: Untitled

Hovo: My house

Alex B: It’s been a while

Awake Man: #15 Washing

Alex B: 一周 (Once around)

Dave: iCade arcade enclosure for iPad

Dave: An entire shop dedicated to M&Ms

Dave: Big foot

Dave: Harry potter ride at universal studios florida

Dave: My new job

Dave: Kennedy Space Centre