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chrisjrn's site: More from Bruce…

Sat, 12 May 2012 10:45:32 +0000

Hello! Have you missed me? It’s been a while since I’ve updated you all on what’s happening in the world of PyCon Australia, so I figure it’s probably about time we did that. And it’s good that I’m doing so, because a lot of things have happened since the last time I did so!

Talks, talks, and more talks

Our Call for Proposals closed its doors on Friday 4 May, and we’ve been absolutely blown away by the level of response that we’ve got from Python developers around Australia and the rest of the world. We received 59 proposals to speak, across three categories of presentation, which is far and away the biggest response this conference has had in its short history. So, to all of you who proposed presentations, give yourselves a pat on the back.

To put this into perspective — we have approximately 30 positions that we can fit presentations into. Our review team (who are, by the way, doing an incredibly awesome job) have the mammoth task of figuring out which talks will actually make it into the conference: they’ll need to cull approximately half of the proposals that we’ve received. It’s something that we really weren’t expecting, but I think the review team are up to the task.

With this in mind, it’s going to take us a few days more than expected to sort through the proposals, and we won’t be meeting our deadline of 18 May for sending out notifications. It won’t be too much later than that, but we still apologise for the delay. If you did submit a talk, don’t worry too much about missing out on Early Bird registration rates — we’ll be extending Early Bird pricing through to June 30 for everyone who has submitted a talk. I hope this is OK by you!

We want you to come to our conference

And the best way to make sure that you can actually come to the conference is by signing up for our Early Bird registrations! These have been open for just over two weeks now; and with three weeks left to go, just over a third of our available early bird tickets have been sold. Our early bird registrations represent a substantial discount on our normal registration rates, and they also guarantee you a spot at our conference dinner (which is both space-limited, and is seriously not to be missed).

Early bird regos are available for the first 60 Enthusiast or Professional tickets sold; all the relevant info is at our website.

… and that means all of you!

We’ll be reprising the very successful gender diversity grants programme that PyCon Australia launched with Google last year; in a much-expanded form. Last year these grants helped many deserving women attend the conference with subsidised registration, and some travel allowance. This year, the grants programme will offer travel assistance to many more deserving female delegates. We’ll reveal more details later, but needless to say, we’re very excited.

fin.

Well, that’s it for now, I hope you’re as excited about the conference as I am. It’s shaping up to be really quite special, and I can’t wait to share more of our plans with you. See you in August, and get registering!

chrisjrn's site: PyCon Australia early bird registrations now open!

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:59:12 +0000

For fear of spamming EVERYWHERE with the news, I include just the tl;dr:

tl;dr: PyCon Australia early bird registrations are now open! Find out more at http://2012.pycon-au.org/register/prices, including details of our accommodation programme.

The full media release on the opening of registration can be found at http://2012.pycon-au.org/media/news/15

Hope we see you all registered soon!

chrisjrn's site: Talk — Android: The year of Linux on the palmtop?

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:38:48 +0000

Here’s my talk from the Hobart TasLUG meeting yesterday (18 April 2012) on the features of Android from the point of view of a Linux user — both from a technical perspective, and issues arising from Android’s unique status as an Open Source OS for cellphones. If you want to download the video, you can download it, or watch it in the embedded format later in this post… Enjoy!

chrisjrn's site: OMFG! OSCON!

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:03:22 +0000

Since I enjoyed presenting on Android development at last year’s OSCON in Portland, it seems as though I shall be returning to do it again this year!

I’m presenting Android-Fu: Awesome apps for Ice Cream Sandwich and beyond at OSCON 2012. It’ll be on Tuesday 17 July at 9:00am, and will be a comprehensive look at things that modern Android tutorials should teach you, but tend not to.

On a related note, I’ll be travelling through the USA a bit on either side of OSCON. I’ll be in New York from (late on) Monday 9 July through Friday 13 July, and Seattle from Saturday 21 July through Monday 23 July. So if you happen to be reading this and would like to direct me at coffee whilst I’m there, let me know!

chrisjrn's site: More pontification on alcohol at conferences

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 02:11:17 +0000

This post started off as a reply to a comment (by “Alan”) on my previous post on this topic, but it got a bit long-winded, and raised a few clarifications of my own viewpoints on this matter. So it’s turned into a post of its own.

So, before I start this, nothing against the organisers or team surrounding OSCON. I loved my experience speaking, and attending the main conference event, and I’m coming back to OSCON to speak again this year. The reason why I pick on it is because it’s the one large American conference that I’ve been to, and it provides a nice contrast to the grassroots-style conferences that I’ve been involved with back home. It also exhibits some very specific examples of fostering that “culture of exclusion” that could be fixed with a few minor policy changes.

So, without further ado, here’s me addressing the points in Alan’s comment.

Could it be that this and the “brogrammer” culture is a problem that is more present at JSConf and Ruby conferences than Python?

I certainly agree that this culture does peak around various types of communities — for instance, Ryan’s post on the “Culture of Exclusion” speaks very specifically of JSConf and various Ruby groups, and in my own experience this sort of culture doesn’t seem to be prevalent at PyCons. However, to say that it’s attached to a small subset of communities is probably quite unfair — OSCON is very much a multi-community conference, but there’s still quite the drinking culture attached to it. Likewise, it seems to me that the Ruby community in Australia isn’t quite as drinking-centric as the examples that Ryan put forward.

You don’t hear anything about sexist COBOL programmers or late night binging at Java conferences from what I can tell. Even PHP seems to have grown up.

I think the likelihood of these sorts of things to occur really does depend on the level of “community” that is attached to a given language or technology. As an example here, people doing Java coding are almost certainly doing so because they work for in a corporate environment. Ruby and JS people are doing so because they work in a “startup” environment, or they’re doing it for fun. The companies that form the founding groups around a conference will often bring their culture along with them. It’s interesting to consider why this doesn’t happen so much at Python conferences. I don’t have any particular answers here — indeed, it’s quite the paradox, because I’d have considered Python to be more of a “startup” type language, and one would assume that would bring the “startup” culture into it. Perhaps it speaks of the values of those who started gatherings for Python coders?

Are these excesses a problem at conferences in general? Is this an American thing? Or even a Ruby/JS thing?

Is it a problem with conferences or communities, or is it a much more widespread cultural issue (as in e.g. American youth culture) that has just become more visible for us recently?

Excess is something that needs to be managed — it’s very easy for a conference organiser to say “yes, you can provide an open bar at this event” to a sponsor, and sponsors get quite an amount of good will from it (free alcohol doesn’t upset people, non-drinkers won’t speak up). It’s also pretty clear to me that if an open bar is offered, there’ll be a group of people who will take it up, regardless of the community that centres around the conference.

So the conferences that suffer from this sort of problem are the ones which either don’t have a policy of limitation of alcohol sponsorship, or those that actively encourage a culture of drinking (the sort of things that Ryan Funduk talks about in his article). I doubt there’d be open bars at any conference if there weren’t sponsors who were willing to fund them.

The onus is therefore on conference organisers to make sure that they don’t encourage binge drinking. In particular, this involves limiting the amount of alcohol sponsorship a conference is willing to accept — we at PyCon Australia are doing this by only providing tokens for drinks at our alcohol sponsored events (with the exception of at the dinner, where the open bar is time-limited, and comes with food and other entertainment).

What distinguishes conferences and communities that have this problem from those that do not?

Conferences can send out a message about this culture: For example, offering OSCON offers free attendance to the drinking events, but not to the main content of the conference; this can be compared with Linux.conf.au, where you have to pay extra to attend the drinking session. The contrasts between these arrangements provide quite the subtext between the values of the two conferences — intentional or not. In my view, OSCON providing such a ticket says that the “base level” experience of the conference is one where you go to all the parties, and the talks and tutorials are the “added extras”. For LCA, it’s the other way around.

So in summary, there are plenty of factors that surround the discussion of alcohol at conferences. I think it’s an important discussion to have, not least because it presents as a diversity argument in very much the same way as the gender diversity argument has presented itself over the last few years — conferences should always be looking at the messages they send out about the communities they wish to foster, and ensuring that they’re inclusive towards everyone in that culture.

chrisjrn's site: Do Australian tech conferences suffer from “A Culture of Exclusion”? How do we avoid it?

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:06:05 +0000

I spotted this interesting article by Ryan Funduk, on the culture of exclusion generated by piss-up parties at tech conferences — primarily at conferences in America, but the issue is certainly prevalent in other places.

I attended OSCON last year, and whilst OSCON is clearly not as bad as the type of events that have been highlighted in this writeup, there were still plenty of events that were promoted by the conference and their sponsors, but clearly served only as an opportunity to booze up some delegates. In fact, there was at least one such party advertised in the conference schedule each night — peaking on the Wednesday where there were three such conference parties advertised on the conference schedule, cleverly paced for two hours so that delegates could move on to each of the parties as the previous one wound up.

I personally feel as though these sorts of events have no place being actively promoted by the conference schedule. There are several good reasons for this that are all detailed in the parent article, but they all boil down to the fact that not everyone drinks. Parties where the key attraction is drinking only attracts those who drink. By advertising such events as part of the programme, they create cliques within the conference community that aren’t defined by the community that the conference serves to support.

Worse still is when such events are not run with alternatives available, because this strongly promotes the subtext that drinking is the only way to socialise at the conference. So a delegate who doesn’t drink will not fit in to any part of the conference, because there is no well-established way for non-drinkers to find each other.

As an active participant in tech conferences in Australia, it’s important to reflect on criticisms of such conferences in other countries, as well as here, to make sure that we’re providing a culture that actively encourages any delegate who chooses to attend — regardless of age, gender or lifestyle choice.

In the case of conferences run in Australia, I don’t believe that the issues of Alcohol-driven events are near as much of a problem as they are in America.

At Linux.conf.au, since the demise of the Google Party (an event very much brought over by American employees of Google), I don’t think I’ve seen a single event associated with the conference where drinking was the sole purpose of the event. One exception of this is the Professional Delegates Networking Session, however, I have always seeked to run a non-alcohol driven alternative against it. As a non-drinker for most of the LCAs I’ve been to, I don’t think I’ve lost out by not participating in the drinking.

At PyCon Australia, we’ve been careful to not offer up any events with an open tab — companies who want to sponsor alcohol have to do so in a way that ensures that the amounts provided are limited, and any foray into dangerous territory comes at the expense of the delegates. There is no conference event planned without a defined activity, and in every case, the presence of a bar at the event is clearly a distant second in terms of priorities for the organisers.

One of the great successes over the past few years in Australia has been ensuring that toxic cultures within the tech community aren’t tolerated. I think it’s imporant that we look at everything we do with a critical eye. I’m sure that our record on avoiding the fostering of an alcohol culture at our events isn’t spotless, and it’s one that we should look over with as critical an eye as we use to look over issues of gender or sexuality.

It’s definitely my intention to do this as I continue to put together PyCon — constantly looking at what we can do as Australian-based conference organisers do to ensure that the culture of alcohol doesn’t take over from the culture of the technology that we’re gathering for?

Update: I’ve written a further post on this topic. Do try it.

chrisjrn's site: Talk: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Java!

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 06:24:18 +0000

Hark! My TUCS Tech Talk for this semester is an attempt to show the connections between Java as a programming and software technology, and the technology that followed it.

You can view it at the TUCS Blip.tv page or in the embedded player above. It even works with youtube-dl

chrisjrn's site: A personal history of TUCS

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:01:59 +0000

After three years in the job, I’ve finally relinquished the role of President of the University of Tasmania Computing Society (better known as TUCS). The years I spent as President spanned the last year and a half of my time at uni, and the first year and a half outside of that life — it’s something that’s been a pretty constant thread over the past few years, and it’d be a shame if I didn’t take a moment to dwell on my time in the role.

My first year representing TUCS was 2008: I’d come back to uni having attended my first Linux.conf.au in Melbourne, fresh with the knowledge that it would be held in Hobart the following January. The previous computing society at UTAS, the Internet Developers Society had elected to change its name at the previous year’s AGM, and with that new start, I decided to run for the exec of the society. I didn’t really have any aims at the time I ran, save for making the Uni computing community closer to the Open Source movement that I knew and loved at the time.

It was with that that I decided to organise the first of the TUCS Tech Talks. It was a talk by myself on introductory Python. I think I spent the best part of two weeks writing, tweaking and rehearsing that talk, and learning how to get screen recordings going. To my astonishment, the talk was amazingly well-recieved: the room was packed, lots of questions were asked. But much more than the success of my own talk, what astonished me was that people at the barbecue after the talk were telling me about how they wanted to present their own. And a few weeks later, so it was. And the following semester, we had talks every other week, on topics ranging from StarCraft strategy to iPhone development — the advent of tech talks at TUCS exposed a strong enthusiasm for sharing knowledge with others, and it brought our society into great stead with students, staff and the broader tech community in Hobart.

It was at the end of that year that I nominated as President, and happily, I was elected so. And when January rolled about, Linux.conf.au came to our home campus. Whilst TUCS wasn’t really involved with the event as much as I’d have liked, I did spot an opportunity for TUCS to contribute a small part — we ran a barbecue for student and hobbyist delegates to LCA as a way to help our members to engage with the rest of Australia’s tech community. This ended up being the first Unprofessional Delegates’ Networking Session, and it’s an event that I have continued to run at LCA ever since — for the 2012 conference in Ballarat, we brought the UnPDNS format back to the format that we ran for the first time in 2009, and the mood was as good this year as it was in 2009. It’s an event that I’m proud of starting, and the event happened because TUCS members contributed so much to getting that first UnPDNS organised in 2009.

Our Tech Talk schedule improved substantially that year, too. We had the first of our talks from then-Ph.D student, Jonathan Adamczewski on development for PS3 devices. He’s presented almost every semester since then, and his topics have been both diverse and exceedingly in-depth on whatever topic he chose to cover — my personal favourite was a talk showing how “Hello World” programs actually work on Linux systems. We also had the first of our talks by Paul Fenwick — that year, he packed out the tiny seminar room we were using for tech talks with his fascinating insight into the info you could glean from the Facebook API.

The other great discovery that arose from the talks series at TUCS was our frequent series of Lightning Talks — once per semester, students came to share three minutes of whatever insanity they decided they wanted to talk about. We’ve had talks on everything from Alex Berry’s experiments with the postal service; to self-devised esoteric programming languages; to buyers guides for headphones. These talks turned out to be a lot more fun than I could ever have hoped for, and they’ve been a great show of the minds that the society has attracted over the years.

And so it was that last year, I found myself away from Hobart on a very frequent basis, and I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t contribute to TUCS on the level that I had in previous years. Though I tried to give up the post last year, with nobody to replace me, I found myself in situ for a third year. The time I did have to contribute to the role of President last year was spent finding and preparing suitable replacements to come on board the next year. Thankfully, new members with huge amounts of drive started to appear — we ran end-of-semester events for the first time since 2009. We ran an end-of-year Quiz Night, which was a huge success for the society, and showed that the society had strength and enthusiasm to continue on for years to come.

Of course, my own contribution as President over those years did not a society make. The execs who I served with over the years made the society great. The treasurers, Michael Ford, Luke Hovington and Matt D’Orazio all helped make sure that the society was profitable every year I was involved, and keeping on top of grants from the Union. Matt, along with Tim Nugent made sure that the LAN parties that IDS had run for years before continued on well into the TUCS era. Luke Hovington, our tireless sysadmin, kept our old box alive on duck tape and twine, and is overseeing the transition to a new server box with Matt. And Eloise Ducky, who went from being the squeaky year 11 student who showed up on societies day in 2009 to being the person whipping me and the rest of the society into shape as 2011 came to a close.

And so, my term in charge of the society has come to an end — I feel that my hope of creating a community in which students could share their love of computing with others was met; along with keeping the society as bridge between students and university staff, and the IT industry more broadly. They’re goals that a Computing Society at a university should hold at the forefront of what they do, and I think it’s the reason why TUCS is held in high regard.

I hope the years that I spent in the society have changed it for the better — it’s been a lot of hard work, but it’s work I’ve enjoyed, and it’s a role that I’ve greatly relished filling. And thanks to all of the TUCS members who elected me to the role in the first place, but saw enough in me to re-elect me to the role for the following two years. I hope you think it’s been worth it.

Whilst I wasn’t the first President of the society, I was the last. The AGM last year removed the roles of President and Vice-President in favour of holding two Co-Presidents’ offices. I’m sure Eloise, along with Ben Lea will fill these roles with great enthusiasm and with the goal of making the society the best it can be for its members (take care of my baby for me, OK?). Whilst I’m staying on in the executive as a general representative for the rest of this year, it’s going to be interesting to not be in charge of the place.

Photo credits: Adam Harvey, various photos by myself.

chrisjrn's site: Speak at PyCon Australia 2012

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 03:21:53 +0000

February was a pretty big month for PyCon Australia organisation, we finally got our new website up and running, and our Call for Proposals is finally open. We’ve even got our first keynote presenter lined up (hush hush).

Of course, opening a Call for Proposals doesn’t make a conference just happen. We need people to submit talks now. In particular, we’d like for you to submit something. Even better, our Call for Topics (which has been open since January) has turned up some great trends for what people want to see. Perhaps you have something to say on one of these topics? We want to hear from you!

In-depth techniques with common Python libraries

Have you done interesting things with Python Libraries? Perhaps you’ve solved a difficult application design using Django; or maybe you’ve done awesome hacks with SQLAlchemy? Our delegates want to know just what can be done with those libraries that are out there in the wild — help them take the next step in enhancing their skills.

Testing

Few things are more important in the application development process. Thorough testing means that you can be confident that your code works, and well-written tests ensure that things don’t break when you make changes. But talks on testing have been sorely lacking at PyCon Australia in the past. Help show our delegates how to make code that’s testable using the best tools available to Python developers.

Alternative implementations

Sure, CPython may be the reference implementation of Python, and it may be what nearly everyone coding python uses, but it’s not the only version of Python out there. The PyPy project is working wonders at making Python code run fast (so that it can compete with state-of-the-art JavaScript VMs), and the Jython and IronPython projects are helping to bring the world of Python to Java and .NET developers. Show PyCon Australia that the Python world doesn’t stop at CPython.

Live Code Reviews

One of the best ways to learn about how something works is to take it apart and see what’s inside. Open source projects let us deeply study the internals of the tools and libraries that we use every day. Show our delegates just how their favourite Python tools work, suggest improvements, and perhaps find new contributors to your projects.

Forward-porting to Python 3

Currently, two incompatible versions of Python are competing for your development time — Python 2, which is the old version of Python with flaws you’ve come to know and accept; and the all-new Python 3, which is easier to code with and more consistent. The problem is that all the code you depend upon is written in Python 2. Help speed up the migration to the new version of Python by showing how to forward-port libraries to Python 3.

Now, submit something!

So, now that you know what people want to see at PyCon Australia 2012, perhaps you have an idea about what you can present. Head over to our Call for Proposals and submit a talk for us. The call closes on Friday May 4.

If you still need more ideas, PyCon Australia 2011 presenter, Daniel Greenfeld has a list of Python conference talks he’d like to see. And if you have more ideas that you’d like someone else to present, our Call for Topics is still open.

Can’t wait to see your proposals coming in!

chrisjrn's site: 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.

Jack: linux.conf.au 2012 – Day 5 (Friday)

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:59:24 +0000

This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.

Friday 20th January:

Friday is the last day of the conference, and everybody is starting to look tired; it’s a full-on week. But, before we all go home, there are just a few more excellent talks to attend. The first of these was Friday’s keynote, given by Jacob Appelbaum, and what an amazing keynote it was. Jacob talked about the state of surveillance states. He explained what they are doing to keep track of all of their citizens, and the special measures that have been put in place in the last few years (mostly since September 11) that significantly curtail our freedoms in the name of privacy and safety. A few choice quotes from the talk:

Free software is for freedom, open source is for business solutions.

Be the trouble you want to see in the world. [It's in my notes, but I'm pretty sure it was actually just written on his shirt]

90s Nihilism: I have nothing to hide.

The data kept about you in [server] logs around the world tells a story that is not necessarily true, but is made up of facts.

This talk flowed on nicely from Senator Ludlam’s talk at the Penguin dinner.

After morning tea, I watched the talk by Rusty Russell and Matt Evans about why UNIX has been getting bigger over time (in terms of binary bloat). It’s mostly due to new features, but also because of the infrastructure that modern systems have and the libraries that are statically linked in these days (glibc is basically just bloatware). Also in this session I attended the talk by Simon Horman on Open vSwitch. It’s really interesting content, but the presentation was a bit dry. It’s definitely something I want to check out when I get home though, as it could be quite useful for me when I have VMs set up in Linux. The support for VLANs makes it a much better choice than standard Linux network bridges.

During lunchtime there was a meeting between a group of Tasmanian delegates, and it was decided that the Hobart Linux User’s Group should be started up again. So if you’re reading this, like Linux and live in Hobart, get in touch!

After lunch was the best-of sessions. These were talks voted for by the delegates that they wanted to see again, or missed the first time around. I watched two fabulous talks. The first was on Codec2 (presented by David Rowe), an audio speech codec that uses 1400 bits/sec for transmission, which is a 500x improvement on raw 16bit 44.1kHz audio. Very impressive. The second was on the freedom box project (presented by Bdale Garbee, which is a platform for developing easy-to-use home servers oriented towards federated social networking services (such as Status.net or Diaspora). This followed on nicely from Appelbaum’s talk that morning, giving a solution to some of the problems that were outlined.

The final session of the conference was the lightning talks. The real highlight was watching Paul Fenwick jump up on stage between the lightning talks and try to give a several minute long presentation in thirty seconds. He failed, but it was funny to watch. After the lightning talks was the closing ceremony. The main reason for this is to hand out a few awards and thank some people, but also to find out where the next linux.conf.au is going to be held. Next year, it’s in Canberra!

Jack: linux.conf.au 2012 – Day 4 (Thursday)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:30:22 +0000

Thursday 19th January:

The Linux HA Tutorial

The morning started off with a keynote from Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. This was a fascinating talk about the dangers behind having proprietary computer systems running our essential services, the things we rely on every day for our modern society. Her biggest example (and an amazingly powerful one) is the pacemaker that runs her heart (or gives it a jolt if it stops, at least). Attackers could quite easily crack into some of the modern pacemakers via the wireless signal they emit, and cause all kinds of damage (like giving a shock when it’s not needed, or failing to give one when it is). In addition, there are all other kinds of things we rely on (voting machines, car control software, etc.) that are closed source and pose a risk to us because of this. So basically it was about how we really need to move to open source systems to make the world a better place, not just because of reliability or business reasons.

The Penguin Dinner

Between morning tea and lunch I viewed included a tutorial on setting up a Linux HA cluster using pacemaker (with an example MySQL set-up) which I learned a lot from. I’m going to have to try out the techniques at home more, and see if I can apply them to my systems. I’m not sure how well these practises will work over wide-area networks though, as they’re primarily designed for LANs (as Michael Wheeler said to me, “It’s not redundant until it’s geographically redundant.”).

Michael Wheeler seems unpleased

After lunch was another tutorial, this time on the basics of computer security. There are some crazy things you can do to try and break into a computer. I finally understand how buffer overflows work, and what can be done to prevent them (quite a lot, actually). Breaking into encryption was another strong topic. You can measure how much power a CPU is using to figure out whether it’s doing add or multiply, and things like that. But basically what you really need to do is maintain a much higher consideration of security while coding than you did before, and I hope this tutorial will help me achieve that.

After afternoon tea (during which I consumed a suspiciously large quantity of fruit… I must be craving healthy food) it was time for the talk given by my friend Chris and his friend Paris, titled “Android is not vi”. It’s probably the funniest talk I’ve seen the entire conference, and several delegates have mentioned it wouldn’t be out of place in a comedy routine. The talk was mostly about making the user experience on Android better, but with a surprise ending: the general principles apply to pretty much any user experience design, because they’re all the same. Not making the user think is pretty much the key.

Dessert!

Then of course, Thursday night means the Penguin dinner. This is the opportunity for the speeches and the presentation of the Rusty Wrench award, named after Rusty Russell who started running the conference back in 1999. This year it was given to Mary Gardiner for her services to the Ada Initiative, amongst other things. This is very well deserved too, as there is a nearly 20% female attendance rate at LCA this year. The meal at the dinner was also excellent. I had a pork salad starter, the chicken thigh main, and then an amazing mango cake dessert (pictured). After dinner, we received a speech by Senator Scott Ludlam on the surveillance state that Australia is turning into. 250000+ people have had some sort of police surveillance performed on them in Australia last year. Scary stuff, and I think it will only become scarier once we have heard what Jacob Appelbaum has to say in his keynote tomorrow morning. All in all, a great event.

Jack: linux.conf.au 2012 – Day 3 (Wednesday)

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:39:36 +0000

Wednesday 18th January:

Paul Fenwick is awesome!

Quite a few more talks today; seven to be exact. The first was Paul Fenwick’s keynote address on “All Your Brains Suck”, which is about ways of hacking and exploiting the human brain. It’s fascinating stuff, even if I had seen the talk before (when he visited UTAS and gave the talk to TUCS). I now know that scary but logically safe places (like rollercoasters) are good places for dates. And that priming people with slow words (like ‘elderly’) make them walk slower. Utterly crazy stuff, just like the speaker of this talk.

After morning tea, there were two talks on filesystems. The first, on btrfs, was given by Avi Miller, who was an excellent speaker. btrfs seems like an amazing piece of kit. I had always thought that you couldn’t do much with a Linux filesystem; but I was shown to be wrong. btrfs does file-level RAID, so you can how many backup copies of a file you want on the disks. It also does copy-on-write, so you have backups into the immediate past as well. The next talk was on XFS, given by Dave Chinner, and he showed how the performance of XFS has jumped up in recent years, as good as btrfs (sometimes better) and they both far outstrip ext4 now (no surprise, ext4′s underlying technology is about two decades old).

The first talk after lunch was on Ubuntu’s ARM ports, and how development is progressing for the various ARM platforms (of which there seem to be hundreds). The most interesting thing for me was the coming-of-age of ARM servers, which consume far less power than x86 servers (a good thing for the environment) while doing a similar workload. Because most services don’t require CPU-intensive workloads, we can save even more! The second talk after lunch was on adding millions of watchpoints to a Linux system. Most Linux systems currently only support 2 or 4 watchpoints, and this isn’t enough for good security analysis. So they added a driver to Linux that steps through instructions when an out-of-memory page is accessed (via virtual memory). Clever stuff, even if most of it went over my head.

After afternoon tea, I watched two talks on bootloaders. The first, on using Linux as a bootloader (given by Peter Chubb), was interesting, though was really only useful as a method in a small number of cases. Most systems are better off sticking to something like GRUB. Speaking of GRUB, the second talk (given by Josh Triplett) was about porting Python to GRUB, and the resulting project, BITS. This seems like a fascinating thing to do, mostly because it blurs the line between what an application is and what an operating system is. This is a line that Emacs has been tiptoeing on for some time now, and it is nice to see it has a friend.

The Debian Swirl

For dinner today, I attended the unprofessional delegates networking session (UnPDNS) which is held at the same time as the event for the professionals. We had a barbecue, which gave me a great opportunity to hang out with some of the other cool people who didn’t buy expensive tickets.

Jack: linux.conf.au 2012 – Day 2 (Tuesday)

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:46:19 +0000

Tuesday 17th January:

Bruce Peren's Keynote

Day 2 was full of a lot more great talks. First up in the morning was Bruce Peren’s keynote address. He talked a lot about trying harder to maintain the ideals we’ve worked for in the past. He says the fights we fought in the past, using our moral high-ground to our advantage, we might not win now because we have business groups (like Ubuntu and Redhat) speaking on our behalf… and businesses always have to put profit first.

After morning tea I saw two great kernel-related talks, the first by Jonathan Corbet and the second by Mathew Garrett. Jonathan basically gave a rundown of the Linux kernel development work that has happened over the last year, including the release of Linux 3.0 and for the first time ever, a kernel release having less source code in it than the last one (due to some cleanup work). Mathew Garrett gave a really impassioned talk on the good and evil of EFI. From what I gathered, the runtime services stuff offered by EFI is a great idea with a half-arsed implementation. On the other hand, the secure boot offered by EFI threatens to make open-source deployment to normal users a right pain in the arse… if it is possible at all. That’s a bit of a worry.

Greg Banks' "This Old Code"

After lunch I watched a talk by Greg Banks (who works for Opera) on renovating old source code to get it up to scratch with modern systems. His examples came from the Cyrus IMAP server, and there was a heap of great tidbits of information there. The second talk after lunch was given by Robert Mibus from Internode, about how they are implementing reverse IPv6 DNS mappings for their customer. With a possible 4TB of mappings for each customer, they have to generate them on the fly… but no existing DNS server did this. So they wrote their own. One thing I was very interested in, being an Internode customer, is that I can request to get IPv6 reverse mappings delegated to my own DNS servers; something I have already put in a request for.

More trainspotting!

The second last talk for the day was about moving large amounts of data and essential services from one datacenter to another with no loss of downtime… an impressive feat! Given by a team from Mozilla, it detailed how they prepared for and moved thir crash reporting system from San Jose to Pheonix. The last talk I saw was given by Sarah Novotny about caching databases, and how the many caches on a system can sometimes work against each other. It covered performance benchmarking and monitoring as well, just to make sure everything is running fine.

Dinner this evening was at the Irish Murphy’s we visited the night before. While a bit unadventurous, I was with a group who hadn’t been there before, and the food was still quite excellent. I was happy. On the way back to the hotel I got to do a bit of train spotting as well, which made me quite happy.

Jack: linux.conf.au 2012 – Day 1 (Monday)

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:47:37 +0000

Monday 16th January:

Chris Neugebauer waiting for the conference to begin...

Monday is the real start of the conference. First thing to do was register and pick up the conference badge and bag. While eating breakfast (a lovely cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs for me!) I looked over the provided schwag to see what free goodies had been obtained. For most of the delegates (including me) the item of interest this year was a Freetronics Leostick, an Arduino development board in an absolutely tiny form factor. Then it was time for the conference proper to begin!

First of all was a welcome before morning tea. The sponsors and volunteers were thanked, and the conference rule #1 was revealed: Be Excellent To Each Other. So much awesome. After morning tea (where I filled up on caffeine like a camel on an all-nighter) it was talk time. Some highlights from the first day:

I particularly enjoyed Adam Harvey’s talk on migrating to PHP 5.4. His style of speech is very fun to listen to, and you always feel like you’re learning some kind of juicy gossip of how the PHP team makes decisions (which, of course, you are). I know now not to use the PHP functions that I didn’t use anyway, because it seems about half the language is being deprecated. Luckily it is the right half, including the much-hated magic quotes feature.

Yes, those really are My Little Ponies.

Rob Thomas gave two talks. The first was on building a redundant PBX system using Asterisk and a heap of BASH scripts. It seems pretty cool, though unfortunately I have no use for such a thing. Michael does though, and he almost immediately tried to get a quote off Rob to install the system at his work. The second of Rob’s talks was on common mistakes made when trying to create a highly-available Linux cluster. This tied in with his other talk, still including the same PBX system as demo material, but was a bit more geneal. Both were highly entertaining and hilariously hilarious (yet, that hilarious!) and only involved me getting rickrolled once. Oh, and those talks were where the picture of the My Little Ponies came from.
Peter Serwylo gave a talk on performing static code analysis on PHP code. He showed us a cool program written by a german bloke to do this (both names I have forgotten however ). This really piqued my interest; I’ve heard a lot about static code analysis but really failed to see it progress any further than trying to correct variable names or tell me when I have the wrong class member. This trawled the entire function call tree and tried to find security flaws (most of which end up from being non-escaped characters passed to database queries). Very informative. That talk, along with a few of the lightning talks from the open programming miniconf, really want me to do more investigation into what programming languages and compilers can do.

The Guiness Pie I had for dinner. Yum.

After the day’s talks it was time for dinner. But what to do for dinner? An Irish pub is never a bad idea. Ballarat’s is Irish Murphy’s, and they do a very good guinness pie. It was amazing. After that, back to the dorms for some blog post writing and some much-needed sleep.

Jack: linux.conf.au 2012 – Day 0 (Sunday)

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:44:57 +0000

Sunday 15th January:

Yay! My favourite mode of transport!

Sunday was spent travelling. My flight from Hobart to Melbourne departed at 8:35am, and it was a perfect day for flying. Warm, clear skies and little wind. An almost perfect flight. I landed in Melbourne before schedule and caught the SkyBus into the city. I was there by 10am, and my train to Ballarat (which I was travelling with my friend Michael Wheeler on) left at 5:08pm, so I had quite a number of hours to spare. Needless to say, I did what any tourist would do, and set about travelling on as many forms of public transport as I could in one day.

The View From St. Kilda Pier

I caught a tram down to St. Kilda, the light rail (which was merely a glorified tram) back, a suburban train out into a random suburb and back, as well as the plane, car and bus I had already travelled on. I took a few pictures, mostly from St. Kilda pier. A poster detailing the risks of getting in the way of a tram also caught my eye.

A rhino on a skateboard? Sure...

After my random adventures in Melbourne’s transport system came to an end, I met Michael (fresh from his trip down from Rockhampton) and we proceeded to get on the VLine train to Ballarat. We fired up our laptops and were just getting comfortable in a game of OpenTTD, and then the train was off! But not for long. After about 200 metres of travel it was announced that the train was cancelled, and we would all be transported on coaches instead. We finally arrived in Ballarat two hours late, at about 9pm.

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.

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)

Jack: Making Chicken Stock

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:22:56 +0000

Now that university classes and exams have finished for the year, I have a lot more free time on my hands. Today I decided to make chicken stock. A few days ago we bought a roasted chicken from the supermarket to use the meat in sandwiches. We also got a chicken pasta bake from the meat as well. I wanted to use the entire bird (waste not want not). Also, stock is delicious. Especially home-made stock.

Note that this is just what I did… I’m not saying this is a perfect recipe.

At the start of cooking.

Ingredients:

The bones and skin from one (preferably free-range) roasted chicken.
A large onion.
About eight baby carrots. You could use one large one.
A stick of celery.
A few peppercorns.
A small handful of herbs.

Method:

Break any large chicken bones into small pieces (this will help get the good bits out of the marrow) and divide the carcass up a bit smaller as well. Chuck it all in a large saucepan.
Cut up the carrots and celery into small chunks. Chuck those into the pot.
Cut the onion (with the skin still on) into quarters. Chuck that in the pot.
Add enough cold water to the pot to cover the other ingredients well.
Add a few peppercorns and whatever herbs you have handy (I used a small handful) into the pot.
Put the saucepan on to boil, covered.
When the saucepan is boiling, reduce the heat to low and remove the lid. Skim off any foam that rises to the surface.
Leave it to simmer for three to four hours, then remove from the heat.
Leave it to cool, then strain liquid and discard solids.
Use the completed stock within four days, or freeze it.

Note that one bird doens’t make a huge amount of stock (probably about a litre), so it’s probably worth stockpiling the bones and skins until you have two or three. I was just impatient.

chrisjrn's site: Linux.conf.au 2012

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 06:08:14 +0000

Miniconf: organised
Talk: accepted
Attendance: confirmed
Accommodation: booked
Ferry crossing: reserved

See you in January, Ballarat!

Chris: Google Reader obit.

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:48:00 +0000

Google Reader’s just announced that they’re turning off reader sharing progressively from today. I wrote the following in my share stream a few moments ago, and realised that this was massively counterproductive — it will probably disappear in a few hours anyway.

So on the off chance that you subscribe to my feed and haven’t read this:

Hey all,

Reader sharing starts dying today. I’m pretty sad about that, I’ve loved reading the things all of you have shared over the past few years — I’ve discovered new things, built up new interests, learnt a lot and have had a lot of fun doing it. I’m going to miss reading what you have.

So what am I going to do? Well, I’ll be seeing if the ‘plus’ features actually replicate reader sharing in any useful form. Who knows, it might actually be a useful feature.

If not, we’ll see what manner of useful *external* sharing appears (share by e-mail looks particularly useful) — shared feeds don’t seem too hard to re-implement, and we could theoretically have something useful up and running over a weekend. I’m seriously considering doing this. Let me know if you’re interested!

So yeah, if you’re not already following me on twitter, that’s probably the most useful place to find me: I’m @chrisjrn. My blog is at http://chris.neugebauer.id.au. Keep in touch! I still want to read your stuff!

Thank you, and goodbye!

–Chris

Chris: RIP Dennis Ritchie

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:22:23 +0000

Although I did not know the man, the contributions of Dennis Ritchie have have a profound effect upon my life and the community with which I associate. I interact with systems inspired by the first versions of UNIX, and write code in languages that owe their design principles to C, almost on an daily basis.

Dennis Ritchie was a giant on whose shoulders many of those in technology, including myself, can feel proud to stand on.

Jack: Review: The Googlization of Everything

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 01:39:15 +0000

Front Cover

As you might be aware, I’m not a huge fan of Google, or indeed, cloud-based apps in general. When I saw The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry) in my local campus bookstore, I decided that it would be a good read on the spot. It was a good read, and here’s why.

I will admit upfront that I’m probably not the most unbiased person in the world when it comes to what is really a review of a review of Google. If you dislike bias, go watch the Pakistani cricket team instead.

I’d always been a bit hesistant to use Google products (or any cloud product) because of lax privacy. How do I know that Google won’t be using my information against me? This book (partially) confirmed my suspicions. They are using my information, both for and against me. Every time somebody performs a Google search, Google stores the query and information about me (my IP, my location, browser, etc) and uses that to tune search results for me. This appears on the surface to be fine. I like it when I search “cat” on Google and Google knows that what I really want is the first result to be whatismyip.com (I use the “cat” Google search as a quick method to test Internet browser connectivity, I don’t know why). But Vaidhyanatham (the author) raises other points about this. Firstly, how long is our data kept? And who else is it being shared with? But perhaps most disturbingly, Google might prevent me from seeing new information because it’s too busy telling me about what I think I want. For instance, if a new species of cat was discovered in the jungles of Peru, I might miss it because Google is too busy customising my results with Internet connectivity tests. While that not matter much, on other (more important) subjects the splitting up of information based on what we think we want to see is disturbing.

Vaidhyanatham raises many other points in his book too. The Google Books project is designed to give everybody in the world access to out-of-print books, instead of having them sit on dusty shelves in university libraries. It’s a nice goal. However, the program is structured in such a way that nobody else could possibly compete with it, due to arcane copyright law and out-of-court settlements. Do we want Google to be the sole provider of this service? Shouldn’t this be done by a public or community organisation instead? They’re difficult questions, and the fact that we haven’t even started considering them should warn us.

Another similar situation exists for Google Scholar. Google has obtained agreements with universities to provide academic articles for inclusion in Google’s archives. The idea, similarly to Google Books, is to allow more people to see things they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. A noble goal. Again, however, there are several problems with the project’s implementation. Again, arcane agreements and laws prevent universities from easily collaborating with an alternative archive agent. Even more worrying is the fact that to most users (those without access to the paywalled sites that the articles actually reside on) only the abstract of an article is available. This results in a broadening but a shallowing of the information available to most people. This is another of those projects that might be better taken on by the people, for the people. I know of one user on an IRC channel I frequent who is collecting datasheets and manuals from PC components from the 1980s, before these datasheets become extinct. While not legal, and while he hasn’t made this public, it’s the right direction to go in.

Then there’s the shallowing of our knowledge due to Google. This is a huge topic, and so many authors have covered it in so many various degrees of rigour that I won’t even begin to scratch the surface. However, here’s the gist of the idea: Because we have access to the largest library in human history (the web) at our fingertips at any point we’re in front of a computer (which for those of us with a smartphone, is constantly), we don’t remember information like previous generations did. I’m still not confident that this is a bad thing; I am a lot more knowledgeable than I would be if the only learning resource I had was a paper encyclopædia. I don’t know a lot of facts, but I know where to find them. In today’s world, that’s what counts. Still, it’s something we should look into further.

A good portion of the arguments put forward in this book are more general than Google and apply to the Internet at large (such as the shallowing of our knowledge). Most of the other arguments could be taken directly to Google’s legal department in a court showdown (which would almost certainly be the court case of the century). Whichever way you stand on the issues, more information is never a bad thing.

Jack: My linux.conf.au 2012 Plans

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 07:33:09 +0000

This summer, like last summer, I’ll be travelling to linux.conf.au. This year it’s being held in Ballarat, which presents the opportunity for one of my favourite modes of transport: TRAIN! Here, tentatively, are my plans for that week:

On Sunday the 15th I’ll awake early, catch the 8:45am Jetstar flight from Hobart (HBA) to Melbourne Tullamarine (MEL). That arrives at 10:00am. I’ll then make my way into the city, have lunch at a trendy café with friends from Melbourne. I will then catch the 3:08pm train from Southern Cross Station to Ballarat. My good friend Michael Wheeler will join me for that leg of the journey. I will then be in the conference city, ready for finding all the cool people to annoy.
I will stay at the on-campus accommodation, for maximum NCSS-style bonus points.
I will attend the Penguin dinner.
The next Saturday (the 21st) I will do the same journey in reverse. I don’t have lunch plans that day, so if you’d like to catch up in Melbourne (and prevent me from spending all my money in stationery shops) let me know!

I’ve also recently re-installed Debian on my laptop. Running Windows 7 last conference was embarrasing. I ran PuTTY full-screen the entire time just to cover up the fact.

I hope to see you all there!

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

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 03:57:43 +0000

TL;DR — submit a proposal at http://tinyurl.com/opm2012-proposal
before the first round closes on Friday 7 October.

I’m pleased to announce that The Open Programming Miniconf, a fixture for application developers attending Linux.conf.au since 2010 is returning as part of Linux.conf.au 2012, to be held in January at the University of Ballarat. The miniconf has been an opportunity for presenters of all experience levels to share their experiences in in application development using free and open source development tools.

The Open Programming Miniconf for 2012 invites 25-minute presentations on topics relating to the development of excellent Free and Open Source Software applications. In particular, the Miniconf invites presentations that focus on sharing techniques, best practices and values which are applicable to developers of all Open Source programming languages.

In the past, topics have included:

Recent developments in Open Source programming languages (“State of the language”-type talks)
Tools which support application development
Coding applications with cool new libraries, languages and frameworks
Demonstrating the use of novel programming techniques

Past programmes can be found at http://lca2011.linux.org.au/programme/schedule/monday and http://www.lca2010.org.nz/wiki/Miniconfs/Open_Programming_Languages

To submit a proposal, visit http://tinyurl.com/opm2012-proposal and fill out the form as required. The CFP will remain open indefinitely, but the first round of acceptances will not be sent until Friday 7 October 2011.

OPM2012 is part of Linux.conf.au 2012, being held at the University of Ballarat on Monday, 16 January 2012. Further enquiries can be directed to Christopher Neugebauer via e-mail ( chris+opm2012@neugebauer.id.au ) or via twitter (@chrisjrn).

Jack: Cisco Catalyst 3550 Fan Mod

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 06:37:52 +0000

First of all, the usual warning: I take no responsibility for any harm done to yourself or your equipment if you decide to take my lead and mod the fan on your switch. It’s your fault for listening to some guy on the Internet you’ve never met.

A little while ago I acquired some old 3550 switches from a friend, and I haven’t used them much because they’re horrifically loud. Recently though, I decided to try and make them quiet enough to leave on in the living room. While I didn’t succeed, I made enough of a difference that I thought it might be worth sharing.

Please note that this mod isn’t going to work if your switch is a) under warranty; b) installed in an equipment rack with hot/cold aisles; or c) you don’t like taking the cover off equipment that has 240v inside.

Basically, the gist is this: The fan inside the switch has a cover on it. By removing half of the cover (the half that isn’t attached to the fan motor) and then mounting the fan upside down, you reduce the vibrations of the fan’s casing. Please also note that the outlet fan is thus turned into an intake fan; it takes cold air from the back of the router and blows it over the power supply unit.

The finished fan installation. Much quieter!

Research on the Internet (#cisco on Freenode and some forums) led me to decide that complete removal of the fan wasn’t an option, due to the switch overheating. I then wanted to replace the fan with a quieter computer fan, but the connector, though the same, is wired differently. Though I own (and can operate) a soldering iron, I’m also quite lazy. Turning the fan upside down (as suggested by a friend) was much easier!

Update 2011-08-17: I initially tried this with my non-PoE switch. Today I tried this with my PoE switch and tested it running a few PoE devices. It quickly overheated, so I don’t recommend this with the PoE (inline power) models.

Jack: The Simple Guide to Complex Passwords

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 22:37:12 +0000

Photo by Michael Wheeler

We all know a good password is necessary for good protection of our computer systems and our personal/business data. They are however one of the most annoying inventions in human history. The biggest problem of course is not that we need a good password, it’s that we need tens or hundreds of good passwords, ideally one for every single computer system and website we visit, plus more for banking, encryption and other miscellaneous tasks. For me, that’s at least 100 different passwords that I should have. Guess how many I used to have for all of these different things?

Three. Not thirty or three hundred, just three. One for encryption and banking, one for system logons, and one for all the miscellaneous websites I visit every day. Not ideal. Not even close to decent. Woefully inadequate. So I decided to change that, slowly and surely, until I had a unique password for every system and website. But how? I’m not stupid, and my memory is pretty decent, but the thought of remembering a hundred different passwords is boggling in and of itself!

So how on earth am I to solve this problem? I found a couple of inadequate options:

I could write the passwords down on a scrap of paper and keep them in my wallet. If I lose my wallet, I’m pretty much screwed anyway, so being a little more screwed probably isn’t going to matter. On the other hand, there’s no reason to put myself in more of a pickle than necessary.
I could use one of those handy little password-keeper applications. I take care of remembering one difficult password, and the program takes care of remembering all my other passwords (which are suitably encrypted, using my master password as the key). The God of computer security, Bruce Schneier, has written one of the best applications for this: Password Safe. There are a few problems though:
- If you’ve been reading my blog long enough, you’ll know that I don’t like trusting people I’ve never met. And handing over all my most secret passwords to some application written by a dude I’ve never met is pretty trusting, if you ask me. I’m not good enough at cryptography to write my own, so that’s out of the question too.
- I need to have the password safe on me whenever I need to access my passwords, which isn’t always the case. Sometimes I access websites via my smartphone, where most password applications won’t work (which is especially the case on Symbian). Synchronisation becomes a problem. Multiplatform support is lacking.
I could keep on using my three passwords, and just deal with the fact that it’s not ideal. Most other people deal with it, so in theory I can too.

After a bit of research though, I stumbled across the answer. Password algorithms! The central idea is that like a password is put through an algorithm to produce an encryption key which unlocks your data (or a website), you are taking something you can remember (a normal dictionary word) and using it to produce a password.

The really clever element of the idea is that you can write your password algorithm down, because without the starting words the algorithm is useless. The amount of stuff you have to remember is greatly reduced! It’s genius! Here’s how it works:

Take a plain, simple word that you can remember (like ‘Jack’ or ‘Banana’).
Apply a series of steps to the word (I’ll use ‘Banana’), like so:
1. Start off by adding an exclamation mark after the sixth character. We end up with ‘Banana!’.
2. Replace the fifth character with the ASCII value of the character. We end up with ‘Bana110a!’.
3. Swap the capitalisation of the first and second characters (lowercase becomes uppercase and uppercase becomes lowercase. We end up with ‘bAna110a!’.
4. Swap the third and fifth characters. We end up with ‘bA1an10a!’.
Put the resultant password into the website or application where it does it’s magic and unlocks your data.

For all the sites that you visit often, you’ll be able to remember the password in it’s complete form (via muscle memory). For sites that you don’t visit so often, you can take your simple word and produce the result password in only a couple of simple steps. It makes it even easier if you use a pool of common words (like fruit), as you can just keep guessing your way through the common fruits if you happen to forget even the simple password.

There are things you can do to make the passwords even stronger, too:

Use phrases to begin with instead of words. This makes things a bit harder to remember though.
Use longer algorithms. This makes things more annoying to generate a password though.
Use different pools for different purposes. One pool of words for work, one pool of words for banking, one pool of words for websites, and so on. If work ever figures out my algorithm and my work pool and decides to be a bit malicious (unlikely as that may be), they still have to figure out the pools of words I use for other purposes. That buys me a decent chunk time I can use to change the algorithm.

There are a few drawbacks, however. You still have to remember something (although remembering ‘fruit’ really isn’t that difficult). If somebody figures out both your pool of words and your algorithm, you are pretty much screwed. But those are fairly low-risk prices to pay, I think.

I’ve recently converted to using this sort of algorithm-based password mechanism. I think it’s great. I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts too: have you been using it for years? Do you think it’s a stupid idea? Should we all just be using biometrics instead? Let me know!

Jack: The Ten Commandments of Computer Backups

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 04:49:43 +0000

Photo courtesy of Michael Wheeler

I recently put a lot of thought into how I perform my computer backups. I’m one of those people that, while I would only be mildly pissed off by the failure of a hard drive, would be quite angry at myself if I lost even the merest hint of data that I wanted to keep. I used to perform my backups manually, using the Windows backup utility to back data up onto an external hard drive. It worked fine most of the time, but it definitely had process defects… the largest of which being, I had to remember to do it. It required my interaction to succeed (because I had to plug the drive in) and this meant there was always a human element involved. And humans are lazy.

So I set about designing myself the ultimate foolproof backup system. There would be multiple storage media, there would be encryption, there would be checks and validations and several custom-written applications. Then I started thinking, “what exactly am I protecting myself against?” It’s a good question. Here’s the list I came up with:

I need my data to be safe from storage media failure. This may mean a single backup DVD being unreadable, or maybe my primary hard disk drives it’s head into the sand.
I need my data to be safe from the failure of every drive of a particular type, simultaneously. It happens more than you would think, and the consequences usually aren’t pretty (whole RAID arrays failing, with all their ‘safe’ data, usually makes people a bit upset).
I need to make sure my data can’t be stolen. If it is stolen (or people I don’t want reading my data try to do so) then it should appear as meaningless gibberish.
I need my data to be safe from being corrupted while in storage, or while being transferred between storage devices.
My data needs to be safe from theft or fire, which could mean every storage device in a particular location is unusable.
My data needs to be safe from natural disasters, which could take out an entire city or state. Unlikely, but it’s the kind of thing most people don’t plan for.
I need to be able to search for data that I’ve accidentally deleted, and I need back.
If my data is anywhere not under my direct control, I need to be able to trust the people who do control them.
I have to assume that if my backup hasn’t been tested (i.e. I haven’t tried to restore from it) then the backup isn’t any good.
Finally, I shouldn’t have to do anything… computers should be smart enough these days to back themselves up.

That was all I could think of, though I’m sure there are additional points (leave a comment or email me, please!). Then I figured out what I had to do in order to prevent these situations from happening.

Points one and two are the easiest to solve, and are really what most people think of when they think of “backup” plans. The solution is simple: keep your data on multiple storage media, and those different storage media should be different types.
Point three is pretty simple to solve: encrypt everything you can possibly encrypt. This also partially side-steps point eight, because if your data is encrypted, you don’t have to trust them to not read it, you only have to trust them to not delete it. And you don’t need to trust them to not delete it if you’ve got the data in multiple locations (i.e. somewhere not under their control).
Point four can be partially solved by taking checksums of the data (which can be done at the same time it is encrypted). If a checksum doesn’t match, something has gone wrong and should be tried again or looked at by a human. There is the issue of what happens if the original data is corrupted. I put this in the too-hard basket for now, though the use of a RAID array can reduce the likelihood of this.
Points five and six are closely related, and also solved together. Every good backup plan should make use of off-site backups, where a copy of data is kept away from the original. Point five might mean keeping a copy in another building (or in my case, at my parent’s house a few kilometres away). Point six means I might consider going further. Ideally I’d like to store a copy of my data on another continent, just in case of nuclear war. If I survive, my data should too.
Point seven means I should be creating archives of data, so that copies of old files are kept so that I can go back in time. I would like to be able to choose copies from every day for a week, then every week for a year. After a year, I’m probably not going to remember that I once had a file.
Points nine and ten are quite possibly the trickiest. To solve them, I have to write automatic scripts to do all these backup tasks, then write automatic scripts to try recovering from the data and make sure it’s in perfect state. I also need to do this manually, just in case my scripts stop working (it is a computer, after all).

So there was my analysis of the backup problem done. Now for the design stage. My current working computer systems consist of a laptop (running Windows 7), a desktop (dual-booting Windows 7 and Debian GNU/Linux), and my home server (which runs Debian GNU/Linux). So I chose to do the following:

I decided that, since it was turned on all the time, my home server would be the primary location for all my treasured data. Every other location for my data would feed off that. My laptop and my desktop will be synchronised to my server using software such as rsync running on a very frequent schedule. Ideally I will code a switch into the script on my laptop that does syncs less often when I’m not at home, to avoid wasting bandwidth. This will give me three or four working copies of my data, depending on how implementation goes.
My server has two hard drives, and I’m going to use this to my advantage. The first hard drive has my primary working copy of data, and the second drive is where the backups go. So I’ll write another script that will take my working copies from my first hard drive, perform archival on them (using tar), encrypt them and checksum them (using encryption that money can’t buy) and copy them to my second hard drive. This gives me the ability to go back in time through my data, if need be. At this stage there are some things I won’t backup, either for legal reasons (I’m fairly sure the MP3 backups of my music collection shouldn’t be stored off-site under Australian law) or for practical reasons (videos are just too large to transfer off-site over the Internet).
I still haven’t solved the problem of off-site backups. To solve this, I’m planning to make use of Amazon S3, which is a cloud backup solution offered by everybody’s ~~favourite~~ ~~friendly~~ forgettable online book store, Amazon. Because my data has now been encrypted, I don’t have to trust them at all. I can just copy it across, mark it as being invisible to the wider world, and forget about it. I will also take up an offer from my friend Jamie to store my data on his NAS, which gives me another off-site backup location. I’m in Tasmania, Jamie is in Queensland, Amazon is in the U.S.A., and my data is safe.
I’m also planning to fit my server with a DVD burner and write a script that backs up my most crucial data (such as financial information and treasured memories) onto a DVD every week or so. Encrypted, of course. The only problem is that I need to remember to go and change the DVD over every week.
Finally, I have to write scripts to occasionally check the consistency of my data, so that nothing suffers from bit rot.

I haven’t completed the process of implementation yet (in fact I’ve hardly started). Already though, I feel safer knowing that I’ve thought about the process of storing my data, and that makes me feel a lot safer. Most people don’t think about backups until it’s too late, and perhaps maybe they should.

Jack: TP-Link Homeplug AV200 Review

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 02:16:54 +0000

A few months ago I moved in with my girlfriend (yay! ), and this necessitated the moving of all my computer equipment to her house. At my old place, I had strung Ethernet cables all down the hallway between the various rooms, and although aesthetically unpleasant, certainly did the trick. Moving in with my girlfriend meant I could no longer have the freedom to string cables everywhere. It looked horrible, somebody was going to trip on something eventually, and being in a rented house meant that we had to keep the place looking half-decent (Ethernet cables, surprisingly enough, are not everybody’s idea of a home decoration). So what to do?

My first thought, naturally enough, was to hook up some wireless adapters. This plan worked very well for one area of the house (where my server rack now sits), but horribly for another (where my desktop is). I read about the new-fangled Homeplug idea, which involves sending Ethernet frames over the AC power network in our home. I was dubious, but intrigued; Homeplug seemed to be the solution to my problems, in theory:

Turns existing cables that are in every home into a computer network.
Doesn’t use up valuable space in the wireless spectrum.
Devices can just plug in via standard Ethernet, without the need for drivers.

Of course I decided to give it a go! I hurried on down to my local computer store and bought myself a pair of Homeplug adapters, these ones made by TP-Link (who, despite being Chinese owned and operated, make some excellent equipment). I plugged one in near my router and cabled it in, and plugged the other end in near my desktop computer. Unfortunately I had to plug it in via the powerboard due to the size of the adapter, but according to the documentation makes no difference. I immediately noticed several problems:

The network is slow. Very slow. The theoretical speed of these Homeplug adapters is 200 Mb/s straight out of the box, which should compete with 802.11n very nicely. The real speed I got was 10Mb/s, which is slower than the Internet connection we have. Not good.
The whole Homeplug network is a single collision domain. For the un-Ethernet-savvy, this basically means that the 10Mb/s I mentioned above is shared between every device plugged in via Homeplug, instead of standard Ethernet where every device would get 10Mb/s to itself.

Worst of all though, was this:

If my desktop was plugged in via Homeplug, every two or three seconds, for no reason other than that Homeplug was plugged in, my computer would freeze. I have no idea why. I reinstalled Windows and used a different Ethernet adapter, and it made no difference at all. On the other hand, Homeplug worked absolutely fine in every other computer I plugged it into.

In the end, I couldn’t stand my computer pausing every three seconds to think, so I gave up on Homeplug (I handed the adapters to my housemate, who is successfully using them to plug a wireless black-hole in his bedroom). I’m now using a top-end wireless adapter and a strong aerial, and it seems to be working.

As an aside, I read that Homeplug does have serious security issues in it’s out-of-the-box configuration. You have to set up something similar to wireless network security in order to prevent your neighbours from connecting to your Homeplug network.

Basically, the short version is this: Homeplug is an awful idea, and avoid it if at all possible. Just use wireless, which is faster and far better tested. But if you are going to buy a Homeplug adapter or two, buying the TP-Link models isn’t a bad idea, they’re pretty decent.

Chris: San Francisco Streets

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 19:41:35 +0000

I really like this shot — looking up Pine Street in San Francisco, with a B&W conversion done by punching a bunch of buttons in *cough*iphoto*cough.

I’ve been told it makes a good background screen for a certain 2:3-ratio mobile device, too.

Update: actually identified the street that the photo is of.

Chris: Time Flies! (Adventures in the San Francisco Bay Area, part 1)

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 19:26:42 +0000

… When you’re completely distracted by all manner of things! So, as promised, here are a bunch of pretty photos of the things that I’ve done whilst here:

Wandered around San Francisco, looking at the awesome architecture…

Had fantastic coffee, brewed with SCIENCE^w SIPHONS! (Thanks to @bluebottlemint for that…)

Caught the Caltrain between San Francisco and Mountain View far too many times.

Visited clichéd tourist attractions (actually, the bridge is pretty spectacular, and I’m very glad I went to have a look at it!)…

Other things not featuring photos:

Doing a cross-city trek to a Best Buy to purchase some Nexus S phones for friends back home.
Getting an Uber cab to pick us up from this Best Buy (LOL!). Actually, Ubers are pretty damn cool — it’s a mobile app used to hire private town cars (think private drivers for expensive hotels). The cars are all Lincolns (high-end sedans), and the service is incredibly convenient.

Since then I’ve been based in the lovely city of Mountain View, which appears to be the epicentre of much of the tech industry — it’s home to such notable companies as Mozilla and Google, and the coffee shops are full to the brim with people sporting laptops… and there’s ubiquitous free wireless internet provided thanks to Google. I’m spending a lot of my time at Red Rock Coffee, who I’m eternally grateful for, as they helped me to discover that the variety of espresso drink known as “Caffe Latte” in Australia is known as “Cappucino” over here [1]. They have an OK rotation of single origin espressi here, though they taste a bit over-roasted at times… it beats the crap out of everything else in the area though…

Downtown Mountain View, including Red Rock (on the right of the shot).

So that’s the short wrap-up of what I’ve been doing of lately. Hopefully I’ll have some more to report on in the next week or so. Or earlier. I’ve no idea.

Oh, and thanks to Paris Buttfield-Addison for showing me around the area, and also to Jon Manning, who occasionally emerged whenever Paris would let him

Until the next post,

–Chris

[1] Ordering a “Latte” here appears to get you three weak flat whites served in a bucket.

Chris: Movements

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 21:19:32 +0000

And once again in the flurry of action that occurs during and after LCA, I have completely neglected to update my blog.

So since then, I’ve been doing various bits of development work for my benevolent mad scientist overlords at Secret Lab; this Thursday I’m off to the San Francisco Bay area to do three weeks of onsite work with my next client, which should be thoroughly enthralling.

I suspect the most reliable place to find any evidence whatsoever of my recent activity will be my Flickr stream, though I may take Jethro Carr’s lead and just post regular blogs with lots of pictures every other day (at least it *looks* like he’s had regular activity…).

Until the next post, whenever that may be!

–Chris

Jack: Saying goodbye to the cloud

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 01:18:54 +0000

My friend Michael Wheeler has written an excellent article on the whys and hows of removing your data from the cloud. This post is basically just to point you all towards it.

Over the last few years I’ve been in a similar process, getting rid of my Google account and hosting my own email. I’ve attempted to get rid of Facebook, and learned a lot about myself, my friends, and Facebook in the process. I now no longer have twitter (again) and I’m just generally being a lot more careful with my data.

I think everybody will benefit from thinking just a little more about where their information goes, so I highly recommend you read this article.

Jack: linux.conf.au – Day 1

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:55:54 +0000

Today was the first proper day of linux.conf.au, which is being held this year in Brisbane. This morning we were treated to a welcoming speech by conference organiser Dr Shaun Nykvist, and a presentation on the Google Summer of Code happening this year. In the welcoming speech, Shaun detailed how the organisers and volunteers had to work against water and time to get the conference ready despite Brisbane’s horrific flooding:

“I’ve got some lovely photos of our old venue with sandbags against the flood zones. It’s a shame the sandbags were about three metres lower than the water.”

After morning tea (some very lovely cakes and biscuits were provided) it was time for the Miniconfs. During the morning session I attended the Open Programming Miniconf, organised by my friend Chris Neugebauer. The first talk was about perl5i, which is a package of library modules for perl that makes it an almost usable language (almost, I don’t think that there is anything can truly save it). It was very interesting stuff, seeing how the syntax and semantics of a language can change. The speaker (Michael Schwern) was brilliant as well, which is always nice.

The next talk was about the F# programming language, designed by Microsoft. Brian McKenna’s speaking wasn’t great (but it was his first big talk, so that can be forgiven). Although I dislike the idea of languages that run on top of runtimes (such as JVM and .NET), F# looks like a good invention. Indeed, it’s basically where Microsoft develops and tests features that might be useful to put into C#.

After that was a talk by Brianna Laugher on generating English-language text using software tools, from a set of data. She was using it as part of her job at the Bureau of Meteorology to automate the generation of weather reports from their models. The idea was hugely interesting, and something that I want to implement. However, I didn’t really understand how the generation itself worked… quite a few arcane symbols seemed to be in use. I think I got the general gist though.

The final talk before lunch was about Go, the programming language developed at Google. I originally thought Go was a programming language for children, but I’ve now been set straight. It looks like something to test out… which is being added to my very long list of stuff to try now.

After lunch I went to see two talks from the Haecksen Miniconf. The first was about how open source software can help save the world, mostly by developing open source software to fix natural disaster problems, and doing it really really quickly and cheaply. The second was about setting up an overly-complicated home network, an area with which I am well acquainted.

Then it was back to the Open Programming Miniconf, where I learned about the demise of Java (basically, the Java community is dead, but Java itself will probably survive, and the JVM will definitely survive). The final talk before afternoon tea was about how to create compilers for the JVM using a parser written in Scala. Unfortunately due to the use of Scala I lost most of the detail of the talk, it went straight over my head. Which is a pity, because I was really looking forward to that talk. Ah well, guess you can’t win them all. After all this though, I was really interested in designing programming languages and compilers. I might have to give it a go.

During the final session of the day I was treated to a brilliant talk by Adam Harvey, who is a PHP developer (i.e. actually develops the PHP interpreter) telling us about the state of the PHP language. It seems Debian Stable is hugely out of date… but this is nothing new. He’s a great speaker, and I look forward to hearing his talk tomorrow, even though I don’t know what it’s about.

Last up was Jethro Carr, a hacker from NZ I know from attempting to complete his 30 Days of Geek challenge. He talked about the software revision control management tool thing he wrote, and talked about the benefits of using such software. Personally I quite enjoy using Redmine, but it’s requirement for Ruby means that I might be looking for an alternative when I get around to setting up my own installation. Currently I use the Quokforge service, run by one of my friends on OSDev.org.

So that was day 1. Or rather, the official day 1. Since then I’ve bought a printer and been to an Irish pub. More LCA news coming tomorrow, I hope.

Jack: linux.conf.au – Day 0

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 23:01:05 +0000

Yesterday was day 0 of my adventure to linux.conf.au in Brisbane. I woke up extremely early (5:15am AEDT, which is 4:15am AEST) and caught a flight to Sydney and then on to Brisbane. I caught the AirTrain into the city (which is awesome, so much better than any other capital city’s offering) and met my friend Michael to drop off my bag at the hotel. After catching up with my sister for lunch (she lives in Brisbane) I headed off to the venue for the conference, QUT in Kelvin Grove.

I sat around with a few of my friends from the ##australia IRC channel on Freenode, while discussing the conference’s preperation on #linux.conf.au on Freenode. After a while, I went and registered for the conference, and got some awesome swag. The item of note is a Yubico Yubikey, which seems to be a really awesome solution to the password problem.

After the registration, I went with a few of the other ##australia geeks to get pizza from a local place in Kelvin Grove. It was a lot of impromptu fun, especially when a few more geeks from linux.conf.au showed up and also had a bite to eat.

After the pizza, it was back to the conference venue for the “noobie’s talk” which introduced us to what happens this week. In short, it sounds like a lot of fun. The presenter of the talk, Rusty Russell, has a great sense of humour. We then went off to the pub with the other first-time attendees, but we didn’t stay long because it was loud and we went off to something better.

Most of the attendees are staying at a place called Urbanest, which looks like an interesting place, mostly because of the density of geeks. Last night I went up to Urbanest for an hour or so, and watched the cricket and talked to a few other geeks. I met Jethro Carr, a geek from NZ whose blog I read. I then retired for the night, because you can only be awake for so long without a drip of caffeine.

Chris: LCA2011 Starts Here!

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 20:05:20 +0000

Oh hey, I appear to be in Brisbane!

Linux.conf.au 2011 starts tomorrow, which means that today is the fun day of hanging around at the conference accommodation and watching the comings and goings of LCA people, and registering for the conference. Registration opens from 16:00 at the QUT Kelvin Grove Campus*, I personally intend to get to the venue sometime around 17:00.

As I understand, Rusty Russell’s usual newbies’ session is being held today, and that’s on at 18:30, also at QUT Kelvin Grove. If you’ve not been to LCA, this session comes highly recommended — I should know, I’ve been to all of them! (wait, what?) The session helps explain what LCA is all about to people who haven’t been, contains important advice about what sessions to show up to, and how to read the schedule.

Well, that’s it for me. Maybe another update later today?

–Chris

*Kelvin Grove being the QUT campus where the conference was originally scheduled NOT to be at. The conference organisers have done an awesome job at making sure that the event is going ahead at a new venue, especially given the conditions in Brisbane of late. Kudos etc!

Jack: The Ultimate House

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:22:08 +0000

Recently I was talking with a few friends, and mentioned a few of the things that my ultimate house was going to have, when I was rich and famous and got around to building it. They suggested a few more ideas, and we came up with the following list:

It’s a castle, with two moats. The outer one has a crocodile (to feed Hollywood A-list celebrities to) and the inner one has a wave machine for surfing.
Instead of a front-door key, you get a remote control. The remote control has a button on it for launching a fireworks display whenever you want.
There’s an entire game park out the back. Animals in the park included cassowaries, lions, tigers, and bears. All of whom are capable of eating various A-list celebrities.
The castle is on a cliff, and going down from the castle to the seas requires the use of a network of secret caves.
There’s a maze and a labyrinth.
A medieval banquet hall in the middle of the castle, complete with 3 or 4 long tables. I imagine this room will look a lot like the great hall in the Harry Potter films.
There’s a leaking dungeon with lots of chains and prison cells, for keeping A-list celebrities in.
A full recording studio.
A full restaurant kitchen, with three pantries. One for tea, one for chilli, and one for everything else.
There’s a room specifically for listening to Pink Floyd music, buried deep in the castle. It’s completely black with no windows. The only furniture is a La-Z-Boy recliner and two speakers, with everything set up for perfect reproduction of sound.
A yacht is moored off the coast.
So is a submarine, which is used to travel between the coast and the lighthouse on an island offshore.
There’s a runway long enough to be capable of landing a Space Shuttle.
Stored at the end of the runway is my private Boeing 747 and home-built RV-4 land capable float plane.
There’s a 3-storey library. It’s got the wooden rails around the side with the ladders that zoom around the walls. At the top level there are two doors at either end, and connecting the doors is a suspension bridge covered in vines.
A super-fast Internet connection, of course. We’re talking multiple gigabits per second fibre backbone straight to the AARNET and PIPE networks.
A cinema complex with 4 theatres. One is constantly playing Star Wars movies, one is constantly playing Star Trek, and one is constantly playing French films. The two playing Star Trek and Star Wars are defended against humans entering them by a team of skutters (from the Red Dwarf TV series).

Jack: Hacking Work – or how to write a book about nothing at all

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:12:25 +0000

I recently travelled on an aeroplane to the Boxing Day cricket match in Melbourne. Before the flight home I was killing some time in the Borders in the terminal, when a book caught my eye. It’s name? Hacking Work, by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein.

After reading the back cover, I bought the book immediately. Who wouldn’t want to work smarter and get more done with less effort? It’s me in a nutshell. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed.

For most non-fiction books, the back cover is a very rough summation of the goal of the book, along with a few of the more interesting little titbits. For this book however, the blurb is the entire contents of the book. The other 200 odd pages are just fluff.

Section 1 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.

Section 2 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.

Section 3 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.

Section 4 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that their employees will try to hack work too.

Unfortunately, nowhere in this book are there actual instructions for any methods of actually getting more done in less time. There are occasional snippets detailing what people have done before, usually followed by “we don’t recommend actually doing this”.

I personally consider myself somewhat of a life hacker, and this is a travesty of a book about “hacking”. The severe degradation of the meaning of the word “hack” is beyond annoying, it’s almost insulting.

Zero stars. I wouldn’t read it if it was free.

Chris: BSc(Hons) Graduation mk.3

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:19:41 +0000

On Monday, I had the wonderful opportunity to walk through my third graduation ceremony for what is effectively the same degree! So a bit on how that happened, maybe?

Well, I completed my Bachelor of Science with Honours degree in June, from which I graduated with First Class Honours in August. Just on two weeks ago, I received a further letter, suggesting that I attend another graduation to collect a University Medal. The University Medal is the highest award that can be awarded to an Undergraduate Student at the University of Tasmania, and my friend Josh Deprez did an exceedingly thorough writeup of the dimensions etc of the Medal itself when he won his last year.

I note with some amusement the comment that I wrote on that post:

Hmmm. Not so convinced I want to aim for a uni medal now. Really really worrying about the number of opportunities the dean would get to mispronounce my name.

Luckily for me, they paid attention to this and solved the problem by awarding two other Medals in the same ceremony (one to a Maths/Physics student, Paul Stack; the other to my colleague from Computer Science, Theo Wadsley, both of whom thoroughly deserved their awards). This resulted in the script detailed in Josh’s post being altered to something resembling:

Naturally, my name still needed to be read out, so I made the requisite alteration to my card in the hope of something resembling the correct pronunciation appearing (this is primarily due to the Dean at my BSc graduation in 2009 pronouncing my surname as ‘Nee-ge-boa’):

The result wasn’t that bad (Something along the lines of ‘Neu-bauer’, which I’ll accept as a pass ).

Since Josh’s graduation last year, they’ve made slight variations to the process of handing out Testamurs, instead of having blank scrolls handed out, the testamurs are now handed out in envelopes at the ceremony. In this case, like every other student, I was handed an envelope reading “Your Graduation Certificate”, bearing a large UTAS Lion on it. Unlike every other student, mine did not contain a testamur (I collected mine at my proper graduation in August), but instead a blank piece of cardboard — this naturally led to jokes about the worth of my degree…

Finally, here’s a photo of me with the medal, and its obverse, just in case you were at all interested:

Chris: LCA2011 Anti-Harassment Policy

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 10:08:48 +0000

Further to a post made by Rusty Russell earlier today, LCA2011 have just published a detailed anti-harassment policy on the conference website. Well done to the LCA2011 team for promptly and publicly preparing such a policy.

Chris: Linux.conf.au 2011 Miniconf Timetables etc.

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 23:34:53 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that the two miniconfs that I am involved with at Linux.conf.au 2011, the Open Programming Miniconf and the FOSS in Research & Student Innovation Miniconf have published their draft schedules:

Unfortunately, you’ll also notice that both Miniconfs lack a complete schedule at this point in time. If you have a talk that would be of interest to either miniconf, we’d love it if you could submit a proposal as soon as possible so that we can publish our completed schedules! The CFPs for each miniconf are available from:

I look forward to seeing you at either of these miniconfs, presenting or otherwise!

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 18 – Most cringe-worthy geek moment

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:46:36 +0000

Ooops, I’ve missed days 16 and 17. Meh.

Nothing in particular, but I do have a couple of counts I could make:

Various occasions in High School computing classes where I found myself correcting my teacher.
Any time when someone uses Comic Sans when they should know better.
Seeing Jethro’s selection of the word ‘cringeworthy’. (:D)
The Oracle Sales guy at LCA2008, giving the same speech about their RHEL support programme on no fewer than 3 occasions, all of which I happened to make it to. Hrnnngh.

I’m sure I could come up with more if pressed, but right now I’m not! See you at the next post!

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 15 – A geek experience that changed your life.

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 02:00:03 +0000

So the original topic for this was “Earliest geek experience”. I really couldn’t identify with that one, so I’m going to do something completely different. I’m sorry if this one’s a bit heavy, but it needs to be written.

I’d like to tell you about one of the worst times in my life. The year was 2006 — it was early January (early enough that I was still coming to terms with the fact that it was 2006…). The last term of school in 2005 was fantastic — I’d had one of my most successful periods academically, was successful in programming competitions, and I had a number of excellent friends who I shared many interests and experiences with. In the new year, that changed. I had a massive falling out with a very good friend, which caused me to question every aspect of the identity that I had built up over the past few years. I became unsure of personality traits, which I though were an important part of who I was, and which I thought were endearing to those around me. I questioned my interests in life. I questioned the validity of every relationship I had come to value over those late years of my schooling.

It is one of two times in my life that I had seriously felt suicidal. I guess this is one of the inevitable results of constantly questioning one’s identity. With each aspect of my personality that I felt needed to be changed to be worthwhile to people, I questioned the effort that would be needed to make that change. Thought after thought permeated my brain, and the weight of it all brought me to the conclusion that faced with the mounting “evidence” (in that state of mind, burden of proof is extremely low) that it probably wasn’t worthwhile to make such changes. At the end of it all, and after all of the changes that I would have to make, the person that I would have had to have been would have been unrecognisable to the person that I was then.

I still have no idea why I survived that week.

I made it through to the Sunday of that week, and was welcomed with open arms onto a flight to Sydney to attend that year’s National Computer Science School. It was during that week I properly discovered Python for the first time — it’s since become my favourite programming language. More so than that, it was a week of hanging around with geeks from all around Australia (and one from New Zealand), each of whom had different areas of interest and inclinations, and each had different skill sets. The tutors were smart uni students apparently studying interesting thing. The week gave me an insight in what it meant to be involved with IT and Computer Science. By the end of the week, I’d made heaps of friends (some of whom I still keep in contact with) who I shared interests and abilities with, and it was a fantastic revelation that there could be so many people around the country who I could just talk geek with. By the end of the week, things had resolved themselves back home — I’d forgiven and forgotten whatever it was that caused my friend and I to fall out, and I had a renewed drive to be awesome with my life.

I have no doubt, however, that I was saved by that week at NCSS. I’ve never had severe depression since, and I’ve been proud of my identity as a computer science-loving geek ever since.

Two years later I returned, this time as a tutor of the group that I had taken part in two years earlier — partly because I wanted to pay back a debt, and partly because I really really wanted to. Returning in 2008 led to me forming even more lasting friendships with people, not only tutors but students as well. I communicate with many of them every day, in one way or another. It’s where I first saw a Google office and decided that I really really wanted to become an intern there. Just afterwards I attended my first LCA in Melbourne, and have found, both there and in other geeky circles around the country, that my ties with NCSS are shared with geeks around the country — the line “I saw the girl on the hill with the telescope” is a wonderful calling card (if you ever hear James Curran lecture you’ll know what I mean by that).

So thanks to James, Tara and Michael (and everyone else from that week in 2006, you are too numerous to mention) — you have made something to be truly proud of… You may even have saved a life

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 14 – Favourite Computer Conference

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 06:08:48 +0000

Oh. You probably won’t be surprised to hear this one, but the answer is Linux.conf.au the Australasian Free and Open Source Software Conference. I’ve been attending since Melbourne 2008, and have since “been” to Hobart in 2009 and travelled to Wellington to attend in 2010.

LCA is a great conference because it gives people in the broader FOSS-using community in Australia (people like me) the opportunity to meet the people who put together the software that we used on a day-to-day basis. It turns out that they’re an entirely friendly bunch of people, who are all too willing to share their experience: in 2008, Andrew Tridgell spent 20 minutes one-on-one with me explaining how a particularly awesome piece of code he’d written worked.

In 2010 I ran one of the short single-day conference streams (known as “miniconfs”), on the topic of Open Programming Languages. This was a fantastic opportunity to give back to the LCA community, and help bring more of the topics that I was interested in to LCA — we had a fantastic lineup of presenters, and the day went awesomely. I’m glad to have the opportunity to do this again: I’m running the Open Programming miniconf at LCA2011 in Brisbane, and along with my friend Peter Lyle, will be running the Research and Student Innovation Miniconf. Both of them are shaping up to be excellent miniconfs.

So yes, LCA is in Brisbane this January, and I thoroughly recommend you get along if you can!

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 13 – How did you become such a geek? Career? Personal interest?

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:14:58 +0000

I can’t remember not having the traits that I described on day 1, so I guess that means that it’s a combination of personal interest and lifelong obsession. Not much that can be said here

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 12 – What area do you want to expand your skills into?

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 09:10:54 +0000

I can’t really think of much to say here, other than that I’d love to continue expanding my skills. As a soon-to-be Ph.D student, I’d love to expand my researching abilities (papers papers whoo!) — hopefully resulting in an excellent thesis topic, and potentially an excellent thesis too. As a coder, I want to learn more skills and techniques to help achieve my ends quicker. But really, I’m pretty happy with the direction my geekery is headed, and expanding out in those directions is going to continue to be useful.

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: Days 10 & 11

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 08:49:52 +0000

So yesterday I was in the air, and unable to do day 10′s post. Luckily they make enough sense combined to combine into a single post.

Picture, screenshot and specifications of your primary computer.

Apologies for the blurry photo. I’ve shown this one because it contains both of my primary computers.

The desktop is a generic Athlon 64×2 of some specification, with some RAM and some hard discs in them, it also has an nVidia (HRRRRRNGH) graphics card of some description to drive my two monitors — I honestly don’t care much beyond that, as it serves its purpose. It runs Debian “testing”. The keyboard is a Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 — I first used one of those during my internship at Google. I liked them so much that I bought one the moment I got home, and I haven’t looked back

The laptop is my general purpose on-the-road device. It’s a black MacBook from 2008, with an Intel Core Duo 2.4GHz in it. It also has RAM.

Favourite hacking environment – music, light, seating, etc

Turns out you’ve got all of the clues you need in there as well — the corner of my bedroom where my desk is serves as my primary hacking area. It’s softly-lit, and has plenty of working space when I can be bothered cleaning it up

As for music, well, it really depends on my mood whilst hacking on something — sometimes it’s nothing at all, but other times it’s something from my extremely esoteric and varietous music collection.

Oh, and if I get bored/stuck on a problem, I can always look out the window!

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 09 – What OS/distribution do you run?

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:10:48 +0000

I’m a user of UNIX-like operating systems of different persuasions. On my laptop I run Max OS X 10.6. I’m not hugely attached to the Mac platform, for example the vast majority of applications I run are Open Source, or sufficiently generic that I can find Linux-based alternatives at the drop of a hat.

At home, I run Debian GNU/Linux’s “Testing” distribution. I like Debian, firstly because of APT/Aptitude, which makes delivering updates reasonably easy. However, these tools are available in a great many distributions now. The reason I use Debian over, say, Ubuntu is that Debian’s quality control protocols ensure that updates work correctly enough of the time that updating packages on a daily basis is not usually a dangerous process.

The “Testing” distribution’s policy with respect to release-blocking bugs means that the distribution is stable enough for everyday non-critical use, and that updates are reasonably timely.

Bring on the Red Hat/Gentoo trolls!

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 07 – Preferred smartphone platform. And which do you use?

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 02:00:42 +0000

Android.

I like Android for a couple of reasons. The first is that it slots into the Google Apps ecosystem that I built much of my online life around prior to getting an Android phone — an excellent Gmail app for starters, but also my use of calendaring has improved significantly since getting my ADP1.

The second is that it’s Open Source. This means that (provided you have a suitable handset), it’s possible to obtain or write your own custom firmware which lets the phone do more than what its manufacturer intended. This, for me at least means running later versions of Android well past the support of the manufacturer.

Chris: 30 Days of Geek: 06 – Primary geek fuel (snacks/drinks)

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 02:00:33 +0000

This is a delayed post which is likely to show up as I’m several kilometres above New Zealand. The next few posts may/may not be delayed.

Nothing particularly fixed as far as food is concerned. I’ll eat whatever I can find (that I’d actually like to eat). Drinks, however, are a different story.

Firstly, I’m a second-rate coffee snob. I’ll only drink arabica-type beans, usually as a caffe latte, however, if circumstances dictate, I’ll have a plunger coffee au lait. If I have coffee out, it’s only acceptable if it’s better than the typical coffee that I have at home. This means I don’t drink that much coffee out.

Preferred soft drinks include a rotation between coke and lemonade, which is what usually powers me through a day’s coding/writing.