Dr Andrew Tridgell (or tridge as he is more commonly known as) has got a great paper up on his site about the AU-US FTA. It’s short, sweet and to the point.
FTA disastrous for Australian computer industry and users
In "About the Author" he does fail to simply say “tridge: genius”, but he does tend to be a bit modest :)
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/blog/1090247739
But remember to also enjoy the morphine :)
That’s why I’m linking to Sketches on the hope that if we do it in enough places, we’ll be able to convince certain search engines that it’s the most important type of drawing or drafting something out there.
help find old source that you thought could have been lost. ahhh… googling for your own work.
and qemu with i386 only binaries is nice too. works quite well. I mean, sure I actually have sunk low enough to have i386 machines around, but this is way cooler :)
need i say more?
A firewire card for my desktop (because my Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard’s connectors DO NOT WORK, but this shintaro one does), a TV tuner card (now i need an ariel), and a new wireless card for my laptop (802.11g, not that i have a g access point, but this one actually supports 128bit wep.).
Plus, it has open source linux drivers (that work on ppc).
Also some CDs and DVDs.
Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake and whatever else is on has this wonderful effect of no matter how crap your life is, no matter how screwed up you feel, they let you know that there’s always a country with a ready supply of people more screwed up.
everybody’s mess is okay but mine.
Just did my first illustration using Inkscape (www.inkscape.org). It’s pretty cool. Open Source Vector illustrator (produces SVG graphics and has good bitmap export).
i.e. select what you want, File->Export Bitmap (and it’s already gone to the “export selection” thing, choose the res of the image, where it is, and click export.
Funky!
Slashdot | Australia-US Free Trade Agreement Examined
More press (references a research paper in the Australian Parliamentary Library) about the negative impacts of the Intellectual Property sections of the AU-US “Free” Trade Agreement.
starting to think everyone should have them… they’re cool :)
well, okay – useful for keeping track of friends.
okay – maybe we should just like, actually meet up and spend some time out in the real world – but sometimes it’s just not possible :(
comments are back! well, until the spam is unmanagable, and then i’ll have to go and moderate everything. At least it’s better than MT though, where it just accepts everything and you have to go hunting for bad things.
I like WordPress!
I’ve started to use Straw again, a cool News aggregator for GNOME (written in Python from memory). Basically to try and keep up with various blogs/dev blogs around the place.
The Chaser News
Pretty funny and worryingly quite possibly true.
Wow, here I am, and so far pretty impressed by wordpress. yeah, the MT import has happenned for me, now to update Giz.
and find out why my last two entries aren’t displaying….
http://www.linux.org.au/fta/testimony/
Rusty presented to the Senate Select committee (with slides!) and did a really good job. This is compulsory reading – it explains the issues using easy-to-understand language.
Okay, so debian finally caught up to the rest of the world and unstable has GNOME 2.6 packages. So, everything has settled down, and i’ve dist-upgraded my laptop.
After a logout/login cycle (unfortunately, everything doesn’t "just happen" when you upgrade, I’m now onto GNOME 2.6 and spatial nautilus.
Yes, this whole idea where "the window IS the folder" idea that has made computers usable since the first Mac is back. And, Guess what? That’s right, it’s GOOD! There’s the browser interface also, so you can go and do things how you used to.
my mother has been using this for a bit (since we put Fedora Core 2 on here machine, well, actually, one of the test releases).
i’m also gathering up the strength to go and install FC2 on my desktop…. as long as I can get DVD stuff going, i’ll be okay :)
and then there’s the whole bootloader thing… gah. i fucking hate the way partitioning and bootloading works. generally, not just the extremely bad way that PCs do it.
reminds me… gotta test my yaboot patches for sparse files on XFS.
and move away from movable type.
Today (well, *technically* yesterday, ’cause it’s 2:30am on sat now) my new headphones arrived in at work. From Grado Labs, Alessandro Music Series One.
Pretty good so far.
Having to go through my iMic on my desktop PC as the built in sound has too much noise (you hear this high pitched tone with the headphones).
knew that imic would be useful.. :)
The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
This optimization prevents the wasted copying of large amounts of data (the address space, easily tens of megabytes); in the common case a process executes a new executable image immediately after forking.
been doing a fair bit of mods to memberdb recently – getting features in.
– new css based look (which is almost correct)
– more solid code around the place
– better error reporting (that needs debugging… hahaha)
– a start on the positions tracking UI
– change password UI
– sorting of the memberlist
– moving look and messages into site customisable directories (so nobody has to get scared by memberdb code itself)
so, been busy :)
some of these have made it to the stable branch… i guess i’ll put more of them in there as things actually stabilise. Especially since linux.org.au is actually running the stable 0.2 branch now (which is nowhere near final).
Have no real schedule or ideas on when to release 0.2, maybe when i’ve done the positions stuff, fixed the CSS and made a “edit member info” (accessible to admin and each member) UI. That’d be a real big leap from 0.1 :)
I’d like to put GPG stuff on the cards for 0.3…. but it’ll be tricky finding a nice way to integrate everything. I’m thinking along the lines of a UI where a person enters their key ID, fingerprint and keyserver (then we pull the key using gpg). To help verify, we could then send all email gpg signed/encrypted :)
we’d then have to have a not-well-trusted GPG key for memberdb installations – which could be… interesting….
but hey – it’s the one big feature request from an outside group.
They want to have GPG signed applications – but maybe they’ll settle for sending GPG encrypted mail to the applicant (saying “confirm membership like this”). The validity of the key can always be checked before approving the membership – it’s going to have to be semi manual anyway.