what are we doing today, brain?

Many people talk about how Microsoft need to make their products more interoperable through using Open Standards and publishing their own protocols and standards. It was announced in December that Microsoft have licensed a large proportion of their protocol documentation to the SAMBA team, which effectively means in the coming years we will be able to interface with and replace annoying vendor lock-in traps like Sharepoint and Exchange. This is excellent news, and although my blogpost is a little late, I wanted to extend a huge thanks and congratulations to Andrew Tridgell and the SAMBA team on this excellent outcome!

All the details with links and such are on the SAMBA website here. If you are involved in a FOSS project that could benefit from this, you should chat to the SAMBA team.

• Breaking through the silicon ceiling - smh.com.au
  “There are a lot of women doing very powerful stuff in technology, and we’re kicking ass,” said Capper. Nice article, interesting project showing off women running successful ICT companies in Australia.
  (tags: ICT women Australia business)
• Computerworld - IT’s Million $ Babes
  “a great cross blend typically representative of the industry”… “carving a niche into their chosen markets and excelling using a variety of Oracle, Linux, Apache, PHP, .Net, Microsoft SQL, and Web 2.0 technologies”. Another Million $ Babes article.
  (tags: ICT women business Australia)
• FAQ - IT’s Million Dollar Babes
  “Does a certain type of man look at all women as ‘babes’? - YES they do. Will denying the femininity of women in the workplace prevent this? - NO it will not.” Interesting and I think quite true perspective.
  (tags: women australia ict)

Just found this collection of geek art. It has some pretty hilarious references, and I’ve posted my favourites below.

And finally my favourite:

• Computerworld - Tech’s all-time top 25 flops
  Fascinating, keep an eye out for tech flop favourites like Vista and DRM
  (tags: computerworld tech flops vista drm)
• Computerworld - Govt agencies view open source as positive: survey
  A nice article from Rodney Gedda about the AGIMO survey summary released late last year.
  (tags: agimo rodneygedda foss)

For me anyway I have always loved maps, but never really got around to digital mapping much. The Census has given me a perfect opportunity to play as we wanted to map where the Open Source industry and community is roughly located (by suburb for privacy reasons) and for comparison throughout Australia. I’ve had a lot of fun!

The first major challenge was figuring out how to represent the data I had (suburbs, postcodes, etc) into useful data. KML, which is a markup language for this kind of stuff seemed to be the answer along with Googlemaps, at least to start. I found a great little tag called “address” that seemed to make my life easy, until I figured out after an hour or two that it only works in GoogleEarth, not GoogleMaps. Ah well! So now I had to figure out how to change addresses to latitude/longitude information. Enter Batch Geo Code! This website is so simple but so great. You input data and it feeds you back longitude/latitude info, which I could then script into a KML file and voila! A beautiful GoogleMap with all the suburbs represented!

I can’t post the maps yet, but when the Census is released in late February there will be a lot of great information like this Also, a bit of it will be chatted about at linux.conf.au.

Tonight I went and saw the Spicks and Specks roadshow, “Spicks and Spectacular“. Really awesome, see it if you get a chance. Great work by Adam, Myf and Alan!

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) released a simple two page synopsis of their investigation into the use of FOSS in Federal Government agencies recently. They also have several interesting papers about FOSS on their Open Source software page. Some snippets include:

86% of agencies have a positive view of OSS and expect its usage to increase over the next 5 years

Agencies understand that by adopting OSS standards and solutions they could protect their investment in ICT systems, data and software

Agencies indicated their desire to be both vendor and format independent, with the high level of flexibility available to them by using OSS leading to an environment of innovation and transparency

And then the kicker:

OSS vendor support is perceived as problematic and was indicated as the biggest challenge facing OSS adoption by respondents.

Hopefully the soon to be released Census will help overcome the biggest challenge facing FOSS adoption in Government, and then 2008 will be a serious power year for FOSS in Australia The report is due out in late February, and some teasers will be presented at linux.conf.au.

• David Hicks’s complete statement
  David Hicks - “As part of my conditions of release from Guantanamo Bay, I agreed not to speak to the media… before March 30, 2008. It’s my intention to honour this agreement as I don’t want to do anything that might result in my return there.” I hope he
  (tags: davidhicks)

I just found this article which is a few weeks old which has given me more actual information about Hicks than all of the Australian media combined over the last 5 years. Looks like we occasionally have to look international to get local coverage

After basically allowing Hicks to remain in Guantánamo for five years without any significant protest, the former prime minister, John Howard, came under domestic political pressure to secure his release, or at least a trial, and he made what was tantamount to such a demand on Vice President Dick Cheney when Cheney was in Australia in February. Formal charges and the plea bargain quickly followed.

It is interesting to already see Howard being reporting in this way.

Andrew Hendry from Computerworld has done a really interesting article covering the OOXML symposium at the UNSW Cyberlaw Centre in December that I helped coordinate. It is a really interesting piece and covering some of the arguments against OOXML. He’ll apparently be doing an article after this one covering the arguments for OOXML.

Microsoft’s OOXML: The No vote
The first of a two-part series examining the arguments for and against the standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML format.