Category: Uncategorized

Coles Myer are offering an IT scholarship for women. Rock on!

Several months ago, I presented to the Riverwood Community Cente about Linux, and they were so excited they went out and installed a lab of second hand machines running Linux. I helped facilitate getting some spare parts from Computerbank NSW so they could have some more machines, and it was all running very smoothly. They were most excited that they could give the software away to people visiting the centre and that they could use the Ubuntu LiveCd to boot up into multiple languages easily for teaching elderly Arabic and Chinese women amongst others. Anyway, they very recently had an issue where some idiot set fire to their computer room. Most monitors died, and several machines. Luckily I still had a motza of monitors and a few PCs that were originally going to Nhulunbuy but we didn’t need them up there (plus, couriering to Gove is quite expensive). So I donated all the hardware to them to get the computer room up and running again. The room itself needs repairing, but with the new machines when the room is ready, they should have about 10 machines up and going to public access again soon.

I really do think that only the smallest effort can make someone else so much better off. Good luck Paul with getting it all up and running again 🙂

This last few days has really been amazing. I had coordinated with a few people in Brisbane and Darwin to get 5 of us over a few weeks out to Nhulunbuy, a small town fair smack in the middle of Arhnem Land, Northern Territory. The town is a mining town with a strong local and surrounding Indigenous community, and it was really a pleasure to meet some of the great people there. We set up 10 computers for the Miwatj Health Community Centre (plus a mock website for them which is coming along), 3 computers for another health centre out of town and 2 computers for a crisis clinic in the area. We used Linux on most of the machines, namely Ubuntu with an enticing set of icons, set up some useful applications for general use (note, Sokar, Jeff and I in the latter), and then watched people have fun. It turned out we could have used Linux on all the Miwatj (pronounced me-watch) machines as the single M$ application they need for the health training runs on the terminal server there and the Ubuntu terminal server client does the trick nicely. It could have been a bit better coordinated with other local groups there, however we had an alright turnout to the opening and the people there were very impressed with the end product. Also we had some guys come to the opening interested in making an Open Source event tracker for a community-run initiative to solve issues such as drug and alcohol abuse locally and in a culturally effective fashion. I will certainly be speaking to them again soon 🙂

All up, we spent 2 days building, hacking, and working around power outages, network outages, and dodgy hardware and a third day to show it off and talk to the local campus of the Charles Darwin Uni. We ended up with a perfectly working lab that will be more useful to the general public there as a resource, rather than just for health training. I’ll have a short video out soon, but the 3 days finished with a perfect sunset. A wonderful job by Jeff of CDU, Horatio from Brisbane, Geoffrey from Sydney, and of course Sokar. Interestingly when Jeff and I were waiting at the Nhulunbuy airport for Sokar to meet us, we both realised we had no idea what she looked like. When she came in, amongst many other people she and I recognised each other immediately. It turns out we are probably each on either side of the same mirror 🙂 She is an amazing and driven woman who is achieving some pretty cool things. At any rate it was wonderful to meet everyone, and work with everyone, and I think we’ve done a great job that lays a foundation for many more such projects. We’ve already started planning for a few more community centres in remote and rural Australia, so if you have any communities in mind that you think need help, let me know. I believe this is one of the best contributions an Open Source advocate could make to their cause. Getting out there and getting their hands dirty, using Open Source to solve social problems and actually help people.

Rock on Nhulunbuy! A video blog soon to follow.

“I think you might have gone overboard with your policies, I think you might have gone overboard with your lies. I think you might have gone overboard with your politics, I wish someone would throw you overboard, cause when you’re overboard you can’t play with people’s lives.”

Great song from The Taken, some of the Ozlabs crew from Canberra. Rock on, and a valuable lesson for our Prime Minister 🙂

I think it is quite interesting that at a conference claiming to deliver a valuable insight into todays major ICT issues there appears to only be two speakers discussing Open Source, and both are from a Government agency. I also find interesting that there is not a single female keynote speaker, and none of the Linux associated companies are there. Where is IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Novell, Red Hat and the rest? It is apparently an Asia-Pacific wide conference. Weird.

This looks like a pretty big event, and I would have liked to have gone except I’m going to Nhulunbuy *tonight* to help set up some infrastructure for a community centre, which will be great! More on that later.

Last night I went to see a performance by top Chinese artists, who also happened to have disabilities ranging from sight impairment, to hearing loss, or lack of limbs. It was an incredible performance, particularly the hearing impaired dance troup and the sight impaired pianist who was brilliant! It got a little overdone at times in terms of over-emphasising the specific disabilities, I mean these people were amazing, and trying to play the pity factor was odd. The MC was horrendous, missing his cues, misreading stuff, and being quite rude to the performers, although he probably thought he was being nice. Anyway, well worth seeing!

This quote amused me greatly from the Citizens Against Government Waste website. These are the guys who were apparently paid to put out a ridiculous press statement about the Massachusetts Government choice to move to open formats for data, namely the OpenDocument foo found in OpenOffice. There was a great article about the MS response to the Massachusetts Government about this decision.

“To advocate an efficient, sound, honest government is neither left-wing nor right-wing, it is just plain right.”
— J. Peter Grace, Co-founder CAGW

It is indeed, just plain Right 😉

I am appalled at this article. I don’t understand why there is this absurd link made between being gay and being a paedophile, and I’m disgusted that our own media is happy to reinforce it. Aren’t we better than this? I guess we are going down the rabbit hole and it is only going to get worse for the next few years.

As usual, I’m late to pick up on a wacky fad 😉

create your own visited countries map

So I didn’t quite expect so much of a response to my comments about who makes decisions in this country. But I’d like to pose a few questions:

• How easy is it for women to get into politics? I attended a conference a few days ago that told me two things, firstly it is damn hard to get in and play the boys club rules, and second, most of the successful women in politics are successful because they deny their own gender, and play by mens rules. Only one woman at the whole conference mentioned that although there are more women than ever in Aussie politics, that womens issues are completely off the political agenda. We still have idiots like Tony Abbot trying to make comments about a womans right to abortion as a choice, and trying to encourage young people to abstain from sex rather than educating them for safe sex. We are heading backwards!
• Anthony, putting all the factors together you get a small percentage of the populations demography. I don’t think it is an unreasonable suggestion that we get a broader spread of the demography into decision making for policies that affect all of us.
• I agree with Leon that not enough young people get into politics. As someone who only started getting into politics in the last 4 years, I can relate to that. I think if current events, and the beginning of our democracy were more explored at school, rather than the staleness of “here is the senate”, and “here is the house of reps” then more people would get into politics at a younger age. It was very interesting and stimulating for me to learn about some of the policies this country was based on, and both saddening and exciting to see how we have or haven’t changed. I also believe it is probably a good tactic for the government to not better this education, because kids who know nothing, vote the way their parents do (typically) thus maintaining the status quo. A fairly clever tactic.
• In Brazil I had a bit of an epiphany. I saw politicians who talk from the pulpit and then go out to beers with the people. I saw politics and people mixing. In Australia the average person and their life is so far removed from politics that how are we ever going to hope for decent reflective politics that are relevant to the average person? I like the idea of people entering politics later in life, after they’ve actually _worked_ in a real job for a few years. A country run by lawyers and career politicians bodes badly for anyone! I get continually frustrated by the team sports I see in politics, and the people more interested in clever quips that outperform the other party rather than solving problems. Perhaps I should have added “lawyers/career politicans to my definition of the “decision makers” in this country.

I guess I’d like to see some changes, not sure what yet, but a parliament made up of people that understand the average Aussie, and who reflect a little better the diversity found in this country would be a good start.