Category: Uncategorized

Since last blog, I have travelled to Cairns to give a presentation on open source to a consulting firm, which went great, I have changed jobs to working full time with the same company on their open source strategies, I went to a kung fu camp and learnt even more weapons 🙂 and today is my birthday. I’m one of those rare people who absolutely _LOVE_ birthdays. I get excited, I run around happy all day, I look for presents. 😉 I seriously love having something wrapped up and knowing I can’t unwrap it till the next day. What can I say, I love surprises!

I also managed to pull together some great speakers for a software patents forum. Information will be up on the Linux Australia site under Australia and Projects soon. I’m really glad the LA committee has some awesome dudes on it that put such an effort into these things. Yay, team!

I found out one of my bosses is going to China. I’m pretty excited because I may be able to tee up my love of China and my job this way 🙂 Look out Simon, I told you I’ll be back! The Beijing Linux Users Group was an awesome array of individuals, and I’m looking forward to catching up with them again.

So after having booked almost three months ago to go to the GNOME Boston Summit, I had to cancel. Why was I going to the Boston Summit? Several months ago I came across some potential funding for accessibility and language stuff. I started asking around and realised we have lots of people interested in this stuff and wanting to work on it. I thought that maybe I could tee up those who want to work on it, and fill the gap between the GNOME accessibility developer team and the Australian developers, users, and organisations willing to back it. I am still hoping to do this, but unfortunately due to the summit being announced quite late, most of the accessibility team were not going to attend. I was thinking it would still be interesting, and was going to swing past London to see some people, but then lots of great open source stuff came up in Australia and I thought it’d be better not to go. I was targetting GNOME because almost all the people I’ve spoken to said the GNOME accessibility stuff is well on the way to being really usable, and so a little development and getting some serious feedback from users might be able to take it there 🙂

My interest in accessibility and languages has come from a realisation that Linux is something that cuts across all boundaries – cultural, religious, gender, age, physical, language – and so making it something truly for everyone is such a great goal. It delivers equal opportunity to people in a way that I really love.

Anyway now with the NSW gov tender for open source on the cards, life is going to be quite exciting for a while 🙂 Rock on Australia!

So I have some outstanding items to blog 🙂

I went to Brisbane last weekend and met up with Software Queensland and HUMBUG. Software QLD are a new group there bringing together ICT companies to have education and discussion about issues and opportunities that face them. They also only allow people from Australian owned companies to join, and thus can suggest they represent Australian best interests for QLD ICT companies. This is quite a leap, and very interesting because some other organisations in Australia claim to represent Australian best interests but have mainly foreign companies on the boards. Anyway, the people I met were great, and we found some areas to collaborate on, namely the support and protection of IP creators in Australia. The idea that the Australian ICT sector can only really flourish in its own right by focusing on IP creators is such a good goal, and one that many Australian organisations and companies can agree on. Especially in a time when a lot of the chokeholds on innovation are mainly owned and practised by non-Australian companies. I digress… I think that we (the OS community) can protect and educate ourselves using LUGs for local perspective, Linux Australia from an OS national community perspective, and OSIA from an OS business perspective. Organisations like Software QLD can take a broader Australian ICT perspective, working with orgs like ACS. Anyway information can be found on them at http://www.softwareqld.com.au.

I also attended the HUMBUG AGM, which was a lot more fun than it sounds 🙂 I got to catch up with some old faces, meet some new ones, and generally see another LUG in action. I had some great conversations, my only regret was my work told me a few days before leaving that I had to be back in Sydney by 11pm for work (disaster recovery foo). So I had to cut short the trip and wasn’t able to participate in the beers and food post meeting 🙁 GAR! Anyway thankyou to all the HUMBUG gang, and especially to Rob Brockway for a breakneck rush to the airport when we all realised the classroom clock had stopped. Also, many thanks to AJ for the hospitality. Rock on QLD!

Back a few months in Brazil one of the people I got to catch up with was Bdale, who is one of my heros, influences and examples of leadership. In January last year, when I was speaking to a lot of people about Linux Australia, what they wanted out of it, and how we could make it more useful to the community. I was planning to run for the committee, and then someone (I’ll find out who someday!) nominated me for President. At first I was quite shocked, and I wasn’t sure whether I was the right person for the job. Anyway I had seen Bdale speak that day, his “Herding Cats” talk and thought if anyone knows about working with the community, it’ll be Bdale. I chatted with him for ages at one of the dinners, and he convinced me that I could probably do a pretty good job and gave some awesome advice, particularly about establishing common values before common goals. I spoke to him again in one of the theatres after a talk, and someone got this picture:

Which is amusing as Bdale looks pretty huge compared to me. It circulated pretty quickly, and even had Bdales lovely wife asking who this was 😉 Anyway we took the opportunity in Brazil to even the odds with this:

Apart from it being a hideous photo of me, I think we can safely say we are even 🙂

So I guess I owe a blog by now 😉 Things have been incredible! Crazy stuff getting organised, projects, travelling, and very little sleep. In a nutshell:

LA – new website is up, after much running about, and there is a fair bit of news and stuff happening. I’m pretty excited about the fact that open source has become an election platform in Australia with all the main parties having an opinion (usually positive) on open source. The way is certainly looking up, and it has been great! I have to say I really enjoy meeting up with people from the community. Right across Australia, and then the world there is this amazing group of like minded, independent, JFDI-driven people, to whom freedom, Quality (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reference), equality, and doing kick ass stuff is important. I really have felt quite honoured to be able to work for the community with the LA stuff, and I hope that I can continue to stay up the scratch, given I have so much on my plate atm. I feel pretty confident now that whatever happens with LA, there is a great precedent set, and it can only continue to rock on!

Jeff and the awesome Canonical guys have done the pre-release of Ubuntu, a distro based on Debian. I have to say I’m extremely impressed, not only with the distro, but with the company. Hiring some of the best heads in the open source community is a good start, but committing to working with the community, to contributing so much is awesome. I am however again in a situation where I need to seriously consider where my conflicts of interest lie and make sure I keep them well defined. A frustrating but necessary reality. Ah well 🙂

I head up to Brisbane to see the HUMBUG crew this weekend, which should be great! I’ve been promising this for at least a year now, and I’m looking forward to it 🙂 Especially since I am the QLD state person in our new drive to increase comms with all the LUGs.

I also go to the GNOME Boston Summit this year. There are several reasons for this, but mainly because I think that there is a gap in the accessibility development between users and societies that are wanting and able to help out with suggestions and testing, and the development people. I’m hoping to help bridge this gap, with the loose aim of getting Linux right up to scratch in this area. Why? Well it has occurred to me that in our world we have a very unique thing. We are able to create solutions that traditionally have never been financially viable for big companies to do, we have real Quality and care going into our stuff, rather than doing as many software companies do, putting something half-ass out there, and then relying on customer support income to make it stable and quality. Anyway, I want technology to be available to everyone. The whole equal opportunity argument, and using technology to help humans improve themselves, if they so wish, rather than using it purely to make some nameless corp more rich, or to make people slaves, or to further increase the divide between rich and poor in our world. Using technology to increase communication and participation across cultural, physical, religious, age and gender differences, thus leading to increased understanding, increased empathy and tolerance, a stronger focus on care, Quality, equality, community, sharing, and hopefully a less bullshit world all round 🙂

I’m working on a disaster recovery simulation, so anyone needing me, please call me 🙂 I’m keeping odd hours.

I’m coming to Melbourne this weekend. I’m looking forward to catching up with the Computerbank crew, the new LUUV ctte, and any LUV-ers (or AUUG-ites, or MLUG-ers for that matter) that feel like a beer on the Saturday night. Welcome all! 🙂

Yep, Jeff is only a week away from being home again. It has been really frustrating not being together, especially not being able to easily share everything we are getting up to. Anyway, it is good to see he is putting the new camera to good use while he’s away. Ewww! David Hasselhoff!

For anyone who hasn’t heard yet, Labour has made a decision to back the FTA but only if two ammendments are made. One concerning the PBS, and the other concerning ensuring Australian content is not reduced on our air waves.

I have found it disturbing that even though there has been a lot of articles by people of many backgrounds about the issues surrounding IP (namely patents, copyright and anti-circumvention issues), these have never been mentioned as key issues by the government. Certain politicians have recognised the issues, and even encouraged us to fight them, however it never seemed to quite make it up the ranks. I’m concerned that we now are going to face incredible challenges just to create in this country (software, hardware, research, new technologies) because the new laws will lock in a personal and anti-competitive threat to developers, researchers, small companies and even the end users. The fact that the text of the FTA finds USERS of multi-zone DVD players criminally liable is ridiculous! So the the gov has agreed to make a special clause for that case, why the hell is it in there? We’re trying to develop some contingency plans that protect our community, but everyone should be looking carefully at how this affects them and their businesses.

We tried to get Lessig out here, but the Senate Enquiry committee, who originally were keen beans to hear him ended up saying they couldn’t wait till then. I mean what is the rush! We then tried to organise him to come earlier but being siuch a busy individual that didn’t happen.

Interestingly enough, “Mr Latham last night said he was holding Mr Howard to his word that the agreement did not open the prospect of US companies using “bodgy” patents”. They seem to be able to grasp the concept with drugs. I suppose they don’t recognise the incredible amount of Software IP this country develops. From the extensive Open Source network and home-grown projects, right through to the custom proprietary software developed by Australian companies. We are all at risk.

I have had a pretty low couple of weeks. Between hospitalisation, car issues and leaving my house keys in Yass things have been frustrating and evidently cumulative. Thankfully I know K! 🙂 Tonight I got an hour Salsa lesson, and will be following it up with some sessions over the next few weeks. When Jeff gets home I am going to be rocking pretty hard!

The other interesting thing was finding out about Chinese Astrology. Astrology in our society is often seen as quacks and the naive looking for happiness in the stars. In China it was used in a very, well, practical sense. An astrologer could tell a persons personality to about 96% accuracy, and so emporers and leaders would consult them to determine who in their militia would be the best leaders, strategists, lemmings, etc. It is a pretty amazing thing. I turn out to be year of the ram, and hour of the rat. This means I have a free/dreamer/flighty part with a strategist/thinker/planner part. It explains a lot for anyone who knows me well 🙂 The kewl thing about the whole system, is as a mechanism to figure out the parts of the picture, and then transcend that box and all its limitations. That is all.

Although not that type of Christian 😉 We had Christian, Jan and Etc come around for dinner the other evening, which was a fun combination of sausages (well done), steak (done), kangaroo (raw, and no i don’t mean rare) and politics (red and bloody). It was fun meeting Christian, comparing Aus with Norway, and getting another insight to things.

I was admitted to hospital Monday night with severe back pains on my right side that turned out to be a pretty ugly kidney infection. Luckily now it is almost all ok, I have more antibiotics to take, but I came home this evening. Jeff and I wondered what we’d have for dinner, and ended up rocking up to debsig, as the food there isn’t bad at any rate, and the company was fun 🙂 Many faces I haven’t seen for ages (mental note to go to more Debsigs). Unfortunately I overdid it a bit, I should have had dinner and left, but the chat daemon in me doesn’t always obey 🙂 Anyway, home now, straight to sleep, and probably some painkillers.

“You are an SEDF–Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well–even those you have known a long time–because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.”

This is probably more indicative of my mood than anything else at the moment 🙂 although I do like the bit about destroying the weak and unsuspecting, oh hold on, I’m _not_ supposed to do that 😉