Category: Uncategorized

65 bikes and another 25 km!

Today I rode home from Macquarie University to Surry Hills again, about 25 kms. I sheared about 20 mins off my first time, bring me down to 1 hour 40. A long way to go to getting fit! 🙂 I was really excited though because I counted another 65 bikes on the road! I feel like I’m in some sort of special club! I found the secret harbour bridge path for bikes (ok it isn’t secret, but I hadn’t known about it till then), and had one fellow rider try to hit on me, which was, well just plain weird. I’m bad at picking if a person if just being friendly or sleazy at the best of times, let alone when I’m trying to avoid traffic!

Anyway, I had a few friendly riders help me figure out where to go and I’m really enjoying the bike culture. Thanks Lindsay, Steve and Mike for inspiring me to start 🙂

GPL3 Seminar in Sydney – November

The University of NSW CyberLaw Centre will be running a GPL3 Seminar sometime in November. They are after input, speakers and feedback about what needs to be covered. Contact them to have your say to ensure the conference covers issues that affect developers and our community. The CyberLaw centre have been doing a bunch of great events and research about FOSS licensing, copyright and other legal issues. It should be a very interesting event 🙂

AWESOME! OpenSource WA to stay open!

I love it when community efforts can lead to tangible positive outcomes!

So now the Opensource WA resource centre is staying open.

Mr Grocott denied there was any threat to funding and said the Government recognised that greater investment in open-source software was needed for WA to stay competitive in a market of increasing importance to both business and consumers.

Rock!

Lets hear more from our local expert on Islam

Yes, I am frustrated at Eriks comments on Islam. But I have to say, he certainly does his research:

Now I am certainly not an expert on the Qur’an, but after 10 minutes research…

Wow Erik! Don’t go out of your way here. Your depth of understanding is certainly astounding.

So, according to this web page…

Seriously Erik. As we all know there is a lot of crazy crack out there on the internet. You need to cross reference. Have you ever actually spoken to a Muslim (on purpose)? Have you asked anyone who studies the religion about this? Considering your above attempts I would suggest no.

The website you quote also had the following:

www.submission.org is not owned, governed, maintained, managed or operated by any kind of legal organizations or organized groups.

Not a totally reputable source perhaps? I have to say, unless you can read Arabic and look at the original texts then you can’t be sure. Anyway, in just a few minutes of my own browsing:

Rape is an abhorrent crime and an abominable sin. This heinous crime is forbidden not only in Islam but in all religions, and all people of sound thinking and pure human nature reject it.

A raped woman is a victim that must be treated with honor and kindness. She is not required to produce four witnesses to prove the crime done against her, nor is she punished for the crime done against her.

Both from this article by an actual Sheikh.

So please stop talking about that which you don’t know. Stick to programming and your obviously hidden talent for web design 😉

TechGirls!

Warning, major pink ahead! (Not my fault!)

Yesterday was the first TechGirls event, which is strongly based on the success of events like Go Girls, Gidgits and other events linked from the TechGirls website. We had ~250 girls in the Central Coast with some great speakers, and awesome demo zones. I was looking after a room of girls and ran a Linux gaming demo zone with hardware generously donated by Craige for the day, thanks! The girls loved the games (particularly Super Tux) and I had one girl who came specifically to see Linux come over really excited to see Linux there and keen to get more involved. Awesome stuff!

Every attendee got an Ubuntu CD, and there was information about usergroups, the Australian Development Gateway, FOSS and more on display, as well as the few remaining SFD tshirts, which were all XXXL sized, but still very appreciated 🙂

We are looking to run the first such event in Sydney (of such size) mid next year for about 2000-3000 girls. Anyone interesting in helping out or sponsoring, please get in contact with me 🙂 The current website will be updated with a report soon.

Black Duck event

Thanks Rodney for covering the Black Duck event. It was _very_ interesting to get the hard questions thrown around such as how locally relevant and legally localised an American software compliance service can be in Australia. Black Duck answered all the questions quite well and I think have realised that we are a different market. Their services are certainly interesting and seeing a company tackling the issues of software compliance is a good thing, as it is again helping to remove barriers to Open Source.

Software Freedom Day 2006 report

I sent this out to mailing lists a few days ago, but completely forgot to blog it! 🙂

Software Freedom Day 2006 in Sydney was an awesome day jam packed with great talks, workshops, and fun all round. We had no more than 100 visitors during the day, however many people stayed for most of the day and the retention rates from this year will likely be a lot higher than last year, where we gave out probably 1000 CDs and pamphlets, but got very little follow up participation. We were very happy with the event this year which was a lot of fun.

The entire day saw great talks by all speakers, and all the recordings will be linked from the SFD Sydney team website soon. Senator Kate Lundy gave a fantastic speech which is available on her new (Joomla) website 🙂 It is awesome to see an Australian Senator who is Open Source savvy and generous with her time enough to drive to Sydney to speak to us all!

Congratulations to Stuart Hector who won the GP2X. The competition was to define what Software Freedom means, and it was voted on by the crowd. Stuart won with a short and concise “Software Freedom Rules!” which earned a cheer from attendees 🙂

Location: University of New South Wales – the Main hall in the new law building G04 near the roundhouse. Ground Floor left at the entrance

Date: September 16th 2006

Goal: To introduce more people to why Software Freedom matters, and in particular how it is important to maintaining digital environments we can trust to work and play in. Some good examples where Software Freedom matters is in e-voting software, and Open Standards for long term access to your documents. After all, the basic freedoms we expect are only as free as the technology they are based on. The day will be of interest to any person interested in how technology is changing their lives and freedoms. It will also be fun for anyone interested in technology generally and we will have some great workshop sessions.

Conclusions: This year by running an actual event we reached less people, however those who came were from a broad set of backgrounds (legal, cultural, technical, media and political) and everyone had a brilliant day. We have a brilliant collection of talks that really encapsulate Software Freedom from many different angles.

Sponsors: Venue kindly sponsored by the Unlocking IP Project at UNSW Law Faculty. Event run by the Sydney Linux User Group, Linux Australia and also many thanks to all the speakers who are donating their time and knowledge about Software Freedom. Also many thanks to GP2X for provided a great gaming device as a prize for the day! There is a review of the device available at http://www.localfoss.org/node/245

Thanks: Many thanks to all the volunteers who helped out as well as the people who turned up to help if needed. Particular thanks goes to Silvia Pfeiffer and John Ferlito for keeping the video recording going (which will all be online soon!) even when we had to switch rooms during lunch.

Also to Sridhar Dhanapalan, Andreas Fischer, Chris Deigan, Shane Stephens, Conrad Parker, Andreas Fischer, Andrew Sinclair, Peter Baker, Bruce Badger, Billy Kwong, James Purser, Mark Phillips, and Raphael Kraus for the audio/video work, the morning setup and afternoon pulldown, the and in some cases for being there if we needed more help 🙂

Many thanks to all the speakers and workshop people who gave their time and expertise to making the day awesome!

Thank you also to our sponsors the Unlocking IP project at the Cyberlaw Centre, who organised the venue and helped promote the event. They also gave a great talk and workshop, thanks Professor Greenleaf, Abi, Catherine and Ben! To GP2X Australia who provided a very cool little gaming device for the competition prize. To Linux Australia and SLUG for providing support and CompSoc for helping getting the word out.

Thank you to Software Freedom International for making this day possible and supporting all the teams 🙂

Also a big thank you to my husband Jeff Waugh, who is always a wonderful support and inspiration!