So much to blog!

Over the coming week I’ll be making up for lost blog time, the last week at linux.conf.au was awesome!! The Melbourne team did a great job and I had a great time! Lots was done and said and more on that soon, however to start, Paul Wayper wrote some funny limericks I just had to blog 🙂

That wonderful man Andrew Tridgell
Over SaMBa keeps permanent vigil.
SMB, it is said,
He decodes in his head,
And CIFS 2 will some day bear his sigil.

The great LGuest programmer Rusty,
Is virtually never seen dusty.
He eats 16K pages,
And has done so for ages,
Yet his moustache is clean and not crusty.

That marvellous girl Pia Waugh
Is certainly hard to ignore.
With her leet ninja moves,
Open Source just improves –
All Linux Australians show awe!

Yay! 🙂

Access to Microsoft protocols – good for FOSS

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.

links for 2008-01-24

Geocoding – a new frontier

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.

Overview of Australian Government FOSS Survey Released

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 – an interesting article

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.