pipka.org

I am breaking a record here! I drove to Canberra from Sydney (3.5 hours) yesterday at 2 to get to the WAVE seminar, at which I gave a short introduction as to how Open Source and Open Knowledge can benefit socioeconomically disadvantaged peoples, in this forum, particularly women, and it went down really well. I had a lot of interest, and hopefully we’ll ahve some awesome Linux rollouts to rural Australian communities who are severely disadvantaged in terms of education, online services and communications. When I get more information I’ll be spamming the SLUG mailing list as well as other LUGs around the country for people keen for some awesome road trips! I’m expecting this will be a fantastic opportunity to not only teach more people about Linux, but to bring real opportunities to people who need them.

Anyway, back to my record, I drove back to Sydney this morning at 3:30am, after 4 hours sleep and I go back to Canberra this afternoon. Yay sanity! Anyway, I’m getting some people psyched in Canberra for the Open Computing in Government (but I still like to call it the OSG conference, otherwise lots of pollies have no idea what I’m talking about 🙂 ) co-conference, and I managed to convince my company to be a sponsor. Go team! I am really getting somewhere with them, and I’m so proud to have a large Aussie company joining to ranks of OS providers in Australia, especially as we are developing awesome relationships with other smaller Aussie companies, and actually bringing a lot of what works in the Open Source world to the corporate world. Who knows, I may be able to change corporate culture for the better 😉

The wedding is only a week away! HFSNW!

Well, Jeff and I are finally getting married next Sunday the 17th April. Yes you heard it right, the day before LCA 🙂 We wanted to make life easy for our community friends, particularly the ones from overseas who were going to be in Australia then anyway. So the ceremony itself was quite restricted for numbers, however we are going to have a big celebratory BBQ after the ceremony on the Sunday evening starting at 6:30pm. Anyone in the area should certainly come along and say hi. I’ve even agreed to continue wearing my dress for a while into the evening, so all the disbelievers can see 🙂

The party will be in Yass, which is about 45 minutes drive from Canberra, and there are a bunch of other LCA people coming, so ask around for car pooling and the like. If you are interested please email us for the address and such. We are limited to 200 people so get in fast 😉

Last week was exciting. I am still trying to catch up on a single week interstate, and then I have a good friend go into labour a month early, and then a car crash. I had a young guy run up the back of my Barina in rainy weather, and it was a pretty big bump. The front of his 4 wheel drive ute was totalled, with headlights popping out and the rediator back through into the fan, thus making it undrivable. Amusingly enough the Barina had a simple dent in the back, not to high to affect the window and not to low to affect the bumper 🙂 It is all covered by insurance anyway, but I’m glad I bought a sturdy little car and not an aluminium can 🙂

The Cirque du Chaser show last night was great! Basically the guys from CNNN having a go at a live show, and doing an awesome job. It meant we got to see all the stuff they wanted to say which the ABC didn’t allow 🙂

Also had a great lunch on saturday with Sara and Moe from SLUG, with their 5 kids. It was a graet day, and Sara is doing some great work for LA so rock on to her 🙂

I’ve mentioned Maureen O’Sullivans work on the Free Software Act before, and I just read an interesting article by her about Free Software. It reads:

“At this point in time we should be building legal defences to ensure that a repeat of the privatisation of software a quarter of a century ago is not repeated.’

A sentiment I share. I support the work of many lawyers around the world such as Maureen, George Greve, Lawrence Lessig, all the crew on Groklaw, and all the aussies such as Brendan Scott, Kim Weatherall, and Jeremy Malcolm who are out there helping politicians, legislators and of course the community to understand the legal threats and opporuntities facing Free Software.

Rock on freedom fighters! 🙂

I’m very excited because work is kicking ass! I’m getting to a point where several months of really hard work and documentation are starting to pay off.

Spam has become a serious problem for me, not so much because of the amount of it, but mainly because of the range of email I get, often I have to check whether something is spam or not. The “vibrator”, “viagra” and “impotence” emails are making way for the “coming up”, “here it is” or chinese/portuguese emails, that _could_ be ham. Anyway, so I found a new product that we’ll probably be using at work to trial called BePrivate. Basically is uses address black/white lists, it sends confirmation emails to assess validity of sender, and then it slows does IP addresses sending to it that exhibit spammer like behaviours. It isn’t free software, however it is pretty kewl. I know people can do similar things manually, but it is nice to see a product out there attempting it.

Met up with Grant Allen and Damien Conway who are organising the OS in Gov co-conf and the Educonf miniconf respectively at LCA this year. Both events look awesome! I’m helping out where I can with both, and am looking so much to LCA! Last year I came direct to LCA from China, and after going to a doctor on the first day to get some medicated strepsils, I was put into isolation in case I had SARS, which didn’t make for a happy Pia. I missed most of the conference!

Well some kewl stuff is certainly happening. The wedding invitations are out! And althought we couldn’t invite everyone we wanted (we simply can’t afford to) we are having a big post-wedding party in Yass and everyone is invited! Well everyone that knows us anyway 😉 We’ll probably post details closer to the time, and I promise to continue wearing my dress into the evening (so the non-believers will see!) 🙂

My favourite
photo at the moment is of maddog and I in Brazil 🙂 Maddog is a wonderful man and I look forward to seeing him at an LCA when he can make it. Perhaps 2006? 😉 He still hasn’t told me where the video of 3000 Brazilians yelling “Software Livre” is…

Also I’ve got the 2nd Open Source Forum today. They are going really well and certainly achieving what I want them to. We are recording todays one, and then next month we should be able to start streaming them so everyone can participate 🙂

We are having our first Linux Australia face to face meeting and planning session this weekend, and I’m feeling really positive about the team. We’ll be going to the Woolloomooloo hotel for dinner on Saturday night if anyone wants to join us for some beers. It’d be a great chance to meet the committee as they are rarely all in the same place. You can get help us get some ideas before our main meeting Sunday, which will be covering everything from how better to support the community, looking at where LA has gone in the last few years, to assessing the grant proposal and other projects and how we can make them more useful to people. We’d certainly love the feedback. When I first got involved with LA the first thing I did was accost almost everyone at LCA 2003 about what they’d like to see in a national body, and the feedback helped shape what we did. The feedback and involvement of the community is what makes such an organisation relevant and useful to the community. Yay team! 🙂

Well the first online LA election went well. The new committee is unofficially:

President: Jon Oxer
Vice President: Pia Smith
Secretary: Anthony Towns
Treasurer: Mark Tearle
Ordinary Members: Andrew Cowie, Geoffrey Bennett, Stewart Smith

Well done by everyone, looks like a rocking crew and I’m looking forward to an excellent LA year 🙂 I’m happy that I was re-elected, as I get to continue my work for LA while ensuring continuity of what I have been trying to achieve for the past two years. I’m extremely glad Jon got president as I think he’ll bring yet another community focused and mature approach to LA.

Gar! So last night while the household was sleeping, someone climb up our balcony, walked into our loungeroom (we didn’t used to lock that door when home) and took two laptops and some cash. Craige lost a lot of work, and I lost about 3 months of work. Very annoying stuff! Luckily they didn’t take my entire wallet (just the cash), and to be honest, when stuff like this happens I’m just glad that everyone is safe. Anyway, now to try and catch up with everything.