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Julien Goodwin (20 unread)

Suggestions for a new laptop backpack

Posted: December 13th, 2008, 6:45am CET

My beloved old Targus Sport Deluxe Computer Backpack recently celbreated its fourth birthday, but, much as I love it, is starting to get a frayed base, and other serious wear marks.br /br /I know I need to replace it, but the problem is that I use every single bit of space in the pack, at least some of the time, and the biggest missing feature from current packs is the top flap which I use to hold my headphones (a href=http://www.dansdata.com/k271.htmAKG K271/a) when Im not wearing them.br /br /Id also prefer something with an integral padded laptop space instead of a removable slip case which appears to be the current hip feature that many otherwise nice bags have.br /br /At this rate I might have to just give up and order one or two out of retailers spare stock.
Goodbye Cisco

Posted: December 12th, 2008, 1:49am CET

Youve now joined Extreme Networks on the list of companies that I will not recommend or buy from, at least until you accept that copyright law applies to you as well as your customers.br /br /Its a shame, you made quite decent products (although JunOS is so much better its not funny).
Re: Best speakers Ive seen

Posted: December 8th, 2008, 12:35pm CET

a href=http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/296Jon/a,br /br /I cant believe you forgot Keith (Packard) and BDale (Garbee). Anthony Baxters also good value, although I dont go for the heavy python internals stuff (I do regret missing this years whats new in python installment).br /br /And youre pretty good yourself.br /br /Id go further then just Tridge, Ive found all the Samba core team to be great people who have given great talks.br /br /Van Jacobson is amazing, but only because I care about the subject (networking).br /br /Arjen (Lentz) is always good value, always teaching me something new (and often reminding me of three things I shouldnt have forgotten), for that matter sos Stewart Smith.br /br /There are a few more people who have always been good value of the years:br /Andy Fitzsimonbr /Donna Benjaminbr /Pia Waughbr /Leslie Hawthornbr /Jono Baconbr /Dave Airliebr /Ted Tsobr /Vik Oliver (Mr RepRap)br /Steve Ellisbr /Geoffrey Bennettbr /Rasmus Lerdorfbr /Adam Kennedybr /br /(And yes, I too will be missing a whole lot of people)br /br /In short, if youre going to LCA and you dont want to see multiple talks at once, several times a day, youre not trying.
Dear OpenOffice...

Posted: December 7th, 2008, 11:03am CET

Todays feature request is for Impress.br /br /(Disclaimer: Still running v2.4 as thats whats in Lenny)br /br /Im writing the outline for a fairly long presentation (of the 4-hour tutorial variety) and some way to mark sections in the outline view would be nice as Im going to be well over a hundred slides before Im done.br /br /Looking back at a href=http://laptop006.livejournal.com/12511.htmlmy last Impress rant/a thing have certainly improved, the only thing thats still really lacking is better transitions (theyre still not smooth in v3).br /br /OO should ship with some better templates, although theres enough decent ones on the web these days that its not a big issue any more.
Thank you Qantas

Posted: December 5th, 2008, 2:54pm CET

blockquotebr /Your flights is under 24h of departure, you cannot change flightsbr //blockquotebr /br /Im sorry, you didnt even get a native English speaker to *check* things these days?br /br /(That snippet is from the view a booking page of the Qantas site, probably only seen when the last segment of a booking is within the next 24 hours)
Off to OSDC

Posted: December 2nd, 2008, 7:49am CET

pJust about to hop on the 767 to Sydney, if anyone attending the Google hack day sees this can they SMS me which pub everyones gone to?/ppemsmallPosted via a href=http://community.livejournal.com/cosysoftware_en/LiveJournal.app/a./small/em/p
People who I owe a beer (or $BEVERAGE) to

Posted: December 1st, 2008, 12:26pm CET

In no order, this limited time offer applies until I forget I made it. You want to claim, remember to badger me (preferably when were at a pub).br /br /ulbr /liDonna Benjamin Peter Lieverdink - For many things/libr /liArjen Lentz - OSCON ticket, and being an all around great guy/libr /liLev Lafayette - Havent seen you in too long/libr /liDaniel Stone - caveat: must come and get it, you know where I live/libr /liAnyone from the Samba team - for being awesome people/libr /liBDale, Keith, Dave (Airlie), Ted Tso - ditto (plus giving awesome talks at LCA)/libr /liPia - cause shes well, Pia/libr /liStephen Elspeth Thorne - More people I havent seen in a while/libr /liSteven Cherie Ellis - cause I havent been bothered to make the trip to NZ this year/libr /liStormo - another havent seen for ages/libr /liJoxer - yet another one, where has everybody gone/libr /liRyan Verner - never did have that post-LCA party/libr /liPaul Fenwick Jacinta Richardson - do I need a reason?/libr /liDamian Conway - I think theres two bottles of wine with your name on them still at my old job (from LCA06)/libr //ulbr /br /(Despite generally being awesome, Google employees are excluded from this list as theyre probably still recovering from the alcohol poisoning from Leslies last party)br /br /Can you tell Im procrastinating packing for OSDC?
Anyone got a spare LCA bottle?

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 4:27am CET

Mines developed a leak and I dont want to buy one that doesnt promote everyones favourite conference.
Todays Wikipedia Humor

Posted: November 6th, 2008, 1:05pm CET

Comes from the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_G#Telstra_MobileTelstra/a article, where theres an image of a payphone, labelled A typical Telstra payphone, nothing special, but the genius is its a ivandelised/i payphone.br /br /img src=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Telstra_payphone.jpg/329px-Telstra_payphone.jpgbr /br /This post brought to you by a href=http://www.laphroaig.com/Laphroaig/a, everyones favourite Islay single malt. For those days when youve boxed up and said goodbye to an $80k server.
Stable VMware Workstation in 2.6.26

Posted: October 21st, 2008, 1:54pm CEST

After over a week of bashing my head against a wall I think Ive finally got VMware (Workstation 6.5) running solidly under 2.6.26.br /br /The solution appears to simply be to lock it to a single core:br /pre for proc in `pgrep vm`; do sudo taskset -p -c 1 $proc; done /prebr /br /In this example Im using pgrep to find all vmware related processes, and taskset to lock them to CPU#1 (the second core on my laptop), as I run only single-core VMs I dont have any issues there.br /br /Ive no idea what changed in 2.6.26 to make this necessary, but this might help someone out there.br /br /bUpdate:/b Talked too soon, locking to a single core has helped, but things still stutter on occasion.
Longplay record recycling

Posted: October 8th, 2008, 3:25pm CEST

div style=float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/7891209@N04/1137644004/ title=photo sharingimg src=http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1247/1137644004_ea26f07f84_m.jpg alt= style=border: solid 2px #000000; //abr /span style=font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/7891209@N04/1137644004/Longplay record recycling - Langspielplatten Verwertung/abr /Originally uploaded by a href=http://www.flickr.com/people/7891209@N04/gynti_46/a/span/divOn the one hand its beautiful, on the other, such a waste of (admittedly probably trash) vinyl.br clear=all /
David Barrett at 200 f/1.8

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 7:47am CEST

div style=float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/laptop006/2785516083/ title=photo sharingimg src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3216/2785516083_0bffb9bae5_m.jpg alt= style=border: solid 2px #000000; //abr /span style=font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/laptop006/2785516083/David Barrett at 200 f/1.8/abr /Originally uploaded by a href=http://www.flickr.com/people/laptop006/LapTop006/a/span/divNew toy showed up today, a Canon EF 200 f/1.8 L.br /br /Shiny.br /br /A proper test will have to wait for another day as I get to spend this weekend inside a datacenter.br clear=all /
Oldest debian box?

Posted: August 6th, 2008, 12:22pm CEST

I think I found ours this afternoon, I was installing a new test (2.6.24) kernel on it and noticed that ttupdate-grub/tt found some bvery/b old kernels, the oldest (2.0.36) has a modification date of July 1999 which must be close to a record (and as far as I can tell is the systems install date).br /br /Given the date kernel the box was probably installed with the then-new Debian Slink (released in March that year).br /br /That means the box has been in production (yes, with one hardware refresh) for over nine years.br /br /codebr /sncrtr1:~# update-grubbr /Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub .br /Testing for an existing GRUB menu.list file... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst .br /Searching for splash image... none found, skipping...br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.24-1.editure.1-686br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.20.3-p3br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.31-myinternet.1-p3br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.29-myinternet.2-p3br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.29-myinternet.1-p3br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.26-myinternet-p3br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.25-myinternet-p3br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.4.21-myinternet-p3br /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.2.25-myinternetbr /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.2.23-myinternetbr /Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.0.36br /Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... donebr //code
An "I work for the man" review of Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 10:13pm CEST

Posted several days later, but just copy/pasted from what I wrote on the flight.br /br /Im writing this from my economy class seat on a Qantas flight from Melbourne to New York for the HOPE conference. As the flight was delayed by over three hours (which may cause me to miss my connection to New York, either way it will be tight) so Ill soon (well, in another nine hours) get to experience some of the sights sounds referenced in the book, both from the US Government the hackers fighting against them.br /br /I come to Little Brother with a different perspective then most as my day job is to run large-scale systems that filter web e-mail for primary high school students worldwide (gt;2 million direct users) so anything that allows students to bypass our systems would of course be considered a bug.br /br /The concept use of pervasive tracking presented in the novel is both depressing and seemingly quite likely. I really do hope that schools dont get forced (wont somebody please think of the children!) into some version of this. Working with schools I know how tight the purse strings are, and, at least in Australia, I feel confident that this wouldnt get deployed unless until legislation was padded requiring its use. Simple surveillance is more likely, and less objectionable as the but everybody else is doing it excuse will hold some sway here.br /br /The sad fact of life is that w15t0ns father would be extremely common, as weve seen in America, with so few people objecting to the erosion of their civil liberties even when presented with some solid evidence.br /br /So from my perspective could ParanoidLinux work. In short no. The problem is its easy to do cross-comparisons of an aggregate of users and do exactly the sort of profiling suggested in the book. The mere act of overwhelming the data collection systems is data in itself.br /br /Xnet on the other hand could work. Theres practical problems with NATs etc, but theres absolutly no reason why it couldnt work, especially when a net like that actually scales. TOR itself is an example of the concept, a closer one might be FreeNet.br /br /However, there are simpler solutions that would actually work. IP-Over-DNS does actually work most of the time. I only know of a few cases where people have created intellegent caching DNS implementations that block IP-Over-DNS. However if you have a server available, just having SSH listen on port 443 works just as well most of the time as people very rarely ensure that the port someone does a CONNECT to is actually HTTPS.br /br /As for myself, all of my important communications are encrypted via SSL or PGP, with keys verified wherever possible. While I dont encrypt my laptops hard drive I do use encrypted swap to hopefully ensure data I keep stored encrypted (like the backup passwords for several hundred servers around the world) cant be easily leaked. I do also gain some small measure of protection by running a 64-bit linux, instead of something where government trojans might be more easily available.br /br /So will I buy the print book? Im not sure; if I happen to see it in a shop, probably, but otherwise I guess not. On another hand Ill certainly be recomending it to people.
Touring NYC

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 4:36am CEST

Arrived last night into JFK, I tried the AirTrain to Jamaica then the Subway to Penn Station. Went well and Id suggest it to anyone (well, anyone who has the self confidence to board a foreign subway by themselves at 10PM).br /br /Two things the Melbourne system has that the NYC one doesnt are next train boards and breaks that dont squeal painfully at every stop. br /br /On the other hand the New York system clearly works well with a huge number of passengers, and Ive not had longer then a five minute walk to a station. If youre in New York I strongly suggest purchasing the unlimited MetroCard, it just gives you the freedom to go where you want.br /br /This morning I took a recommendation from an old friend of mine (Albert Ullin on the off-chance anyone reading this knows him) and took the a href=http://www.circleline42.com/Circle Lines/a 3 hour long water tour of Manhattan. It was an excellent voyage, and I managed to fill up a 4GB CF card with the photos (the flickr upload will have to wait until I get some decent bandwidth). I managed to get some decent shots of all five of the a href=http://www.nycwaterfalls.org/man made waterfalls/a, and also more helicopters then I normally see in a year.br /br /After the tour I went to see the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citicorp_TowerCiticorp Tower/a to see if the building was as impressive in real live as in photos. Unfortunately shops have been built around the base making it seem like just another skyscraper, really disappointing.br /br /I dropped by the 5th Avenue Apple store where there was a very large line of people outside waiting to buy 3G iPhones. I went in where it was also very busy and picked up the Shure add-on to allow using any headphones as a headset.br /br /Then I walked across to Central Park where I had a nice relaxing (well, no it was 30+ and I was sweating like hell) walk across the park to the natural history museum where I caught the subway back to my hotel.br /br /By the time I made it back HOPE preregistration had started and I headed on down and got myself my RFID badge in preparation for what should be an excellent time.br /br /This evening a href=http://fogcreek.comFog Creek Software/a (a href=http://www.joelonsoftware.com/Joel Spolskys/a company) had an a href=http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/07/14.htmlopen house/a with plenty of food, wine and good conversation. I got some nice shots of the offices, and saw with interest the plans for their new offices which are no longer slanted.br /br /On my way back to the Hotel I walked past BH photo, but they had just closed for the day. I guess Ill try again some other time.br /br /It was only once I had walked back to the hotel and was chatting with some of the HOPE people that I finally got a genuine New York welcome (well, sorta), Ive been in the city for a day now, and finally heard someone tell someone else to F#$% off.
Arrived in NYC

Posted: July 17th, 2008, 6:01am CEST

31.5 hours door-to-door, about three hours later then expected thanks to a three hour delay leaving Melbourne.br /br /Off to be a tourist tomorrow, then HOPE.
iPhone 3G, the first few days

Posted: July 15th, 2008, 3:45pm CEST

In just seven hours I start my two week trip to the USA for HOPE OSCON.br /br /Before I left though I thought Id give my impressions of my new iPhone 3G.br /br /The purchase experience was fine, although it did take nearly a half hour per person, which meant I was waiting around the Optus store (North Melbourne, great staff) for four and a half hours. Oh well, thats the early adoptor penalty I guess.br /br /Unfortunately the number porting didnt go so well, taking six hours for the incoming to switch, then a further four hours before I was able to make outgoing calls.br /br /It synced first time with iTunes 7.7 (x64) on XP x64 on VMWare 6.5 beta on Debian Lenny (AMD64, on my Thinkpad T61), something that really surprised me.br /br /In the hand I actually slightly prefer the old iPhone, but theres really not much of a difference.br /br /The biggest downside of the phone would have to be the UI for the phone functions, fairly awful. What tips it over the edge to awful is the extreme latency between selecting a function and being able to use the touchscreen again, at least with my old phone when that happened the display would freeze, making the wait obvious.br /br /The UI for the rest of the device is fairly good, which does mostly make up for it (at least for me, I make few calls).br /br /One big downside is that I cant point the internal calendar app at my Google Calendar, I would have to sync it via iTunes + Outlook (or through the Exchange mail option). While that could work for my personal calendar, my team also uses Google Calendar to schedule team events.br /br /The App store works nicely for free apps, however the two pay apps I attempted to purchase (SignalScope SignalSuite) refused to download and only this evening was I able to download them via iTunes.br /br /Lastly the network. I switched from Vodaphone to Optus with this change, and Im not that impressed by the coverage, added to that the iPhones tendency to not reconnect to 3G networks if youre coming from a non-3G area and the net effect is the iPhone + Optus appears to give noticibly worse coverage then my old Motorola A780 + Vodaphone.
Dear Telsta, Vodafone,

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 2:49pm CEST

Im one of those sad people who are going to drop rather a lot of money on an Apple branded mobile phone.br /br /In theory it launches this Friday, but unlike your competitor Optus you have not announced plans handset pricing. Telstra did issue a press release giving basic info on what the phone will cost on a $30 plan, but no details on what that plan actually consists of.br /br /Sure it will only take me fifteen minutes to work out who Im going with, but really, theres three days left.br /br /Dont feel too bad, none of the three carriers have announced an exact launch time or which stores will get stock.
Dear ATO,

Posted: July 4th, 2008, 7:12pm CEST

Why do you make things hard for yourself?br /br /All I want to do is submit my PAYG numbers for the recently closed financial year. To do this the ATO offers two options, first a paper form, or, for those more with it an ability to upload a proprietry data file generated by an approved application, naturally none of them are free (in either sense).br /br /So despite the fact that I keep all my records in text files on my laptop I will have to submit a paper form.br /br /I see no good reason why the ATO cant add a simple form for end-of-year PAYG to their existing web Business Portal, even if it was only available for the self-employed it would probably save its development cost in data entry in just the first year.
Bash autocomplete shinyness

Posted: July 4th, 2008, 8:07am CEST

I dont know when this hit debian, but bash now not only autocompletes ssh hostnames, but remote filenames for scp.br /br /pre $ ssh [tab] Display all 538 possibilities? (y or n) $ scp cms:c[tab] check_hp_duplex.php check_snmp_proliant_raidcontroller cms.selections check_cpq command.cfg /prebr /br /More *shiny*

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Julien Goodwin (20 unread)

Posted: December 13th, 2008, 6:45am CET

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