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Michael Davies' Blog (20 unread)

linux.conf.au 2009 coming real soon now

Fetched: January 5th, 2009, 2:39am CET

p a href=http://linux.conf.aulinux.conf.au 2009/a in Hobart, Tasmania is only 13 days away. Have you registered yet? Flights blooked? Bags packed? Mine are ;) p Why come? p One awesome week of technical, a href=http://linux.conf.au/programme/schedulebrain-numbing input/a during the day and party time, catching-up with the free software community in the evenings. And theyll be ducks with lasers! Dont miss it - a href=http://linux.conf.au/register/prices_ticket_typesregister before youll regret it/a.
iPhone Cellular Data: Just Say No

Fetched: January 4th, 2009, 2:03am CET

p So I got a 3G iPhone for Christmas, a closed proprietary platform, but a fun one :-) We just need to get a python runtime on there :-) p A frustrating thing with this device is the lack of control over its network interfaces. You can explicitly control 3G data and wireless, but not 2G data - this was a retrograde step moving up to the 2.0 firmware. What this means is that if your wireless connections drops, you skip back to cellular data - and even if you have 3G off, youre still unexpectingly racking up 2G data bills. Urrghh. p There is a very easy solution though - which strangely doesnt seem to get mentioned out there on the web that Ive discoverd in my brief searches so far. To turn all cellular data connections off, but leave wifi on, just turn on Airplane Mode, then after that turn Wi-Fi on. That gives the desired result.
Real-world use for MD5 Collisions

Fetched: December 31st, 2008, 6:00am CET

p Practical implications of weak cryptography - a href=http://www.phreedom.org/research/rogue-ca/Creating a rogue CA certificate/a. What does this mean? If this approach is generalised, you cant trust secure websites at all - every single secure website may not be who you think they are, even if your browser happily presents the quot;little green tickquot;. So who uses secure websites? ecommerce (Amazon, eBay, your bank), the tax office, many government departments, social networking portals, software update sites, software download sites. Scary, yes, but highlights the need to build seemlessly upgradable cryptographic software solutions - and we need to do this now before public confidence in our virtual world is eroded.
LinuxSA December 2008 - Christmas Dinner

Fetched: December 9th, 2008, 11:20pm CET

pre Hi all, As is the tradition, for the December meeting of LinuxSA we go somewhere for dinner (no meeting topic, no speaker). Please register (see below) so we can let the restaurant know how many are coming. The important info: When: 6:30pm on Tuesday, 16th December, 2008 Where: Seacliff Beach Hotel http://www.seacliffbeachhotel.com.au/ 221 The Esplanade, Seacliff Who: Any Linux-minded people who want to eat with us! RSVP: ASAP (itd be good to get numbers for the booking in the next couple of days) http://www.linuxsa.org.au/meetings/ For more information: Email: organisers@linuxsa.org.au Web Page: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net /pre
Apache blocking based on IPs

Fetched: December 9th, 2008, 3:42am CET

p When will people start securing their Windows boxen? Ive had to start blocking http connects based on IP address due to for a few servers around the place getting hit with buffer overruns aimed at Microsoft IIS. Sheesh. p Quick and easy guide to doing this here: a href=http://www.perlcode.org/tutorials/apache/attacks.htmlBlocking Apache Attacks/a.
Python 3.0 released!

Fetched: December 4th, 2008, 4:14am CET

p a href=http://docs.python.org/3.0Python 3.0/a is a href=http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-announce-list/2008-December/007073.htmlreleased/a into the wild. a href=http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/Download now.../a
Meme #42

Fetched: November 14th, 2008, 5:51am CET

p Following a href=http://noisymime.org/blog/?p=66on/a a href=http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2008/11/12/phrase-from-nearest-book/from/a a href=http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/292the/a lead of a href=http://www.cafuego.net/2008/11/14/blog-meme-42others/a, p ul liGrab the nearest book./li liOpen it to page 56./li liFind the fifth sentence./li liPost the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions./li liDonât dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST./li /ul p Result: âRe vera, cara mea, mea nil refert.â p from iLatin for all occasions/i (Beard). p (Interpretation is left as an exercise for the reader :-P)
LinuxSA November 2008 - Wesnoth: A Free Software Strategy Game

Fetched: November 11th, 2008, 5:15pm CET

p pre Hi all, Time for the November meeting announcement (note that its one week later than normal this month). The usual details: When: 6:30pm-8:30pm on Tuesday, 25th November, 2008 Where: Room G05/G06 Gerard Innovation Centre Prince Alfred College Capper Street, Kent Town SA Cost: FREE Who: Anyone and everyone. No pre-registration necessary. Presentation: Rusty will be presenting on Wesnoth: A Free Software Strategy Game: Wesnoth is a fun strategy game for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Rusty joined the development just after the 1.0 release; hell demo the game, then talk about how he got started, a bit about the community and cover some of the improvements he made. Getting to the Venue: Prince Alfred College faces Dequetteville Terrace, but you need to enter from Capper Street, closer to The Parade West than to Dequetteville Terrace. Parking is available on-street or maybe off-street (adjacent to the Sports Centre). Look for the two storey stone fronted building with sign Gerard Innovation Centre. Enter through the double doors, first room on the right hand side of corridor (ground floor). The external door automatically locks at night. Should it not be propped open please be ready to knock loudly. There are buses that go along Dequetteville Terrace, with a stop adjacent to Capper Street. The 143, 145, and 146 buses leave from North Terrace, and the 141 and 142 buses leave from Currie Street and Grenfell street. If you are in the city, you could also catch the 99C bus to East Terrace, then take a 10-15 minute walk to the College. Pizza: After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Georgios (cnr. Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city). For more information: Email: organisers@linuxsa.org.au Web Page: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net /pre
Mind Rot

Fetched: October 27th, 2008, 4:29am CET

p Charles Petzold on a href=http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.htmlDoes Visual Studio Rot the Mind?/a. For some reason I hadnt seen this before (Thanks Kevin for pointing it out). It raises some very important questions about code automation, programming productivity, maintainability, data driven software and the importance of naming things right. Its very interesting as an opinion piece circa-2005 for comparison against where we now are at 3 years later.
What unit tests arent

Fetched: October 24th, 2008, 12:24pm CEST

p a href=http://andrew.puzzling.orgAndrew Bennetts/a comments on iwhat a good unit test is not/i in this a href=http://andrew.puzzling.org/diary/2008/October/23/narrative-testspost/a and this a href=http://andrew.puzzling.org/diary/2008/October/24/more-doctest-problemsfollowup/a. p Thanks for that.
LCA2009 Registartion

Fetched: October 19th, 2008, 11:54pm CEST

p Have you a href=http://www.marchsouth.org/register/prices_ticket_typesregistered/a for a href=http://www.marchsouth.org/linux.conf.au 2009/a yet? Get in now while the huge early bird discounts are active! p a href=http://www.marchsouth.orgLCA/a - conference nirvana.
LinuxSA October 2008 - Building an Electric Car

Fetched: October 12th, 2008, 11:54pm CEST

p pre Hi all, Time for the October meeting announcement. The usual details: When: 6:30pm-8:30pm on Tuesday, 21st October, 2008 Where: Room G05/G06 Gerard Innovation Centre Prince Alfred College Capper Street, Kent Town SA Cost: FREE Who: Anyone and everyone. No pre-registration necessary. Presentation: David Rowe will be presenting on Building an Electric Car: Until recently I had never worked with anything over 5V and 1A or welded or held a spanner in anger. Building an Electric Vehicle (EV) has changed all that! Over the past 12 months I have taken a Daihatsu Charade and converted it to run purely on electricity. My Electric Charade is faster than the petrol version, has zero greenhouse emissions and costs a few cents a day to commute all over Adelaide. Best of all my fuel is made right here in South Australia. No more 80 million year old fossilised plant liquid from the Middle East for me! This presentation will talk about how I turned from geek to mechanic, how electric cars work, how much it costs, what it is like to drive, and even some business ideas based around EV conversions. David Rowe has 20 years experience in the development of DSP-based telephony and sat-com hardware/software. David has a wide mix of skills including software, hardware, and project management including a PhD in DSP theory. He has held executive level positions in the sat-com industry (www.dspace.com.au) and has built and successfully exited a small business (www.voicetronix.com). However he has decided he is better at debugging machines than people so currently chooses to hack telephony hardware and software full time. Getting to the Venue: Prince Alfred College faces Dequetteville Terrace, but you need to enter from Capper Street. Parking is available on-street or maybe off-street (adjacent to the Sports Centre). Look for the two storey stone fronted building with sign Gerard Innovation Centre. Enter through the double doors, first room on the right hand side of corridor (ground floor). The external door automatically locks at night. Should it not be propped open please be ready to knock loudly. There are buses that go along Dequetteville Terrace, with a stop adjacent to Capper Street. The 143, 145, and 146 buses leave from North Terrace, and the 141 and 142 buses leave from Currie Street and Grenfell street. If you are in the city, you could also catch the 99C bus to East Terrace, then take a 10-15 minute walk to the College. Pizza: After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Georgios (cnr. Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city). For more information: Email: organisers@linuxsa.org.au Web Page: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net /p
Python 2.6 released!

Fetched: October 2nd, 2008, 6:54am CEST

p Awsome news! a href=http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6/Python 2.6 has been released!/a Hereapos;s a list of a href=http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.6.htmlwhatapos;s new/a.
LinuxSA July 2008 - Linux FOSS Adoption: A case study, road map and story

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 9:24pm CEST

pre Hi all, Time for the July meeting announcement (its next Tuesday)... The usual details: When: 7:00pm-9:30pm on Tuesday, 15th July, 2008 Where: EXCOM Education Ground Floor 191 Pulteney Street Adelaide SA Cost: FREE Who: Anyone and everyone. No pre-registration necessary. Presentation: Piers Rowan will be giving a talk on Linux FOSS Adoption: A case study, road map and story: Many people use Linux as their preferred desktop. Many web sites are hosted on Linux. But why would a run of the mill business adopt Linux across desktops and servers alike? Just over two short years ago Extrastaff had two offices with a dependency on Windows systems for desktops and servers. Today Extrastaff has nearly 10 offices in two countries and a big part of this growth has been partly due to Linux and FOSS. Any business can benefit from the lessons learned in this process. This presentation will cover the various stages of the process, including: * The background decisions and objections * How to talk to management about adoption issues * Change management from the user perspective * Roll your own: making your own rules a point of difference with your customers * Making the System Administrators job easier * What went wrong, what to do when things go wrong * Capturing innovation The areas which Extrastaff uses Linux FOSS * Desktops * Internet Kiosks * CRM * Web site hosting * Candidate management * Document storage * Domain controllers * Content filtering * Email / Webmail / etc * Payroll * Billing system * Messaging Services The presentation is aimed at being interesting to everyone interested in Linux, and also owners and managers who would like to hear about how they can benefit from this excellent business tool. About Piers Rowan: I am a Director and shareholder in Extrastaff Recruitment. Extrastaff is a 2nd generation family business which my brother and I purchased a little over two years ago. Previous to holding this position I was split between the roles of Marketing IT Management. Coming from the technical side I am always keen to tinker and get something up and running and having the marketing background means that I am always focused on what benefit the tinkering will have on the customer or business. I have been using/breaking computers since the ZX Spectrum and did my time in the Windows 98 trenches. Im running Ubuntu at the moment but have used Fedora on my laptops quite a bit. For servers Ive used Red Hat 9.0, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora and the occasional Solaris and BSD. Most of my productive time is spent writing software that is critical to my business. I first started using Linux in 1999. Pizza: Well order in pizza to have at EXCOM after the presentation. Bring $8 if you are hungry. For more information: Email: organisers@linuxsa.org.au Web Page: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net /pre
Perls CGI is broken

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 9:24pm CEST

p pre use strict; use warnings; use CGI; use Test::More qw( no_plan ); my $cgi = new CGI; $cgi-param(foobar, 6); ok( $cgi-param(foobar) eq 6, 6 is a magical number ); $cgi-param(foobar, 4); ok( $cgi-param(foobar) eq 4, And 4 is a favourite ); my %hash = ( random_key = 13 ); $cgi-param(foobar, $hash{randomKey} ); ok( $cgi-param(foobar) eq 13, but a simple typo in a hash key shouldnt be so hard to find ); # Fail ok( $cgi-param(foobar) eq 4, so it hasnt changed but theres no complaint ); $cgi-param(foobar, $hash{random_key} ); ok( $cgi-param(foobar) eq 13, The key is to get the key right :-) ); /pre p What sort of deranged API isilently/i ignores calling a setter with an undef? Surely a warning or exception could have been thrown? Or perhaps setting the value to undef, or to the empty string, or even You messed up, Idiot!. But quietly swallowing the error and leaving the value unchanged is really bad form. p This sort of thing doesnt rate well on Rustys API design advice: a href=http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/index.cgi/tech/2008-03-30.htmlHow Do I Make This Hard to Misuse?/a. Grrr.
Its not MS Comic Sans!

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 9:24pm CEST

p I cant let this a href=http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2008/January/28/lca2008-first-impressionsaccusation by Mary/a go. My presentation was using iMarker Felt/i, not MS Comic Sans :-) p Sheesh :-)
Back running

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 5:25am CEST

p Just finished my first 7km run in 3 weeks - everything feels good. Awesome!
Photoshoot September 2008

Fetched: September 27th, 2008, 2:55am CEST

p img src=/img/AdamThePhotoGeek.jpg align=left vspace=5 hspace=5 border=0 p nbsp; p Out on a photoshoot with Adam, a fellow Canon DSLR affectionado. We met before dawn and walked through the eastern side of the Adelaide parklands, discovering many wonders and treasures. p Surprisingly, I was only a little jealous of his new a href=http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EF-50mm-f-1.4-USM-Lens-Review.aspx50mm f/1.4/a :-) p Also of note, this week I started a new photoblog, ba href=http://learning2see.aminus3.comLearning To See/a/b, in an attempt to force me to keep shooting regularly. p nbsp; p
A hard week

Fetched: September 15th, 2008, 8:57am CEST

p Last week was pretty hard. All was going well until Thursday when things turned pear-shaped - I was completely out of my depth with the unexpected news. p Its times like these when you think about life, your loved ones, and whats most important to you. Priorities become very clear at times like these, and you find out how wonderful your friends are. I have been so blessed by the love and support Ive received by good friends. p Thank you for supporting me and my family, and thank you for your kind words, thoughts and prayers.
Google Chrome

Fetched: September 2nd, 2008, 2:57pm CEST

p Google a href=http://www.google.com/chromeChrome/a a href=http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-01-n47.htmlsounds awesome!/a p a href=http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.htmlLaunching tonight/a.

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Michael Davies' Blog (20 unread)

Fetched: January 5th, 2009, 2:39am CET

Fetched: January 4th, 2009, 2:03am CET

Fetched: December 31st, 2008, 6:00am CET

Fetched: December 9th, 2008, 11:20pm CET

Fetched: December 9th, 2008, 3:42am CET

Fetched: December 4th, 2008, 4:14am CET

Fetched: November 14th, 2008, 5:51am CET

Fetched: November 11th, 2008, 5:15pm CET

Fetched: October 27th, 2008, 4:29am CET

Fetched: October 24th, 2008, 12:24pm CEST

Fetched: October 19th, 2008, 11:54pm CEST

Fetched: October 12th, 2008, 11:54pm CEST

Fetched: October 2nd, 2008, 6:54am CEST

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 9:24pm CEST

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 9:24pm CEST

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 9:24pm CEST

Fetched: October 1st, 2008, 5:25am CEST

Fetched: September 27th, 2008, 2:55am CEST

Fetched: September 15th, 2008, 8:57am CEST

Fetched: September 2nd, 2008, 2:57pm CEST