Linux Users of Victoria, Inc.

Time to learn Javascript properly.

The Onion: Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

‘…”Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.”‘

Story here

Hi all, Time for the March meeting announcement (it's next Tuesday)... The usual details: When: 6:30pm-8:30pm on Tuesday, 16th March, 2010 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: Mark Pulford will be presenting an overview of IPv6 - The Next Generation Internet Protocol. The talk will cover: * Advantages * Differences with IPv4 * Using IPv6 Mark is a Network Engineer at Internode and recently built their IPv6 Broadband Trial: http://ipv6.internode.on.net/access/adsl/ Getting to the Venue: Prince Alfred College faces Dequetteville Terrace, but access to Room G05/G06 is only available from Capper Street; there is no access to these rooms from any other entrances in the College. On Capper Street, Room G05/G06 is 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 the 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, people generally go out for pizza at San Giorgios (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

Recently I’ve been pondering about the role of Linux and free software and whether we should be concentrating on making proprietary stuff work seamlessly with it (or just concentrating on making great free software for us).

I’ve come to the conclusion that we should be making everything “just work.”

Most things are proprietary, my video card is proprietary, my BIOS is proprietary. Linux already works with all these proprietary things, and we should make sure that everything else does too.

Users should be able to seamlessly sync their hardware with Linux, like an iPhone. They should be able to install any Windows application they want to. They should be able to purchase any piece of hardware and have it just work plug ‘n play style.

If users want to use proprietary data formats like H.264 and MP3, they should be able to.

Linux does already do a great job at a lot of these things and we should continue to support as much as we can.

Consumers will buy what they want to buy – things that are nice and shiny and inevitably proprietary. If they can’t use these on Linux, then they will continue to use other operating systems. This vendor lock-in model is not going away any time soon, so unless they work with Linux, these people are tied down elsewhere.

I’m not saying that we should be out there fighting Microsoft for market share, we should just be scratching itches. If it’s an itch to get an iPhone to sync, then it should be scratched and everyone benefits. If the barrier stopping someone from moving to Linux as their primary operating system is because their iPhone won’t sync, then that should be changed.

Sure, Microsoft and Apple are out to destroy us, but who cares? We should just ignore them and keep plodding along making great software for us and scratching itches.

My current job involves working extensively with Omniture products. The company has an annoying habit of secrecy, with documentation only available on request for many aspects of their products.

They also attempt to obfuscate their JavaScript, despite the fact that a determined viewer should be able to work it out eventually. I'm told this is so that people aren't tempted to play with the code. The obvious methods of deobfuscation are pretty tedious, and because Omniture don't use standard (minify et al) methods of obfuscation so it seems a little more difficult. Fortunately I lucked onto a better approach.

You'll need Firebug, and if you don't have that already you should anyway. Go to a page that already has the Omniture "plugin" (function) you want. Open the Firebug console and run alert(s.functionNameYouWant) and run it. You'll be shown a nicely-formatted anonymous function, which will be much easier to read than the line noise you'll see in the actual s_code.js file.

In my case I'm after Cross-Visit Participation, and that's used on the Omniture site itself (though an older version than the latest available from Omniture which has a very useful additional feature).

Contact me

Attendees of LCA2009 may be pleased to know that there is at least *some* hope for the Tassie Devil.



There is a completely separate monoculture that has thus far not been affected by the facial tumor. Whether it will be enough is the $44,000 question.

Attendees of LCA2009 may be pleased to know that there is at least *some* hope for the Tassie Devil.



There is a completely separate monoculture that has thus far not been affected by the facial tumor. Whether it will be enough is the $44,000 question.

Santa Cruz Bongo

Originally uploaded by Nooks

One thing I like about several of the Santa Cruz pictures is that they have a couple of layers to them, such as this one, though I do seem to recall that background colors were less muted than they are here.

On the other hand, what's this drum doing sitting on the beach anyway? No-one seemed to be tending it.

BlueTree Search recently re-launched their site with the help of Stripe Creative, switching from plain HTML to WordPress as a CMS. Along the way, they decided to bring their job listing in-house.

Initially, this client asked us to add a job posting section to the web site we developed for them a few years ago. Our awesome programmer dude (Scotty at randomproductions.net) suggested that for the same cost of adding a custom-written application, we could re-create the site in WordPress and find a customizable job posting plug-in. This allowed us to offer the client some serious added value (easier updates and adding new functionality through plug-ins) at no additional cost. The transfer to WordPress was transparent to the end users — we kept the site’s original design — and adding/customizing Job Manager was a breeze.

— Brian Robboy, Stripe Creative

With a little bit of editing of the Individual Job Template, they were able to easily highlight pertinent information, without distracting from the content of the listed job.

And a final bonus comment from Brian:

I love working with people like you who actually CARE about the applications they’re writing…we’d never get this level of dedication, customer service and communication with a commercial product.

Are you doing creative things with Job Manager? Have some time to tell me how and why you’re using it? Drop me a line, you could be the next Job Manager Highlight!

When I was sticking to Xubuntu 8.04, one of the things that saved my life was PPAs. A PPA is a Personal Package Archive, hosted on Launchpad. They let me install the latest versions of OpenOffice and Firefox even though the versions that came with my distro were a few versions behind. They are also useful for a ton of things that for whatever reason don’t make it into the official Ubuntu repositories. Once you have added a PPA to your system, installing and update software from it is as seamless as from the official repositories, and the apt-get style of software management is possibly my favourite thing about Ubuntu/Linux.

However pre-9.10, adding a PPA was kinda fiddly – you had to edit certain files, add special keys, blah blah blah. Now in 9.10 (karmic koala) it is super easy. For example, here is how I install the Arduino and Scratch IDEs from their PPAs:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scratch/ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:arduino-ubuntu-team/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install arduino

sudo apt-get install scratch

I love it!

In an interesting blog on patents, copying and litigation former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz discloses that Bill Gates and Steve Balmer tried to put the frighteners on Sun over OpenOffice.org to try and protect their office application monopoly. Their attack went like this:

“Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.” [...] “We’re happy to get you under license.”

Of course (as ever) they do not identify any patents, as that would let us fix any problems (if there are actually any), they would much rather weave their usual web of FUD on the matter than come clean. Jonathan’s response turned the issue on them on a different tact:

“We’ve looked at .NET, and you’re trampling all over a huge number of Java patents. So what will you pay us for every copy of Windows?”

That killed that angle of attack off..

This item originally posted here:



Microsoft Tried to get Patent Royalties for OpenOffice.org from Sun

A new lens got added to the collection today, a Canon 24-105mm f/4 L IS. I'm just a wee bit excited :-)

James Bradley responds on Slattery CAL Article

A little while ago Luke Slattery wrote an article on the amounts returned by CAL to authors.  The Australian has published a response from James Bradley, ‘one of three author directors on the board of the Copyright Agency Limited’.   Luke Slattery has also added an editorial comment (describing criticism of his article as being at times “histrionic”) at the end.   There does not seem to be a place for Creative Commons material in the Bradley article.

Sarah's doing her phlebotomy externship at San Francisco General Hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and needs to leave home fairly early to get there by 9am. As a result, I've been walking to work those mornings.

I remembered to record a track this morning:

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

It's certainly an improvement on the old commute. It's a shame there's a slight back-track involved.

I'll have to try rollerblading in another time.

Santa Cruz overlook

Originally uploaded by Nooks

This is where I started walking. The Boardwalk is to the right and the public beach to the left; the small sign is (of course!) a warning to stay behind the fence that I left out of the frame. The boat and bird were a happy accident. I have another shot of this same piece of land from below.

This config works by port forwarding RTP traffic to the asterisk and ATA on both ends. From what I've seen SIP does not handle RTP traffic well with double NAT when port forwarding of RTP it not used.

I've got the following network topology. The far left is an asterisk box I terminate all my VOIP calls through. The far right is my ATA and desk phone, a sipura spa2000.

This is how I do double nat sip with asterisk.

On the asterisk end far left, sip.conf has this in the general section

externip=198.51.100.100

localnet=10.20.20.0/255.255.255.0

For the account I have for my ATA to authenticate I have this

[sipura]

nat=yes

canreinvite=yes

In rtp.conf I lock RTP traffic to ports 10000 through to 10100

rtpstart=10000

rtpend=10100

On the far left Linux router I port forward the following

 

read more

I’ve been thinking (and talking) about learning some new programming languages over the past couple of years and it seems like time to make a decision about what to tackle. I’m not talking about learning a language just well enough to be able to poke at some crufty code that needs a tweak—what I’m interested in is learning languages well enough to seriously use them. And that, as Peter Norvig says, takes time. Which means I can’t learn every language out there.

After a lot of reading and thinking, I’ve decided that it has to be a functional language and that brings me to Erlang and Haskell. There are, of course, other candidates, but these two seem to offer the best opportunities for me at present, not least because both languages now have what appear to be good books available. And I like learning, at least in the beginning, from books.

It will be a while before I have anything to report about this plan, as I will first need to fit in my reading and practice until I can get something that I define as interesting ready for testing. At this stage, my tentative plan is to work with one language until I can write something easy but useful like a web server with it and then to reimplement the same thing in the other language and see how the two languages stack up.

It might not be a web server, but it will be about that size. And it will be something I don’t need to write (since, to keep with the web server example, I already have mature software handling that task for me), because I want to do this without any time pressure so that I can really delve into it. And it’s quite possible that I’ll just love whichever language I start with and not bother to even learn the other one. I really hope that I don’t hate them both, but I’m ready for that outcome too.

At the 2010 O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo there will be a Drizzle BoF!

It’s currently scheduled for 7pm on April 13th.

Come along, it will be awesome.

Another day, another Microsoft cross-patent licensing agreement for companies who use Linux.

Japan-based I-O Data Device Inc. has agreed to cough up an undisclosed sum to the software giant for using Linux and other open source software applications in its devices and routers.

Now I-O Data joins the ranks of Samsung, LG, Kyocera, Fuji Xerox, Brother and TomTom (and others which we don’t know about).

Microsoft says:

Microsoft has a strong track record of collaboration with companies running Linux-based offerings, and this agreement is a reflection of our commitment to partner with industry leaders around the world.

Thank goodness we aren’t doing anything crazy like deliberately putting Microsoft technologies such as .NET into Linux distributions. That would just be insane.

Well, I finally got a revision 1.0 out the door for one of my Drupal modules.  A fact I thought I'd celebrate with a blog.

The module with this honour is the most recent one I started, userpoints_evaporate, just over a week ago.

I guess it's a nice example of why open source is cool. Someone on the #drupal-support channel on Freenode asked if anyone knew whether an existing module could do what he wanted, which was essentially use the UserPoints module (which works kind of like karma on Launchpad) to automatically expire a set number of points for all users every hour or day (again, kind of like karma on Launchpad).<!--break-->

The existing modules can add an expiry date to any given points transaction, but can't expire a set number from all users in a batch run. Not any of the Drupal 6.x compatible modules, anyway.

After having a look at the hook_cron api docs and the userpoints module schema, I reckoned it shouldn't be too hard to just run an update query on the userpoints table and set points = points - 1, so I offered to have a go at it.

About an hour later I had a working module that essentially did what was needed. A bit more work added an administrative UI to set some options as well. The only problem turned out to be that because a cron run doesn't always take exactly the same amount of time, it's possible the module's cron hook gets fired after 59 minutes, instead of an hour. That would cause it to skip the occasional run. Bad.

The fix is easy though, just store the last run time minus a few minutes. I did that this morning, so now version 1.0 is out for all to enjoy :-)  Next step: getting it added to userpoints_contrib.

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