Linux Users of Victoria, Inc.

Well it seems that my insanity knows no bounds. During the LCA2011 call for papers I had an idea for a mini conf based on the ever growing arena of FOSS based mobile systems.

It turns out that I'm not the only one interested in this :)

I got the okay a couple of days ago and today I was told that I could start talking about it. So the next step is going to be setting up the site for the miniconf and working out Call for Papers and so on.

W00t.

Copyright Harms Australia Again

Amazon (AUD) Booktopia Australians Ripped off by The Wealth of Networks: Ho... $15.63 $27.80 78% Ajax: The Definitive Guide $36.19 $66.75 84% Star Wars Clone Wars Chara... $13.27 $23.40 76% Heads $14.06 $19.95 42%

So, for example, the US price of the Wealth of Networks book when expressed in AUD is 1.78 times the best price from Booktopia in Australia, or Australians pay 78% more for the book.

Prices exclusive of delivery.  Delivery is calculated differently, but price is roughly equivalent, with longer nominal delivery time for Amazon (weeks vs days).

I also looked up the first two in the Nile and emporium books but the prices were slightly more expensive.

Today I installed iTunes 10. Apple has stopped requiring you to reboot your computer the moment you get an iTunes upgrade – I consider this a plus point. Its now sporting a new logo, and things look a little more polished in the application.

Noticing no Ping, which seemed to be all the rage in the morning, I wondered what the cause might be. Quite clearly, you don’t get in on Ping, Apple’s new social network, if they don’t run an iTunes Music Store in your country! The moment I made the change to my US-based iTunes account, all seemed to be OK, and I could start playing around with Ping.

Then it became clearer why they didn’t want me to use Ping. “Each time you purchase, review, rate or like music on the iTunes Store, it will appear here” (so it said on my profile). At the moment, Ping does not fit my use case – I rip audio CDs that I purchase, and they have information within iTunes thanks to the CDDB database it syncs with. I have never purchased music from the iTunes Music Store, because I cannot be bothered with using a foreign credit card or looking for iTunes gift certificates.

Does this in any way hamper last.fm/AudioScrobbler? Probably a little, considering Ping is built-into iTunes. Plus you can follow your favourite artistes ;-) Does this mean people will quit last.fm for Ping? I find it highly unlikely. But last.fm is probably on their toes now, since there’s some overlap – concert recommendations, etc. Ping also is run within iTunes, you can’t use a web browser. There does not seem to be any API either.

Then, people got excited with Apple’s new Apple TV. I didn’t. Its not international. OK, not international enough. I can still buy the old Apple TV from the Malaysian or Singaporean Apple Store. The new ones seem to be available for sale in Australia, UK, the US, and probably a few other countries where you can rent/buy movies from the store.

The iPod Touch? Some good changes, but the camera isn’t all that hip. Good enough for FaceTime. Speaking of FaceTime, it is apparently based on open standards. Steve Jobs said something like it will be open. When will Apple release some information about how others can independently implement FaceTime? Or inter-operate with FaceTime?

Game Center looks interesting. Social gaming is going to be big (also, big in iOS4.1). The new iPhone 4’s don’t have iOS4.1 yet, but when the update comes (next week?), you will get Game Center too. And the iPod touch should be fast – sporting an A4 chip. Apple has successfully made devices do multiple things (iPod touch: music player, game machine, video conferencing tool, etc.). Would I buy one? I’m still too smitten with my iPad, so much so I haven’t used my 1st generation iPod Touch since April 2010!

The new iPod Nano looks cool. Its a pity they’ve removed the camera. And the shuffle, well, its a shuffle – I’ve never owned one.

So the Apple Music event turned out to mostly be a bummer, unless you live in a country where the iTunes Music Store is available.

Related posts:

1. Apple launches the Malaysian Online Store
2. Apple opens up Podcasts, iTunes U in Malaysia
3. A plea to Apple

Today I installed iTunes 10. Apple has stopped requiring you to reboot your computer the moment you get an iTunes upgrade – I consider this a plus point. Its now sporting a new logo, and things look a little more polished in the application.

Noticing no Ping, which seemed to be all the rage in the morning, I wondered what the cause might be. Quite clearly, you don’t get in on Ping, Apple’s new social network, if they don’t run an iTunes Music Store in your country! The moment I made the change to my US-based iTunes account, all seemed to be OK, and I could start playing around with Ping.

Then it became clearer why they didn’t want me to use Ping. “Each time you purchase, review, rate or like music on the iTunes Store, it will appear here” (so it said on my profile). At the moment, Ping does not fit my use case – I rip audio CDs that I purchase, and they have information within iTunes thanks to the CDDB database it syncs with. I have never purchased music from the iTunes Music Store, because I cannot be bothered with using a foreign credit card or looking for iTunes gift certificates.

Does this in any way hamper last.fm/AudioScrobbler? Probably a little, considering Ping is built-into iTunes. Plus you can follow your favourite artistes ;-) Does this mean people will quit last.fm for Ping? I find it highly unlikely. But last.fm is probably on their toes now, since there’s some overlap – concert recommendations, etc. Ping also is run within iTunes, you can’t use a web browser. There does not seem to be any API either.

Then, people got excited with Apple’s new Apple TV. I didn’t. Its not international. OK, not international enough. I can still buy the old Apple TV from the Malaysian or Singaporean Apple Store. The new ones seem to be available for sale in Australia, UK, the US, and probably a few other countries where you can rent/buy movies from the store.

The iPod Touch? Some good changes, but the camera isn’t all that hip. Good enough for FaceTime. Speaking of FaceTime, it is apparently based on open standards. Steve Jobs said something like it will be open. When will Apple release some information about how others can independently implement FaceTime? Or inter-operate with FaceTime?

Game Center looks interesting. Social gaming is going to be big (also, big in iOS4.1). The new iPhone 4’s don’t have iOS4.1 yet, but when the update comes (next week?), you will get Game Center too. And the iPod touch should be fast – sporting an A4 chip. Apple has successfully made devices do multiple things (iPod touch: music player, game machine, video conferencing tool, etc.). Would I buy one? I’m still too smitten with my iPad, so much so I haven’t used my 1st generation iPod Touch since April 2010!

The new iPod Nano looks cool. Its a pity they’ve removed the camera. And the shuffle, well, its a shuffle – I’ve never owned one.

So the Apple Music event turned out to mostly be a bummer, unless you live in a country where the iTunes Music Store is available.

Related posts:

1. Apple launches the Malaysian Online Store
2. Apple opens up Podcasts, iTunes U in Malaysia
3. A plea to Apple

Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.

This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.

In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.

For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.

Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.

A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.

But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.

Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.

Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.

• [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law
• [2] http://www.theonion.com/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_chaser

Waseem Daher of Ksplice posted some interesting SSH trick on his blog recently. Most of them are old-hat, but one in particular was interesting to me – SSH’s escape key (tilde). This lets you send commands to the SSH session itself, like backgrounding the session.

chris@localhost ~ $

chris@localhost ~ $ ~?

Supported escape sequences:

~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)

~B - send a BREAK to the remote system

~C - open a command line

~R - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)

~^Z - suspend ssh

~# - list forwarded connections

~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)

~? - this message

~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice

(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

Neat.

13:07: Mikal shared: Penn and Teller take on vaccines | Bad Astronomy

Nice video about the dangers of vaccination.

Tags for this post: blather Comment RSS with no blather

I previously wrote about my experience handing out How To Vote (HTV) cards at the federal election a couple of weeks ago [1].

One comment noted that at one polling place “all the volunteers for different candidates had combined into a single team, handing out all the cards together“, which makes sense. There is some advantage in forcing cards on people, some people decide who to vote for once they are inside the polling booth based on information on the HTV cards (a couple of voters stated an intention to do so which disappointed the politically aware people who hand out the HTV cards). But for most voters there is no benefit in competing to hand them a HTV card.

Some of the comments expressed a dislike of being subjected to people handing out HTV cards. As a voter I don’t particularly like having a group of conflicting people wanting to hand me a HTV card either. Also it is obviously a waste of resources to hand out so much cardboard that goes to waste (particularly the Liberal and Labor parties that use glossy non-recycled paper).

I think that the ideal solution would be to have the officials at the polling booths hand out HTV cards on request. A voter would have to specifically request the card from a party and the poll officials would not be able to offer them a selection, “sorry I can’t tell you who is running for election, but if you express a desire to vote for a particular party I can give you a card instructing you how to do so“. The parties would be responsible for providing the HTV cards (according to strict specifications regarding the acceptable sizes), and if the supply runs out then the officials would decline requests.

This could even be made self-financing by making the parties who want their cards distributed pay for a fraction of the wages of the people who hand out the cards, if each polling place had one person handing out the HTV cards at a salary of $500 for the day and there were 5 parties cards to hand out then each party would have to pay $100. The reduced print runs for HTV cards would probably save each party more than $100.

Something like this should satisfy the real need of voters who want advice on how to support their preferred party while not annoying the voters who know how to vote without any assistance. I expect that most members of the parties would be in favor of this idea. The only reason we go to the significant amount of effort and expense to hand out the HTV cards is because everyone else is doing so.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/08/22/telling-people-how-to-vote/

My email lives on a virtual server and lately I've been accessing it with mutt on that machine via SSH. I really like mutt, but this makes things tricky when someone emails me a URL and it's either awkward to copy & paste (e.g. PuTTY) or I'd like to look at the web page on another machine--often I have my laptop to one side for email while doing other things on my desktop machine.

Mutt uses the rather nice urlview program to extract URLs out of email messages for easy selection. urlview's handler script can also be hijacked to do whatever you want. I've set mine up to generate an HTML file in the server's webspace. This HTML file has a meta refresh tag to immediately redirect the browser to the URL of interest.

Now when I get a URL in an email I hit ^b to invoke urlview, select the URL I want, load a web browser on the target machine and choose my bookmark for my own URL redirector.

To set this up yourself:

1. Install the urlview package aptitude install urlview
2. Modify /etc/urlview/url_handler.sh to call your own script. I put the following line under the user-configurable settings but before their own handler: /usr/local/bin/sharelink.sh $1
3. (Optional) Disable the http handler so that you don't end up loading elinks or something else on the computer running mutt: http_prgs=""
4. Create a world-writable file in the machine's webspace: (but not world-deletable! The parent directory should only be writable by www-data or root.) touch /var/www/link.htm chmod 0666 link.htm
5. Create a script to generate that link.htm. In my case I used this following in /usr/local/bin/sharelink.sh: #!/bin/bash LINKFILE=/var/www/link.htm url=$1 cat > $LINKFILE <<EOF <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head><title>Email Link Redirector</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=$url"></head> <body><h1>Redirecting</h1><p><a href="$url">$url</a></body> </html> EOF

Coming up with a cool way of retrieving attached files is left as an exercise to the reader.

 Sigh, so close and yet so far.

This morning a message hit the Android Australia mailing list claiming that Australia had been added to the small list of countries that  were allowed to sell Apps in the Android market.

Alas, it wasn't so. Instead it appears that Australias addition to the list was in error and we are still part of the great unwashed who are unable to take advantage of googles sales infrastructure.

Come on guys and gals at Google! You have an excellent product and people want to be able to take advantage of it, people are begging to be able to give you money via whatever cut you take via the marketplace, why are we being locked out? Why are you ensuring that those of us outside of the US/UK have to turn to iphone development to make our mark in the mobile world?

Sigh.

 Just a quick update on the iphone version of the openaustralia search app:

House of Reps Search:

Currently hardcoded to search by postcode. Need to include a Picker so that people can choose how they search for their members, however, the Picker widget on the iPhone is hucking fuge! Seriously, the thing looks like something out your local hotels Pokie room.

Senate Search:

Nothing done here yet

Hansard Search:

While the general search functionality hasn't been touched yet, I've started working on the  Rep related Hansard search, tends to crash right now, but still going :)

My Rep:

Nothing done as yet.

If you want to have a look at the horror that is my objective c then have a gander over here

Here’s what I’m saying: I’m a woman, I’m in my late thirties, I can’t handle first-person shooters, I’m afraid of Comic-Con, and I really, really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I hope I’m not, you know, blowing your mind.

– Linda Holmes in her incredibly cool meta-film-review, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Versus The Unfortunate Tendency To Review The Audience

Here’s what I’m saying: I’m a woman, I’m in my late thirties, I can’t handle first-person shooters, I’m afraid of Comic-Con, and I really, really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I hope I’m not, you know, blowing your mind.

– Linda Holmes in her incredibly cool meta-film-review, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Versus The Unfortunate Tendency To Review The Audience

After wrestling with various Gmail extensions with similar aims, I was pleased to hear about the new Gmail Priority Inbox which I have now turned on for my Gmail. I don't think they have it quite right yet, but I expect it will evolve over the next few months and that it might just become so useful that I end up feeling that I did the right thing moving all my email to Gmail.



I’d be interested to see what other people think about this feature as they try it out.

10:40: Mikal shared: chumby hacker boards (now available in beta)

Very very tempting. It is a bit of a shame that ethernet isn't built in though.

12:09: Mikal shared: Lloyd's of London - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lloyd's has an interesting history. I like the coffee shop beginnings.

14:02: Mikal shared: FDA Finally Inspects Tainted Egg Farms, Discovers They're Unsanitary

Why isn't the FDA inspecting places like this? That seems like a pretty fundamental requirement to me.

Tags for this post: blather Comment RSS with no blather

ISBN: 0441013430

LibraryThing

This is actually a relatively simple story, but padded out with a series of historical interludes. These are presented as when the main character is exploring a VR world, but most of them don't directly further the plot. However, they also don't make the story drag along, and are some of the most entertaining parts of the story. Relatively light reading, like The Coming and Marsbound. I enjoyed it.



Tags for this post: book joe_haldeman combat colonization vr nanotech disease

Related posts: Body Armor: 2000; Bill the Galactic Hero Series; First Family; Marsbound; On Basilisk Station; Death Bringer; Cyteen: The Vindication; The Complete Hammer's Slammers Volume 1; Space Soldiers; Cryptonomicon; There Is No Darkness; Without Warning; The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; Bolo Strike; A Separate War & Other Stories; Blood River; Bolos 4: Last Stand; The Complete Hammer's Slammers Volume 2; Dragonsdawn; Cyteen: The Rebirth; Colony



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I'm going solo, working for myself at Horms Solutions, a boutique free and open source software consultancy.

I'm going solo, working for myself at Horms Solutions, a boutique free and open source software consultancy.

If your eclectic tastes include legendary modern music-as-art heroes such as Radiohead, MGMT, Florence and the Machine, Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels, you simply must check out upcoming New Zealand band The Naked and Famous.

Their debut album will be released in early September, but they’ve put out some mind-blowingly good singles already… here’s Young Blood:

Update: Okay, I can’t just link the one. Here are my other favourites so far…

If your eclectic tastes include legendary modern music-as-art heroes such as Radiohead, MGMT, Florence and the Machine, Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels, you simply must check out upcoming New Zealand band The Naked and Famous.

Their debut album will be released in early September, but they’ve put out some mind-blowingly good singles already… here’s Young Blood:

Update: Okay, I can’t just link the one. Here are my other favourites so far…