K-SIT Wollongong Based Open Source And New Media

Customer requires a special-case redirect for the first use of a browser (each day) on a workstation. So much stuff almost does this, & in the closed-source world, it would be:<GAME OVER>
<PLAYER ONE>

Happily, adding one feature to Squirm will make this all possible, so customer will get functionality, plus also a little fame, & the rest of the world will get functionality as well, no extra charge.

As a sub-bonus, it’s an Aussie program, so we’re supporting local industry. Hooraw! (-: would be nice if I could really work, do this kind of stuff full-throttle :-)

I am working on a really interesting OLPC XO/XS trial (all to be revealed soon!) where the main lynchpin demonstration is the VideoChat activity. We are certainly looking at the educational benefits, the interesting impact on truancy, and opportunities for disadvantaged kids, etc. However, the VideoChat offers a great way to provide support to remote kids including speech therapy, behavioural therapy, counselling, health services and of course distance education. So we have been working hard to get the VideoChat activity working. It now works online, but not with an XS (unless you disable Squid and have no firewall), so more work to go.

Anyway, I temporarily uploaded the xo to my website knowing I wanted to have it hosted elsewhere fairly quickly. Luckily one of the wonderful Telepathy guys (hi Cassidy!) offered to host it, so it’s all good. Thing is, in the 3 days I was hosting the 8mb file, I had 534 downloads. Woohoo! That is a lot of bandwidth in a very short time I guess it is of interest to a lot of folk out there.

Check out VideoChat. It is very cool but it still needs a lot of work including some prettying up!

Anyway, this is a short one. I have several blogs to catch up on, so sorry everyone!

Problem: workplace is perennially unable to maintain a hot-drink mug that I can use.

Solution: spend a small amount of cash roughly equivalent to 20 seconds of my working time acquiring a mug from Crazy Clarks en route to work.

Benefit: problem solved, would have spent more time looking for (& failing to find) a mug than I did acquiring a new one (micro-economics), workmates quietly amused.

Problem: I acquired an extra can-opener in the course of replacing a damaged (DOA) one.

Solution: donate the opener to said office, which now has can manipulation facilities.

Benefit: more storage space for me. Loss: the opener cost $1.99 a week ago, would have fetched $3.49 if returnable stand-alone but needed a receipt I don’t have.

Comment: being disconnected from the Liar/Gross (LG) has many benefits (a pleasant Thai girl had me list them out), but has not yet overcome the physical/financial damage done by LG, so $1.50 makes a significant difference to basic items like what I eat (micro-economics).

I like Blizzard’s latest gimmick… memebait that is actually interesting. Here’s my YouTube Four, care of the very appropriately named Firefox Awesome Bar:

… and a bonus one because I can’t resist. But also because 5 is a much cooler number than 4. I don’t know what Chris has been smoking.

(Hooray for Viper’s Video Quicktags! Except for that bug with incorrect YouTube links in my feed…)

Tomorrow morning I'm doing a talk at the K12 Open Minds Conference in Indianapolis.

I'll put the slides online as soon as I have bandwidth to do so, but in the meantime here are links to the references.

Freeman, Oliver. Teaching for uncertain futures: the open book scenarios. Teaching Australia, Feb 2008. http://www.teachingaustralia.edu.au/ta/webdav/site/tasite/shared/OBS/Tea...

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For some time now we have had SugarCRM deployed on test for the Green & Nutty Trust. This last week has seen some major steps forward on this project. With the help of two hours of training support from Insightful Customer Relations we are well on our way to having this system fully deployed on schedule.

Personally, I have found the adjustment to the new web 2.0 styled 'intuitive design' quite easy when it comes to insurers, travel, accounting and social web sites but have honestly struggled a bit when it has been implemented into the administration functions of web design and software packages such as this. However, having played with the Open Source v4.x of SugarCRM and then moving to the Commercial Open Source v5.1 has been an amazing transition. I have found the intuitive design very easy when working in studio to customise lead, contact and account details and, perhaps for the first time, I have come across a package that does basic customisation really, really well!

In order to fininsh this design and get it deployed we still need to get the Microsoft Outlook Plug-in working, which well, means getting Outlook, in some form, onto Green & Nutty's servers in the first instance! Lest to say, we are doing our best to make it work seemlessly without too many Microsoft or Linux related hiccups. To date we only have one open bug with SugarCRM relating to it's inability to undertake a javascript function within the Firefox web browser, rendering account records unable to be saved. We hope this is something that we will be sorted out soon for browser security reasons.

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surge, noun — Throwing good after bad. Such as: money, lives, reputation, international good-will.

Recent examples of use: Iraq, Wall Street, deregulation, tax cuts for the top 1%, War on Drugs.

Today is the day! There are over 600 teams (including the additional Sun events from almost 100 countries participating this year, which is almost double the size of last year!

Over 600 teams for SFD08

There are some really exciting events happening, some of which are highlighted on the new SFD community Planet, but check out the Software Freedom Day website and join in the fun. Even if there isn’t an event near you, you can have your own little outreach effort. Talk to your friends, family and colleagues about software freedom and why it is so important. Today of all days you ahve the world behind you!

For those not sure about what software freedom means, I’ve wrote a little piece called Software Freedom, underpinning your human rights which should hopefully help. There is also plenty more information on the SFD site!

Happy Software Freedom Day everyone!

Simon Phipps has recorded a great podcast about Software Freedom Day starring Simon (Sun), Jono Bacon (Canonical), Josh Sullivan (FSF) and yours truly (SFI). It was a fun podcast, some great conversation and worth checking out. Thanks to Jono and Josh for participation and Simon for putting it all together! Great work everyone!

Putting cynical populism, ignorance of global security and environmental vandalism into perspective… “Drill Here, Drill Now” is not even a short term solution, it’s a long term road to nowhere (via garrett).

In fact, that’s precisely what returning a Republican to the White House will be after eight years of cronyism, incompetence and mismanagement: A Road to Nowhere.

But hey — at least they have a bridge to sell you!

Run DHCP on your wireless interface (e.g. dhclient eth1).

The nearest power socket is in the nook on the south-ish side of PICA, which is about 3m outside wireless range for this hp/Compaq nx9040 (I think because of environment shape rather than actual distance), so a fully-charged battery is a great place to start.

Fire up a web browser, click on OK, the world is now yours. I can ssh (so of course scp) including to weird ports, which allows me to upload photos to my webserver (at about 2MB/s) without any setup.

I was able (once) to briefly connect from on the other side of the train tracks (near the Blood Bank) but this is not reliable.

Was able to chat with friends in the USA & Thailand. Can’t complain about the price.

Dear blog readers and clients alike

We thought we'd give you a heads up that we will be migrating our web services this weekend. With the change of name servers it may be 2-3 days before you can view our site again which may be until Tuesday in Australia or Monday in the United States. This change will also affect email sent to our accounts during migration and clients with appointments on Monday and Tuesday will be provided with a separate email for the duration.

This change will occur at the following times:

US Pacific Daylight / Summer Time - Friday 19 September 2008 8.00pm
Australian Eastern Standard Time - Saturday 20 September 2008 1.00pm

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

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Today I had a great interview with the wonderful James Purser on the Open Source on the air (OSOTA) show. Check it out! Thanks James, it was a lot of fun

I have been playing around with the very impressive Dropbox, watching the surprisingly rapid syncing between my desktop and netbook, when I stumbled on a use case that would totally rock my socks off: I totally need a Dropbox on my Linode!

So I copied ~/.dropbox* up to my Linode VM server, checked if it had any obvious references to the machine it was originally installed on, and ran ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd (a quick ldd will show you that it is a simple daemon, and doesn’t link to any of the GUI stuff).

Voila — Dropbox on my server, synced back with my desktop and netbook, with the same delightful performance and seamless attention to detail as the desktop client. Seriously, their GNOME-like “Just Works” approach and Nautilus integration are totally awesome.

(I also posted to their forum about it, so there might be some discussion there to watch.)

Bravo, Dropboxers.

I’ll be posting all the Youtube SFD videos here for everyone to find If you have a blog and want to blog your SFD related news, send the feed to me to add to the new SFD planet!

Software Freedom Day, Richard Stallman in New Zealand

SoftwareFreedomDay 2008 KDE Jos Poortvliet

Software Freedom Week 08 - BVBCET, Hubli-India (Promotional video)

Open Hardware Foundation - Lourens Veen

Softwarefreedomday aankondiging Bas de Lange (check out the SFD shirt preview)

We have a large amount of resources now for SFD. Artwork, posters, shirt designs, templates, videos and more! Check out the SFD downloads and resources page and add a SFD button to your blog or website today!

Last night was the Pearcey Awards, which in itself is always a great way to find out about up and coming leaders in the field and achievements in ICT, however they also created a national roundtable event called INNOVATION & ICT IN AUSTRALIA: A NATIONAL DEBATE. It was closely linked with the Federal Government’s National Innovation Review, released just a couple of days ago which has some excellent recommendations in around open publishing, sustainability, Open Source, open standards and patent reform, just to name a few. In fact chapter 7 of that review has many of the recommendations put forward at Senator Kate Lundy’s ‘Foundations of Open’ Local Summit back in March. There were two panels last night, one with entreprenuers (which I participated in) and one with larger organisations. Then there were speeches from Minister Conroy and Terry Cutler just to name a few. It was really a great evening and it was fascinating to hear many of the concepts we have taken for granted in the FOSS world be brought up as important to Australia’s future economic properity, ideas such as “open innovation”, “services built around shared content”, “searchable publicly available data sets [particularly publicly funded data]” and more.

On the panel I spoke about how we need to educate entreprenuers and small business how to stand on the shoulders of giants and better leverage tools like FOSS to build both cheap and scalable infrastructure (I mentioned an organisation I’m involved in where the ex-Deloitte employee assumed we would need $100k for a website!) as well as the ability to create new value and services by combining existing FOSS components in new and innovative ways. I spoke about the need for more focus on technical skills (every child should learn basic programming) to help all our citizens to better leverage technology in all circumstances. I also spoke about how we need to be not only recognising and encouraging ICT as an “enabler for all industries”, a term thrown around a lot, but we also need to focus on core ICT and being a world leader in bleeding edge technologies. We need to recognise that if we only see ICT as an enabler, then we are actually parroting the much disliked “Australia is a consumer nation” phrase with new buzzwords. The increased awareness of innovation at an organisational and infrastructure level is wonderful, however it can not be at the cost of innovation at an ICT industry or technologies level lest we be left behind in such a competitive global market.

Other panelists spoke about the need for Government to partner more with smaller innovative Australian companies rather than always going to safest road. Apparently the Australian Government already has a requirement to spend something linke 0.5% on piloting innovative solutions, so it would be great to see more work going into this. Several people mentioned how Government will often get a great idea from a small company (or from the many smart and innovative people in Government), which will go to tender and then inevitably be won by a large multinational who isn’t providing the inspirational and innovative solution initially proposed. A massive loss for those smaller companies with big ideas.

I was in the audience when IP came up and luckily had the microphone ready to ask the next question (one panelist said that the dropping number of patents recently was an enormous issue for Australia, argh!), so I spoke briefly about how Government and industry need to look at new IP models, new business models and realise that IP protectionism (patents, proprietary code) is not the means to open innovation nor an openly competitive market (particularly when we follow in the footsteps of the flawed US patent system), and ultimately we need to keep focusing on how to create world leading exportable services, which is where the industry has been heading for some time. This earned an applause which was interesting.

I was quite surprised throughout the evening the number of people who came up to me and said they were really impressed with my comments and observations. I didn’t think that I had said anything particularly incredible, but it made me realise that is because I’m so involved with the Open Source community which is full of people who are innovative, focused on openness and collaboration, aware of the practical implications of different IP approaches, often on the bleeding edge of new ideas and technologies and often successfully making a living with new business and IP models not yet in the mainstream. Our community has world leading innovators and thinkers who are miles ahead of the curve, so my expected level of comparison is quite high

Education came up again and again. Education at schools/TAFE/University for students, technology education, entrepreneurial skills, information and training for small businesses, what skills are needed to meet the needs of evolving markets. It was great to have so much attention on this topic because ultimately there is no point having great policies and support around “innovation” if we don’t have any skills in Australia to innovate with.

Many people expressed a desire to enable innovation, but it was said several times that “innovation” is a term that is thrown around a lot without people necessarily being on the same page. I think that is has been overused and abused a lot, and it was Terry Cutlers speech at the end that really brought it together for me. Terry wrote the innovation report that was discussed, and in his speech he pulled no punches when it comes to the laughable reality in Australia at the moment (very, very low OECD rankings when it comes to investment in ICT and education, amongst other things). He spoke about the potential for Australia, about “open innovation” and I think the report has many excellent recommendations that will hopefully pull our public and private policy and practices into sharp evolution. I think in Australia we have the smarts and the desire to be innovative, successful and to be competing in the global ICT market, but achieving this success starts at home. Many Australian businesses and Government agencies want to see success overseas or great success locally before committing to even trialling new solutions and we need to figure out how to better enable local success which will feed into growing local innovation and global competitiveness. The Australian market is extremely risk averse and as such runs the risk of always being behind the ball.

Murali Sagi, who is an extremely clever and successful CIO and a great example of the innovators found in Government, put it most concisely.

Australians are innovative, but Australia isn’t.

Let’s try and fix that