K-SIT Wollongong Based Open Source And New Media

This last 3 weeks have been insane. So much cool stuff, and I keep thinking “I need to blog about this or that, and then not making the time! Below is a quite recap of the cool stuff I’ve done and been involved in over the last few weeks. I have a few lengthy blogs posts coming up to cover some of these in detail, but in the meantime, I AM STILL ALIVE EVERYONE!

New Zealand trip
Jeff and I planned to take a short holiday, unfortunately on the day Jeff remembered he hadn’t got his passport renewed after it was stolen in Malaysia. Argh! I ended up going anyway, spending two days snowboarding at Mt Hutt near Christchurch with a friend (hi Glynn!), then a few days hanging out with Glynn and Jayne in Wellington doing Pilates, training with an awesome Shaolin Gung Fu master, and hacking on OLPC related work in preparation for an upcoming trip for the Aussie OLPC trial I’m helping rollout (more details on that later, so please don’t ask yet! I got to catch up with the Wellington “Friends in Testing” OLPC group and got inspired to start a regular OLPC usergroup in Sydney, to be announced at SLUG in the coming week! All in all a tiring but awesome holiday

Aussie OLPC trial
I’m running Australia’s first serious OLPC trial which has been technically challenging, and has consumed _all_ of my time over the previous few months. It has been awesome and I’ve have just now finished the implementation. The documentation will be made publicly available (and put on the OLPC wiki) in the coming week or two. We’ve basically done a world first of focusing on the remote collaboration and child support element of what the OLPC vision and technologies can deliver, so I’m really excited to be involved in this, and hopefully the lessons we learnt will assist many others We connected up 3 schools, such that specialist teachers can provide support to children in remote areas. Very interesting and the children are thriving with the tools they are playing with. I did a trip to the two remote locations, and we had a film crew come with us who are making a short internal doco, which may hopefully be able to be publicly disseminated over the coming months.

Linuxchix Microconf
Today I’m participating in a Linuxchix Microconf, a bunch of awesome women from Sydney and Melbourne participating in a video conference where people in both locations are presenting to the combined group real time, and it has been great. My talk is in an hour (just finished my slides and the day has covered a huge range of topics. All have been recorded and I believe will be made available for everyone. Awesome job by Alice, Mary, Sun-Hee and a huge thanks to Google for the resources. They provided the venue, videoconferencing, and a tasty spread of catering!

Coming up!

• Documentation and publishing of all OLPC stuff plus kick off of bigger regional community project
• Malaysian Government event on FOSS, and FOSS MY, I’ll be speaking about building FOSS community building and stuff happening in Governments. I’m really excited about going to Malaysia both to see the country, and to learn more about their approach to FOSS, which seems to be pretty cool. I’ll try to live blog during the event.
• Open Education Workshop - ASK-OSS in collaboration with the NSW Department of Education is launching a workshop on Open Education to both share knowledge, and to start trying to understand the needs of the sector, and making a strategic plan for Open Education in Australia. This is meant to be broad to include FOSS, Open Standards, Open Knowledge, and open collaboration methodologies amongst much more. If you are in education and interested in openness, come along and participate!

Anyway, much more blogging to do, and I’ll try to be less slack even though there is so much going on

From the Business SA Export Awards of 2008 we would like to send our congratulations to YourAmigo for being recipients not just of the Information Technology export award but also the Premier's Award for "Excellence and High Achievement in Exports". The leaders who have forged YourAmigo to where it is today are solid evidence that absolute persistence and a lot of blood, sweat and tears can pay off for Australian companies looking to export including those in the ICT arena.

Following off from Jeff Waugh, of Waugh Partners, call this time last year for Australian Open Source to look at ways to export their wares it was fantastic to be at the Australian Export Awards to see the recognition on a world class exporter not only on stage but also in the media spotlight this morning.

With the current state of the Australian Dollar now is a fantastic time for all Australian business owners to be considering how to export their produce or services to overseas markets. Contact us today to find out how you can get your business exporting.

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Dear Minister Stephen Conroy,

I'd like to add voice to a growing chorus of disdain.
Please don't implement mandatory filtering of the Internet.

I have three key areas of concern.

1. It will be ineffective and slow down connection speeds for everyone.
2. The government should not decide what I can and can not view in the privacy of my own home.
3. The very concept of "illegal information" needs to be examined.

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So after loads of work and testing, we now have a VideoChat app for OLPC that really works Check it out! It is a core part of a trial I’m working on, which isn’t quite yet public news, but more on that soon.

Many thanks to Stephen Thorne for his wonderful efforts and the enormous amount of time he’s put into making it work. Also thanks of course to the Collabora guys who made it in the first place. VideoChat could do with more work, more UI hacking, work on the “whiteboard” functionality idea, and potentially a way to create multi-conferencing, so if you want to hack, get hacking on VideoChat. More details and the download are on the OLPC VideoChat page.

Please note, this app currently only does basic videoconferencing (between 2 laptops only atm) and not the wonderful but still in planning whiteboard functionality on the Videochat webpage.

The only thing that concerns me about an Obama presidency is the heightened possibility of extremist nutjobs making an attempt on his life. The last couple of weeks of the campaign have highlighted that it is indeed possible, even coming from quarters that purport to be “against terrorism” and “for America”.

More than ever, the USA needs an inspiring leader, so I don’t want to see Obama locked away from the people, forever stuck behind bulletproof glass podiums and the windows of heavily-armoured cars.

At least there’s one very tiny sliver of silver lining, if I may smother my concern with humour for a moment: We can call his car the Hopemobile.

Much of Australia went into DST mode this week, with the only holdouts being the odd little backwaters of our country (generally referred to as “Queensland”) for whom daylight saving is a threat to curtains or farm animals… and anyone relying on PHP5’s bundled timezone database.

I filed a bug and test case regarding the problem (which will hopefully be be fixed with an official update, given that Hardy is an LTS release), but here’s a quick guide to work around the problem in the mean time. Thanks to Andrew “ajmitch” Mitchell for pointing me in the right direction!

1. Grab and unpack the timezonedb extension tarball from PECL.
2. apt-get install php5-dev
3. phpize
4. ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5
5. make
6. sudo cp modules/timezonedb.so /usr/lib/php5/20060613/
   Note: The precise name of the final directory might be different. For instance, on hardy-i386 it will be 20060613+lfs.
7. sudo vi /etc/php/conf.d/timezonedb.ini
   Yes, this is a new file. Content: extension=timezonedb.so
8. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Now your PHP has the very latest timezone data up its sleeve, so you can rest easy knowing that your web visitors won’t think you’re a Queenslander.

Zing!

Update: The php5-timezonedb extension was added to Debian, but removed from intrepid… seems it was because intrepid’s php5 has a patch to use the system tzdata. It would be awesome to get that patch into hardy!

Update: Uh, what about make…?

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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