Colin Charles Agenda

Our friend/fellow OSS supporter jiyuu0/Chua Wen Kiat, is sick. He’s from the famed fedoraguide.org, and the definitely more popular ubuntuguide.org. He also ran (or runs?) MyOSC, an open source outreach program to colleges and universities in Malaysia. Let’s hope he gets better.

Caught The Wedding Date. Its actually quite nice, one of those feel good pick me up movies. I think its to balance my heavy pizza diet, where delivery boys rush to send food my way, to get their daily dose of tipping (well, you see, most of the parlors are about a five minute drive away from my house, I’m just a lazy sod). Along the lines, I also caught Finding Neverland (not bad), and I Heart Huckabees (silly, waste of time).

So everyone’s jumping that the iTunes Music Store launched in Australia? A farce I tell you. Songs at AUD$1.69, thats USD$1.27. Why am I paying USD$0.28 more? Besides, I can’t download buy Desperate Housewives, because thats only available to the US store, right? And welcome to Australia, the land of fast Internet, with quotas. Movies quickly add up to the download quota.

Over the weekend, got productive and installed a Fedora snapshot. I give you Nerd Porn! Folk will notice the installer got a lot simpler, because a lot of the functionality moved over to firstboot. Partitioning is a lot simpler now, and comes on early during the install.

I finally got Firefox Deer Park Alpha 2 building on PPC. Need to disable visibility pragmas for it to actually build (on both FC-4 or Rawhide).

Yay, yay, I’ll be getting the new 15″ Powerbook. I have to apparently wait around 3-4 weeks, I sincerely hope its going to be a lot shorter than that. As in the 3 week cap, but hey, I’m still excited nonetheless.

I’m massively pissed off at the way Apple is handling their iBook’s with a lot of RAM. Like most people that bought one recently, and decided to go get 1.5GB of RAM in total, they’re all facing similar issues with the Airport Extreme. I got my 1GB stick from the Apple Store, for what it’s worth, so no 3rd party goo.

What happens? After a little bit of network traffic (even minimal at times), or some significant uptime (think, 2-3 hours), the Airport dies. It just stops detecting networks, and the only way to fix this is via a reboot. It seems that the card overheats, and it shuts down. However, it rapidly cools, and there’s no good way to start the card back up again. Firmware bug? Software bug (seeing the kernel_task get really high)? Jumpy cursors?

Rebooting 3-4 times during my typical workday is annoying. It doesn’t help that I’ve been spending time away from my home, and don’t have the luxury of a 100mbps connection. WiFi whoring is the way to go. But not if I have to constantly reboot. Think restarting Firefox, my numerous SSH connections to the Linux machines I need to use, irc, and what not.

For fun reading, visit: Airport quits, restart necessary on the Apple forums, and 2005 iBooks losing Airport under network load. MacFixIt has an article too, bt they require some silly subscription. No, you don’t even need to be running BitTorrent. Trying to upload a 4MB photo to Flickr, with my crappy 128kbps upload speed is enough to heat this card up.

Its a design flaw. And it affects us consumers. I don’t see it being any better under Linux (except that Airport Extreme doesn’t work). I have hope with the bcm43xx project (though on irc, dwmw2 confirmed it doesn’t work yet). So if you picked up one of these babies and are running Linux on it, not certain you have broken hardware, I suggest you give OS X a try, and give your local Apple support center a hard time.

This was bound to happen. vFolders and my dependency on them. Thunderbird doesn’t have sane support for this. It however does have excellent IMAP support. I am now doomed to carry two 15″ laptops everywhere I go. Not that this is abnormal, seeing that anyone who’s seen me travel knows I carry at least two. But damn, now I have camera gear to add to the weight. Airlines are going to love me.

Now, we had grand plans (jwulf & I) to run a Fedora MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand. It turns out, that LCA is packed to the brim, and there’s absolutely no space for yet another MiniConf. Its been suggested we hold a BOF instead. But to keep it FUDCon-Styled, a MiniConf for a day, would make the most sense. In fact, on Tuesday before the event, would be the best, IMHO.

But there’s no more space. Anyone know of a location in the same vicinity that we can run such an event? MiniConf’s are largely popular, and if my numbers are correct, Fedora/Red Hat was the number 2 distribution for registrants of LCA2005. While I had thoughts of running one in April 2005 (all gung ho after our initial FUDCon in Boston), it was just going to be too much of a mess (especially since I wasn’t sure if I was going).

So what we need: a room (preferably two rooms), that can host up to 100 people each, on the 24th of January 2006, nearby the University of Otago/LCA2006 location. Also, if there’s interest in attending, or speaking, it’d be great if folk could drop us a line (leaving comments here, or via email). Here’s hoping for a Fedora MiniConf pulling itself off, as it’d be a first of its kind in the Australasian region!

In refreshing Fedora news, I think we had a bunch of really interesting meetings Thursday night (or should I say from various parts of 1am right to about 4.30am, Friday morning). As always good ideas come out from them… like should we rotate the time for the marketing meetings? 15:00 and 18:00 UTC depending on different weeks? FESCO was great, as there was a brainstorming session… the where do we go from here chit chat. And I think we’re a lot closer to rewarding Fedora contributors.

Hack In The Box, are looking for articles for their e-zine (issue #37). Go support Dhillon and gang, as they’re a cool bunch. Already their internationally recognized conference brings heaps of hacker/security types to Malaysia. I think this year they did something in Dubai too. Read: internationally recognized conference and Malaysia in the same sentence. Rock on Dhillon, Mel, Daryl, and the rest of the team.

And for all the movies seen since the last post: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (great stuff, go Mr. Burton, I can’t wait for Corpse Bride), The Mexican (silly show about a gun), Garden State, Head Above Water (both mostly rubbish) and Kramer vs. Kramer (good!).

Reading mypapit’s blog, I found a link to My Knoppix. Its touted as the “digital home edition”, that does various video goodness. There was even an article by the bloke doing this, at the MyOSSMag Edition 5 (btw, Ed6 is out). My only real beef with MyKnoppix is the languages it supports: English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Malay/Indonesian. The “My” there was clearly for Malaysia, and hey, are we forgetting Tamil? Its like the Impianku.org website advertised on Jeff Ooi’s Screenshots a while back - “Do Muthu, Abdullah and Ah Chong share the same dreams, hold to the same “vision” of a future Malaysia?” is what they ask. Except Muthu’s native language isn’t there. And for some reason, its started peeving me off. </rant>

But yesterday, I just got word, that a young fellow, old friend from #bangsar, David, aka Skywalk3r, has passed away from liver cancer. It came this year, and he went this year. Seems Caren and Becky have condolence messages (thanks sour_bee and Rudy for telling me). I think from the #bangsar gang, this has got to be our first loss. My only regret is not finding time to say hi to all the bangsarians this year. Condolences to the family.

Anyone got crash space in Sydney from the 17th to the 22nd? Its for the AUUG Conf. And maybe a bit of time doing something touristy, seeing its been almost a decade since I was a tourist in Sydney. Alternatively, does anyone know of some form of backpackers near the Carlton Crest Hotel? The YHA Sydney Central seems to be a good bet, now I’ve got to convince Virgin I need a cheap flight, clearly.

Been playing with OOo m130 for OS X. Its also rather pleasant that OOo2 is in a release candidate stage. Cocoa OS X OOo? Hmm, while Tim Bray might’ve commented, keep in mind that this has been a requirement/want/need for the last few years. Programmers involved need to have X knowledge, Cocoa, C++, and Unixish tools. We try to gather folk at WWDC, I had created a fairly large spam list at WWDC2004, and got no responses. Now we’ve got web-based OpenOffice.org coming soon? I don’t think so. And I’m sure the X11 port of OOo isn’t dying. Really.

Caught Spanglish and Wimbledon on DVD. Serenity in the cinema. Whats all the hype about? Then its been Bride & Prejudice, P.S. and Lady Chatterly’s Lover on DVD.

And yes, no sell out here. Really. I did however get some good news via email a few days ago. I received the Apple University Consortium 2005 Best Practices Award. Hello PowerBook, money, and a plaque. I’m somewhat kicking myself for not attending the conference in Tasmania last-last week, as Joi Ito was keynoting. My only interest in OS X is from a commercial standpoint (i.e. I’m graduating eventually, I need to broaden my horizons). I’d need to eat and what not (its no fun dating without income, I’m sure), and maybe having both Linux and OS X knowledge will make me a lot more marketable.

As I said on #wordpress, Linux is still my first love, OS X is just like the concubine I’ve always wanted.