Colin Charles Agenda

Beware, whom you trust your DNS to. I have particularly enjoyed using OpenDNS, mainly because I travel a lot, and encounter a lot of broken DNS configurations. However, when OpenDNS goes wonky, it makes you really wonder if running local DNS makes more sense.

[-(byte@hermione)-(pts/1)-(11:57pm:27/02/2008)-]
[-(~)> ping www.google.com
PING google.navigation.opendns.com (208.67.219.231) 56(84) bytes of data.

— google.navigation.opendns.com ping statistics —
7 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 6000ms

Clearly, not good? Quick edit of /etc/resolv.conf, and I’m quite happy to use local DNS. Oops, it seems like OpenDNS is clearly down now (can’t even reach opendns.com). Ironically, only from my Unwired Internet account.

The difference in traceroute output (for status.opendns.com):
12 38.104.140.46 (38.104.140.46) 261.618 ms 267.483 ms 268.207 ms
13 208.67.219.60 (208.67.219.60) 220.762 ms 220.735 ms 220.709 ms

From hop 12, to hop 13, it is unreachable. Let’s hope this temporary problem, disappears.

Update: Its back online, 1.45am.

Technorati Tags: opendns, google, resolv.conf, unwired

While catching up on some interesting chat on IRC today, I decided to watch the Alan Cox video series that Red Hat Magazine recently placed online.

In Alan Cox and the state of free software:

• Alan speaks about software patents, as a problem for free software. Lots are starting to understand that they don’t work and they violate international treaties.
• Alan talks about political systems - so you can’t get free software into government or schools, because of certain vendors that they choose. Approved suppliers cause grief, when they only supply proprietary software.
• Alan talks about the OpenDocument Format and OOXML mess, and it confuses people, who want standards (FUD).
• A challenge now, seems to be that there are a large number of free software users now, who are not technically adept. So software has to adapt to their requirements - people don’t apply patches, etc. anymore so you just have to find new ways and tools to deal with bugs, etc. We in the free software community have to scale.
• Liability, with regards to poor quality products. Security software for instance, has this problem. The free software community has to work with liability law, as governments will increasingly require it. What standards/expectations should free software hold up to?

In Alan Cox on community and the enterprise:

• Alan speaks about his history at Red Hat, and his history with Linux and how he began hacking on it.
• A subscription model, and Mark Webbink figured this out - he built the model, while staying true to free software. If Red Hat hadn’t done that, they’d have lost a lot of community support. Alan focuses on how having a community distribution in parallel made sense. I can’t imagine if he means Fedora and RHEL, or CentOS and RHEL? :)
• He was referring to Fedora! Red Hat is just helping, enabling, providing resources, guidance & advice - the right way to work with the community. Everything else is generally community controlled.
• In developing markets, open source is important - buying local resources to create/maintain it - keep the sovereignty.
• “At the right place at the right time”

In Alan Cox on the kernel, patent promise, and the progress of free software:

• Late 90’s, everyone jumped on the open source bandwagon without any idea what it was about. This was the same period where you stuck an “e” in-front of any company name, and it became a new business model. How true.
• The 2000 crash, helped the serious companies work open source better. Oracle for instance didn’t take Linux seriously - now its an important part of their business model.
• Alan talks a lot about how he now spends time cleaning up code.
• Red Hat, at the end of the day, have a patent portfolio. Nobody particularly wants to launch any, but if you don’t have any to launch you have a problem - kind of like nuclear warfare.
• Software patent promise: people doing free software will never have to worry about software patents. People doing proprietary software, it gives Red Hat a mechanism in case of patent lawsuits (also, to trade patents). No one knows if how well this works, yet. Just hope this nightmare, never happens.
• Who knows, that in the US, the Supreme Court might decide that software patents are not valid? No one knows, since no one has pushed it this far.

Technorati Tags: alan cox, free software, software patents, subscription model, community, enterprise, open source, patent portfolio, patent promise

Today, me, and about eighty other folk, went to Malaysia Hall, to register ourselves as postal voters.

From what I understand, the forms we filled out need to reach Malaysia by 5pm (UTC+8) on the 27 February 2008. Assuming that the official close of 5pm (UTC+10, +1 DST) is met, this leaves 3 hours to fax all the forms to Canberra and to the Election Commission in Malaysia. This is going to keep one Dr. Ali (Education Attache, Malaysia Hall, Melbourne - since we don’t have a consulate in Melbourne), rather busy. He’s also going to courier the original forms back.

One can now only hope that in the next week, a postal voting form appears. Everything was professionally done, only the identity card (IC) was required (no passport, as initially thought), there were sample forms that were filled out, and there were quite a number of people there when I was filling out my form.

The talk? Keadilan (PKR) [they also deserve special mention: minimum wages in Malaysia], PAS, DAP, and an independent candidate! Don’t know if our minuscule Melbourne votes are going to make any difference in this election, but here’s hoping.

Again, mad props to Tirath for helping sort this out. Also met up with an old friend, Raja Azlina while I was there (from MIMOS days, its been about a decade or more since we’ve known each other’s work).

Technorati Tags: melbourne, malaysians vote, voter registration, absentee ballot