Colin Charles Agenda

Its probably worth noting that my fedoraproject.org email address is actually byte@fedoraproject.org as opposed to it being both byte@ and colin@. Email is no longer maintained on the box itself, and there was no room for my two aliases ;-)

No wonder my Bugzilla folder was getting quiet for a while…

In some surreal goodness, the Energizer Life Church in Hobart, Tasmania runs an all Mac shop, and they use (get this) Keynote for their announcements!

I told them all this was rather expensive and a misuse of church funds, and looking at Linux and OpenOffice.org will make sense in their next upgrade cycle. Besides, they can’t even get more volunteers to help, seeing that only two folk know how to use Keynote/OSX.

OOo has this wonderful advantage of being cross-platform. And even on a Mac, running in X11 full screen mode, is ideal for presentations. I’ll have to get playing with OOo Base in the near future, because combined with the Migration Assistant, there can be some powerful “NGO desktop”-styled switches.

In Linux, there are plenty of good time trackers (karm being probably the best). On OS X, all the interfaces seem clunky, and of course, you’ve got to fork out an obligatory set of dollars to use it. I don’t mind, but I’ve not found something easy to use.

I’m after:

*--------|--------|-----------*
|TaskName|<Button>|Logged time|
*--------|--------|-----------*

I expect to click a button, and have the time move right along for the task. When I feel like resetting it (some tasks, weekly, some monthly), I want to be able to just click a reset logged time option (right click menu feature).

Anyone know if something like this remotely exists for OS X? Consider this a time tracker for dummies or something (I really don’t need a complicated interface).

Guess its time to mention the antics of Sunday. I was on a VLine train, heading from Melbourne to Corio, to send my cousin back into school. The stop was announced, and I was trying to open the door. It seemed jammed.

I moved to the next door. It swung open. At this very time, the train decided to start moving (or at least pick up speed). The impact of it all was that I got swung out of the train, and hit the gravel platform.

First aid was provided by the conductor, who was highly apologetic. Doors don’t open while trains move…. They offered to pay my full medical fees provided I visited the Geelong hospital, but when he found out I stayed in Melbourne instead, he said contact Vline if there were bills, and so on.

His responsiveness to the situation seemed to me like this was normal happenings on Vline trains.

On Monday I headed to the doctors, who served me with iodine (now on open wounds, thats painful), and gauzed up both my ankles and left arm. I got a tetanus jab, and am on antibiotics now.

Seems that its not a good idea to wet the wounds, so showering sparingly is a good idea. Today, I had a Glad Wrap, and plastic bag shower. This is highly annoying… More news come Thursday when I get re-dressed.

I arrived in India today, after spending most of the day flying, and in the lounge at the Mumbai/Chennai airport. Generally, all the travel time was useful – I managed to get most of my presentation done, and during flights, I got to catch up on much needed sleep.

At Mumbai, where I cleared customs, I got hassled right after going through immigration, but right before walking out the green lane. The bloke sitting at the x-ray machine decided that I could only carry one laptop, as opposed to two. He wanted to tax me. I refused, and said that it’s all coming back with me, and while they may impose this on Indian nationals, I’m a foreigner. After much arguing, he let me through, without any cost.

The Habitat World at the Indian Habitat Center is not too bad a hotel. Minus a fridge, and a working Internet connection, its a great place to be. Big room, CNN and HBO on the television, pricey food, but everything self-contained within the center. Haven’t seen any sign of LinuxAsia folk (lack of Penguin label-based t-shirts), but am all excited to see what’s shaking tomorrow.

I also remember what it was like to be on dialup. The silly system here costs lots of rupees to be online, so I picked up a 2-hour prepaid card, that lasts for 24 hours. I can’t use both laptops at the same time (lacking a cable to do proper NAT), so I’m learning to be more resourceful.

Red Hat Magazine this month (well, okay, last month, I’m clearing out my tabs), has a feature on Linux and Asia. Of interest were:

• What does open source mean in India? – an interview with Javed Tapia (Director, Red Hat India), showing why India finds OSS important (software costs too much), how localisation works, and a bit about Red Hat India.
• Asia, the questions we ask – a great read, written by Michael Tiemann about his experiences in Asia. A question of interest: “What will be Singapore’s role in the technology industry of the 21st century?” I think thats the question most countries want the answer to, be it Malaysia or Australia. Its interesting to see what he has to mention about Sri Lanka (a place thats great for outsourcing, and has heaps of OSS contributors – look at the Apache project).
• Open source for non-profits – by Matt Frye, Fedora contributor, and NGO saviour. He talks about making the Healing Place of Wake County, a place for homeless people with alcohol and drug addictions to recover and rehabilitate, running Red Hat Linux, Apache and MySQL, with a PHP based web interface.
• The open source movement in Malaysia – </shameless plug> Written by me, it is a positive overview of the Malaysian OSS movement. At some stage, we’ll concentrate on business use of it, possibly in the following month or two.
• Red Hat Interns – this was actually a pretty cool video. If time permits, take a gander, just a little disappointed I didn’t get to see the Fedora contributors Luke Macken and Jack Aboutboul, who both interned at Red Hat last summer (?).