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31/12/2003 - It didn't take long and at 1.30am I was throwing OPIE on my iPaq. Played with it a little, and maybe its time to write a comprehensive review of the software alternatives. My ideal would be to run GPE and then OPIE on top of it, so I can run Zaurus apps, and get it syncing with Evolution. Of course, this is all hype, and only time and fiddling will tell what get's done. Elsewhere, I woke up updating the OOo docs for atSC, some of which entailed me using my colin@atsc.org.my e-mail address; added a watermark as well. This for the training next week. Apache MIME types that have OOo stuff, which is funny, since I got the folk at phpwebhosting to do the same several weeks back. Had the usual dinner for New Years ushering, and also made some changes to bytebot.net; I got a letter from the whois folk and need to stick to ICANN regulations. Whatever. Did a fairly useful study of OPIE and have written several notes - its times like this I wish I had an MMC card handy (or I get my darned sleeve like.. now). I use LiIon batteries a lot - laptops, PDAs, cell phones, etc..., and they have a tendency to explode. Be warned, if it gets too hot. 30/12/2003 - Colin Percival is a Depenguinating moron. Red Hat != dead rats. Worth mentioning, I've pushed this to several lists, is that The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft (reading their Top 10 Challenges for 2004 is fun too). Israel's Finance Ministry is giving up on Microsoft; looks like a bargain, but who cares? The bargain in Thailand failed. I got an iPaq 3870. Bluetooth enabled, 64MB of on-board RAM, and have chucked Linux on it (Merry Christmas to me!). Familiar Linux running the GPE environment. Fun time fiddling with it today right before dinner, the next couple of purchases include a sleeve and WiFi card for the beast. And its time to buy some belts... and get my phone and PDA hooked on to it. I now have Linux on my PDA, in my pocket, thanks to the iPaq. I have Linux on my iBook, instead of Mac OS X. And I have Linux on my other x86 machines. So there you have it, many architectures (oops, forgot the Digital DEC I have sitting in Melbourne) of varying Linux distributions. 29/12/2003 - Woke up definitely feeling that the flu was on. Donned the suit, appeared on Cyberjaya.tv's Power Breakfast #43 with regards to OpenOffice.org. Subsequently, had a fight with the ERL folk. I asked for 1 ticket, I got 3, and the Cyberjaya people refused to refund my money; got it refunded at KL Sentral, and problems have since been averted. I'm now writing for FedoraNEWS. Got to get my writing underway, as I've got to keep up with LinMagAU, AsiaOSC as well as FedoraNEWS now. No content at my column but I am pretty sure stuff will make its way online (and AsiaOSC might find it interesting to syndicate material, as will LinMagAU depending on the content). Robert Love has got some interesting hackery for photo importing in Linux. Using GNOME and kernel events over D-BUS, the module gets loaded, device nodes automagically get created, along with the mounting of the volume and the wonderful syncing of seeing if the file folder with photos has been sync'ed with the memory card. Microsoft, beat that shit. I need a portal of sorts. Looking at Portaloo as well as Perlhoo. I almost installed MovableType on the server. Shock! Horror! No to blogging software. Went out for "steam boat", as it's meant to cure the flu (or rassam, which is a nice-tasting, spicy Indian concoction); it seems to have improved my status, though I've had a lose bowel since. Grr. More new year's fun. Jonathen is back, well, sort of - Jonathen (-Jonathan@ACBCFBC2.ipt.aol.com) has joined #bangsar. I think its time I leave IRC.net and just concentrate on IRC being for my FLOSS projects. Anyone I want to contact knows me via my other contact means.... 28/12/2003 - How I manage to get the iBook to not start was a wonder. Power cycled the laptop and it came up except GNOME was broken. With GDM, I booted into KDE (for the first time on hermione) and upon logging out, and re-logging in, GNOME was working again. Oh, had to fix the time as well, I was back in 1902. Ridiculous problem, I think its the hardware not liking Linux's sleep command. Did a dist-upgrade. 279MB of packages came through. Also downloaded benh's 2.5 kernel tree (which is really 2.6). Now waiting for CVS access to openoffice.org. Erm, tomorrow, will be on TV, anytime between 9am-11am Malaysian time, and there will be repeats; its the Power Breakfast show on Cyberjaya.tv. 27/12/2003 - Up at 6.30am with a phone call. Watched a video of Alan Cox giving a speech to the Swansea computer society. Fun. Breakfast with parents, lunch with friends - Klang seafood. Came back to some drinking, and dinner again with friends, before you realise the day has come to an end. Wow. Maybe tomorrow will be more productive (of course I'm getting some e-mail's out). 26/12/2003 - The usual fun with Malaysian government departments. This time it was to get my drivers license. Go to JPJ, pay RM3 for parking, find out that all the numbers had been taken (at 11.30am), and thats it. OK, go to the post office, get a number, and 45-minutes later, find that my license class (from Probationary to regular), can only be done at JPJ. Finally, go back to JPJ, find an agent, pay him RM10, and they say I'll be able to get it by day's end. Funny how agents do stuff that we mere mortals can't right? Corrupt Malaysia. Changed foreign currency later on (all that USD and Swiss Francs), and didn't do all that much today. Some reading, and I guess I seem fairly tired. Interesting reading...
25/12/2003 - Christmas party. Plenty of guests, good food, fun entertainment, pictures have to go up at some stage. Merry Christmas everyone. 24/12/2003 - More of a disappeared day. Watched S.W.A.T on the plane, as well as My Bosses Daughter and I know I saw something else, but the name slips my mind. Didn't get much sleep, and spent a lot of time on delayed flights. Traditional Christmas dinner with family, and more later on, and got home at around 3.30am. 23/12/2003 - A few of my comments appear in The Sunday Times, in the Click section entitled Can Linux kick butt?. Day disappeared as a result of being in the airport, flying from Zurich to Singapore.... 22/12/2003/. reports KDE gaining accessibility support, no less thanks to what Sun and GNOME have in store. Alan Cox says it nicely as to why accessibility support is nice to have around. And for the past week working with accessibility, I can see the need as well. I think it's safe to say, I've read all my e-mail. Of course I skipped threads and the like, but I have zero messages that are unread :) I guess, this till the next time I get a chance to get e-mail. 21/12/2003 - Went to Lucerne today. Caught up on lots of e-mail and other reading bits as well. It costs Sfr$9 for every half-hour access card for Wifi. Thats RM27! I could get an airzed subscription in Malaysia for about that much, for three months. Boo. Reading of interest:
Chase the dream, not the competition. We FLOSS people should remember this. Of course, we must keep up with the competition, but the dream is just as important. Computer science programmes give you a steady diet of creating toy programs to satisfy homework assignments; they suck. 'Nuff said. 20/12/2003 - Wow. One long fun day in Switzerland. As a techie achievement, yesterday, I translated AMIS to Bahasa Malaysia. Its time to get a workable glossary and things will be much better. I didn't even turn the computer on (well, take it out of suspend mode, since yesterday). An interview with Alan Cox, and now when he does his MBA. Just got an e-mail from him to state that he wont be at LCA2004, but 2005 maybe (at Canberra). Sigh. Was hoping to see him. 19/12/2003 - One day, I hope to have a loving wife like Sebol does. Happy Birthday to him too. I'm on the front page of The Star with a link to "More local schools to get OpenOffice". Nice - is that my five minutes of fame? ;) Sent out Christmas greetings. Come! Shri kind of went into fits, and... day ended, it was kind of sad to leave everyone, and went to the train station. Ended up visiting El Cubanito, a night club and only returning back in the wee hours of the morning. Net access is going to suck for a few days now... 18/12/2003 - Net access sucked. Really, it did. Read the Fedora Schedule because of a little argument I had with Michael. Seems Alan Cox himself might roll a 2.4 kernel if he has to, since 2.6 is what will be included in FC2; idiots I tell you, at least two kernels then, not one. But 2.6 is stable and has been released now, so even I offered to roll a 2.4 rpm. Oh, about Net access. I defeated it. Trusted MAC addresses. Trusty iBook, trusty Linux, trusty spoofed MAC address, full 100% Internet access. They made me do it. Remember to use diff -urw and that makes nicer patch files :P (unrelated to the MAC address incident). 17/12/2003 - More hacking. Downloaded some of the mp3's from Gnome devel and answered a lot of mail with regards to fedora on the lists. Also got some press bits out of the way. Open Source into public libraries is Bob Kerr's five minutes of fame; he did this via getting OOo into public libraries on the marketing list. Nice stuff, and I believe he was also /.'ed. 16/12/2003 - I'm fed up of hearing CNN talking about Saddam. There's got to be nicer news out there. Fired up Galeon, and it opened up all my previous pages that were open from the last bomb (I think that was just before I flew out). Wow, I think all browsers should have this feature! Got some lost links back:
Sat it on the design meeting for AMIS Next and Linux (and Mac OS X) support. Fun. I'm now looking for a useful windowing toolkit (cross-platform). 15/12/2003 - Up at about 4.30am, but caught some sleep till about 5.45am. This is jet-lag working on me, but I don't mind getting up and writing Zurich!: Day 1 and committing some interesting photos. Wonderful breakfast, and started work ASAP - got an overview of what we're doing, and started trying out existing players for instance. Dinner later was at an expensive restaurant, and by the time I got home (~10pm), all I wanted was to hit the sack. Oh, the Australian wine, I had plenty :) 14/12/2003 - I might as well document how I change timezones in Debian (as well as the date) since I do it fairly often... Run tzconfig and all will change. Of course X is a bit painful, so logging out and back in solves the problem. Noticed that gdmflexiserver will show the new time just fine though. Odd. In GNOME, using the GNOME System Tools 0.29.0 prerelease tells me it doesn't recognise Debian Sid. That said, I couldn't get XMMS to fire up the alarm, since it was confused by time. And upon logging out and restarting, pmud got 100% CPU usage. Doing /etc/init.d/pmud stop and then later start solved this, but while I stopped it the GNOME Pmud monitor crashed (but GNOME 2.4 gladly asked me to restart it). Anything Zurich related is at the regularly updated Zurich page. Why lenify? Just because... it's not got a place anywhere else. I'm told that Saddam Hussein has been captured by the USA. Wow, go Mr. Bush; one success story out of the two wars. Maybe now confidence in the USA will increase, and the damn Aussie currency will drop to the pegged ringgit. Nasty commentary on how Mac OS X is just as vulnerable, like Windows. Maybe once Linux becomes more popular, more worms will show itself and hope that there are lazy admins, and dumb users. That's what things like HD Moore's Metasploit do... Macau gives away 1,200 OpenOffice.org CDs during their recent I.T. Week 2003. Let's hope that PIKOM's PC Fair will do the same... Linux to Gain Ground in 2004 is some publicity for us, but its nothing that die-hard geeks will not know. 13/12/2003 - Day 2 of the HITBSecConf. HD Moore gave a really interesting presentation on how easy it is to write exploits! And the more tools out there, just give you the shits. Left early, packed, and off to the airport for a flight. Oh, Ximian has lost another employee in a month; two deaths. Sigh. Condolences, and what about F-Spot? Deciding to only take on laptop, I tried to sync the Handera 330 with my iBook. With USB emulation and the works, I got to see the mon> terminal. Wonderful. Lost all my open stuff. And a gFTP download of some photos. Thank you Linux. Wrote a forward for a book. Got around to responding to many e-mails. This is the rush before the flight as I'll probably be unreachable for many hours. But here's hoping to get 'Net access real soon. 12/12/2003 - HITB SecConf 2003 Day 1. LSD presented, and Nitesh Dhanjani on Linux Kernel Modules, which I found extremely interesting. Simos Xinetellis had one that was cool about Windows (and X Windows even), and the best part was that when we met, he mentioned that he submitted a patch to the oooufaq. Cool! Rushed through the traffic to get to dinner, and then got lots of e-mail out that way. Hmm... Went out to a pub, and then later on to a new mamak joint called Gazebo in Subang Jaya. Back home at 4am... Oh, Dhillon's mom is Mrs. Khanebhirran (sp?). That was a teacher of mine in Form 5! After some catty remarks, we meet again =) 11/12/12003 - At 6am, Streamyx seems to work a whole lot better. Off to Getronics to get their demo box working; usual hassles, and off by noon. MidValley, lunch at Chillis, and I watch Revolutions for the third time. Eesh. Ampang Point, have some coffee (from SFC, my favourite), then off to KLCC to meet Ruben, Wing Hol. Eat at Lotus, nearby, and the cost ends up being RM35.20. Wow. At least we talked for ages... No work done today. Eek. 10/12/2003 - MidValley, for some shopping for the Zurich trip. Guess the folk at Getronics didn't make much progress with the demo box, and I've made more it seems; so my image will be used. Time to update the Fedora box... Picked up a few magazines for good reading and also managed to get some information (thanks to Google) on Zurich; some sites to see, places to eat & party, etc... Streamyx, from Telekoms is in major suckage mode. I think I'll get better transfer if I were to dialup! I keep on getting errors related to a crappy nameserver that Telekoms seems to be running. Eesh. Dinesh has a cool comment on the National Service website. Apparently, 100 hits is too many for them. It just makes me want to laugh out loud. Silly National Service, it will bring no good to the country. Dinner at Telok Gong again... This time with family to celebrate a graduation. The 'Net's giving me the shits, so its time to work on some useful documentation for building the Ultimate-Fedora-Demo-Box. 09/12/2003 - Up late (again!), and missed the so-ooo meeting (I was lazy). Gave my talk at UPSI (that's the program), and all was well. Plenty of people want to try out OOo so there's interest. And they want the talk so I've updated my talks. Met up with Hasbullah (sebol) as well as Yeak from md. I've been meeting more OSS folk recently...Whee! :) Met up with the guy at the Dindings school in Lumut. I find out that their backend (web, mail, ssh, and file serving) is running on Linux but their front-ends are all entirely Microsoft-based. People use MSOffice rather than OpenOffice.org. Whoote!?! Guess what we did at VI is definitely a first. Sun (well, Frontline, must be a distributor) gave a presentation on Mad Hatter. I'm not impressed; they didn't even mention OOo, and only sold SO7. But I was the only one whom ate his own dog-food - I actually used the Fedora demo-box to get my presentation running. Go Thinkpad! The speakers were so loud that the entire audience got to hear audio from them. Decided to fiddle around and take a Brainbench test. Took a free Linux Administration (General) test, and passed, scoring higher than 86% of previous test takers. Whoo! It's valid three years from now, so I might end up taking a few of these BB tests... except they cost so darn much (unless I get a yearly subscription at USD$199). Keep in view: The GPL & Binary Modules; Linus himself talks. Wow, there are some new, promising Linux distros. I've mentioned White Box Enterprise Linux before, but cAos is what's touted as Community Linux. Based on Debian GNU/Linux, but with file-system formats of RH Linux, it also uses the RPM package management format! That said, anaconda for debian has been released, so no more yucky debian-installer eh? Pity that Progeny themselves don't have a PPC-based one (or the other many platforms debian-installer supports). 08/12/2003 - Crashed late, so up late. Nice to read that Sun beat Microsoft to secure a contract. Spent some time hacking on the OpenOffice.org in Education talk at UPSI. Picked up a wireless router and plugged it into Streamyx and it worked within about five minutes. Wow. Wifi in Klang :) Ended up eating pizza again for dinner. Did more of the UPSI stuff since the presentation would be tomorrow... 07/12/2003 - With the tradition of no hacking or not even responding to e-mails all weekend, up late and headed straight for lunch at Telok Gong. Somewhere off Klang, great seafood, and cheap too! Dinner was laksa, wonderful food I tell you. Some things to note: Microsoft's FAT Filesystem Tech is patented, and they seem to want to cash in on it. Bad, bad stuff, since we (the Linux community) might not be able to ship FAT re-sizing tools or creation tools for instance making it hard to move data around or even get non-Linux folk trying out dual-boot stuff. Janome is using OpenOffice.org and that does make news; except they're using OOo 1.0.x, and since the article was written recently, I'm wondering why they've not tried OOo 1.1. That said, the OOo project is moving to SourceCast 2.6, from our ancient 1.x. We're seeing the end of kernel 2.4 for Linux. Marcelo is going to make it a pure maintenance mode kernel. Funny, since kernel 2.2, is still rather popular among many, and Alan Cox has kept it updated. In the mean time, Paul Gear has his write-up on his Ideal Distribution; granted, Fedora needs some certifications to go with it, as well as some support options. And it shouldn't be touted as something for "enthusiasts or developers", as it is pretty stable-ware. 06/12/2003 - Up early, checked eyes, I'm getting new spectacles, even-though my power hasn't changed. But it's been two years, so its time for an upgrade :P Drove out towards PJ/KL, got stuck in traffic. Didn't meet friends at MidValley, we re-routed to Bangsar Shopping Centre, and had a little session at Chillis. Fun to see Ruben with lengthy hair and Wing Hol still pretty much the same; this is after a year of not seeing each other! Drove back, just in time to catch "Homeless to Harvard" on television. That's one show that I hope, changes my life (forever). Got to search for the DVD and watch it like, weekly or something to keep me on track. Dinner late, around 9pm at a friend's house. Back in the wee hours of the morning. Didn't even get to purchase a battery for my phone as well as a wireless access point because of the traffic earlier. Sigh. 05/12/2003 - Day 2 of OSS-101 at KMDC. More brain-washing. Soaked the KMDC network with up2date stuff for Fedora, and also installed "interesting" applications so that we can have a fairly "good" demo box. Dinner with EK, Minah (who just got back from Japan), Nan Phin and William. Some funky Chinese food it was, somewhere in Serdang. Singing later on at night, after an interesting bus ride to Klang. KMDC's allowance sucks :P 04/12/2003 - Did a dist-upgrade on the Debian PPC box; all seems to be well (save me re-writing my Evolution configuration file so I can skip threads via the keyboard). OSS-101 at KMDC today, with some interesting ideas of a demo box that "works" with all the funky features of Linux based software out there. Hmm. We managed to drop by Getronics just in time for their Hari Raya lunch celebrations too. Started working on the Fedora laptop. Installing bits and pieces of new software. I reckon the WiFi network at KMDC tomorrow will be soaked with me getting a "presentable" demo box. Damn, committed water boy III: he apologises today. Time consuming. Some interesting reading on misunderstanding OSS development. Gotta read it closer at some stage (heaps of stuff saved in ~/tmp at the moment for later on the road reading...) 03/12/2003 - Upgraded Rhythmbox as well as gstreamer and my MP3's are playing so much better now (no more annoying error messages). Started using Galeon a bit today, and filed issue #128437. Subsequently, I filed issue #128443 as well. On a roll I am :) Philip Greenspun had an interesting comment about MIT's OpenCourseware and how it was really made in India. It's dismal to see that it's entirely Microsoft based as well. Have Windows XP and need to read & write to it via Linux? This is something that Knoppix will surely soon implement (think creating swap space on a NTFS partition in a file...). Nice, basic step-by-step guide on setting default OOo tempaltes. Had some Google fun, subsequently updating lenify heaps. Sun supports OpenOffice.org and its an official move! (with an official site) Fiddled with some articles for Con, for the next issue of AUUGN, which took up a bit of time today. 02/12/2003 - Wasted lots of time at the IC department (really, like 5 hours there, 2 hours in transit, thats 7 damned hours). Updated lenify with content: the water boy, food racism and the train mess. Had to later go to the bank to get my credit card sorted, and also dropped off a document - so stopping at Ampang Park, KLCC and Masjid Jamek was on the list. Went to another bank to get my ATM card changed - seems that magnetic striped ATM cards are a thing of the past due to fraudulent transactions; its all smart card based now. Found some interesting sites and reading material. UnixBlog for Unix-ish tips (command line apps) - if it gets "more updated" it would rock though (June 16 2003 was the last update). Kernel Hacker Journals, similar to what jdub did for planetGNOME. Impressive. 01/12/2003 - Spent a rather lengthy day at VI today. Came up to creating quite a few scripts, a few more random hacks and got around to getting some documentation sorted out. System updates, Java & OpenOffice.org installation and some teaching topped the day out mostly. Red Hat Linux is getting security approval; this means something good for RHL, but also widens the gap between them and Fedora. Oh, that's Richard Keech's stuff, so a hi down his way. Been actively getting involved in the GNOME-my list, consequently reading web guidelines for the GNOME trademark. That said, release the first of the training notes - OpenOffice.org: Introduction. Also added a sponsor. Oh, and I wore my World AIDS Day t-shirt today as well... eyes twitched all day :) 30/11/2003 - One more month looks like its coming to an end. Time really does fly. In good jdub style, planet novell has been created; it has a few entries that planetGNOME itself doesn't carry. ThePerfectDesktop is a wiki page that has comments with regards to how the desktop is for end-users, mainly in regards to GNOME/Debian. I feel that its about time I write a response to that. Released v0.3b of the uFAQ so this means that its a release early/release often release before things get "merged". There's also some other newish content that's been uploaded... 29/11/2003 - Saw Chris DiBona on TechTV and subsequently fired off an e-mail with regards to his FAQ and his comments on how Red Hat Linux is "dead". Reading how a Linux user migrates to FreeBSD is superb; part 2 is a required read as well. =STARCALCTEAM() and StarWriterTeam+F3 are little OpenOffice.org easter eggs that exist. That said, I've been able to upload more content for the website, and will have to update the what's new page. Some menu mockups for the next version of OOo when it comes to customising menus are out. That said, we plan to have Calc go up on row limits - 32,000 rows is dated, so more (beyond 64k) is planned, thanks to Eike Rathke. After reading yesterday's freedesktop.org interviews, it turns out that a cool project that will implement their HAL (hardware abstraction layer) is the Fedora Hardware Project. 28/11/2003 - Linus & the Lunatics has photos of screenshots (?) of his presentation at the Geek Cruises III, and a somewhat accurate transcript. Part 1 this is, but good stuff nonetheless; the Sparse parser looks like something fun. The freedesktop.org interview is yet another interesting piece which is a must-read for Linux desktop folk, also those into accessibility. expocity is something that'll set GNOME ahead soon; brilliant stuff in terms of choosing apps that you have in multiple workspaces (sorry Windows folk, this isn't an out-of-the-box thing for you!). To boot, I've joined several GNOME lists. GNOME Bounties are fun, and there are a few for OOo even. You get money to fix bugs. How cool is that? A DVD burner is something I want to get at some stage; no official Fedora ISO's for DVD's, but you can make one. With the Debian stuff compromised recently (things like people.debian.org still down), there's a useful developer cleanup guide; useful if you ever get affected to some degree. Some more links of interest: an article on Fortune asking Can Google Grow Up?; the future of Instant Messaging (IM) with Peter Ford. I got invited to talk at Linux Bangalore. But sadly, I've turned them down. No flight for me, meant no Bangalore for me. Zurich is confirmed, and looking good; it seems like it'll be cold, so that's something to worry me (a bit). {25-27}/11/2003 - Langkawi! Off at 6am, there before lunch, and rented a van. Another thing to add to my "driven" list - a van! Lots to drink, plenty to buy, good seafood to eat (yum!), and some shopping. More drinking. Got a car on the next day, and left on the 27th in sort of a rush - apparently there was a landslide nearer KL, and the roads are all wonky. Holiday got called short I guess... since I was only supposed to come home tomorrow. Oh, lost all my open work and about a month of uptime on hermione. Stupid battery fell off the iBook and was sitting in my bag. The mechanism seems to be rather loose now, and I'm either going to have to stick it together, or get Apple to give me a quick fix. It's rather annoying to always have to check to see if it's attached; what's worse is losing work. Hate losing my open Firebird windows. 24/11/2003 - Supposed to visit VI, but didn't; left poor William there alone. Spent quite a lot of time driving around, went to Sean's birthday party, and got packing to head off to Langkawi. 23/11/2003 - Some hacking, some party bits where I got to drink quite a bit at night, and picked up The Complete FreeBSD, by Greg Lehey. Working on my ~/WWW folder, and organising stuff. Downloaded some stuff via DSL. Spam rage?. That's something I've not heard of before. But getting penalised for an annoyance is nasty as well. White Box Enterprise Linux looks like RHEL SRPMS recompiled. Not bad, if more start supporting WBEL, it would rock. 22/11/2003 - Frewendy's wedding. With their affiliation with CardsNow!Asia, they even accepted wedding gifts in the form of cash (ang pows) via credit card! There were 3 terminals accepting it, and you'd get a nice little picture of them on the payment stub. Nice food, good fugger company. 21/11/2003 - Up at 8.15am for my 9.30am appointment at VI (a school in KL). Went in there to roll out machines. Met Uwe, whom didn't have too much luck with floppyfw. William and I didn't have much luck with SystemImager, and I installed a "golden client" and mirroring that appeared to work. At about 6pm, we were still there (thinking it'll finish by lunch) as some of the boxes couldn't get their images - it was a failure of BIND. Hacked up a quick Perl script, and all was well. 20/11/2003 - why Linux is Wealthier than Microsoft, is something that comes from an economist! Up early, spent the day at MIMOS with some of the OSS folk, and finally met Imran. Meeting about OpenOffice.org materials, took home some large document that I'm now editing. Got a lift home as well, MIMOS seems interested to hire someone to do more policy. I've been doing some editing of the Wiki there, and making more use of my account there. Its time to get some "real" stuff working for that portal, as I think I might be making more use of it at some stage. 19/11/2003 - Caught Save the Last Dance on cable today; it's not all that much, just hype over the movie I guess. There's an announcement of sorts that'll slowly come into place next week with regards to good stuff. Yes, that sort of thing's always a Good Thing™. The Register has an interesting piece on how first time Linux users find it easier to use than Windows! Microsoft has specs for their XML, which may make OOo developers *very* happy :P (except we can't use it, because of their silly licensing). 18/11/2003 - Spent quite a bit of time driving around and getting accustomed to the KL jams. Eew. Rekall, a database project has become mainly "open sourced". Whee. That's not entirely good news for OpenOffice.org, which lacks a database front-end that "looks nice". 17/11/2003 - Flight to Kuala Lumpur. Caught the Italian Job as a in-flight screening. Fixed a niggling network issue before leaving - the switch needed a restart as it got confused with MAC address changing (dodgy memory?). Finished reading two Linux magazines (~AUD$30!), while hacking away on some stuff on the plane; chewed lots of e-mail. Skipping threads is so much fun! Forgot to mention having plenty of fun writing at Starbucks, near Nike Melbourne yesterday - a nice cup of coffee, the laptop, quiet environment; it was bliss, minus the fact that there was no power socket! On the drive home, had a little argument with the Touch 'N Go folk. Card seems locked, due to a fault on their side. Morons. The fellow sitting in front of me in the plane had his entertainment unit wonked out, so I had to tolerate ambient light. Urgh. 16/11/2003 - Clubbing till the wee hours of the morning, we cancelled plans to have a yum cha session. Spent some time with my best friend as she came over, and then went on towards the city. Met up with Kenneth and Ju, so we headed off to a bar, and much later at night, Siong and Tirath joined us for some supper. Home at about 3am, packed, and the flight's erm, later today. 15/11/2003 - An aim is to get this site properly validated and XHTML compliant in due time. That may mean a re-design, especially of the main page, but it's probably going to happen in due time... Melbourne's public transport on a Saturday sucks. It'll be worse tomorrow. Eesh. Lunch with a friend in the city - bad Indonesian food. Back home, heat was like 38°C. Hot, turned the air-cond on, and went to see Runaway Jury. Probably one of the better movies I've seen this year. Its cool. Well, off to go clubbing now! Its 12.52am, wish me fun :) 14/11/2003 - 31°C. Its too hot. Hacked on some slides for Linux-Bangalore/2003; let's see if they get accepted, considering the due date was well, past. I'm going to Zurich in December, so that's one trip confirmed, but the flights back seem wonky, and I may be spending Christmas Eve on a plane. Eew. Been signed on to do four days of training in December as well, or it could be January. I need to get the schedule sorted out. Haven't been sleeping much, and instead of partying up, I'm toning down and spending more time in front of the laptops. Oh, the LCA2004 folk came back with regards to their delegate program - decisions are out 1st December, so I'd better pay up ASAP! And, I'm going for HITB Security Conference 2003. 13/11/2003 - Hmm... Up at 2pm, after over fifteen hours of sleep, and awakening with the lights still on and a book by my side! Out straight after getting up, to the city - Crown Bakery for some tea with Tirath, Siong, Julian, and Vinod... Movie time, which was Matrix Revolutions (again!?!). Dinner was the Sante's buffet, after-which arrival at home was midnight. Chewed e-mail, before sleeping at about 3am. Oops, was at the Nott - the pub - for a bit. 12/11/2003 - Exam today. Red Hat's Linux choices is am interesting comparison table. Looks like all RHCE/RHCT's will have to use Enterprise Linux WS at the very least. Had fun with configuring printing early in the morning on Debian (on hermione, the iBook). Things that worked included loading printer into the kernel, and also typing the arcane foomatic-configure -s lpd -n HP-DeskJet_3325 -c file:/dev/usb/lp0 -p HP-DeskJet_3325 -d hpijs -o PageSize=A4 after installing the interesting foomatic* bits. This after failing to get CUPS working properly... and I needed to print some lecture notes for the exam. Students...may get jailed for having the music piracy site. All Asians, and this is a first of its kind in Australia, in terms of prosecuting it. Scary stuff. Some rather useful Fedora links:
11/11/2003 - Up early for the so-ooo meeting - 6am for me! Evolution shat itself, and all my meta data such as "follow-up to's" have since died. Sigh, back to copying stuff to my usual "read-me-now" folder. The AUDF Seeding Grant actually has a little snippet of information as to what I'm doing. With regards to licenses, apparenlty no one has an opinion on it at My-Opensource. Hmm. PDL is only required if I want to stick it on OOo and get others to work on it. I'm thinking licensing it under the Creative Commons License, so I can bloody charge for its commercial usage, if need be. Of particular interest is how to sell open source against Office 2003; we don't want MS to win, let's not use their crap. Scored a copy of Services for UNIX by Microsoft thanks to Nigel. Expect a little Microsoft package in the mail soon. And apparently, if I want Windows 2003, thats available too. Hmm. Hacked a lot on the slides, finished the introduction; this after OOo eating my slides when I was nearly done! Damned AutoPilot crashed it all. Grr. 10/11/2003 - I got me my AUDF seeding grant, so I expect a iBook G4 14" standard issue laptop with the works (DVD/CDRW, 256MB RAM, 40GB disk, etc...). Will only arrive in about two weeks, and I'm out of Australia by then, so the laptop ought to be sitting at Monash till, next January. Sigh. Well, that's going to be a Panther-based OOo build/hack machine. Fiddling around with Fedora Core 1. Chucked it on potter (poor laptop takes all the different Linuxes on it!). Interesting thing is that when taking screenshots during package installation, sometimes it doesn't allow you to; but the error message actually states that you should try several times first :) Reading an interview with Warren Togami, who used to run fedora.us. Interesting, he's a senior year university student with a part-time job, and there are plenty of references into making thing's more "Debian-like". And no, they forgot to send him a free red fedora! 09/11/2003 - Hacked on the "open source" open content slides... Not to be secretive or anything, but really, companies need to learn how to open their content, otherwise, precious hacking time get's wasted. Office eating up your files? - yes, such a Microsoft thing to do. Is Novell ripe for a buyout? Or are they making open source in-roads, owning Ximian and SuSe now. Only time can tell, as more craziness from SCO, who will pay you not to use Linux. 08/11/2003 - Have been considering moving to MovableType for the journal, but it's not 100% FLOSS-ware. I'm not too pleased. Was supposed to go clubbing at Salt last night, but a good thing I didn't as a 19-year old died there. Go fights. No, don't stick with Windows at home. Think about it. It's only because if you have no clue about the hardware you buy, and you pick up a scanner, and can't be resorceful enough to get it working, then really, Windows for the moment. Heck, things don't even work with Windows. Supper with Wanz, Sng, Susan at Star East. Yum, their chicken wings actually do taste good. Their command of the English language is questionable however. 07/11/2003 - Few days of having my community.asiaosc.org account, I've finally chucked some content on to it. Let the beta-testing begin. Installed Emacs and went thru the tutorial for about five minutes, before I decided that vim was the editor for me. Maybe I'll have to work on getting cvs/rcs working, but that's something to worry about later. Emacs is just so... icky. Is public lecturer bashing the way to go? It all started when a malaysian chinese from australia decided to write. No, his English wasn't perfect, but, I decided that a response was in lieu. He publically shamed and named a few folks (both at Monash Malaysia and Australia), to which I personally responded to him assuming it didn't make it to the list. Eventually, a summary from me. Did Charles deserve this? 06/11/2003 - Caught Matrix Revolutions. Such a geek thing to do; no "l33t" hacker skills from Trinity this time though. Sucked down Fedora Core 1, code-named Yarrow today - 3 ISO's. dist-upgrade'ed potter, which has Gnome 2.4 stuff for Debian. Caught up with mail, and hacked on some of the OOo slides. Oh, halcyon is alive! Thanks to Dev, its back up and alive! But on Comindico, I'm not sure how reliable it'll be. 05/11/2003 - Red Hat is not dead. Where did this FUD come from? Of course, they encourage you to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which have workstation offerings, but the free Fedora Linux still exists, albeit minus the support. Did you get support from RH the last time you bought a handwritten ISO? NO. So things aren't changing. Its just a name change for crying out loud. RHL will still be around, just that it's called Fedora. Really, Red Hat will be around. You won't have boxed sets to buy (too bad, most didn't buy it anyways), and that means no support numbers and so on. Did you use Red Hat's 30-90 day support before? Or did you rely on Linux User Groups or something? Handwritten CD's never come with support, remember that :) Pazli has a good rsync/backup guide, thats pretty comprehensive. Debian in the Enterprise or not? In reality, using Sid is not the solution for production environments; Woody is obsolete, and Sarge is broken. Dated, but good for UI stuff - ESR's wife tries K*, and isn't happy with what KDE has to offer. Some inane OOo comments, they should post a follow-up - things have improved, even in the KDE world. LUV meeting today. Was a little late, but Debian Project Leader, Martin Michlmayr gave a fairly good talk. As did Richard Keech from RHL, for the Fedora project. Comparing things side-by-side is always cool :) 04/11/2003 - Hardly had sleep. Wore a suit at about 7am, with tie and all. Went to the exam at Caulfield, and headed straight off to the Melbourne Cup. Cup day's a big thing here in Melbourne, with a public holiday and all happening. It was boiling hot at about 24°C, and me in a black suit just didn't work out well. Had champagne, looked at horses, watched the carnival, and an idiot in the party got drunk and became a whiney retard (IMHO). Hard Rock Cafe provided some solace, where I had an Irish Coffee with like seven packs of sugar. Shit, thats one bad tasting drink. Home to sleep and up again at 9pm, with dinner at like 11pm. Whee. Novell buys SuSe, and not long after they bought Ximian even. Michael was telling us about it on IRC for a while though, but it became official today. 03/11/2003 - Looks like I'm going to the Cup tomorrow. Spent most of the day in the library with that best friend of mine. Studying of course, marketing tomorrow. ESR on Licenses is probably a good read to some degree (when time permits, its long; co-written with his wife as well!). As usual, the mailing lists are abound with nonsense about education or IT students - pisses me off so much I may write a CS-Student-HOWTO to some degree. 02/11/2003 - Apple's an idiot organisation, and at least that's why I don't use Mac OS X; they're forcing a Panther upgrade for security patches! So people on OS X 10.2.x will have no choice but to go 10.3. Vietnam thinks about FLOSS - maybe thats another country to prod. Malaysia's trying with their MAVCAP shiznitz. Dinesh is largely a part of it, but I have my reservations about something like this. os@schools is a seminar thing held by UPSI - I'm semi-interested in presenting. And a bit on the software economics in the OSS world. 01/11/2003 - Wow, another month has arrived and the close of the year is soon. Worth mentioning that Malaysia has a new Prime Minister. Had a fun day (of study!) with my best friend; we've really been having an on-off relationship, which always gives me the shits. While brushing my teeth (with an electric toothbrush) a friend said that I have no become lazier. Thinking on that thought.... Technology makes us lazy. In fact, I use Linux because I'm lazy.. Lazy to fix problems, lazy to re-install software, lazy in general to have it crash while I'm doing work to start re-doing it. Linux, for lazy people, might be a fairly good motto :P 31/10/2003 - No more hacking again. Up late, did some e-mail reading, and out to St. Kilda with Wanz, Charms, Nick, James, Sng, and Steph for a drink. Thanks for that Charms! |