noogzblog

Welcome to Wellington (Or: Incoherent early-morning brain dump)

2010-01-17T17:43:00+00:00

I'm taking what scant morning time I have away from the conference today to let you know what I'm doing during it, isn't that nice? Naturally, I've written this at 6:30AM, which is like 4:30AM Sydney Time: a fact that my body hasn't kept from me. Still, I need to be up early, if only for today... So. Here begins the brain dump:

I landed in Wellington on Friday -- as a miniconf organiser, I was fortunate enough to get picked up at the airport, and get the sights of the area shown to me. This includes Wellington's idea of an aircraft control tower (slotted between two houses on a residential block -- no photo, going too fast :(), a wind meter, which kindly blocks the road in sufficiently-strong winds, and most importantly the conference centre in which LCA will be held. I checked in to UStay (the budget accommodation booked by the conference), and got a room on the 11th floor. This wouldn't necessarily be an issue to me, save for the fact that the elevator goes up to 10 only: the remaining floor is scaled by way of a fire escape that isn't terribly well-marked. The room is pretty comfortable (really good for NZ$21 per night), and the common room is big, with plenty of couches, allowing delegates to socialise.

This is my first time staying at conference accommodation (I've been to two LCA's before), which has revealed an entirely new side of the conference: all the delegates staying here share a single common room, and there are plenty of new friends to be made just by popping over to another of the many groups that form there.

The common room, luckily, provides more than enough entertainment here, since the weather's been pretty awful since I got here -- strong wind and plenty of rain have accompanied 15-degree weather (which I am hoping will lift tomorrow). Flights for some have had to be diverted to Auckland, so it's dubious as to whether some people will even make the start of the conference. This is apparently unusual for Wellington (despite its reputation as the windy city).

Well, it's probably time I considered popping downstairs, and getting ready to go: I've got a miniconf to run today -- wish me luck!

In Wellington for LCA2010

2010-01-16T02:14:00+00:00

I'm sitting on a couch in the UStay common room in Wellington: the first bunch of LCA2010 delegates are showing up. Very much looking forward to registration tomorrow, and the week that follows it.

That's all for now. More substantial updates once things actually happen!

Summer of Etc!

2009-12-18T00:04:00+00:00

Once again, I've left this site for faaaaar too long without letting you all know what I've been up to of late (oops). Needless to say, a fair bit has happened in the past few weeks, and it's probably worth telling you all about this.

Honours, Semester 1 (during semester 2)

Uni study's been going quite swimmingly of late: both my units of study went pretty well (insofar as I got HDs in them); thesis on the other hand, has only really just started to take off. My research is into the computer vision task fo object detection (for example, finding faces in images), in particular, I'm working on improving the scheme built into the Intel OpenCV Library (Haar Classifier Cascades, if you're at all interested) by having them consider colour.

One of the deficiencies I've discovered during my research is lack of sufficient real-world colour face datasets to perform detection upon: whilst I need in the order of 2000 faces (1000 to train upon, 1000 to test upon), the largest useful academic set is an order of magnitude smaller. For this reason I'm developing my own set. My current intention is to assemble the data set entirely from Creative Commons-licensed data (e.g. from Flickr and Wikipedia) and to release the resultant set under CC licenses too. I expect I'll give a lightning talk at LCA on this, I'll also dump a blog post here somewhere about what sort of data I'd like donated.

Summer of Google

One thing that's looking like it will derail my Honours work slightly happened not too long ago. I applied for a Software Engineering Internship at Google Sydney back in July, and didn't hear much about it. In late October, however, I very suddenly got contacted about it, and interviewed for the position, and quite happily, I was offered a job. This, amongst other things, involved dropping (almost*) everything for the summer, and moving to Sydney within two weeks, which I guess I've done somewhat successfully.

So I'm now working at Google until sometime during the first two weeks of semester (!). My current project involves working on [redacted], to make [redacted] do [redacted]; in related news, the new Sydney offices are pretty damn cool, the food is excellent, and the work is fun. I'm really looking forward to the rest of my time here.

*I guess the most important thing to mention here is that I'm still spending my week-and-a-bit in Wellington for Linux.conf.au 2010, and that I'll still be running the Open Programming Languages Miniconf there. I can hardly wait!

Elsewherein'

2009-11-01T10:06:00+00:00

Just a friendly prod to interstate friends (and apologies to those of you picking who are otherwise uninterested):

I'll be in Sydney from Wednesday evening for the AUC XGrid Workshop; I'll be heading to Melbourne on Friday evening for the weekend. If you want to meet up at any time whilst I'm there, you can contact me through the usual channels.

LCA2010 Open Programming Languages Miniconf: CFP Closes on Friday!

2009-10-19T08:30:00+00:00

And this time we mean it!

Our CFP was extended by a month, and now you only have this week to get your presentation proposals in for the LCA2010 Open Programming Languages Miniconf!

Our call for presentations closes on Friday 23 October 2009, so if you're planning on attending LCA2010 in Wellington in January, and have something to say about doing development with Open Source programming languages, libraries or frameworks, we'd love to hear from you!

We're looking primarly for standard-length talks (20-25 minutes including questions), but we'll also consider double-length talks on suitably compelling topics (that's 40-45 minutes including questions).

Our CFP is available from http://blogs.tucs.org.au/oplm/cfp/ -- if you've already read it, you can submit your proposal at http://blogs.tucs.org.au/oplm/cfp/submit/

ABOUT THE MINICONF

The Linux.conf.au Open Programming Languages Miniconf is a single-day mini-conference about application development with Open Source programming languages. Featuring talks on a wide range of topics and programming languages, this miniconf aims to bring together open source developers with presentations that share techniques, best practices and values amongst programmers of all open programming languages. OPLM2010 will be held at Linux.conf.au 2010, in Wellington, New Zealand on January 18.

OPLM2010 is being organised by Christopher Neugebauer and Jacinta Richardson with help from the broader community. You can contact the OPLM2010 organising team at oplm2010@googlegroups.com or visit the website at http://blogs.tucs.org.au/oplm

LCA2010 -- I'm registered

2009-10-10T22:00:00+00:00

Registrations for Linux.conf.au 2010, being held in Wellington, New Zealand this January opened earlier this week -- I'm registered (a bit of a no-brainer, given that I'm running a miniconf this year). Have you registered yet?

Not sure if I mentioned it here, but thanks to the kind generosity of the LCA2010 team, the Open Programming Languages Miniconf has been able to extend its call for presentations by a month. This means that you can now submit your presentations up until October 23 (which is a Friday) -- I look forward to seeing another deluge of presentations in a couple of weeks-ish!

AUC /dev/world/2009 and its consequences for the Open Source development community

2009-10-03T01:33:00+00:00

AUC /dev/world/2009, the Apple University Consortium's annual student (and university staff) developer conference was held this week in Canberra. DevWorld goes for two days, and consisted (this year) of about 90 enthusiastic Apple developers learning about popular Mac technologies.

This year, as well as being my first DevWorld conference, I was a presenter: I presented a talk about the OS X scripting bridges, with a particular focus on the Python--Objective-C bridge, PyObjC. I rushed through the first half of my talk, and instead of taking ~45 minutes like I'd estimated, I took 30, which means I probably rushed through the back end of the talk as well (though it felt as though I was going pretty slowly!). I was not the only student presenter at this conference, indeed around two thirds of presenters were students at one of the AUC member universities.

As well as my presentation, I was the official photography crew for the conference (with a broken camera for half the conference, too, I might add), wrote a substantial amount of the (ridiculously hard) quiz night, and organised their lunchtime lightning talks, which in my opinion was one of the greater successes of the conference -- more than half of the 11 talks were presented by people who had not presented at the conference, and the representatives from Apple Australia were suitably impressed by the quality of the talks.

Coming from an Open Source person's standpoint, I'm very impressed with the level of developer community that the AUC are able to extract from University students. There is clearly a high level of enthusiasm amongst student Mac and iPhone developers for their chosen platform, which is something that Apple should justifiably be proud of. I am convinced, however, that this enthusiasm is not solely limited to Apple Development, and almost certainly exists for Open Source platforms as well. It is our job as Open Source people to foster this enthusiasm for Free developer platforms and Open Source technology in general amongst the student population.

Our existing conferences do not do enough to encourage students to participate in presentating at them. I will single out LCA in this case, as it is our community's most visible local conference -- what I am pointing out also applies to others. Though there has been a concerted increase in student-related events at LCA (beginning with the Google student event in 2008 and the TUCS UpDNS in 2009), and this certainly establishes ties within the student community, more needs to be done to extend these ties into the broader community.

An appropriate place to start here would be the establishment of a regular student miniconf as of 2011. Student developers make up a significant minority of delegates to LCA, but are seriously underrepresented in both main programme presentations and miniconf presentations. Referencing her experiences on the PyCon papers committee, Anna Martelli Ravenscroft lists 6 reasons why women do not talk enough at conferences, but they apply equally well to student developers at well -- fear of inexperience in comparison with other delegates or presenters, fear of presenting a topic that may be irrelevant to other delegates and fear of presenting in general are all listed as common reasons why people do not present enough. Providing an allocated track for student developers would almost completely eliminates the first two listed issues, and will make significant inroads into the third by providing a supportive environment for students to present at the conference. Linuxchix has been a notable precedent and success story in this field, by providing a supportive environment for female delegates at LCA, there has been a noticable increase in attendance by female delegates since the Linuxchix miniconf was started (the proportion of which I am not sure); and from what I can tell, the standard of presentations is very high.

Student developers are currently an untapped resource for LCA and the Open Source conference community in general, but one that we must strive to harness whilst the opportunity still presents itself. The AUC have demonstrated that a student-driven developer conference is not only a feasible model, but one that can be highly informative, well-delivered, and highly successful. For as long as we are not encouraging enthusiasm amongst our own young developers this way, we are presenting further opportunities for Apple and others to fill the void, and at the moment, the void is great.

I close with a quote from Simon Phipps' keynote from LCA2009. In reference to his presenting from a Mac laptop, Simon observed that

The greatest enemy to freedom is a happy slave.

I argue that an even greater enemy to freedom is someone who is happily being educated into slavery. For as long as our non-free competition are encouraging student development in this way, this is the circumstance that we in the Australian Open Source community are faced with. I commend the AUC for their fantastic work on producing an excellent conference, and it is something that we in the Open Source community should be striving to replicate, and not striving to extinguish.

More ACM-SPPC Goodness!

2009-09-15T04:51:00+00:00

As predicted, our third place is final! This puts us one problem clear of 4th, and tied with second place, which is kinda nice. It also means that Josh, Simon and I are in limbo until early December when wildcard world finals places are allocated -- that said, it's a nice limbo to be in, as it were.

Since Simon lacks a blog, I'm publishing his analyses of problems D and F, as well as H, where his solution TLEd at minute 295...

Problem F was obviously the hidden easy problem (it was full of pointless extra data to make it look more complicated) so I got onto that once the terminal was free. It's BFS on a graph with vertices representing cities and a connection between two cities iff there is a road which contains both cities.

Problem D: It was very number theoretic. With this one, the months had different lengths which made things complicated unless you just took one month at a time, found the solution for each one and then gave the best solution out of all them. For each month, there was a window of opportunity where a full moon could occur such that the next full moon would be in the same month. So, again, I solved the problem for each day of the month in that window and returned the best for the month. Solving the problem for each day involved solving equations in mod Y, the number of days in a year, which can be done with the help of the extended Euclidean algorithm. Writing a Date class helped keep the thing simple enough to humanly code.

Problem H (unsolved) After getting that out, I looked at the stable marriages problem again. I remembered the algorithm in the last hour of the competition (and felt stupid since it's simple and the name of the problem is a way of remembering it). I got onto coding it, at the same time as Josh was bashing at problem B. I actually got it working in the last five minutes but in my rush I'd made it O(n^3) instead of O(n^2) and it didn't cut it.

I guess the last thing to mention is a round of thanks to Mike Cameron-Jones, our site director and coach, as well as Robyn Gibson (our local judge), Tony Gray (who makes everything work here), and Matt Armsby (for passing our printouts, and arranging the food on the table), amongst the many other staff who made the contest possible.

ACM SPPC (And related excitement)

2009-09-13T00:39:00+00:00

The ACM South Pacific Regional Programming Contest is done and dusted for another year. My team (The Triple Helix) scored a provisional third place with seven problems (that's tied with the team on second, but not the team on first as was the case last year), which after talking with other teams at the top seems fairly stable. This is a really encouraging result for us, not least because I shared a team with completely different teammates from previous years, but also because one of those teammates was attempting this contest for the first time.

So of the seven problems, I solved three, being problems A, G and I, Josh solved B and E (there's an interesting story there that I'll leave him to tell), and Simon solved D and F (spending the last hour on H). Here's my analysis of the ones I solved.

Problem A: The problem at the front of the pack is, as usual, a "typing practice" problem, that is, one where the trick is doing precisely what they tell you on the statement as quickly as possible. I had a working solution in 8 minutes, but a technical glitch on our local site meant that I didn't have any pretyped test data (the sample data was very tedious and difficult to type correctly) until minute 15. A quick test and submit, and done.

Problem G: The idea of this problem is to determine if a path exists allowing you to visit all cities from a list of cities, in order, and only once. You are given a set of flights that may contain cities not from the original list, which you may visit as frequently as necessary. The observation here is that you'd like to determine if a path exists between adjacent cities on the list through the allowed intermediary cities only. By being judicious about ordering your verticies in an adjacency matrix, you can solve this using a non-standard version of Floyd's algorithm, whereby your outer loop (the one that considers your current intermediary vertex) only considers the valid intermediary cities. Determining if the desired path exists is just a matter of stepping through the path.

Problem I: This problem involved determining if a path to a point in a grid exists, whereby the only possible moves at a given point are to go "forward" or "rotate to the right", and determining the length of the shortest path if one exists. As a grid-based shortest path problem, a BFS is the correct method; the trick is to notice that the state space involves not only the grid itself, but actually the grid in each of the four possible orientations -- once this key bit of insight is out of the way you only have to consider a few special cases: are you at the goal state already; is the goal state on a wall in the maze; and the one clarified by the judges, is your start space on a wall?

We didn't solve our eighth problem (H), but luckily, a tiny change to our solution to B in the last 5 minutes got accepted (at minute 297, no less), which was sufficient to knock us up to 3rd.

So that's it until after the rejudging occurs, hopefully with no drastic changes at the top :)

Update: Josh posted analysis of the problems he solved (a long with some ACM t-shirts) to his blog. Check it out for more of the story about this year's contest.

Japanese Translation Poetry

2009-08-21T02:52:00+00:00

A friend of mine showed me Translation Party. I thought it might be fun to write some poetry with it:

My duck, please on the roof of the master.
When the roof, ducks quack
Ducks quack, trembling with fear of the roof
Now the world knows the Ducks.

My friends, please see the duck
The ducks live in the river.
River, or pay attention to the ducks?
Kamogawa and Thanks.

Ducks will forever live in the river
However, to take care of the ducks
I need to take care of the river
River?

I, the river, ducks love to swim
Whether swimming in the river?
When, and to save the duck, I love the duck
Also, do you like your duck?

I have to save the ducks, and thanks to all.
If you want to save the ducks?
Know how to save the ducks
And the world knows.

Pythonic UIs

2009-08-13T08:57:00+00:00

I've just been reading Richard Jones' current project, where he's implementing a very Pythonic way of creating GUIs (for example, managing gui contexts using Python's context managers). I'm very very excited, and I hope this sample code shows why:

with gui.form() as form:
    name = gui.row('Name', gui.text())
    skill = gui.row('Skill level', gui.selection(['Awesome', 'Radical', 'Understated']))
    @gui.submit('OK')
    def on_click(button):
        print 'Got name=%r'%name.value
        print 'Got skill=%r'%form['skill'].value
        gui.stop(0)
    @gui.cancel('Cancel')
    def on_click(button):
        gui.stop(1)

Take a look at what this code does at Richard Jones' weblog. It's pretty awesome.

Open Programming Languages Miniconf CFP Now Open

2009-08-12T01:17:00+00:00

The LCA2010 Open Programming Languages Miniconf, to be held at Linux.conf.au 2010 in January 2010 (either on Monday 18th or Tuesday 19th January), invites presentations about all programming languages with an Open Source implementation, such as Perl, Python, C, PHP and Ruby, amongst others.

Topics may include recent developments in open programming languages, interface design, portability and packaging, coding applications with cool new libraries and frameworks, and showing off the use of novel programming techniques; presentations may be proposed in a standard (25-minute) or long (45-minute) talk format.

Whilst most talks will be specific to a single language, the focus of this miniconf will be on sharing techniques, best practices and values amongst programmers of all open programming languages.

We will be accepting proposals effective immediately, and our CFP will close on Friday, September 25. Absolutely no extensions will be granted due to the tight timeline for LCA2010 programme publication.

To read the guidelines for presentations, and the submission process for proposals, please visit the CFP page on our website.

Important Dates

Wednesday, August 12, 2009: CFP Opens at http://blogs.tucs.org.au/oplm/cfp/submit/
Friday, September 25: CFP Closes
Saturday, September 26-Thursday, October 1: Notification of successful presenters
Friday, October 2: Final programme submitted to LCA2010 organisers
January 18, 2010: Linux.conf.au 2010 Begins

The timeline for the CFP is extremely tight by requirement of the LCA2010 organisers, so no extensions will be granted.

About the Miniconf

Announcing the LCA2010 Open Programming Languages Miniconf

2009-08-08T20:50:00+00:00

You may have caught the announcement yesterday about the miniconfs accepted for Linux.conf.au 2010 (to be held in January in Wellington) and noticed my name there...

I'm running one of the miniconfs this year, along with Jacinta Richardson. It's called the Open Programming Languages Miniconf, and is all about doing application development with open source tools (languages, libraries, frameworks, etc). Our proposal put it like this:

The Linux.conf.au Open Programming Languages Miniconf is a single-day mini-conference about application development with Open Source programming languages. Featuring talks on a wide range of topics and programming languages, this miniconf aims to bring together open source developers with presentations that share techniques, best practices and values amongst programmers of all open programming languages.

Our CFP isn't quite ready yet, but our website is, and you can go there to read more of our proposal, and subscribe to our announcements RSS.

So if you have something to say about developing with Python, Perl, PHP, C, or any other open source programming language, start planning your talks and presentations; I look forward to seeing the quality from the main conference submissions first-hand!

Oh, and see you in Wellington!

On Footprints

2009-07-27T00:53:00+00:00

So I happened to be visiting a local Target store with some friends today, and discovered they were selling glorified green pieces of rubber for $22.45:

But then one of us spotted something rather odd:

Hang on! Is that the GNOME logo? Why yes it is!

Anyone want to take this one up?

3 birds...

2009-07-24T12:06:00+00:00

Let's kill two birds with one picture, as it were...

Point 1? I got an Honours scholarship. Yay me! Secondly? I got my final mark today (for Functional Analysis), a very satisfying 95 (better than my previous marks for the semester by a long way). This means that I now officially have sufficient credit to graduate to a Bachelor of Science (though this is mostly a formality, I've been doing Honours study for two weeks now), and will do so in two weeks time. Awesome!

The third bird? My Honours thesis topic has been allocated. Put as vaguely as possible, it's about augmenting a machine learning-based object detection system (for images) to use colour images instead of black and white. My supervisor is Mike (my ACM-ICPC coach, as it were). I'll _try_ and explain it better once I've done a bit more reading than I have so far...

Normal service to be resumed later,

--Chris

More Thingies!

2009-07-20T00:27:00+00:00

Time for another status report on things that have happened recently!

More Uni!

First up, I've started on my Honours year! Isn't that exciting? As I've learnt this week, the next 12 months for me will consist of 4 coursework units, and a research thesis. This semester, it looks like I'll be studying Embedded Systems (yay! I get to program some microprocessors! Whoo!), Computing in Context (a research-intensive unit in HCI), and possibly one other, depensive on what the unit outline for it looks like. My thesis I'm not so sure about, given that the process by which we get assigned supervisors hasn't occurred yet. Currently, I have a pile of 12 project areas for my perusal, from which I must rank 6 proposals by order of how much I want to study them. At the moment, there are some interesting-looking proposals relating to Machine Learning, and some interesting ones relating to web monitoring; I find out what I've been assigned by Friday (very exciting, no?).

Linux.conf.au 2010

Linux.conf.au 2010 is being held in Wellington, New Zealand. One of the things that makes LCA a truly wonderful conference is the first two days, devoted to single-day "miniconfs" on topic areas of interest to the Free and Open Source Software communities. I'm currently involved with two proposals; I'm primary proposer of a developers' miniconf (called "Open Languages") aimed towards uniting the developer communities of open source programming languages, and I'm secondary proposer of an education-flavoured miniconf. I'd be equally happy if either of these proposals get up, but with 30 other awesome proposals competing for 12 openings for miniconfs, there's going to be some very stiff competition.

Blackjack?

Hey, turns out I turned 21 on Wednesday. How did I manage that?

Worldwide Photo Walk 2009

2009-07-19T07:08:00+00:00

I had the fortune yesterday to go on the Hobart edition of Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photo Walk 2009. The WWPW, in its second year, is an organised photo walk, with groups taking photos in 900 cities across the world. This year was the first time it had been run in Hobart, and was organised by local photographer Nigel Honey. The walk started in Molle Street, following the Hobart Rivulet to the Cascade Brewery, and back along Macquarie Street.

I used the day as an excuse to finally use my new ultrawide for an extended period of time, which I've been waiting for for over a month now: the difference in shots that an ultrawide affords you is incredible, the flipside is needing to spend far more time paying attention to composition and ensuring that the entire frame of the photograph is well-used (being selective about subjects is very difficult due to massive depth-of-field).

Perhaps the most interesting find of the day was an abandoned scrapyard in South Hobart near the Brewery, apparently a dumping ground for old cranes, and this is where my most interesting set of shots came from:

The Photo Walk should be happening again roughly this time next year, if you enjoy taking photos of things, events like this present a really good opportunity to improve your skills, learn tips and tricks from people with similar interests to you, and to explore places that you might not have considered visiting before. It's certainly something I hope to do more regularly myself, in the not-too-distant future.

End.

2009-07-08T09:16:00+00:00

After a somewhat self-enforced marathon exams session, I finished my last (and arguably most difficult) exam on Monday, that was for Functional Analysis, and my first results came out this morning: 3 HD marks and a Distinction, not quite as good as my excellent run of last year, but still not dreadful either. Given that I've passed everything, it means that I've finished the undergrad component of my degree! Hurrah!

Graduation is in early August, but before then, the Honours programme starts Friday, after only three days worth of holidays. Excellent!

What? Where did the last 2 months go?

2009-06-01T04:58:00+00:00

Well, somehow we've made it to the end of the first semester of this year, and I quite inconveniently forgot to write about anything since the start of April. This is quite problematic. I guess that means it's time for me to do my semi-regular dump of notable things. Bleh.

So, where to begin?

ACM-ICPC Trip

So yes, we did arrive safely in Germany, spending a week with my relatives who live just outside of Frankfurt-am-Main in centre of the country. That was a fun week, we spent many days taking in the area, sampling the culture, and preparing for the programming contest the next week. We spent a week in Stockholm, where the contest was held, which was great fun in general (despite being somewhat colder than Germany and indeed Australia), we met many like-minded people, and thoroughly enjoyed the week. In the end, we solved three problems in the contest, which was (just) sufficient to see us getting a ranked position of equal 49th (yay!).

I'll write up the two weeks spent overseas in greater detail soon (hopefully).

Twitter & Co.

So I succumbed to peer pressure roughly two weeks ago, signing up for Twitter and Identi.ca. As a fun experiment into the field, I investigated how long it would take, and what measures would be necessary, for someone to notice that I was on Twitter, and then follow me. I did this by following one or two people per day, and getting them to drop relatively silent hints about my existence. In the end, it took about a week for someone to notice me, with a fairly blatant reference to me needed to make it obvious. Despite the great scientific breakthrough observed, I don't think the result is sufficient to write a paper about... :P

My main observation is that Twitter is miles behind Identi.ca in terms of useful features (I like group notices, denoted by '!' tags in Identi.ca, and Jabber-based updating in particular), stability (updating my Avatar in Identi.ca does indeed work first time, every time, whereas it took me 10 tries to get it to work in Twitter), and ability to store my own name (This would make Twitter the first site that I have ever needed to call myself "Chris" as opposed to "Christopher"), that said, Twitter is ahead greatly in terms of the number of people on it, which makes sticking around there a necessary evil (boo for centralisation!).

End of Semester/Undergrad

And yes, it would be amiss to not note that last week was my last week of lectures as an undergrad student (presuming, of course, that all of my exams go sufficiently well), it was mostly uneventful, with the exception of having to hand in two major assignments, prepare and present a lightning talk, and run the session in which it was presented. All-in-all rather busy!

Cocomo: An experiment in metaprogramming in python

2009-06-01T01:16:00+00:00

Friday saw the second edition of the UTAS Computing Society Lightning Talks, if you haven't seen them already, I highly recommend that you check them out -- this semester's were at a very high standard indeed, and I wish I'd printed out more certificates for good talks :). My talk was a demonstration of using metaprogramming in Python, though that's not what it seemed to be about.

An introduction

I went to the Apple University Consortium's Cocoa Workshop at the University of New South Wales in February of this year, it was a heap of fun, and we learnt heaps whilst there. One of the key distinguising features of Cocoa is its use of verbose English method and attribute names, the idea being that each line of code should make a reasonable amount of sense when read aloud, hence:

NSString *str = [[NSString alloc] initWithString @"Hello World!"]

does indeed allocate memory to hold a string object, and initialises the newly-allocated memory with a string containing "Hello World!" (this code is highly redundant!). Supposedly such a naming scheme allows coders to write code that is easily maintainable by the original coder, and easily learnable by people who pick up the code for the first time.

On the other hand, my friends, collectively known as Maclab (named after the room at UTAS we inhabit) have developed a rather unique vocabularly, which in particular involves replacing as many words as possible with either 'thrust' or 'fork', so "Thrustingly thrust the forking forker" is not an uncommon utterance amongst my friends. If this is indeed their usual mode of conversation, then Cocoa's way of identifying methods and attributes is not necessarily going to be a particularly intiuitive one. So, clearly, we need a version of cocoa that meets their needs.

The setup

So, conveniently, Apple provide a comprehensive version of the Cocoa API, thanks to the PyObjC project. We can therefore use the Python bindings for Cocoa facilitate our new version of Cocoa. Since Cocoa has a very consistent naming scheme, we can simply perform string replacement to translate from our maclab language to the standard cocoa language, using a routine somewhat like this:

def translate(inp):
	''' Translates an input string from key language to value language '''
	for i in LANGUAGE:
		if i[0].islower():
			# Try both capital case and lowercase
			inp = inp.replace(i, LANGUAGE[i])
			inp = inp.replace(rtitle(i), rtitle(LANGUAGE[i]))
		else:
			inp = inp.replace(i, LANGUAGE[i])
	return inp

def rtitle(i):
	return i[0].upper() + i[1:]

Here, LANGUAGE is a dictionary, with keys in the language code will be written in and values being the target language (in this case, Cocoa). There's not all that much of a sophisticated nature going on in here. Now that we have a method by which we can translate our attribute accesses, we can get to the meat of the the code.

The implementation

To achieve the new API, we need to use a technique that I will call proxying. This involves the use of objects whose sole purpose is to intercept attribute accesses and calls to an underlying object. In this case, the point of intercepting the calls and accesses is to perform translation from our new objects to standard Cocoa objects. In Python we can do this by overriding the standard attribute access and call methods.

First up is __getattr__, the attribute accessor method -- for this, we are passed a string; the name of the attribute that we're looking for, which we translate, and then attempt to access upon the method on the underlying object (in this case, self.__u__). There is one slight hitch: in certain cases, we may not want to translate the attribute name. This is true, in particular, of the attribute that represents the underlying object. Hence we provide a REAL_ATTRS list, for which we use the default __getattr__ method for. This results in code that looks something like this:

	def __getattribute__(self,name):
		#''' Perform method/attribute proxying on ''' + repr(self.__u__)
		if name in REAL_ATTRS:
			return object.__getattribute__(self,name)
		else:
			new_objectname = "self.__u__.%s" % translate(name)
			new_object = eval(new_objectname)
			return CocomoProxy(new_object)

Notice that we use eval to perform the lookup? It turns out that __getattr__ doesn't work universally, whereas . notation does -- so we use that for less failover.

Being able to call methods on the objects is important, but slightly more difficult -- we want behaviour to be maintained, so we need to make sure that proper Cocoa objects are passed as arguments, rather than the Proxy objects that you may have originally dealt with. We can do this with Python's argument unpacking -- we build up a list of arguments, and unproxy them as necessary:

	def __call__(self,*a, **k):
		new_a = [i.__u__ if type(i) == CocomoProxy else i for i in a]
		new_k = dict( (translate(i), k[i].__u__ if type(k[i]) == CocomoProxy else k[i]) for i in k)
		return CocomoProxy(self.__u__(*new_a,**new_k))

We may also need to deal with iterators. This can be done using a standard generator function, thusly:

	def __iter__(self):
		for i in self.__u__:
			yield CocomoProxy(i)

Finally, there may be legitimate reasons for extracting Cocoa objects, these include printing strings, so we provide an accessor method called no_really:

	def no_really(self):
		return self.__u__

And that's the entire implementation! The final thing we need to do is provide a pre-proxied version of the base module for Cocoa. Let's call it GypsyMagic.

The payoff

So now that we have a working bridge from Maclab English to Cocoa English, we can take this sample code that puts some stuff into an array, and then prints it:

import AppKit

hworld = AppKit.NSString.alloc().initWithString_("Hello, World!")
arr = AppKit.NSMutableArray.alloc().init()

arr.addObject_(hworld)
arr.addObject_("Boop!")


for i in arr:
	print i

And write it in the far more palatable:

from cocomo import GypsyMagic

hworld = GypsyMagic.OGMouthWords.subsume().makeGogoWithMouthWords_("Hello, World!")
arr = GypsyMagic.OGForkableTrinketHolder.subsume().makeGogo()

arr.thrustinglyThrustForker_(hworld)
arr.thrustinglyThrustForker_("Boop!")

for i in arr:
	print i.no_really()

If you're interested in seeing how it all fits together, see Cocomo's website.

We interrupt your previously scheduled silence...

2009-04-17T19:41:00+00:00

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Ubuntu Cola, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

To bring you a drink that shares its name with an operating system. Ubuntu Cola is a fair trade cola (so the Sugar and Cola farmers in Africa get paid fairly for their wares) that we found in Stockholm. It's rather tasty too. If you're in Europe, it's worth going out and finding some -- it stocks in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Norway and Belgium.

(Actually useful writings to come later)

Leavin' on (a) jet plane(s)

2009-04-05T23:21:00+00:00

As previously mentioned I'm on one of the Australian teams competing in the ACM ICPC World Finals being held in Stockholm on April 21 -- that means that I somehow need to get to Europe, and that somehow is series of flights, today -- with a week's stopover in Frankfurt, to visit relatives who live there.

Flights today are Hobart-Melbourne (not too bad) and Melbourne-Frankfurt via Bangkok (oriental setting), an ugly 28 hours total in transit (that I'm not really looking forward to), arriving at the somewhat inconvenient time of 6AM (just to ensure that any excess jetlag will be comfortably prolonged).

I'll be trying pretty hard to document my trip here, and this will probably mean that there'll be a bit of extra noise coming from me on PLOA -- for those of you with little interest in what I'm doing: sorry about that!

Wrest Point -- Earth Hour 2009

2009-03-29T00:28:00+00:00

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Wrest Point -- Earth Hour 2009, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

Earth Hour was celebrated yesterday: buildings and households all around Hobart switched their lights off as a statement in favour of action on Global Warming.

This is Wrest Point Casino (Hobart's tallest building) with its external lights switched off -- though it would seem that some of the patrons of the hotel didn't get the message.

February in Brief

2009-02-27T13:06:00+00:00

Wow. It's been a thoroughly busy month, lots of things to recap, so I won't bother going into too much detail... Here's a selection:

AUC Workshops

In February, the Apple University Consortium sent me to Sydney for their annual Cocoa Developement workshop, and to Melbourne for their inaugural Ruby on OS X Workshop. Both workshops were great, and if you attend an AUC Member University, you really should sign up for their future workshops; that said, I can't see me seriously using Rails for anything in the future, and Obj-C peeves me... Cocoa, on the other hand is seriously exciting, and even from a few days' exposure, I can see why Cocoa developers love their framework so much, and the lack of a similar facility for making good UIs quickly in Linux is really obvious to me now . Hopefully this is something that gets addressed in future releases of the major desktop environments.

Semester 1 Gogog!

Uni went back this week, and it's been all-in-all rather eventful. It's the start of my final semester of undergrad study, which is going to encompass holding the presidency of TUCS, our Campus Computing Society, going to Stockholm to compete in the ACM Programming Contest, all the while juggling effectively 5 units of study. How I'm going to cope with it I have no idea, presumably I will though...

This semester, I'm studying three maths units (two pure, one applied): Computational Methods (or, how to avoid doing hard maths... clever how they keep that one for third year), Algebra 3 (mostly group theory this year) and (Functional) Analysis 3; Computing-wise, I'm studying Data Mining & Text Retrieval (the 3rd-year Machine Learning unit), and Advanced Web Development (purely as a Gimme unit). Hopefully this one constitutes a reasonably good mix between fun and interestingness -- and hopefully not too time-consuming. On another note, Kumudini (the lecturer for Analysis) deserves special thanks, as she's gone out of her way to ensure that Analysis is being offered before Semester 2 for me, which I'm quite grateful for (as it means that I can graduate with the Pure Maths Major).

TUU Societies Day 2009

Mentioning the start of semester without mentioning Societies day would be quite amiss -- for those who are unfamiliar, socieities day is a 3-hour event held on the first Wednesday of the Uni year, where students signup for their chosen sports clubs and societies, generally in return for Alcohol. This year, however, the Union made the curious decision to spilt the allocated space in two, and provide a dry area, which proved to be very useful for us at TUCS (as we'd decided quite some time eadlier that we'd not be providing alcohol). The Union kindly provided us with space directly outside the wet area, which gave us a massive wall for advertising, and the dry area made all our volunteers highly visible (due to there actually being space to move about).

TUCS put on a Barbecue, and provided "Enticing Gift Bags" (full of things including leftover LCA09 schwag) to new members. The Nett effect of this was that TUCS signed up 115 members, which is almost three times as many as we managed on societies day last year. Obviously, we're pretty happy.

That's all for now, more as it comes!

LCA2009 Day 5 -- Friday

2009-01-27T02:34:00+00:00

Friday's keynote was fantastic -- Simon Phipps (who retained his job at Sun Microsystems) spoke of the Third Wave of Free Software, which was an observation that Free Software (specifically not Open Source) is becoming a sensible business proposition. It's about time that it did. It was refreshing to see a large corporate's view of the world of Free Software largely agreeing with my own. Talks after morning tea were Tridge's talk on his automatic cluster testing framework (pretty cool), followed by Conrad Parker's talk on Ogg Chopping, which despite the name, was actually a 50-minute rant about why Haskell is cool -- I'm sold (I think), but somewhat confused about the talk -- really, I have no idea what happened. I strongly urge you to watch the video (when it becomes available) in order to figure out what happened for yourself.

Lunchtime was the Great Unbeardening -- Linus Torvalds (who was roped into the act at the auction on Wednesday) shaved Bdale Garbee's beard -- the result? Disturbing. Really disturbing, but all in the name of charity. The #lca tag on twitter was displayed on the projector screen, so live audience responses were shown as the shaving continued, including one Maclabbian pointing out the relative weirdness of the event; photos were up on Flickr well before the end of the event, and Southern Cross News came to film the event (focusing on the shavee, and not the mysterious Finn doing the shaving...).

Matthew Garrett's talk on Power Management that works was great: nothing too technical, but an excellent discussion of the user interface issues surrounding power management. Matthew's talk was unique in that his talk covered everything in his abstract -- this includes answering the question "will we ever get to beer island?" -- the answer? Yes, provided you're in Texas. Following was Geek My Ride, presented by Jonathan Oxer and Flame -- this was a pretty cool demo talk, showing how the two of them have modded their cars to include some pretty cool stuff, including in-dash diagnostics, MP3 playback, and remote ignition (wow cool!).

The final talk of the conference was Bdale talking about rockets, which as usual were pretty cool. Lightning talks concluded the conference as they did in 2008 -- nice to see them becoming an LCA tradition, I will definitely aim to present at least one next year.

Conclusion

So that's it. LCA is over for another year, and will reconvene in Wellington, New Zealand for 2010 -- I've never been to New Zealand, and am really looking forward to going there next year. The 2009 Conference was excellent, the talks were well-presented, and the organisation of the conference was such that it appeared from the outside that the everything ran well (I've been told that that was certainly not the case). The conference allowed us to show off Hobart to the technical world, which is an opportunity that does not present itself regularly -- I'm glad that we got that opportunity, and I think most delegates this year will agree that it was an opportunity that was well-received, and resulted in an excellent conference for all involved.

Also thanks to Adam Harvey and Monica Wood for helping out at UpDNS -- you certainly made my job in organising it a lot easier; Linux Australia for having faith in the organisers ability to put on the conference -- I hope your investment in the Tasmanian Free Software Community pays off.

LCA2009 Day 4 -- Thursday

2009-01-27T02:33:00+00:00

The opening Keynote on Thursday was a discussion of the Wikimedia/Wikia project, which was overall not too bad. The highlight of the talk was the relaying the Parable of the Vegan, which was quite hilarious. Sadly, I don't think the talk was quite as good as it could have been -- too much time was spent teaching the purpose of Wikipedia and the structure of the wiki community, which I think was generally common knowledge amongst the audience. Once questions were asked, it became generally more interesting.

After morning tea were the absolutely fantastic Perl talks of Paul Fenwick, the first was "The Art of Klingon Programming", which made a hugely insightful analogy between the Perl programming language and Klingon culture, and used this to inspire his talk about libautodie, a library that makes Perl behave sanely in the face of supposedly fatal errors. It's pretty damn cool, and cleans up one of my least favourite things about Perl (though quite a few still remain), Paul's second talk of the day was on new features in Perl 5.10, which were interesting. Perl 5.10 has added a swtich-alike block, which I think is a model that other languages should adopt -- instead of the C-style 'break-or-fallthrough' method (which introduces many stupid bugs for newbies), Perl adopts the 'continue' keyword to allow a fallthrough, or no statement to break -- this is pretty damn clever, if I do say so myself.

This was followed by a talk entitled 7 Things Lawyers Don't Understand About Software -- delivered by a UTAS Law PhD student, who presented some very interesting arguments about the likeness of software and mathematics, and related this to the unpatentability of mathematics. His research appears interesting and I urge you to check it out.

After Lunch was Donna's The Joy of Inkscape tutorial, the point of which was to have people tinker with inscape for two hours, with occasional supervision from experts. Sadly, the room (which holds 40 with tables) overflowed, and hence the tutorial didn't appear to function entirely as planned. I don't think this affected the ability of people with seats to enjoy the tutorial though, which is nice.

Following Afternoon tea, I relaxed for a while (indeed skipping a talk), and finished up at Hugh Blemings' talk on learning Free Software Hacking from Clever People -- this talk was a disappointment -- from casual observation, people in the audience provided more useful input than the speaker, and the speaker was mostly inaudible (partially due to his tone of voice not agreeing with the room acoustics).

Thursday Evening involved me and various TUCS people running the Unprofessional Delegates Networking Session at the Uni Bar -- this was a massive success for us (we turned a profit!!!) and we were happy to provide an opportunity for the non-professional delegates to socialise whilst the professionals enjoyed their pissup at a brewery. Never underestimate the power of meat and quanitity burger to attract and feed people. I should direct many thanks to the business staff at the TUU and the Uni Bar, who opened their facilities at 3 days notice, for what was effectively a break-even prospect. Hopefully TUCS can do more work with them in the future.

(Photo by Adam Harvey)

LCA2009 Day 3 -- Wednesday

2009-01-27T02:30:00+00:00

Tom Limoncelli opened the conference proper with his keynote on "The Scarcity Mindset vs. The Abundance Mindset", which was an interesting and insightful talk on how the modern abundance of computer hardware, coupled with open source software can help sysadmins make better use of their resources. I must congratulate the organisers of the conference for selecting a sysadmin talk as the opening keynote: LCA has suffered from a lack of sysadmin talks (which the miniconf has fixed to a certain extent), and having such a keynote open the conference is an excellent investment in furthering sysadmin content at future LCAs. That said, the talk was very sysadmin-specific, and was therefore not directed well at the majority of delegates (discussing things like implementing better tech support policies in the workplace). For those more willing to look at the bigger picture (i.e. by factoring out the direct application to sysadmining, the abundance mindset is certainly something that can be used to better support open source development.

(Photo by Thomas Karpiniec)

This, for me, was followed by Keith Packard and Carl Worth doing a double-feature talk on recent developments in X, followed by a demonstration of the Linux graphics pipeline, including some discussion of how graphics drivers can be improved to allow better rendering from (say) Cairo and OpenGL. I went to the Django tutorial after lunch, which was reasonably interesting, though I stopped actively participating about halfway through. It was interesting to see how Django works, and how some of its choices were made as far as design was concerned -- in particular how there are many features designed for journalists, since Django was developed in-house by Journalists in Kansas.

Post-afternoon-tea, I went to Jonathan Corbet's talk on joining the Kernel development process, which was a departure from his usual "Kernel Report" talk -- he explained the significance of the various trees of kernel development, and explained how to work with subsystem maintainers in order to ensure that your driver became well-maintained into the future. This talk was significantly enhanced by Linus Torvalds being in the room, helping answer questions and providing further input into the presentation as it presented: this was probably the closest he got to presenting for the entire week. Following this was Martin Krafft's talk on the vcs-pkg.org project, or how distribution package maintainers can collaborate with their counterparts at other distros using distributed VCSes such as Git. He presented a good discussion of his own workflows, as well as discussion of the suitability of various tools for the purpose of cross-distro collaboration.

The real highlight was Wednesday night's penguin dinner, which featured the most bizarre auction that I've ever seen, which ended up with a consortium of Kernel Hackers and Collabora paying AUD$10,500 for a print of a photo, and a beard. This has already been discussed adequately elsewhere, so I shalln't bother.

LCA2009 Day 2 -- Tuesday

2009-01-27T02:30:00+00:00

Tuesday I spent mostly at the Free as in Freedom miniconf, where I saw Arthur Sale's talk on Open Access journals (where he outlined the changes that need to occur in the research publishing industry in order to support research in the online age), Jeff Waugh's talk "We are the Translators", which drew some enlightening parallels between Gutenberg, early Protestants (who translated the bible into modern languages, much to the disgust of the Catholic church) and the modern Free Software movement.

The final talk of the day was presented by Rusty, which essentially consisted of a fantastic 25-minute rant against modern IP law. The talk was passionate, interesting, and featured an interpretive dance about the dangers of software patents. I think that just about sums the talk up. Here I also met Paul Fenwick (developer of Autodie, the library that makes perl behave sanely in the face of errors); to my horror, many of my friends, who were sitting in the same general area as me hadn't seen Paul's lightning talk from 2008, so I took the opportunity to show them -- it's still as fresh and witty as it was last year and if you haven't seen it I urge you to again. At the conclusion of FIAF, we played Freedom Bingo, which although running for the first time ever, went pretty well -- I (as the last person to win a prize) secured a copy of Girl Talk's album, which I'll listen to sometime in the nearish future.

Outside the conference proper, I went with some fellow student (and one professional) delegates to Da Angelo's in Battery Point. Needless to say, it went down a treat (I was thanking my luck that we managed to get a table there at such short notice) -- everyone was really happy with their meal, and other than that, the company was excellent, and was all-in-all a pretty good night.

LCA2009 Day 0

2009-01-18T20:14:00+00:00

Yesterday, being the opening day for registration at Linux.conf.au 2009, I decided to attend the Newcomers' session, in which Rusty Russell and Donna Benjamin detail the history of the conference to conference newbies. This was followed by drinks and nibbles at one of the local bars (the Metz, unfortunately, and became very loud before too long).

Last year's Newbie's session was excellent, I met many interesting people from other projects, and this didn't happen to the same extent as it did (though I spent a fair amount of time chatting with Rusty about various things), though a few friends from Sydney made their way down independently, and I met another NCSSer (a tutor who tutored the returners at his first NCSS), so it was good to catch up with them.

The evening was spent watching the the aforementioned students from Sydney attempting to set up a wireless network. Who'd have imagined it was so difficult for people to three Uni Students to agree on which set of DHCP and DNS services to use?

No photos today sadly, hopefully I'll be able to get some onto flickr this evening. Maybe.

New Camera (iei!)

2009-01-14T11:30:00+00:00

So due to being fed up with my previous camera, I got myself a new Canon EOS 450D digital SLR camera last week, and needless to say, I'm really really quite impressed.

I've taken it out for a few test runs over the past week, and am really quite impressed with the results. To start out my lens collection, I've used some of my Dad's old FD-mount lenses via use of an adaptor¹ (including an f/3.3 200mm prime and an f/5.6 75-300mm zoom, for those of you who are at all interested), which has afforded some good opportunities for interesting photos:

I'm really looking forward to LCA as an opportunity to give it a really thorough workout -- I expect that I'll take a ludicrous amount of photos as an opportunity to test the camera in more varied circumstances. More as they come!

[1]: Yes, I'm well aware of phographers' disdain for using FD lenses on an EOS camera, currently I don't care. When I get to the point where I need to, I will.

The March South

2009-01-13T10:16:00+00:00

Ohgod, only 6 more sleeps until LCA2009 starts here in Hobart, and planet lca2009 has just been announced, so I suppose I'd better make a first post.

I'm really really excited (as Tom has already pointed out), and I hope all the excitement turns out to be justified (not that I have any doubt at all). There are some absolutely fantastic talks and tutorials lined up for every day of the week, which I'm really looking forward to.

Outside of the conference proper, I hope that you take as many opportunities as possible to take in Hobart's scenery, including Mt Wellington (which is 30 mins drive to the summit from the city, and from which you can view the entire city) and Salamanca, amongst others.

I'm looking forward to meeting those of you that make the march south over the next week, and I hope you enjoy Hobart as much as I do.

Happy Arbitrarily-celebrated Public Holiday!

2009-01-01T04:42:00+00:00

I notice that the most significant number on my clock has incremented (as it tends to do once every 365ish days), and hence I feel obliged to point it out to you all: Happy new year!

2009 looks like it'll be a really exciting year for me (for the first few months of it, anyway) -- I'm looking forward to (in no particular (chronological) order):

Not going to Sydney to tutor at NCSS, instead, filling most of the rest of my summer break doing programming competition practice (exciting!!!?!)
linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart (and the associated bonus of finally getting friends from interstate to reciprocate visits I've paid). Only 18 more sleeps until the first day of miniconfs kicks off -- I'm thoroughly excited!
Starting my final semester of undergrad study (not so much the overload that I'll be undertaking in order to actually finish my degree :()
Easter in Germany!
Competing in the World Finals of the ACM ICPC, to be held in Stockholm towards the end of April

May your 2009 also be fun, exciting and productive!

LCA2009 Talk Picks

2008-12-29T02:45:00+00:00

Now that the complete schedule for LCA (Including miniconfs) is available, I've chosen what talks I can go to. I'm quite impressed, almost every session for the entire conference has something that's caught my eye, and so I only have one or two slots left to fill per day. Currently, my selections stand as such:

Monday

9:30-10:20
 Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, Why?  
 by Paul McKenney 
 
10:40-11:30
 Undecided
 
11:40-12:30
 - PROBABLY -  Collaborating Successfully with Large Corporations
   by Bdale Garbee 
 
13:50-14:40
 How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love ACPI  
 by Matthew Garrett 

14:50-15:40
 Undecided
 
16:00-16:50
 Kernel Lightning Talks
 
17:00-17:50
 Ask a Kernel Hacker Panel 
 
-- 

Tuesday

9:30-10:20
 Beyond Open Source  
 by Arthur Sale 
 
10:40 - 11:10
 Future directions for Copyright Law 
 by Laura Simes

11:10 - 11:30
 OpenAustralia - Everyday democracy for everybody in Australia 
 by Katherine Szuminska and Matthew Landauer  

13:50 - 14:40
 Undecided
 
14:50 - 15:20
 Freedom in Focus: CC Photography and Cultural Change 
 by Rachel Cobcroft

15:20 - 15:40
 We are the translators! 
 by Jeff Waugh 

16:00-16:50
 Undecided
 
17:00-17:50
 Undecided

-- 

Wednesday


10:40-11:30
 Introducing the Re-Built Linux Desktop 
 by Keith Packard 

11:40-12:30
 From click to pixel: A tour of the Linux graphics pipeline 
 by Carl Worth 
 
13:40-15:40
 Introduction to Django 
 by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
 
16:00-16:50
 Joining the mob: the kernel development process 
 by Jonathan Corbet
 
17:00-17:50
 Cross-distro collaboration: packaging 
 with modern version control systems 
 by Martin Krafft

--

Thursday

10:40-11:30
 - PROBABLY - AIO: Why is this so hard? 
 by Zach Brown
 
11:40-12:30
 7 Things Lawyers Don't Understand About Software 
 by Anton Hughes
 
13:50-15:40
 The Joy of Inkscape 
 by Donna Benjamin
 
16:00-16:50
 - PROBABLY - the Inkscape LPE revolution! 
 by Andy Fitzsimon
 
17:00-17:50
 Tricks of the Trade: Learning Free Software 
 hacking from clever people 
 by Hugh Blemings
 
--

Friday
 
10:40-11:30
 autocluster - a system for automated 
 testing of clustered systems 
 by Andrew Tridgell and Martin Schwenke
 
11:40-12:30
 Ogg Chopping: techniques for programming 
 correctness and efficiency
 by Conrad Parker

13:50-14:40
 Power management that works 
 by Matthew Garrett
 
14:50-15:40
 Geek My Ride 
 by Jonathan Oxer and Jared Herbohn
 
16:00-16:50
 Open Source for Model Rocket Design
 by Bdale Garbee
 
17:00-17:50
 Lightning Talks! Yay!

If anyone's got suggestions for the talks I've not figured out yet, please let me know!

Hair Removal

2008-12-10T11:44:00+00:00

After a rather... interesting thread on #linux.conf.au today, I inherited a new e-mail address. I can now be reached at hair-removal at the secondary domain of linux.conf.au 2009 (marchsouth.org). No idea how that one happened.

ACM World Finals!!!!

2008-12-05T06:26:00+00:00

Well, as previously reported here and here, my team, the Mehffort Musketeers had a pretty good run in the 2008 ACM South Pacific Programming Contest. Today, the SPP Contest website announced that we've been allocated a Wild Card entry into the World Finals, to be held in Stockholm after easter next year. I'm excited! (Hugely so).

Python 3000

2008-12-04T01:51:00+00:00

Python 3000 (aka Python v3.0) has just been released! Grab your source tarballs whilst they're hot!

Academia (Blaargh...)

2008-11-28T03:19:00+00:00

Another semester, another 4 HDs... No idea what to make of that. More specifically, my marks were: 85 for Graphics, 85 for Research, 96 for Real and Complex Analysis, 97 for Topics in Advanced Mathematics. All in all, it's about what I expected, which is probably the first time that that's happened for me, and it's a nice feeling.

19 down; 5 to go.

Growing a Language

2008-11-26T23:05:00+00:00

I was recently pointed at a talk given by Guy Steele (who, amongst other things, co-invented Scheme), given at the 1998 OOPSLA Conference, entitled Growing a Language.

In it, he talks about the need for Java to add features that will allow the language to grow as users add to it, specifically suggesting two features (one of which has been added, albeit poorly, and one of which is still yet to be implemented); but the real value of the talk is not what he says, but in how it is presented: whilst giving that away would be entirely unfair, I recommend watching at least the first 10 minutes of it, to allow you to figure out what's going on.

So, if you get a spare hour in the near future, I suggest you watch it.

The Week in Review...

2008-11-21T07:41:00+00:00

Time for me to enumerate a few things that have happened of late (in reverse order of occurrence, naturally), since it now seems like the time to do so.

Uni

I handed in my Computer Science term project today, which, I suppose means that my academic year is now complete. I'm fairly happy with how the semester's progressed, every unit that I studied (including the two that I chose on a whim) has been excellent, which is more than I can say for previous semesters. Analysis (Real analysis to be specific) was absolutely fantastic, and I'll be doing my best to enrol in the follow-up functional analysis unit (I've had it suggested to me by several people, and I'm convinced), and it's certainly made the maths major I'm now enrolled in seem like a very good idea.

As far as I can tell, exams went well, but I won't know for certain until results are released next week (I'm very confident with my two maths units, Graphics is a different story (though I don't recall doing as badly as the lecturer claims the class as a whole went)).

TUCS

In other (though slightly Uni-related) news, TUCS (The UTAS Computing Society) had its Annual General Meeting for 2009 last week, and as well as discovering the joy of barbecued* Woolworths' Quantity Burgers (they're excellent, really!), I was elected society president for 2009. The rest of the exec are also a truly awesome bunch of people, so the future certainly looks bright.

TUCS has run some excellent events in its inaugural year: our tech talks were, in general, wildly successful, amongst other things. Thanks to that, we've become what appears to be one of the most active societies on campus. I'll be doing my best to make sure that we can replicate, or even better that next year. (If you're a speaker, or know any good ones, and would like to give a talk, let me know!)

In related news, we also took delivery of some particularly awesome TUCS-Branded T-Shirts just after exams -- we're particularly happy with how that went and will probably do it again next year.

(*I will definitely be approving funding for a new barbecue for the society... the current one is truly dreadful)

LCA

Last week-ish, I had dinner with some members of the Linux.conf.au organising committee. Though much of what was discussed must be kept under wraps (it's thoroughly exciting, I promise!), I can tell you that the conference is shaping up to be most excellent, and if you haven't already booked your ticket, I suggest you do so as soon as possible!

That is all for me for now, more news as it comes (I hope!)

Meme #42

2008-11-14T07:02:00+00:00

Well, I've decided to do the Book Meme from PLOA and Planet Debian etc... Just recapping for those of you who haven't seen it yet (not many of you):

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

And mine is:

It is possible to prove that if such a nontrivial square root of 1 exists, then n is not prime.

-- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition.

Fun with Sockets

2008-10-28T11:06:00+00:00

Whilst doing some coding today for my semester research project I found a need to check for incoming data on a socket without taking any data out of the stream. Here's the code I came up with:

     
cp.sock.setblocking(False)
try:
    cp.sock.recv(0)
    stuffwaiting = True
except socket.error:
    stuffwaiting = False
cp.sock.setblocking(True)

This code works finely on Linux -- you can only receive data if there is data to be received (even if you want to receive no data). Unfortunately, the code doesn't port to Mac OS -- you may receive as many bytes as there are in the socket's buffer -- if there are no bytes in the buffer, you can receive 0 bytes. Therefore, the following fix is necessary:

     
cp.sock.setblocking(False)
try:
    cp.sock.recv(1, socket.MSG_PEEK)
    stuffwaiting = True
except socket.error:
    stuffwaiting = False
cp.sock.setblocking(True)

So, my question for Lazyweb is: is there a better way to do this?

Merging

2008-10-25T02:37:00+00:00

A question for my interstate readers: Has anyone seen the following lane structure outside of Tasmania?

(If anyone wants to guess what the correct procedure is in such a situation, you're also welcome to do that)

LCA2009 -- Registered

2008-10-12T23:02:00+00:00

LCA 2009. I'm registered. Are you?

ICPC 2008 Final Results

2008-09-18T03:16:00+00:00

The 2008 ACM South Pacific Programming Contest Results have been confirmed: my team's come 3rd overall (as expected). We find out whether or not we've achieved a wild card position in the World Finals in December.

A brief (though complete) history of "Mehffort"

2008-09-14T01:11:00+00:00

For the benefit of those who were intersted, Mehffort is a portmanteau of meh and effort, and is a very popular word in the semester 2, 2008 Maclab dialect of English. It is used to convey one's lack of motivation towards a particular task. In context:

Me: Paris, help me come up with a witty slogan for the TUCS T-Shirt.
Paris: Mehffort.

As proud denizens of the Maclab, my ACM ICPC team for this year decided to adopt the word as part of our team name.

ICPC 2008 (huge success)

2008-09-14T00:56:00+00:00

The ACM ICPC South Pacific Region was on yesterday, and was great fun (as usual). My team this year, the Mehffort Musketeers consisted of Alex Berry (who'll be competing in the Google Code Jam regionals soon as well), Michael Ford and myself.

For the benefit of people who did the ICPC this year: I solved problem A, C and I; Michael solved B and D, and Alex solved E, F and H. Here's some general commentary on the problems that I solved:

Problem A was very simple, and the shell of my solution was complete within three minutes of the contest starting. Unfortunately, the entire problem was not defined until halfway through the test data, which led me to finishing it a bit later.
Problem C, which seems to have been the problematic problem this year (as far as judging's concerned) was relatively straightforward, though I had two rather annoying bugs that took me about an hour to week out... it happens, I suppose. Solved on the first submission, which I'm happy about.
Problem I was a longest path problem, that was relatively straightforward depending on what sort of algorithm you chose to solve it. I've heard reports of people using the Bellman-Ford Algorithm and failing -- as far as I can tell, such an algorithm would work on problems except where there existed a cycle not involving the endpoints of the path taken in the problem. I used Floyd's Algorithm and had it solved first time. Simple.

As alluded to earlier, we solved 8 problems, and we're currently the only team to do so with the testing data used on the day (this means that we're in a provisional first place), however, there are many teams who are likely to get problem C rejudged, and following that we'll likely be third. More news to come.

Large Hadron Collider

2008-09-10T23:21:00+00:00

I found this very useful news service today, at HasTheLHCDestroyedTheEarth.com. May you find it informative.

Debian Lenny+1: Cool for Cats?

2008-09-01T23:54:00+00:00

So the new version of Debian is to be known as Squeeze, eh?

Does anyone else think of a certain 1970's British New Wave group?

Desperate ad campaigns

2008-08-09T03:14:00+00:00

Bad ads are one of many things that annoy me when I watch commercial television: normally this is quite infrequently, but due to the large sports event currently being broadcast on my local Seven Network affiliate, I'm being subjected to more than my usual allocation of bad ads.

Few ads are more annoying than Harvey Norman's: bad jingles played to buggery, shoutey voiceovers, etc, etc, etc. Today, I was pleasantly surprised that they've put some effort into a new ad campaign. Their tagline? Nearly 50 years of Harvey Norman. Following the link to their web site, I found that Harvey Norman started trading in 1961, or for those of you who are mathematically impaired, 47 years ago. This leads to two separate conclusions:

This is a highly desperate campaign designed to coincide with the Olympics, and will disappear very quickly.
This is a highly desperate search for an interesting tag line, for a 6-year ad campaign (with a minor change in tag line to happen in three years time).

This is certainly a new low for Harvey Norman, and I hope that it is removed from my attention as soon as possible.

Marshmallow

2008-08-06T22:57:00+00:00

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Marshmallow, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

We randomly found this searching for marshmallows today in the Mac Lab.

If anyone can explain this, it'd be much appreciated.

Seen on Debian...

2008-07-30T05:28:00+00:00

So I was upgrading my Debian installation the other day, and saw the following...

Get:18 http://mirror.internode.on.net lenny/main khelpcenter 4:4.0.0.really.3.5.9.dfsg.1-4 [2339kB]

Rather interesting version number, don't you think?

Harbucks Revisited

2008-07-29T12:31:00+00:00

On September 4, 2006, I wrote the following:

Today, Hobart's first Starbuck's Coffee store opened. I'm going to celebrate by not going!

It seems that I've almost succeeded in my quest to never visit Starbucks here... In the SMH today, it was announced that the Hobart Starbucks will be closing in the near future. I can't say that I'm unhappy.

(If any mainlanders are perturbed by the lack of a Starbucks when they visit Hobart for LCA, may I recommend Oomph Coffee on Liverpool Street as a far better replacement.)

Neugebauer Chocolate

2008-07-17T10:52:00+00:00

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Neugebauer Chocolate, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

I was in the TUU Shop today, and did a double-take as I saw my surname staring back at me (it's in the top left corner of the wrapper).

Why a Brazilian chocolate company would call themselves "Neugebauer" is beyond me -- but I shalln't complain. The occasional ego trip can be healthy.

(Oh, and the chocolate itself wasn't particularly nice. Oh well :()

Google Code Jam

2008-07-16T23:40:00+00:00

Just a friendly reminder to you all that Google Code Jam 2008's qualifying round opens today. Code Jam is an individual programming competition, which lets you compete with a number of languages. Qualifying opens at 9AM Australian time, and you have until that time tomorrow to qualify. Good luck!

Self-absorption in brief

2008-07-16T07:35:00+00:00

My 20th Birthday was yesterday, so I'm making amends for not posting about it yesterday by making a note of it today. Notably, I don't really feel any older than any time before, other than a strange feeling of foreboding that accompanies age in general. Or that may just be my stomach. No idea, though I'm sure I'll find out in the ensuing years.

And a brief wrap-up of other me-related news:

Had a nice, short trip to Sydney in early July -- I will make it a point of not entering New South Wales when State of Origin is on in the future. Went to the Apple Store on George Street far too many times -- free internet is quite enticing when you're waiting for people.
Whilst in Sydney, I attempted to catch up with SydneyPython in order to spruik my proposal for a Python Miniconf at LCA2009. Unfortunately, the meeting was cancelled, and so instead the SyPy people went to Beer2.0, where we met a bunch of interesting Web2.0 people.
Uni exams finished in mid-June, with results being released last week. In short, I had my best semester yet at Uni (straight HDs/nothing below 82), and so I'm certainly not regretting the increased workload as far as maths is concerned.
Semester 2 of Uni is now underway, I've had lectures in all three of my coursework-delivered units (Real and Complex Analysis, Computer Graphics and Animation, Topics in Advanced Mathematics), with only my research project unit to be dealt with. It's looking like it'll be a very interesting semester, with some thoroughly difficult units to be dealt with, so I'm happy about that.

That's all for now. More as it comes.

LCA2009: Python Miniconf Proposal

2008-07-16T07:20:00+00:00

I just posted the following announcement of my proposal for a Python Miniconf to be held at linux.conf.au 2009 to Australian Python mailing lists. I'm posting it here in case anyone has missed it:

Linux.conf.au 2009 is to be held at the University of Tasmania's Sandy
Bay campus in Hobart, Tasmania over the week of January 19-24; and the
call for presentations [1] and mini-confs [2] is now open.

I am currently in the process of producing a proposal for a Python
Miniconf to be held at LCA, so I thought I should detail my plans to a
greater audience for the purpose of feedback/suggestions.

The miniconf would be a single-day conference on the broad topic of
Python programming.  Broadly speaking, the topics I would like to see
presented would range through:
- Recent developments on Python core (presented to a more
Python-oriented audience than may happen at LCA proper)
- Frameworks and libraries (e.g. Django, which I believe is hitting
1.0 this year)
- Techniques of Python programming (e.g. using advanced/new/etc
features of Python effectively)
- Discussions of Python use in the "real world" (e.g. Industry use,
education, etc, etc, etc).
- Anything else Python-related: please make suggestions! [3]

The intention is that there would be 5 "organised" talks of ~45
minutes length (although if there is sufficient interest/free space, I
could split blocks into 2x25 minute talks), with a 50-minute block of
lightning talks to conclude the event, with the possibilty of some
loosely-organised get-together of pythoners after the day's
proceedings have finished.

If you are interested in participating in the Python miniconf (which
requires you to also be interested in attending Linux.conf.au), please
e-mail me [3].  I would particularly like topics of talks that people
would be able to give (vague/general is fine at this early stage in
preparation), so that I can include them in the miniconf proposal (so
the earlier I receive them the better!).

Thanks in advance for any help that you may be able to offer me.

-- Christopher Neugebauer

P.S. if I have missed any user groups/potentially interested parties,
could you please forward this message on -- I've already dealt with
most relevant mailing lists in Australia, but international lists may
also be interested, due to the nature of LCA as an international
conference.

[1] http://marchsouth.org/media/news/6
[2] http://marchsouth.org/media/news/15
[3] for the benefit of google groups users: chrisjrn [ a t ] gmail.com

The Gruen Transfer (and car parks etc)

2008-07-10T11:54:00+00:00

Last Friday, whilst in Sydney on a short trip, I had the fortune of being asked to go ice skating with a bunch of people from USyd. This required me to visit a large suburban shopping mall.

Whilst the ice skating was fun and thoroughly enjoyable, the visiting of the shopping centre and surrounding parking facilities was one of the most traumatic events of my recent life. In my travels, which has resulted in visiting shopping malls in many different cities, never have I been so thoroughly disoriented in my life. As well as the completely haphazard layout of the centre, which resulted in me not being able to figure any direction, there were (at least) two disjoint car parks, each consisting of 6 levels of confused layout, with only minimal indication to newcomers as to how to identify the location of the car park.

Perhaps it's just that my brain is wired for a small city, but I've never encountered such a deliberately confusing building. Ever.

Music!

2008-07-07T13:15:00+00:00

A band that I've been quite impressed by of late is The Grammar Club, a four-piece rock/hip-hop group from the USA who produce their music collaboratively over the Internet. They relaunched their website recently, and whilst it is a really unfortunate all-flash job, they did provide a nice freebie to celebrate: a cover of Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey.

If you approve of it, you can download their debut album, Bremelanotide from their website -- it's good!

Sydney 2nd-5th

2008-06-25T13:54:00+00:00

For the benefit of friends of mine who read this blog, I'll be in Sydney for the latter half of next week visiting friends -- if you want to catch up with me, let me know.

On Public Transport

2008-06-25T12:06:00+00:00

Russell Coker writes on the comparison of costs of Public Transport as compared with that of using a car. I see two key flaws with his argument:

Firstly, the costs of travel that he uses are fairly specific to Melbourne, where there exists a very good ticketing system amongst all forms of public transport, therefore a trip involving a bus to a train station, a train to the CBD, followed by a tram to final destination is all covered within the same ticket, and $2.76 is certainly a very cheap price for this. I believe that this argument only applies to cities with such a system (or cities like Hobart, where there is only one primary form of public transport, with a single supplier). For example, in Sydney, tickets only apply to the provider of transport that the ticket is purchased from: so, a trip involving, say, a bus, a train and then a second bus would require three separate fares (in fact, fares are not even consistent within a single provider -- the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year that there exist more than 100 individual fares for the rail system there. Sorry for the lack of a proper citation -- SMH appear to have removed the relevant article).

Secondly, Russell's argument relies upon a definite choice between public transport, and private car ownership: this is since, as he rightly points out, the cost of registration and insurance tend to be flat, annual fees, that do not depend on how far you travel in the year. Therefore the only way to decrease the "per kilometre" cost of car travel is to travel more. This implies that the choice to occasionally travel by car, and occasionally by public transport will actually increase the total cost of owning a car. At least one friend of mine does not travel by public transport for this reason.

Whist the sole use of public transport may be a viable option for people living near the centre of large cities (such as the relatives I stayed with during LCA this year, the trains were very regular extending well into the night), it is not an option for many others. Transportation here in Hobart into the night is very sparse, and implies either the choice of perfectly timing one's evening to coincide with a once-every-three- hours bus service, or paying for a taxi, which costs considerably more than a private vehicle per kilometre (for example, a trip from the airport to where I live, approximately 15 kilometres will cost $40 -- a cost of $2.66/km). This therefore makes access to a car imperative in many places.

In summary, I'm not surprised by the relative lower cost of trips by public transport, but in a circumstance such as this where not owning a car is a serious inconvenience, the collateral costs that the use of public transport entails makes it a less appealing option.