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Jack: Back at University

2010-03-10T10:26:13+00:00

Today, seeing that I haven’t done so for a while now, comes an update on my life.

I’ve just started my second year at university. My degree is supposed to be three years long, but I’ll stretch it out to three and a half because I failed stuff bigger is better. I’m still doing computing. This year comes one of the units I’ve eagerly anticipated: Algorithms. It’s programming in C, finally, after a year of Java. Also comes a not-so anticipated unit, ICT Project Management. It’s as dull as it sounds.

I’m not really sure why I’m at university. Mostly just because I can’t figure out anything else worth doing. I could go get a job, but having done that before, university seems much easier. I enjoy playing around with computers and programming, but I’m not quite confident that I really want a job as a programmer… I should probably figure that out soonish.

After resigning from Principal Computers again before I left to move to Berlin in July last year (which I ended up not doing, sadly enough), I’m now back there working Saturdays again. And I still jump every time the phone rings. Talk about Pavlov’s dog.

I’ve started playing around with Cisco networking gear again. This time I’ve got a 3550 switch, which strangely enough is more of a 24-port router than a switch. It can do some weird and wonderful things. I can’t wait to do the networking unit at university.

Tom: Fumigation MkII

2010-03-05T03:40:16+00:00

"Do not use in spaces of volume smaller than 5 cubic metres."

This is a statement on the side of the Mortein pest control bomb spray cans. I wonder what's significant about that figure. I know the gas is flammable -- if used in smaller spaces does it spontaneously combust? Does it become potent enough to knock out an elephant? Hopefully I don't get to find out.

I guesstimate that my car has an internal volume of 2-3 cubic metres and there are three cans underneath that tarpaulin. One is inside the car, one is underneath the bonnet and one is underneath the rear. This gives you an idea how serious I am about removing the spider infestation thoroughly this time.

For those who missed it the first attempt was a single bomb inside the car. That killed a few and I've seen minimal evidence of spiders inside the car since then. Unfortunately those under the bonnet and at the back of the car survived. It was a definite improvement but recently I would still see half a dozen spiders on the outside of my car at night-time. They just sit on the paint, work on their webs or hide underneath the door handles. It's not good enough.

So this time I bought a tarpaulin so I can hit the entire car at once. I don't actually expect the concentration to be dangerous -- that tarpaulin will be anything but airtight, but it should keep up a nasty concentration for a couple of hours, which will do the job nicely.

Tomorrow I air it out and give it a good wash and vacuum. Woo.

Tom: The NBN: Tasmania

2010-02-22T11:21:58+00:00

Today I was lucky enough to attend a forum in Hobart run by the Australian Computing Society with the leaders of the three state parties as the panelists. The theme of the forum was the National Broadband Network (NBN), which is a rollout of fibre-to-the-node for most of Tasmania and good wireless access in other areas. This was an opportunity for the leaders of our state to say what they wanted to do with this magnificent investment.

I was a little disappointed and I had the feeling that some of the industry players in the room were too. There was a lot of feel-good fluff about how important ICT is in the Tasmanian economy and a lot of dedication to creating a new ministerial position to oversee ICT in the state. What was missing was specific detail about what they would like to see the technology actually do.

Premier David Bartlett's explanation for this was that he doesn't want to get too narrow-minded and would prefer to engage with the industry to see what they want to do. This is at the same time as today announcing $4.85M of investment in various aspects of the industry. It would be nice if he had a detailed plan for what he wants this money to achieve before he throws it at people.

Nonetheless he has some goals in mind and that is commendable: fifteen thousand jobs created within four years, wifi available at tourist towns and CBDs, investing in online delivery of health services and development of the so-called "smart grid", which is the use of distributed generators to supply and sell power efficiently. He is also putting money into tourism, agriculture and small business with the idea that they will use the money to develop cool uses for the NBN. Well, all sectors can use money. I hope they use it in a way that will give the state a return on its investment.

Will Hodgman, leader of the Liberals, managed to talk quite a lot without actually saying very much. I was amused by his statement that he is sure that health and human services and education can be assisted by the NBN in ways we haven't even contemplated yet. I may be in favour of the NBN but I at least have some definite applications in mind when I think, "Yes, this isn't such a bad way to spend a buttload of money."

About twenty minutes of his speaking can be summarised by:

The ICT industry is important.
A Liberal government will do everything possible to remove roadblocks for both small and big business trying to operate in Tasmania and communicate with the Government. (What those roadblocks are I still don't know.)
They will set up an apolitical committee to choose the state's direction for technology.
They will have an ICT minister supported by two officer underlings.
They will invest heavily in education and health ICT services. Lots of investment.

He didn't even sound that excited about it. There's nothing more to say really; as far as I could see he didn't have anything to offer that Bartlett didn't.

Nick McKim, leader of the Greens, was fairly refreshing in that he wasn't as boring as the other two speakers. Full disclosure -- I vote Green -- but I think he approached today's forum with the most interesting information of any of the three speakers. That's orthogonal to the quality of the policy, by the way, but I learnt the most from him.

McKim spoke about having better e-commerce opportunities for business, better booking systems and making more available from our loungerooms, a point which Bartlett later seized. He would like to create a Broadband Innovation Centre in partnership with UTAS, similar to one in Melbourne, which would work with academia and other stakeholders and also work to identify the required skills for workers in the industry and ensure that suitable training is being offered. He spoke of the aging population in Tasmania as an opportunity to develop some excellent ICT technology to help elderly people live at home for longer, a theme which appears to be similar to Labor. He also recognises the importance of public access wifi, working to set it up on buses in Launceston.

More than the other two speakers I had some idea of what practical outcomes McKim wanted ordinary Tasmanians to get from the NBN. Possibly being a minority party means he doesn't get to say so much about investment, but his description was fairly limited on exactly how these things would be funded and managed.

Despite all the above I still don't think we have a clear political vision for what the NBN is going to achieve in this state. This was made abundantly clear by the first question from the floor. In far more words, it was essentially: "What are you actually going to do after the election?" As all three speakers had already wandered as close to answering that question as they were going to, it was taken as a statement and given no response.

I for one would like to know how the Minister for ICT (or whatever its title is, depending on the responsible party) will be chosen. I would also like our leaders to communicate with the industry and find out some exciting applications for the NBN before they start giving it money.

Here are a few other random ideas I have which I personally think would be valuable:

Development of local high definition audiovisual streaming services which will be in high demand once the bandwidth is available
Programmes to help old-school small businesses move to computerised and online accounting systems to reduce administrative overheads
Making as much as possible from Service Tasmania and Centrelink available online
Improving bandwidth in and out of state to make it more attractive for IT businesses to locate themselves here
Use of the NBN unfettered by an ill-thought national ISP-level filter

I can't say I'm excited yet. At least my software updates will download really fast.

Tom: Streams of Data

2010-02-09T11:48:59+00:00

I've written before about my thoughts on social networking websites and the data you want to give them. What I basically said is that they can do whatever the hell they like with the data provided that I'm keeping a careful watch on what data I give them. If I consciously approve it, it should be fine, right?

I've found that there are two major flaws with this approach when it comes to Facebook.

Other users can add factoids about you by tagging you in photos, status updates and notes.
Facebook is increasing the amount of information which is consolidated from friends-of-friends rather than people you have directly befriended (and implicitly assigned some level of trust).

These two points combine to give a rather nasty flow of information--people can tag you in a photo and this is by default broadcast to all of your friends--even friends who don't know the person who took the photo or tagged you.

The permissions for the Photos application are fairly coarse-grained: either it can publish to your stream or it cannot. Since it's not very useful if you upload an album and it doesn't appear in your stream this option will be turned on for the vast majority of users.

This is another case of Facebook having poor privacy control options and hoping to annoy us into sacrificing our privacy further.

The data which you have to be comfortable having available publicly on Facebook include not only those which you personally approve but everything which Facebook allows your friends to make known about you. Your friends are probably a trustworthy lot, but it's all relative. When most people you know are marked as Facebook friends, including work colleagues, possibly you don't want your mates' photos of you being drunk scrolling past.

It's just setting you up to be embarrassed, really. To create controversy. This is what Facebook wants--more gossip, more excitement in your social world.

Yet the thing which is still weighing on me most heavily is that my entire list of friends is completely publicly available. I said in an earlier post that we still don't know what the consequences are of having that information readily available and easily able to be harvested by robots.

The fact is that I want it both ways. I don't want to have to hide with whom I associate, but I don't want it to be consolidated and made readily available for robots to be able to pick through social networks and work out significant links. It's kinda creepy and possibly useful for marketers, somewhere, or stalkers or spies.

Facebook is actively working against giving us better control over our privacy. They know fully well that most users won't even care. Of the few who do, like me, fewer still will actually cease using the free and completely voluntary service.

Still I wonder whether I'd be better off ditching Facebook. Again. In reality the damage has been done, but the information about me already in the system and on the Internet at large will become redundant faster the sooner I stop the supply.

I may be okay with that information being out there. Just not broadcast to everyone that quickly and easily, please.

Tom: Tracking ipv4/ipv6 usage

2010-02-08T06:29:32+00:00

I discovered earlier today that through my trial ipv6 access I am using mostly ipv6 to access Google services. This made me wonder: just how much of my home network's communication with the outside world is through ipv6 compared with ipv4?

I don't have any results yet, but this is how I'm measuring it using Debian Linux.

Network traffic in the Linux kernel is managed through the tool iptables. Conveniently there are completely separate tables for ipv4 and ipv6 so I don't have to do anything to separate those. There are several chains which packets traverse depending on where they came from, where they're going and whether or not they're being routed on behalf another computer.

The chains of interest are INPUT, FORWARD and OUTPUT on the default table. INPUT receives all packets destined for this particular computer, FORWARD receives all packets which are being ferried on behalf of other computers (in my case, sharing Internet access with NAT) and OUTPUT receives all packets being sent from this particular computer, not on behalf of anyone else. By default all of these will simply allow the packets to pass unmolested.

What I've done is create four custom chains: ipv4_input_ppp0, ipv4_forward_in, ipv4_forward_out and ipv4_output_ppp0. They don't actually do anything, which permits the packets to continue onward, but iptables will keep track of how much traffic travels through each rule, both as a number of packets and in bytes.

Here is some output from "iptables -x -n -v -L" with these chains set up:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 617 packets, 92499 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 41 5511 ipv4_input_ppp0 all -- ppp0 * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 46173 packets, 28090499 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 21742 10919366 ipv4_forward_out all -- * ppp0 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 24431 17171133 ipv4_forward_in all -- * eth0 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 487 packets, 113453 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 61 4783 ipv4_output_ppp0 all -- * ppp0 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0

The rules are set up to use iptables' built in filtering capability. The ipv4_input_ppp0 rule will only collect packets which have an "in" interface of "ppp0". This means that packets from me sshing to my router from my LAN will not be counted. ipv4_output_ppp0 is handled the same way.

Similarly the destination interface is used to differentiate between incoming and outgoing traffic which is being forwarded by my router doing its router job, leading to counts in ipv4_forward_in and ipv4_forward_out.

This means we have direct byte counts which we can pull out of iptables and add together to get total incoming and outgoing ipv4 traffic. To make the information easier to process the counts can be zeroed at any time by running "iptables -Z".

The ipv6 setup is exactly the same except you use the tool ip6tables instead.

Here's my configuration for datalogging. I use the following in my firewall script which is run on boot to set up the chains and rules:

iptables -F iptables -X

iptables -N ipv4_input_ppp0 iptables -N ipv4_forward_in iptables -N ipv4_forward_out iptables -N ipv4_output_ppp0

iptables -A INPUT -i ppp0 -j ipv4_input_ppp0 iptables -A FORWARD -o ppp0 -j ipv4_forward_out iptables -A FORWARD -o eth0 -j ipv4_forward_in iptables -A OUTPUT -o ppp0 -j ipv4_output_ppp0

iptables -Z

ip6tables -F ip6tables -X

ip6tables -N ipv6_input_ppp0 ip6tables -N ipv6_forward_out ip6tables -N ipv6_forward_in ip6tables -N ipv6_output_ppp0

ip6tables -A INPUT -i ppp0 -j ipv6_input_ppp0 ip6tables -A FORWARD -o eth0 -j ipv6_forward_in ip6tables -A FORWARD -o ppp0 -j ipv6_forward_out ip6tables -A OUTPUT -o ppp0 -j ipv6_output_ppp0

ip6tables -Z

Then I run this script every day at midnight from root's crontab:

#!/bin/bash

iptables -Z

ip6tables -Z

ipv4_in=`echo "$ipv4_input_ppp0 + $ipv4_forward_in" | bc` ipv4_out=`echo "$ipv4_forward_out + $ipv4_output_ppp0" | bc` ipv6_in=`echo "$ipv6_input_ppp0 + $ipv6_forward_in" | bc` ipv6_out=`echo "$ipv6_forward_out + $ipv6_output_ppp0" | bc`

echo "$ipv4_in $ipv4_out $ipv6_in $ipv6_out" >> /var/log/traffic/ip

Chris: 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!

Chris: 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!

Jack: Eight Things I Hate About Living In Hobart

2010-01-14T22:30:48+00:00

Following on from my post about things I love about living in Hobart, here are eight things I hate:

The public transport system. It sucks badly. If you want to go anywhere by bus after 6pm or on a weekend, forget it.
People complaining about the public transport system. People love complaining about Metro (I’m one of them). It smells. It’s always late. It goes nowhere near where you want to go. All this complaining is really bad; what we need to do is all get on the busses and give them the money they need to fix it. At the moment I can (and regularly do) catch a bus and be the only person on it.
Bogans. Individually Bogans are fine. I know quite a few, and they’re lovely people (mostly). It’s just when they get into groups; you start to get the feeling deep inside you that it’s no longer safe and you should leave. It’s not a good thing that The Powers That Be decided to build entire suburbs of public housing, which have now become ghettos.
There’s not very much to do. Assuming you don’t drink alcohol (which I don’t), there’s very few things of great excitement in Hobart (if you have ideas, leave comments please!).
Rubbish TV stations. People on the mainland get Channel 7, Channel 9 and Channel 10, as well as digital radio. We get Southern Cross, WIN TV, and TDT, which are bad impersonations of the mainland stations. I know Tasmania is a small market, but wouldn’t it be cheaper then to copy the stations over exactly as they are on the mainland and just change the evening news bulletin?
Badly surfaced roads. I know this is a complaint pretty much everywhere in the world, but in Hobart’s suburbs it’s getting pretty ridiculous. Neither of the two electorates that Hobart covers (Denison and Franklin) are marginal seats (in fact pretty solidly Labor) so there’s not a lot of money spent pork-barrelling here.
Slow Internet. We’re at the end of the world and there’s only a few Internet cables coming into the state. Add to that the high prices charged by ISPs in Australia generally, and it’s a pretty bad situation. The National Broadband Network (NBN) promises to fix the speeds, but at what cost?
The jokes about two-headed Tasmanians when you travel to the mainland. It’s getting old guys, seriously.

Tom: Effective Anti-Filter Protest

2009-12-23T12:20:23+00:00

Currently the protest against Senator Conroy's Internet filter is happening in a vacuum. This vacuum is occupied by thousands upon thousands of outraged Internet-savvy computer users. Unfortunately these people constitute only a small percentage of the overall voting population of Australia, and not all of them are prepared to vote based only on an Internet filtering policy. Where I live, the newspaper does not even cover the Internet filtering as a news item.

It has been shown clearly that appealing directly to the politicians responsible for the poor policy is not effective. We need to engage more with the general public, not only to raise awareness, but to make them realise how the filter could potentially affect them and show how futile it ultimately will be.

Enough Twitter. More Facebook? More real life, person-to-person interaction about this issue. "Hey, did you hear about that Internet filter? Dumb idea, huh? Hah, no, it won't help block child pornography..." You get the idea.

Protestors have succumbed to another problem -- factual inaccuracy. Nothing kills you faster in politics. In this article which Stephen Conroy wrote for Crikey he correctly blasts inaccurate reporting.

Keep up, people, we're no longer facing a heuristic filter which will cause massive slowdowns. Yes, the blacklist filter has only been trialed against 8 Mbit/s instead of 100 Mbit/s fibre, but pattern matching against 10000 URLs is not a large technological hurdle. ISPs can and will do that quickly in order to retain their competitive low-latency advantage.

It took them a couple of days, but nocleanfeed.com have updated their information page to reflect the most recent announcements, so that should be a good source of information. Furthermore, to encourage my own less technical friends to understand the issue I have developed my own more concise guide, The Australian Internet Filter And You, which I hope to use convince people that this filter is a bad idea. Please let me know if there are any factual errors in it; I would like to keep it up-to-date for as long as is required for this debate.

Go forth and spread the word amongst the people who wouldn't normally care! Goodness knows the media isn't doing it for us.

Chris: 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!

Jack: Eight Things I Love About Living In Hobart

2009-12-14T05:01:33+00:00

The natural environment. In Hobart, you’re always really close to nature. Shadowing over the entire city is Mount Wellington, the suburbs are built around beaches and there’s more parks than you can poke a stick at.
Everything is really close. I can drive from one end of the city to the other in about 30 minutes. The CBD is small enough to cover on foot without getting tired.
You’re at the end of the Earth. If there’s going to be a nuclear war, Hobart is the place to be if you want to survive. It’s about as far away from anywhere as it’s possible to be, and still have an international airport.
The weather. Despite how much Hobartians love complaining about it, it’s really not that bad. It doesn’t get stinking hot in the summer, nor is it freezing cold in winter. We don’t have acid rain and we’re not on a fault line.
There’s still enough drinking water to go around. For the moment.
The city itself is beautiful. Aside from a few buildings which really need to get pulled down, everything in Hobart is generally very pretty. The flower beds are all tended to nicely as well.
The busses are always empty. To a Hobartian, a ‘full’ bus is one where more than half the seats are taken. If anybody has to stand up… well, something has probably gone wrong.
It’s only an hour’s drive into the middle of nowhere. When you get there, there’s tonnes of pretty mountains and rivers where you can walk. And that’s probably the most underated thing of all.

Jack: Review: HTC Touch Pro2

2009-12-12T07:19:21+00:00

I’ve been in need of a new mobile (cell) phone for a while. My old phone, an HTC Touch GSM (the original) was becoming a bit broken. I was loving it to bits.

The USB connector was broken, WiFi only worked half the time, I was starting to get jealous of the iPhone; a number of reasons contributed to the need for a new phone.

I did however love HTC. The phones seemed rock-solid and well designed, especially compared to some of the other manufacturers on the market. Other HTC owners I have met over the years agree; I am yet to hear an HTC owner complain about anything but the price.

I considered a few phones. The Apple iPhone was high on the list, as were a number of Nokia phones, most notably the N79. I will admit at this point to being a brand junkie; there was no way was buying a cheap iPhone clone.

What drew me in to buying the HTC Touch Pro2 was the full QWERTY keyboard and large 3.6″ WVGA screen. I know from owning a decent desktop computer that the most important parts from a productivity point of view are the monitor and the keyboard. They are the parts your body has to interact with, and they should be comfortable.

I bought my phone new in the retail box for $887 AUD from a shop in town. I have seen them as low as $650 on eBay, though I didn’t go this route because I wanted a solid warranty. It is a mobile phone with a hinge, after all.

Now onto the device itself.

It’s far and away the largest and heaviest mobile phone I’ve ever had, or ever seen, or even heard of (apart from the old analogue brick phones). It’s 17mm thick, 116mm long, and 59mm wide. Looking at it another way though, it’s the smallest laptop computer I’ve ever seen. It has a 480×800 pixel screen, as well as a 5-row QWERTY keyboard. Although it is on the small side (naturally) the keyboard is very nice to type with, using both thumbs with the hands wrapped around the back of the device. The screen is also nice, not suffering from glare problems as much as other phones I’ve used (older Nokia phones were particularly bad). If you look closely you can see the individual pixels, but you have to look very closely. It is a very high quality screen.

The screen is a touchscreen, and this is one area where they might have done better. The level of touch required to activate a ‘click’ is in my opinion excessive. It’s far more than on my old phone, or the Apple iPhone. It’s still usable however.

Battery life, as expected for a smart phone with all the bells and whistles, is miserable. I have to charge mine every day, otherwise the battery does run flat. However, being human, I have to sleep sometime, and it’s convenient to charge it every night.

In the box comes a screen protector (very useful, it’s a large otherwise unprotected screen waiting to be scratched), a spare stylus, a USB cable, a wall adapter for charging without a computer, a pair of earphones, and a very nice leather case. The headphones that come with the device serve a dual purpose. The first is as a headset for using the phone, and for listening to music. The second is an antenna for the device’s FM radio. I have to say here that the shape of the headphones is abysmal. They do not fit in my ear at all, and the cable is far too short. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are required for FM radio, I would have just chucked them away.

Inside the device is a Qualcomm MSM7200A chipset running at 528MHz. It’s fast. There’s 512MB of storage onboard, of which around half is available to the user to store settings, documents, and optional applications. Program memory (RAM) is 288MB. More would have been nice, but I’m yet to run out of it.

HTC has gone to great lengths to ensure every piece of software you could desire is on the device, and they’ve managed well, with a few exceptions.

The operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1, upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5 some time in the future depending on which carrier you are with. It’s nice, though I notice no huge usability or performance increases compared to Windows Mobile 6.0.

HTC also put their custom TouchFlo 3D software on the device as an alternative user interface. If you’re not used to the Windows Mobile interface, you’ll probably find it nice. I just turned it off and used Windows Mobile as Microsoft designed it. The alternative interface does have a few cool features, mostly related to quickly turning communications on and off as well as turning emails into phone calls near instantly. I get the feeling it’s designed for the jetset business executive. As you may have noticed, I’m not one of them.

The device is also jammed with other software. A YouTube player is there, as is a choice of two browsers (Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile), Google Maps (with support for the GPS built into the device), and Microsoft Office Mobile. As well as a lot more. I loved the fact that Google Maps and YouTube were installed by default, saving me some download time. One application that is missing is Facebook, although given two browsers and a huge screen, it’s not so much of a problem. Opera Mobile even supports tabs, though having more than 2 or 3 tabs open at one time does slow down the device quite a lot, especially when multitasking with other applications as well. I would have liked a few more games installed by default, although I guess I can’t complain – this is a business phone.

Overall, I love this phone, and I’m very glad I bought it. Assuming you have the the money to spare, I would definitely recommend it.

Good:

Huge 3.6″ screen.
QWERTY keyboard.
WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, HSPA, it’s all there.

Bad:

Opera slows down when multitasking.
Battery life is short.
Included headphones are awful, and using your own requires an adaptor.

Overall: 4.5 stars.

Tom: Twitter vs Me

2009-12-09T12:13:50+00:00

Twitter has hated me for the last few days. I was getting consistent errors about exceeding my API rate limit when I haven't even been running any clients. Just in case I changed my password and now I'm getting inconsistent errors telling me that my account has been locked from excessive bad logins. Again, not running any clients.

Either I've recently become a Twitter celebrity without becoming aware of it and somebody somewhere is trying to crack my account, or Twitter hates me. Yeah, I'm going with the hate option. Never assume malice where stupidity will suffice.

So what's my response to all this? Shall I jump up and down and complain that the (free) Twitter service is not working and that I desperately need my constant intravenous flow of tweets to operate? It doesn't sound particularly elegant. Shall I make a declaration that Twitter fails in general and ragequit and try to delete my account? Tempting, but not incredibly rational or practical.

Instead, ironically, I've announced on Facebook that I won't be reading Twitter for a while. And that gives me a little bit of leeway to experiment. For Twitter has become a reasonably large time sink.

When you first deal with Twitter it's easy to fall into a naïve mindset that to prevent your list of tweets being full of crud you don't care about you just have to be careful who you follow. Unfortunately the reality is that perfectly nice and normal people, such as my friends and me, when given an environment like Twitter will fill it with all kinds of garbage. Alongside all the useful stuff you actually care about hearing from your friends. The signal to noise ratio is just bad because community expectations for usefulness of tweet content are not high.

The concept of flirting with the idea of not using Twitter for a while seems a little strange given that we all got along perfectly fine without it. All the same, it forms an inlet and an outlet in your brain which were nowhere near as active before -- an inlet for "I wonder what's been happening in my friends' lives lately" and an outlet for "heh, I just found/thought this thing which is kind of cool/annoying/I feel like sharing".

Previously those outlets had less opportunity to be exercised but they were invigorated by Twitter. When you stop using the service the outlets remain for a while. When I first started having difficulty with my API rate limiting my first desire was to post about it on Twitter. It gets into your BRAIN.

In hindsight I think those outlets were doing just fine before. I shouldn't have to think about what my friends -- or at least those connected to the Internet all day -- are doing at every hour, and I certainly shouldn't be sharing my random thoughts at a rate of several per day. Because they just ain't that good. If there's one thing the Internet is good at, it's showing you just how unoriginal you truly are.

Heck, I haven't even been reading Twitter properly lately. There's just too much crud. I'd never get anything done if I was notified every time a new tweet comes in, and it's something like a chore to read through the backlog a couple of times a day. It's not that the tweets aren't relevant to me or even that they aren't interesting -- they just aren't relevant or interesting enough. We have to draw a line, folks.

So is the correct response to not read Twitter at all? Beats me, but the Twitter website's failure to let me log in seems as good a reason as any to find out. I could go and play with identi.ca but I'd probably end up in a similar problem one day.

I just don't like micro-blogging in principle. I like using big words when they mean precisely what I want to express. The amount of time it takes me to fit what I want to say into 140 characters is significant, as is the amount of semantic intent I have to lose in the process.

Yet Twitter is fun. But it's not, lately. And now it's not working for me. So it can bugger off for a while.

Did I mention I like email? I like getting email from real people. Also phone calls. Just not at 4:20AM like the most recent phone call I got, please.

Jack: I Rolled Over

2009-11-26T07:19:14+00:00

In follow up to my post about the different mobile phone providers in Australia, I’d like to share with you what I ended up doing about my overpriced phone account. To sum up the previous post, I wanted a new post-paid phone plan that cost less than my existing Telstra pre-paid plan (about $30-$50 AUD a month).

I ended up deciding to go with Virgin Mobile, since they seemed to offer the best deal overall. I chose the $25/mo Rollover Caps Plus, which includes $60 worth of calls and 300MB of Internet data.

Although I was originally planning to get a phone with the plan (probably a Nokia 6220 or N79), I ended up not doing this for three reasons. The first is that I get $10 extra call credit a month if I don’t get a phone. The second is that the phone I really want (an HTC Touch Pro2) isn’t available through Virgin Mobile, and I really like this phone. Looking at it causes drooling. The third and final reason is that the plan then has no contract length, I can leave at any time, instead of being locked in for 24 months. This does however mean I don’t get to take advantage of the 4000 bonus Velocity points offer.

I’ll reserve judgement on Virgin until I’ve used them more, but so far I have nothing major to report. The order process was moderately painless, as was the activation process (though they could improve it by marking which of the fields on the form where optional or not). I also transferred across my old mobile phone number to the new plan. This was supposed to take ‘up to three hours’. It actually took longer.

So far I’m liking Virgin. I’ll let you know if anything bad happens.

Jack: On Phone Plans & Wireless Data

2009-11-21T13:03:21+00:00

Recently I’ve been looking into my mobile phone account, since I’m sure I’m not getting the best deal. Currently I’m with Telstra on a prepaid plan. There’s nothing wrong with it, except that it’s generally expensive.

I’m only a light caller (we’re talking a couple of sub-minute calls a week, tops), and only a couple of SMS’ a day. On the other hand, I use a significant amount of data. Every month I use at least 100MiB, and sometimes I go up to a gigabyte. For various personal reasons, I’m expecting to use even more than this over the Australian summer.

So I went through the options, with the goal of paying less (a good thing) or getting more for my money (also a good thing). I currently pay somewhere between $30 and $50 AUD a month.

Telstra - I like Telstra a lot. Signal can be found pretty much everywhere in Australia, and a 3G signal can be found in all the major towns and cities. Call quality is very good also. However, they are very expensive. The Telstra plans I looked at (in particular the Mobile Member Plan) confirmed this, being even worse value for me than my prepaid plan. Data usage (most important for me) is charged at $59 for 1GB, then 25c/MB after that (more info). This is HUGELY expensive. Even with a low-cost $20 plan though, I do get a new phone (but no data).

It’s worth mentioning that I’ve also had a Telstra Prepaid Wireless Broadband dongle in the past. I liked it a lot and found it very functional, but the prices were very high. This is still the case, and the prices are about the same as they were 6 months to a year ago. I’d prefer not to have to have a seperate plan for data, but it is an option.

TPG – TPG have one of the cheapest post-paid plans on the market. It’s $9.99, includes $150 of cap value, with call charges being very reasonable rates. However, at this cheap price, data suffers. Data usage is $5/MB, which is much more expensive than Optus, Virgin, or even Telstra!

TPG’s more expensive plans ($49.99 and $79.99) do include data (500MB and 2GB respectively) as well as free calls to other TPG users in off-peak hours. However, at this price, other providers are cheaper anyway. In addition, none of TPG’s plans include a new phone (although for that price, you can’t blame them).

3 - After a friend’s experience with their accounts department, I’ll never go to them in my life. I haven’t even looked what the prices are, let alone care.

Virgin - Virgin Movile was one of the providers I looked at very closely. For $25 on their Rollover Caps Plus plan, I get more calls and texts than I’ll ever use in a month, as well as 300MB data, which is more than I use in an average month. Also included is a new phone, free voicemail, and free calls and texts to other Virgin Mobile customers (though this is nobody I know, making it a dud offer). It goes straight on the shortlist. If I do use over the 300MB in a month, I can buy a data pack which gives me 1GB (up to a total of 1300MB) for an extra $15 a month. There’s also the Velocity points I earn, but they amount to two parts of nothing.

Also worth consideration is the Beancounter prepaid plan. This has the benefit of really cheap calls and texts to everybody (10c SMS’ to anybody in Australia is very tempting), but falls down in the data department; I have to buy a seperate data pack ($10 for 300MB) seperately.

Optus – The ‘yes’ Cap plans have similar value to Virgin’s post-paid offerings, but without the possible bonus of free calls to other customers of the same telco. With regards to data, Optus is slightly more expensive than Virgin at $19.95 for 1GB. Virgin uses the Optus network (in fact, Virgin is owned fully by Optus, not by the Virgin Group as you would expect) so reception and signal quality should be very similar, at about 96% of the continent’s population at the present date.

Vodafone - Last but not least is Vodafone. They have two series of plans. The first is the SIM Only Contract Caps, starting at $20. This has quite reasonable value at $150, but my research indicates it comes with no data. A data pack can be added, $9.95 for 200MB. This would cover my needs most months, but leave me high and dry in a few.

Their other line of plans is the Contract Caps, starting at $29. These include a new mobile, and for the more expensive plans, some data as well (quite a lot of it, in fact). However, for the cheaper plans it’s the same $9.95 for 200MB as the SIM Only plans.

Another thing to be mentioned about Vodafone is that their network in Tasmania, from experience, sucks. It’s getting better all the time, and in other states is probably quite fine, but is still lagging behind the other networks in Tasmania.

Conclusion

So which one to choose? It’s a hard choice to make. Most of my friends are with Telstra, and would either kill me or not message me anymore if I moved away to another provider. On the other hand, being with Telstra is definitely the most expensive option for me (except for possibly TPG). I won’t go Optus, since I may as well go Virgin. I also won’t go Vodafone, since I like my phone to work around the places I live. 3 is ruled out for being incompetent. That leaves staying with Telstra or moving to TPG or Virgin.

I have no idea what I’ll do yet. I’ll let you know when I decide.

Tom: SLIP and slattach

2009-11-19T05:11:51+00:00

After some experimenting I've managed to get a semi-permanent 115kb/s SLIP connection between my main Debian server and a 486 running BSD. By semi-permanent, I mean as soon as there's a power cycle I'm going to have to run out with a laptop with DHCP server, a crossover cable and some patience to make it work again.

Here's a bit of odd behaviour from the BSD machine shown from /var/log/messages:

Nov 20 03:08:33 cogline slattach[644]: SIGHUP on /dev/ttyd0 (sl-1); exiting

This occurs when I run slattach -s 115200 /dev/ttyd0 with nothing attached to the port, or when the other computer is connected and has been running slattach for "a while" (a minute or two?). Debian slattach has no difficulty running with the serial port in any condition, and if it's started reasonably soon before the BSD slattach, everything is fine.

Unfortunately this kind of problem makes it difficult to set up computers that will automatically negotiate a SLIP connection when they first turn on. I configured the BSD system to run slattach and the required ifconfig command on boot and it never works.

Normally SIGHUP is used to indicate that the carrier has dropped and a redial is necessary. The BSD slattach code reveals that the above message is simply what the SIGHUP handler does when no redial command is set, presumably before the interface has finished initialising because the "unit" is still "sl-1" instead of "sl0". I'm using a null modem cable so it makes sense that the carrier will go down when nothing is attached, but that doesn't explain the failure when both are running for a while.

Curious. Stay tuned, I might learn something.

Tom: Native PPP IPv6 in Debian

2009-11-10T12:59:10+00:00

My ISP has been doing a lot of work in the IPv6 department recently and amongst all their IPv6 offerings they have just started a trial for ADSL customers to run a dual IPv4/IPv6 PPP connection. They also run a broker to provide an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4, but this native solution is much neater.

Here's how I've set it up on my home Debian server so that it will provide IPv6 addresses to my home network:

Add +ipv6 to /etc/ppp/peers/dsl-provider
I had to change the username in dsl-provider and in /etc/ppp/chap-secrets to use a different hostname, as this is how Internode knows you want to connect to the IPv6 trial server.
Start the DSL connection with "pon dsl-provider", resulting in a connection ppp0 which has both an IPv4 internet address, and a local fe80:: IPv6 address
Ensure eth0 has a local IPv6 address too, using ifconfig. I was messing about and lost it, and got it back by resetting with ifdown eth0; ifup eth0
Now to get a real IPv6 prefix you need an IPv6 DHCP client. At Internode's suggestion I installed the WIDE client (package wide-dhcpv6-client in Debian). The given working configuration for a PPP connection ppp0 and local ethernet connection eth0 is placed in /etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c.conf as follows:
interface ppp0 { send ia-pd 0; script "/etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c-script"; };id-assoc pd { prefix-interface eth0 { sla-id 0; sla-len 4; }; };
When you install the WIDE DHCPv6 client it starts automatically, with an non-useful config. Restart it with invoke-rc.d wide-dhcpv6-client restart. Hopefully now an "ifconfig" will show that you have successfully attached a 2001:: prefix address to your eth0 interface.
Add a default route -- this doesn't happen automatically. Run the command:
route --inet6 add default dev ppp0
This will add a default route through the gateway on your PPP connection.
At this point there is working IPv6 connectivity on the local machine. It can be tested with "ping6 ipv6.google.com":
# ping6 ipv6.google.com PING ipv6.google.com(tx-in-x68.1e100.net) 56 data bytes 64 bytes from tx-in-x68.1e100.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=171 ms 64 bytes from tx-in-x68.1e100.net: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=172 ms
To set up advertising of addresses and routing I referred to Martin Krafft's excellent IPv6 with Debian documentation. In summary, the configuration I had to do was to set /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding to 1, which can be made permanent by setting it in /etc/sysctl.conf, and to set up radvd.
radvd (which is also the name of the package) will provide IPv6 addresses from the allocated /64 prefix to hosts on the local network. Install the package. I set my /etc/radvd.conf to the following, which uses the prefix I was allocated, as found from ifconfig:
interface eth0 { AdvSendAdvert on; AdvLinkMTU 1280; prefix 2001:44b8:7c90:be0::/64 { AdvOnLink on; AdvAutonomous on; }; };
Now other machines with IPv6 support which are connected via the eth0 interface should be allocated an address and will be able to access the IPv6 Internet too.

I have a fun ISP who gives me toys to play with. :)

Chris: 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.

Tom: More Pun Theory

2009-10-30T10:52:04+00:00

I have a hypothesis regarding the comparison of the ability of punning folk.

Amongst those who pun actively, everybody is able to produce bad puns to a similar level of ability. It becomes instinctive enough to search for puns that you can come up with poor (often self-referential) puns virtually on demand.

This means that if you are to compare two people by how bad their puns are, the only observable criterion is the point of equilibrium each person chooses between high frequency of jokes and having any friends. The people who seem to not say the bad puns are just restraining themselves more effectively.

Truly good puns do require some level of skill in my opinion. Unfortunately I don't think of them very often.

Chris: 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

Chris: 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!

Chris: 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.

Tom: Function Plotting in Inkscape

2009-09-29T03:11:27+00:00

Today I found myself needing to draw both a sine wave and a triangle wave accurately for a diagram in Inkscape. It turns out that all the required functionality is included, but you have to do a little work yourself. Here are my findings...

The tool is called Function Plotter and can be found under Effects | Render | Function Plotter...

Sine Wave

The sinusoid is easy to do.

Draw a rectangle with the rectangle tool, select it, then open the Function Plotter.
Check the "Multiply x-range by 2*pi" box so the end x-value represents how many periods you want.
Adjust the y values of the top and bottom of your rectangle---if your sine wave has a peak value of 1 and you want it to take up the whole box, use +/- 1 here.
Make sure that "use polar coordinates" is unchecked.
Choose enough sample points to get a good looking sine wave. It evaluates your function at various points and makes an interpolating path. In this case I got a reasonable looking sine-wave with only 8 samples.
Put "sin(x)" into the Function area and click Apply.

Your rectangle will turn into a sine wave, like this:

Triangle Wave

You can't make a triangle wave directly, but it can be built up from simpler functions.

Draw a rectangle which will contain the triangle wave.
Set the end x-value to the total number of peaks you want.
Set the bottom y-value to 0.0 and the top y-value to 1.0.
Choose a large-ish number of samples. You'll probably want at least 25 per peak. This is necessary to get tight corners on your triangle wave because Inkscape tries to smooth out lines between your points.
Make sure that both the "multiply by 2*pi" and "use polar coordinates" options are unchecked.
Put "-2*fabs(fmod(x,1)-0.5)+1" into the Function area and click Apply.

Your rectangle will become a triangle wave like this one:

Conclusion

Inkscape's function plotter is very powerful for drawing paths conforming to shapes which you can define mathematically. The "Functions" tab in the Function Plotter gives a list of the available functions. Have a play with it.

Tom: Now I’m Cool Again

2009-09-27T12:47:53+00:00

So I bought a new mobile phone. The few months I spent without one have been excellent. For the first time since I first got a phone back in 2004 my electronic communications have been entirely on my terms. It is satisfying to know that you can go about your business doing exactly what you want, knowing that your email inbox and IRC logs are happily collecting everybody's calls for your attention for you to peruse in your own time.

As nice as independence from pestering is, I'm fully aware that phones are useful things so I'm back on the bandwagon. I wrote some time ago (while my old phone was still working) about why I didn't want an Apple iPhone, back when they were the revolutionary new toy and the cool widget to get. The same reasons hold true today---it's expensive, the contracts expect fairly extensive use, the phone comes locked and needs jailbreaking to do interesting things, you can only install applications from their sanctioned App Store, you can only run one app at a time, and there's the pervading sense that for things to work smoothly you ought to be using other Apple products too.

I bought a Nokia E63. It is the new baby brother to the E71, coming in a thicker plastic case instead of metal and lacking a GPS. I bought it for $AU320 delivered from eBay and it's working a treat.

Clearly it has a fairly small screen for modern so-called "smartphones", and with all those buttons it doesn't have a touch screen. If you're thinking that this makes it not very useful for web browsing, you'd be right.

I like it anyway, because these are the reasons I chose this model:

QWERTY keyboard! Hell yes! It was only a matter of time before I had an aneurysm from trying to write SMSes with a numeric keypad. The physical keys feel nice and have a nice response too.
Great battery life
Easy to buy it not locked to any phone company
Installs apps from anywhere by URL, and runs several at the same time
It's very happy to talk to my IMAPS mail server
Lots of free software available for Symbian S60, its operating system
Reasonable price
Favourable reviews on the 'net
Played with one belonging to a friend, who also thought it was pretty good

Things like playing MP3s, web browsing, taking pictures on the built-in camera or using GPS software are not features that interest me in a phone. It's a good thing too, because this phone is not exceptional for any of those.

The thing I'm happy about here is that I actually took the time to evaluate my own values and needs before buying one of these fancy new phones. I highly recommend doing that.

If you want to you can contact me by phone or SMS again. I still reserve the right to ignore it for indeterminate periods of time if I feel like it though.

Chris: 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.

Chris: 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.

Tom: Starcraft II, LANs and FOSS

2009-08-24T10:18:55+00:00

By now it's common knowledge amongst Starcraft fans awaiting the release of Starcraft II that offline LAN support has been officially dropped from the game, citing warm fuzzy reasons like better-integrated community interaction or something which equally fails to hide the fact that they're worried about things like Hamachi and piracy at LANs causing them to lose revenue. Nobody's been fooled, and reports would suggest that they're trying to make a sucky idea suck at little as possible while still being a pain in the arse.

But is it that sucky an idea? It sure is for me. I think it sucks for a couple of reasons:

I play Starcraft at LANs where there is no Internet connection. Battle.net authentication of any sort is simply going to be impossible.
In principle, as a paying customer I am having my flexibility in how I want to play the game restricted because they're worried about the people who don't pay for the game. I consider that counter-productive and immoral.

The game is a long way out yet so I'm not going to make any definitive statements yet, but I'll probably buy the game anyway. Despite the fact that I don't like some of the things they're doing the game should still be of high quality and I'll pay for that and play it under the restrictions imposed.

I even suspect that these measures will be fairly effective in reducing piracy. Emulating an entire authenticated battle.net server and convincing the game to use it is like making a fake Steam server---it's not a small task and will take a lot of time and effort from the cracking community. Hacking direct LAN support into a game specifically designed not to have it will probably take even more effort.

Unfortunately my only way of protesting these measures is to not buy the game. Yet I think I will anyway. I'm damn sure that hundreds of thousands of others will too, particularly in countries where Internet is ubiquitous (including the Starcraft capital of the world, South Korea).

So Blizzard is not going to change a damn thing. They still get rich and they reassure their stakeholders that they're taking measures to prevent piracy. Those measures might even work, at the risk of pissing off some fraction of their userbase.

Blizzard wants to make a buck out of its games. They're making the game so they make the rules. If you don't like that you have a choice. You can either not buy the game, or you can buy it and implicitly accept what you're getting yourself into. By extension, if you do choose to buy the game you don't have the right to complain about restrictions you knew were going to be there.

If you want a game to support features not motivated by commercial interests you have to build one without commercial constraints. That means free and open source software. Do any of the existing RTS projects measure up to Starcraft II? Almost certainly not. In the FPS area some are up there with the commercial guys (Nexuiz and Urban Terror, for example).

If you want to be more constructive, find, contribute to or make some free games.

Just remember: actions speak louder than words. A vocal minority is just that. Vocal.

Chris: 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.

Tom: On Doing It Wrong

2009-08-19T08:28:48+00:00

I'm not one to give up on a bad idea if I think I have half a chance of making it work for a while. So it was that today I fixed my dipole with a new questionable strain relief design (click for larger version):

Yes indeedy. So far it hasn't broken. Reception on 80m isn't awesome but that's probably because it's more of a 10m or 20m dipole and that it's still not all that high. It may come down when it rains or when the wind blows around the branch to which it's attached. Not shown in the above diagram is the 10 loops of coax which form the air-core balun.

Sometime I'll make one properly. Honest. But for the meantime, I'm on HF again! \o/

Tom: RD Weekend 2009

2009-08-16T12:28:31+00:00

A few hours ago I finished the Remembrance Day Contest for this year, working in the VHF phone section. Not that I knew that I would be until yesterday.

It started with a beautiful Saturday. The weather in Hobart was nicer than it has been for months and refusing to stay inside, I went outside to play with antennas. I wasn't certain about the health of my HF dipole, which is constructed largely from a broomstick and gaffer tape, so I took it down for a little TLC.

Some conductivity checks showed that there were still good connections to both of the legs of about 12 metres of 12 gauge, and a short hadn't developed either. Excellent. I put it back up, running the wire into a tree on one side and over some balcony on the other so that it was a bit higher than before. Unfortunately it was running against some metal structure, but when I fired it up it tuned up fine with the tuner and I was receiving VK2, VK3 and VK4 stations fine.

It was about 2PM by now, and listening to the lighthouse stations on 40m I heard mention of the RD Contest. I panicked briefly and checked the date---oops, it was starting in a few hours. I still hadn't learned CW as I'd hoped I would by this point, but I continued to monitor HF until I had the disconcerting experience of the noise floor dropping by about 20dB suddenly.

I wandered outside and sure enough the tree-tied half of my antenna had become well-grounded. By, er, falling onto the ground.

Oops. Something to work on when the weather improves. I plan to make a more solid mounting platform for both the dipole wires and the coax feed with some strain relief. Rather than, say, nails and tape.

I went on to participate in the contest using 2m and 70cm with my Yaesu VX-6R HT attached alternately to the 70cm yagi and 2m 5/8 vertical visible in the above picture.

Sadly it was fairly quiet on VHF this year. Overall I heard only 10 or so southern VK7 VHF stations, and through less than stellar effort I managed to make 54 contacts over the 24 hours. Those who pulled all nighters such as Danny VK7HDM and Justin VK7TW made approximately 160. With the low number of participating stations the spread of contacts was determined by how late you were willing to stay up and whether you had the hardware to manage all the different modes and bands. (I didn't hear about anyone doing CW, though I'd be willing to give it a shot with an appropriate rig.)

There may not have been many people, but it was fun all the same. I had some good chats with people I hadn't spoken to for a while between the not-so-frenzied number swapping. We agreed that we definitely need to get some F-calls in on the excitement for next year.

As for the commemorative side of the contest---remembering the radio operators who died serving in wartime---lest we forget.

Jack: Nullshells Networks

2009-08-16T01:21:40+00:00

About a month or so ago I investigated replacing my extensive collection of virtual private servers, free web hosting accounts, SSH shell accounts, and so on with a single managed server account. The reason for this is that the time taken up with managing these various accounts and servers was starting to chew up more time than the money I was saving.

A couple of friends had free accounts with Nullshells, and had positive things to say, so I thought I’d give them a go. I chose the “Value” ($7 USD / month) web hosting plan based on the number of domains I planned on hosting. All my websites are fairly low bandwidth and low disk usage, so this was the only one of the listed specifications I really cared about.

I have to report that the signup process was fairly simple, and the setup process was completed quickly. The only thing I found slightly confusing was that (for some odd reason I can’t quite fathom), there seems to be a separate user account for the billing system and the system logons. While this doesn’t really matter (I set them both to the same password and just ignore the fact), it does puzzle me.

The web hosting plan I chose gave me access to one of Nullshell’s servers on the East Coast of the USA. I have had no problems so far with the speed of the server, nor with the speed of the connection. I live in Australia (basically the other side of the world), and was getting ping replies in 250msec. Not quick, but that’s not the fault of Nullshells. Transfer, however, was no problem. It fully saturated an ADSL2+ connection I tried a transfer speed test on. I have no doubt it’s a lot faster than that too.

As with all modern hosting plans, a user control panel is included. The one Nullshells uses is called ISPManager, and everything about it is very nice. It’s a lot easier to work with than CPanel, and makes a lot more sense.

As for the actual plan’s features, well, they’re pretty nice too. $7 a month buys me 1GiB of disk space, 5GiB of data transfers, 10 MySQL databases, and 100 email accounts. As well as that there is the previously-mentioned 5 domain limit. Available for use are PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails and Server-Side Includes. Compared to the larger ISP hosts, this is brilliant value. Even for some of the comparable smaller hosts, it’s still rather outstanding. But there’s one surprise up Nullshells’ sleeve that I haven’t talked about yet.

The service is amazing. I’m yet to have a problem resolved in an unsatisfactory way. The staff are always ready to help. In addition to this (and this is the first time a commercial company has impressed me in this way), I’m asked occasionally if things are working fine and given notice of recent improvements the company has made (I’m interested in such things, which is why they tell me).

Overall, I’m really pleased with Nullshells. For the cost of 3 bottles of Coke a month, I have a web hosting service that’s much more reliable than anything I could do myself, with great service and more features than I’ll ever use. 5 stars.

Chris: 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.

Chris: 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

Tom: Twitter And Politics Don’t Mix

2009-08-10T10:09:02+00:00

Twitter received some major news coverage for its fanatical userbase following the recent Iran election. The tone of the media reports is more or less that of wonder. It seems to be a common theme to assume that social networking is completely useless, then make a news story about it when it is useful. Add to the mix the attempts of Iranians trying to inform the rest of the world against the Internet filtering put in place by the Government and there's a convenient David vs Goliath theme. How dramatic.

I think using Twitter to engage in political matters is a dumb idea. There's simply not enough scope in it for intelligent discussion. This evening I got caught in a little argument about free speech and gay rights. After about 4 maximum-size tweets back and forth we realised that we'd mostly missed each other's points. This is not an efficient way to do business.

If you have something intelligent to say about Iran or another political matter you're doing yourself a disservice by trying to express it on Twitter. Get yourself a blog or something---if you're really as interesting and intelligent as you think you are, people will read it and share it.

Political matters are complicated beasts and I believe that they are better served by a suitable length of prose so that your readers can under your context, your reasoning and your conclusions fully.

I suspect that a large proportion of the Twitter Iran enthusiasts would find themselves a lot less insightful than they thought about how to deal with the whole situation if they tried to string together a short piece of writing explaining what and why rather than sitting about all day retweeting URLs of things they found interesting.

You don't have to write to be a good thinker, but you do have to communicate your good thoughts effectively if they're going to be any use to anyone. Something more like a blog makes it easier for others to comment (again with a decent length of text) and get some intelligent debate happening.

Once we get some intelligent debate rather than token snippets of support for whichever side you like most, perhaps we can use the Internet to do some politics. And society will be better for it.

Chris: 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!

Tom: Gah, Fanboys

2009-08-05T08:47:33+00:00

I would like to put an uncomfortable spotlight on those computer geeks who think that they’re cool because they use some particular piece of software. I have some authority to talk about those kind of people because I’ve been one before, but I hope that I’ve since grown out of such trivial rubbish.

One common example of this in geek circles is LaTeX, the typesetting software distribution. There seems to be a gene in some people that gives them the warm fuzzies as soon as they find a cool piece of software which few others are using, especially if there’s some slightly cryptic-looking syntax to prevent others from getting in on the action.

LaTeX is good, yes. It is not, however, a justification for the destruction of all word processors ever created and branding their users as people who work in dumb ways. Nor will it kill you to use a word processor if you have to, or if, heaven forbid, it’s more convenient in a given situation. Your pathetic cries of inferiority only cause the attention you yearn for to be directed at somebody else.

Linux is a bigger example. If you like Linux, that’s fine by me, whatever your reasons. I use it and love it too. But the moment you tell me that you cannot do your work on a Windows computer, it’s not Windows’ inferiority that’s the problem. It’s your inability to adjust, your lack of general technical expertise and your ego trying not to get crushed by the fact that your reputation for only using cool non-mainstream software will be sundered.

So what’s acceptable here? I think it’s pretty simple:

Don’t associate yourself with your tools (conversely, don’t judge others by their tools)
Use the right tool for the job!

We all like to poke fun at companies or their software which we don’t like. I’m not complaining about that. A certain amount of banter and bitchiness is healthy and fun. But for goodness’ sake, please don’t get personal. It is the software which has strengths and weaknesses. Not you. What defines you as an effective computer person is being able to evaluate competing software products or technologies fairly and accurately, and being able to get the most of out each one.

Having done that you can use what you like, but don’t come to me for help when you’ve hamstrung yourself with your own obsessions.

Chris: 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?

Chris: 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

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?

Chris: 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.

Tom: Signing My Way

2009-07-16T13:47:06+00:00

If you receive an email from me the chances are good that it will have an attachment named signature.asc. This contains a PGP signature, which in combination with my public key can be used to verify that I wrote the email and that it hasn’t been changed since I sent it on its way.

Why do I bother and why should you care?

Anyone can send email claiming to be anyone. It’s fairly straightforward to write an email assuming somebody else’s address and identity. If the recipient knows to only trust a message which has a cryptographic signature certifying that it is valid, fraudulent messages can be ignored or at least confirmed. This problem is reasonably widespread, more for sending spam from reputable-sounding email addresses in the cases that I’ve seen so far.

In addition, almost all email is sent in plain text. Anybody who runs any computers between you and the recipient of the email can read its entire contents if they want. If you’re using a cryptographic system you can also encrypt your message so that only the exact people you want can read it.

It’s reasonably obvious that this crytography business is quite a good idea, so why isn’t it widely used by everyday internet users? Probably because it isn’t yet widely used by everyday internet users. To get in on this, you need to generate a key of your own and run some extra software to do the cryptography for you.

Generate a key. This will have two halves — a public key and a private key. It will also have a password. You keep the private part and the password completely secret, but you need both of them to make it work.
Publish the public key to the world. Give it to your friends. Upload it to a public keyserver. They can use this to send you encrypted mail or to verify your email signatures.
Sign your friends’ keys to indicate that you, the holder of your key, have decided that the person who owns the other key is who they say they are. Hopefully they’ll do the same for you, and this builds the “web of trust” — if you trust your friend’s key, and they trust someone else’s, you can probably trust it too. If ten of your friends trust another key you can be even more certain that it’s trustworthy. (It’s worth knowing that there are formal requirements set down for trusting someone’s key — don’t sign a stranger’s key!)

What you need is GnuPG, a free and open source PGP implementation. You can download it for Windows or for Mac. Installation on Linux is as normal with your package manager. Then you need some integration for your mail client. If you’re using Thunderbird try Enigmail.

It’s not that hard and it’s probably the most trustworthy way of verifying communications on the ‘net that we have. Let’s solve this chicken-and-egg problem early so we have something to fall back on if and when identity theft, fraud and spam make the current situation untenable.

My key id: 0×6F3A5B84 <http://arctanx.id.au/tk-pub-key.txt> Please feel free to use it.

Chris: 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!

Tom: It’s All About The Keyboard

2009-06-28T12:47:09+00:00

The reason I favour some console applications over their graphical equivalents is that they’re designed to be easy to use with a keyboard. A little while ago I wrote about a day I spent trying to perform my usual online and music-listening tasks using console applications, just for fun. These days I spend my time in KDE4 and have my graphical web browser back so that I can keep up with xkcd. I’m still using cmus to play my music and irssi is going to remain my IRC client of choice for some time.

There are practical reasons why one might be restricted to console apps—connecting remotely with no X forwarding, or perhaps being on a romantic computing date with a hopelessly ancient terminal. There are also reasons why one might need a mouse. Graphics or audio editing, games, some website layouts and many other applications call for the more analogue-ish input of a mouse.

Where does this leave software in the middle? Mail clients, web browsers, chat clients, file/directory browsers, PIM and calendar software are all types of application which could feasibly have a keyboard or mouse-based interface. Increasingly, applications are adding features which specifically require you to use the mouse. I come up against this all the time but to pick an easy example (all platforms are guilty here), OS X Finder only lets you move files by dragging with the mouse. Cut and paste was evidently too complicated for their target audience.

I’m a keyboard nut, so having to reach for my three-buttoned friend annoys me when I know that a little more work in the software would allow me to do the same thing more quickly with a quick jump from the home keys.

In my opinion graphical applications should have good support for both keyboard and mouse. I today finally caught up with Vimperator which is an addon for Firefox to make virtually all browsing functionality available directly from the keyboard using vim-like syntax. Firefox provides a good opportunity to try out different interface types with its interface being so heavily customisable using Javascript. With Vimperator, Firefox behaves exactly how I would like. I can still use a mouse when needed, and I can also do things quickly from the keyboard when my hands are there.

It took a third-party effort to get this functionality in place. Sadly I doubt that many application developers are going to put this level of thought into the keyboard interface. It is worthwhile adding that a keyboard interface is required for proper accessibility for some physically-disabled users.

I like modern software. Really. Am I so backwards to prefer pressing buttons which remain stationary on my desk?

Tom: Making iTunes Suck Less With Firefly

2009-06-05T07:07:05+00:00

Friends of mine know that I have much to complain about where iTunes is concerned. To summarise what is a long rant (which I may someday write), the problems are poor support for file formats—Ogg Vorbis and FLAC in particular—and various UI issues. Getting a better music-playing program running on OS X is a secondary task in which I haven’t yet succeeded. So let’s think about how to bandaid some of iTunes’ problems.

Today I’m going to present a possible solution to the first complaint: poor file format support. The accepted way to extend your OS X machine to play (oddball?) formats like FLAC seems to be to install the Xiph components for Quicktime. In my experience, this will usually convince Quicktime to play most things. Getting iTunes to look at the songs and store them in your library is another matter entirely. The best success I ever had with this method was getting about 1/3 of my considerable collection of FLACs to import.

Let’s fix things up with a little bit of Firefly. No, not the unbelievably awesome Joss Whedon show (blast you, Fox!) but the also rather awesome Firefly Media Server, formerly known as mt-daapd. I last played with this project a couple of years ago and it took some tinkering to make it work. There’s been a bit of work done since then and now the latest build is in the Debian stable repository, so it’s dead simple to set this up now.

“Debian? Isn’t this a problem with iTunes on OS X?” you might be wondering to yourself now. Yes. You’re right. Allow me to present the recipe for this particular solution:

iTunes Make Support Go-Go

Ingredients

One computer running Mac OS X with iTunes
One computer running Debian Linux
Your music in any of normal formats: MP3, OGG, FLAC, WMA, etc. stored on the Linux computer
Firefly Media Server
A LAN connecting to the two computers

Install the package with aptitude install mt-daapd
Edit /etc/mt-daapd.conf and set admin_pw to an admin password, mp3_dir to where your music is (with a trailing slash) and add any file extensions to the list of those it will serve. In my case, I had to add wma. You can also change the name of your server if you like.
/etc/init.d/mt-daapd start
Head to iTunes on the mac and notice either the name you set or “Firefly …” appears in the shared libraries list.
Play your music. Observe how you can play songs in all formats regardless of whether iTunes supports them directly.

The magic at work here is that Firefly will use ffmpeg to transcode any songs not natively supported by iTunes on the fly to uncompressed wave format.

One extra advantage is that you no longer need to use all the hard drive space on your mac, which can be handy if it’s a laptop. One disadvantage is that you can only listen to your music when you’re on the same LAN as the Linux box. Perhaps you should have thought about that before you paid the Mac tax and expected them to support your open formats properly. *sigh*

(serves as many as your Firefly server has the bandwidth to serve)

Tom: Text. Why Not?

2009-06-01T09:23:10+00:00

A day or two ago I reinstalled Debian on my PC, removing in the process a mostly broken installation of Ubuntu 9 (no, it came like that). In the interest of avoiding the problems usually associated with Linux on the desktop I declined to install an X server.

This afternoon I fired it up and tried to use it to get my stuff done, and these are the results.

Web Browsing – Elinks is remarkably robust console web browser. The only issues I’ve had with it involve occasional full stops getting stuck on the display while scrolling, and on some systems it’s disagreeable with encoding special characters for my terminal. The good bits are the tabbed browsing, CSS support, frames support and general ability to cope with websites which were definitely not designed with console users in mind.

Planning to keep on top of my usual routine I hit up Twitter and Facebook. Neither worked, which was unsurprising because both use lots of Javascript. It occurred to me to try their mobile versions, which are specially stripped down to work well on mobile phones: success!

Both Facebook mobile and Twitter mobile work perfectly in elinks, and I spent the afternoon following both using that method.

Online Chat – My mainstay of online communication, IRC, is already irssi in a screen session on another machine entirely so this was no problem to continue to use. For my instant messaging services I called upon finch, the console user interface to libpurple/pidgin. A quick read of the manpage revealed the important keyboard shortcuts and soon I was happily chatting to folk on MSN. Another success.

Music – Playing my music is something which causes me enough issues on my Macbook. iTunes is ridiculously limited with its file format support (yes I know about Xiph, I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work properly) and has a rigid UI which disagrees with a fellow who favours the keyboard.

So here I am in keyboard-bound console Linux land — what shall I use, but of course the excellent cmus? This marvellous program supports a bunch of formats as it comes packaged on Debian, including all of those in which my music is encoded: ogg, flac, mp3, wav and wma.

cmus is possibly the best music player I’ve ever used. Even as good as Amarok 1. It might not have the (slightly dodgy anyway) lyric-retrieving bling but it works reliably, has easy on-the-fly queuing, playlist support, customisable columns, easy to use incremental search, is fully controllably remotely using sockets, and plugs straight into ALSA. Beautiful.

Conclusion – Well that’s all lovely but I still can’t read my webcomics. It was also too hard to navigate the wordpress administrative interface to make this blog post in elinks. So I’m back on my mac (but cmus is still playing my music in the background!) The most interesting conclusion I’ve made is that we can expect a renaissance of text-based browsing for those harebrained enough, making use of the cut-down “mobile” pages offered by the popular websites.

Get in there and enjoy it.

Chris: 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!

Chris: 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.

Jack: Webmail in under 5 minutes?!?!

2009-05-26T01:47:09+00:00

Today, I am in awe. I decided I wanted webmail on my mail server, so that I could check my email on computers I don’t have a proper email client set up on. For instance, on a lab computer at my university. So I started looking around.

I’ve tried setting up webmail in the past, usually unsuccessful. IMP, Horde, squirrelmail, most people would be familiar with the horrors of webmail clients. Some of them even want access to the raw storage files in /var/spool/mail/etc. Which I don’t think is the proper way to go about things. But luckily today I stumbled upon RoundCubeWebmail, which I had downloaded, installed and configured in under 5 minutes.

Where’s the downside to this painless webmail? I’m yet to find one!

It looks nice (unlike some of the others, whose web design is stuck in 1995). A few small icons and a bit of CSS goes a long way.
It works via IMAP, so doesn’t require access to the raw mail files *yuck*.
It seems fairly configurable, but the defaults are sensible.
You can configure it to allow access to multiple IMAP servers, so a single installation on a web server can deal with multiple IMAP servers, no problems at all.

In all, I really like this software!

Tom: Social Networking: An Analysis Of Hypocrisy

2009-05-17T11:57:47+00:00

It would be fair to claim that I’ve been a little hypocritical in my darting around the issues regarding Facebook in the last year or two. This is highlighted by the analysis of my behaviour (!) in Jack Scott’s article about why he doesn’t use Facebook. My article discusses some issues identified by Jack so I would recommend reading his first.

The thrust of Jack’s article is that Facebook is a bad thing and he quotes me providing a number of reasons why this is so. Just in the last couple of weeks I have returned to Facebook, which makes me look a little silly so by writing this I hope to justify myself.

Before I leap into my current opinion it is useful to describe my history with social networking. Near the start of 2007 I joined Facebook for the first time having held off on both it and MySpace for a year or two longer than most of my tech-savvy friends. I didn’t have any special reason for avoiding the sites, except that they were closed networks, they appeared to be spreading like social virii and that some of the Myspace profile page colours made me want to tear my eyes out. It was simply an opinion, and by no means a strong one; just a vague understanding gleaned from reading factoids and opinions on the Internet.

I had joined MySpace a little while before, but by that time it was already dying with the hordes moving quickly to Facebook. Facebook of the day had a number of user interface issues which stemmed mainly from its similarity to MySpace. Even though I didn’t like the interface, this probably helped them get steal as many users from MySpace as they did.

The emphasis was on individual users’ profile pages, which were heavily customisable. You could activate various widgets and arrange them as you liked. The focus of each user’s page was the “Wall” where you can leave messages for each other. Beyond that there were thousands upon thousands of gimmicky applications in which you play card games, dress up snowmen or give your friends eggs which hatch into cute animals. These were entirely pointless but they insisted upon cluttering up their users’ profile pages and provided some advertising revenue.

Having quickly given up on MySpace I continued to play with Facebook over the next year or so. It was over this time that I learned about some of the implications of social networking. I caught up with a large number of people whom I hadn’t seen for a while, some superficially, some not. I also saw people’s changing relationship status being broadcast to world, incriminating photos and even had my own boss send me a friend request.

In January 2008 I was attending linux.conf.au in Melbourne, which was a fine congregation of geeks. I found myself in a discussion with some of them about the relative merits and problems, but mostly the problems, of Facebook. On a whim I decided that Facebook was not that important to me and a waste of time so I moved to where there was wireless access and deleted my profile on the spot.

By this time I was more aware of the social, privacy and technical issues in social networking and I was forced to spend some time thinking about them. Some of my friends pressed me for reasons why I no longer had a Facebook account. “Because I felt like it” wasn’t a satisfying answer for either them or me, so I did a proper evaluation in my head of what my position was. By the time Jack asked me for my opinion, about which he wrote in his article, I had my thoughts organised and was able to give him a concise summary.

Even though I had convinced myself of the validity of the problems I identified, I wasn’t entirely convinced of their severity, or whether they were insurmountable. Talking to Jack about it only increased my doubt.

A scant couple of weeks later I was back on Facebook. I was going to do it properly this time.

Today, I have approximately 100 friends identified. I know exactly who all of them are and would happily sit down and have a chat over coffee with any one of them. My privacy settings are strapped moderately tight—only friends can see my profile, and only friends or friends-of-friends can see photos with me labelled. I mostly use it to post bad jokes on my wall, the same as I do in person, and also to see what other people are up to.

Sometime in my year off they fixed the user interface. Now the main page when you log on is an aggregation of all your friends’ walls. That’s it, nice and clean. If you click on a user you get a page with their wall, and a tab lets you access their profile information. You have to look in a little sidebar for their applications, those irritating perversions which used to get in your way and eat your bandwidth. Mostly people don’t even use them any more. In my opinion it is now actually convenient to use for its intended purpose.

So what was the stimulus that made me finally sign up again? It was an invitation to a friend’s birthday party. He had organised the event on Facebook, as this was by far the most convenient way for him to contact the vast majority of his friends. He had gone out of his way to send a special extra invitation to my email address.

I felt a little embarrassed about that. He didn’t say that it was inconvenient and there was certainly nothing to stop me attending given the information which was included in the email. As I put it to Jack, I felt like a “pain in the butt” making my friends go out of their way to include me while I was indulging my moralistic, perhaps paranoid views. Having reflected on it a little more it wasn’t so much that I actually felt like I was causing annoyance. It was more that I felt like I no longer had a good reason why. So I threw my unproved assertions to the wind and here I am today.

Now that I’ve made my experiences clear I would like to present my Middle Path. A compromise, if you like, that allows me to use Facebook in good conscience while remaining aware of the problems.

Facebook is a public space. It is incredibly easy to forget this when you’re swapping photos with your friends, chatting about things you did that day, and basically hanging out with the same people you do in real life.

On the other hand you’d better be prepared for anyone at all, including your family or even employers (potential employers too) to see anything you see or put on Facebook. There are two ways that this could eventuate.

Generally your more personal information is restricted to those you have marked as friends. If your friends are a hundred people, you can bet that sometimes someone who is not one of your friends will end up on a computer logged on as one of them. On my wall aggregation it’s a weekly event to see posts made using drunk friends’ accounts. All good fun, but it illustrates the point that your information being restricted to just people you know is a fallacy.

From a more technical perspective, you don’t have any control over the information you submit to Facebook. Assume the worst. Crackers might steal all the friendship network data, all the photos and publish anything anywhere. Facebook might make mistakes of their own with your data and show it to the wrong people.

If you understand these risks I believe that you can exist happily and safely in the Facebook world if you’re measured in how you use it. If you don’t post photos or anything about you, you’re not giving up anything. But there is a certain minimum commitment. One inherent set of data in your account is the list of people you care about most, the people you know best: your friends, family and whoever else makes it into your friend list.

You can lock your privacy settings down so that people can’t see who your friends are, but if we’re assuming the worst, remembering that you aren’t in control of this information, you’re stuck with giving up who your friends are if you want to be on Facebook.

In my case, I decided that I could live with that. I’m pretty certain that I don’t have any private investigators snooping around trying to work out who my friends are, but I have no doubt that there are bots working to collect all the friendship information before we realise that it might be sensitive. However, when all is said and done, I am not a hermit, and it would take minimal observation of me in person to work out who my friends are. So I am happy to consciously commit to giving up that aspect of my life to the public world, even on the Internet.

Once you have taken that step the rest is up to you. If you’re not happy for any person at all to see something on your wall, don’t post it there. From a technical, logical perspective, that’s all there is to it. Why is it not that easy?

I mentioned before that it is easy to forget that Facebook is public. You can be lulled into a false sense of security when you’re interacting with people you trust. I have had a personal website for a number of years which has contained a variety of content and when I publish anything on there I know that it’s there forever for anyone to see. The Internet Archive drives the point home with their Wayback Machine. It lets you see what a website used to be, going back many years in some cases. Facebook is the same but because it’s not just you—you’re just there mucking around with your friends—it is forgivable, if unwise, to forget that you’re in public eye, even indirectly.

A feature of social networking sites seems to be that people like to inflate their list of friends. I have received a large number of friend requests from people I haven’t seen for years, some as far back as primary school. The first time I used Facebook I was almost dazed by the number of people I could talk to again. I didn’t have time to catch up with them before, so of course I didn’t have time to catch up with them on Facebook either. The nett result was more irrelevant garbage getting in the way of the people with whom I was still actively interacting. Now, the second time, I have rejected requests from people I barely know.

A common complaint about Facebook is that it uses up a lot of time. This is a simple problem which applies to every other toy in the history of mankind. If necessary restrict yourself to looking at it only once or twice a day, or whatever it takes to rein in your rampant online socialising. Facebook is not a drug, but it’s possible to get addicted. That’s a reason to get a grip on yourself and go outside and enjoy the fresh air, not a problem with Facebook itself. Don’t shoot the instant messenger, as it were.

There is one more almost silly reason why I thought I ought to get a Facebook account: to establish my name. It seems rather pretentious to say so, but as the site continues to grow larger, the risk was increasing that somebody who knows me would create a profile in my (unique) name. Whether as a joke or in malice, there’s a good chance that the account would successfully make friends with people I know. That’s something I simply don’t want to have to deal with. I’m there now, so that’s not a problem any more.

Overall I believe that I now understand the risks well enough to use Facebook without causing regrets for myself later. My fear now is for those who don’t think about it: the people who will share around all kinds of photos, feeling safe, not realising that they may be compromised years later. Some users will become famous someday and their information from social networking sites will become hot property. Statistically that won’t happen to most people, but there are other less public situations where someone might want to find information about you which you would rather keep to yourself.

I have intentionally said nothing about the quality of communication that occurs on Facebook. One of Jack’s anecdotes is that he appreciated receiving a phone call much more than receiving a quick typed noted on Facebook. I strongly believe that people should meet in person, speak on the phone, write letters and have more binding communication than small snippets flung across the Internet. However, many people my age are using Facebook to communicate so it’s my interest here to work out how to deal with it, rather than hope to make sweeping changes to the way the world works.

I also don’t believe that Facebook should be a complete substitute for anything. If you are organising a major event, please don’t make it centred on Facebook. A website is a good central point, with a group on Facebook to complement it.

If you’ve read this far, both Jack’s article and mine, hopefully you now understand our perspectives on the issues and can use them decide what social networking means for you.

If you’re friends with me feel free to come find me on Facebook. If not, either arrange to meet me in person or go away. Have a nice day.

Tom: Twilight Imperium

2009-05-17T04:17:16+00:00

Yesterday a subset of Maclab was summoned to play Twilight Imperium, one of Zen’s many board games. It’s ideally a 6-player game (though an 8-player expansion is available) and is definitely an all-day event. We started playing at about noon and barely finished by 6PM.

Under the watchful eyes of Zen and Peter, the only two who had played before, the galaxy was semi-randomly generated and our fleets and technologies organised.

It would be a mistake to try to explain the complicated mechanics of the game in a little blog post, so I won’t.

In a nutshell, you don’t win by wiping out all the other people, which would take far too long. Instead your overall aim is to gain “victory points” which you do primarily by fulfilling “public objectives” which anyone and everyone is able to complete, and your own “secret objectives” which are worth more victory points but are more difficult. You try to keep your secret objectives to yourself so that others don’t stop you from achieving them.

There is a detailed tech tree to give you all kinds of marvellous advantages, an inter-player trade system, a system of political influence and various laws which can be enacted.

Space battles are an orderly affair with all outcomes decided by rolling 10-sided dice, but technologies can give your ships an edge. They might also let you build a War Sun or two, which are extremely powerful. I built two of them and used them to crush Mr Ford. Unfortunately for me, attacking another player’s fleet is not worth any victory points itself, but it can be fun.

The game progressed slowly through the day. Quite slowly:

Just after we started (12:38 PM)
1:52 PM
2:30 PM
4:00 PM
The winning board (5:45 PM)

The action is not so much what happens on the board, but the excited discussions and arguments about what laws are acceptable, who is allowed to take what planets without risking retaliation and trying to convince other players to play their cards in a way useful to you.

Being undistracted from the goal of achieving many victory points, Zen emerged the winner and we packed up the many, many pieces carefully into little plastic bags.

Now we just need to play again having learned how it works. Thanks folks for a good game and day. :)