Planet Ubuntu-Au

The Education Expo is on this weekend. I’ve sent a couple of missives to our helpers. The second one contains some advice that would work well in many situations regarding FOSS (especially where marketing is concerned), so I’ll reproduce it (slightly edited) here:

Subject: Education Expo, this weekend!
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:29
From: Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar@dhanapalan.com>
To: SLUG Activities <activities@slug.org.au>

Thanks again to everyone who has volunteered to help with the Linux Australia stand at the Education Expo.

The expo itself runs from 9am to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday. Entry is free. It’s a fun day for families with children in the K-12 space, so feel free to bring along your kids and make a day (or two!) out of it.

This year, the expo will be held in Rosehill Racecourse’s brand new Events Centre, and our stand is in a prime position right in front of the door. If you haven’t already, take a look at the original announcement and the Education Expo Web site.

I asked in my previous message if people could tell me when they would be available to help out. If you haven’t already, please let me know. If you’re unsure, that’s fine too: just show up and grab me at the stand.

I’ll be there at 8am on Saturday (an hour before it starts) to set up the stand, and probably at 8:30 on Sunday. I might need some assistance to set up, and also to pack up afterwards.

Some tips:

• Wear comfortable casual clothing. It might get hot in the exhibition hall.
• If you’ve got any Linux or FOSS themed clothing, wear that
• Wear comfortable shoes. You’ll be standing most of the time.
• Keep some water handy.
• Talking to stand visitors can strain your throat. Some mints can help.

Make it clear to visitors that there is a vibrant FOSS community in Australia, and especially in Sydney. Invite them to SLUG, which meets in the city on the last Friday of every month (next meeting on 27 June). SLUG has a segment known as ‘SLUGlets’, which is intended for newbies.

Familiarise yourself with the leaflets that we will distribute:

• http://linkpot.net/ravines/
• http://linkpot.net/dethrone/
• http://linkpot.net/tremolos/

Have a read of Linux Australia’s guides to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and FOSS in education. Remember to promote these to stand visitors as the best place to start with Linux and FOSS:

• http://linux.org.au/linux
• http://linux.org.au/education

One important point to remember is that Linux is not FOSS. We will be handing out copies of the OpenEducationDisc, which is a CD full of education-oriented FOSS for Windows. Not everyone is able to switch over to Linux cold-turkey, but we can get them started with FOSS on Windows first.

Similarly, open standards are not FOSS, but they are a good start. Inform people about the dangers of proprietary file formats, as seen with Microsoft Office, and promote in their stead open alternatives such as OpenDocument and PDF.

Show people that Linux isn’t strange and new. Many don’t realise it, but they are already using FOSS. For example:

• Firefox and OpenOffice are becoming increasingly popular. The NSW Department of Education is in the process of switching over >40,000 school computers to OpenOffice.
• Wikipedia is built around the idea of open knowledge, inspired directly from the FOSS movement (and it’s built on FOSS too!).
• Even Mac OS X has many important components based on FOSS, such as the kernel, file sharing, printing and the Web browser.
• About two-thirds of Web sites are served by the FOSS Web server, Apache.
• Most of the large Web companies (like Google, Facebook and Yahoo) are built with FOSS.
• It is normal for Hollywood films to be created using Linux.
• Linux is prevalent in a range of consumer devices.
• The popular ASUS Eee PC, and many of its competitors, come with Linux pre-installed.

Show people that Linux is easy to install and use. Ubuntu has an installer called Wubi, which is a Windows application that installs Ubuntu as a file without partitioning the hard drive. It behaves like a normal dual-boot system, but it can be uninstalled from ‘Add/Remove Programs’ just like any Windows application. We’ll also have copies of Edubuntu. Remember that this is an add-on companion, not a stand-alone liveCD as in the past. Give a copy of Ubuntu with every Edubuntu disc you distribute.

Linux is more secure. While nothing can claim to be 100% secure and virus proof, Linux has an excellent track record. It doesn’t need ‘band-aid’ solutions like anti-virus and anti-spyware software because the software was built sanely to begin with. The Internet was built for UNIX, not for Windows.

Linux and FOSS is great for families. It’s affordable and reliable. It won’t get infected and show unsolicited porn adverts to your children. There are heaps of great educational software installable with just a few mouse clicks.

Some caveats:

• As a community stand, we are not selling anything.
• Avoid unnecessary Microsoft-bashing. We’re running the stand because we love FOSS, not because we hate Microsoft.

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.

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So Foxtel HD is a month away. If you have been hiding under a rock for the last couple of weeks, Foxtel has been quietly setting up their HD service. I am a Foxtel Digital subscriber and you can now see the HD channels in the EPG.

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Ok, so this is probably going to sound weird and suspicious. Good. Controversy ftw!

I am well aware that there is a fair number of Microsoft employees who regularly read the F/LOSS syndications such as planets. Good on you! I think it is excellent that you’re keeping an open mind.

I am currently interested in engaging with these Microsoft employees in some research for a presentation I hope to give at a few user groups and conferences.

People who are not in this category, but know others who are and aware of F/LOSS, are encouraged to direct those people to this invitation.

Participation will be in the form of a short questionnaire and will not require disclosure of any product or project information. You will be able to remain fully anonymous if you so wish.

Please feel free to contact me privately at research [ @ ] geekosophical [ • ] net to indicate your interest in this research.

Wow, it’s almost two months since I last posted — where did that time go?

I do know, actually. I’ve actually been avoiding posting since about a month ago when I parted with my previous employer. It’s ok, I have a new job now and thankfully the new employer was kind enough to let me fulfill a previous commitment of running a LinuxChix stand at the Aussie edition of CeBIT, and then let… or rather talked me into… taking a few days off the following week to recover from the cold I caught at CeBIT.

Now if only I could get my hands on the person who left the undocumented mess I’m trying to sort out…

Speaking of CeBIT though, it was good fun. The LinuxChix stand was right next to the popular-as-usual Linux Australia stand, so for alot of the time, I was dealing with the Linux Aus overflow to varying values of good and bad.

Oh, and if the guy who was a total fool and shamed himself and unfortunately also the project he associates with by being a braindead troll is reading this: What Brenda said.

Don’t even get me started on the old guy who informed me in absolute seriousness that he cannot believe that women can use computers purely because he cannot find a woman who can cook good enough for him anymore. I wish I could say I was making this stuff up - I really do.

In happier news, next weekend is the Education Expo at Rosehill Racecourse, Sydney. Linux Australia will be there spreading the love of shiny CDs and wobbly windows to the next generation of geeks.

I rather hope I don’t catch another cold, though.

A couple of days ago I was emailed a scanned invoice as a PDF. I was planning to just print it and file it, as the tax office here still requires dead tree records for 7 years last time I checked. Before printing it on 100% post consumer waste recycled paper, I opened it in evince. Nothing spectacular in any of that.

Then it happened, I accidentally clicked and dragged on the page. All of a sudden evince was highlighting the printed text on the page. This was a bitmap embedded in a PDF. Evince was using OCR to highlight the contents of the page.

There are moments every so often I am amazed by the features talented hackers add to FOSS. This was one of those moments. I will never look at evince the same way again.

I had a similar reaction when properly using the awesomebar in firebox 3 for the first time.

Update After seeing the comment below from Mr X, I checked evince with a few more PDFs and unfortunately evince wasn't doing OCR in real time. The text is embedded in the PDF. Maybe one time this will be possible. Any evince developers reading, please consider this a feature request.

I am still impressed with evince, just a little less impressed than I was.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be examining the various tools available to those who wish to conduct online collaboration. The idea is to introduce you dear reader to the various different technologies, and the best way to use them.

For the first entry, I'm going to be examining the grandfather of all online collaboration tools, Email.

Email - A Brief History:

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Yesterday Internode annouced that they will be hosting the Australian SourceForge.net mirror. Internode has been a long term supporter of FOSS. They are one of the few ISPs who officially support Linux. They offer their massive mirror, which has terabytes of FOSS, to the world.

The new SourceForge mirror will be available to the world. The Australian mirror was previously hosted by Optus. Optus hosts other mirrors for FOSS projects including ubuntu. Unfortunately their mirrors are not as reliable as many users would like. The Australian sf.net mirror should be rock solid if Internode's past performance is anything to go by.

Like the other content Internode mirrors, the sf.net mirror will be unmetered for node's ADSL customers. This is in addition to a large amount of other unmetered content, such as ABC content, almost 100 streaming radio stations and other services..

I use and recommend internode to anyone who is interested in high quality ADSL services. The support for FOSS is a secondary consideration, as it is pointless having access to it all, but the connection being down all the time.

This turned up in my inbox this morning and I thought I would share it with people.

Good day

I have on several occasions received email from some other debian consultants not just you they've all been asking me to introduce debian to every institution in my country; you must understand that though am very interested, we are talking about a number that would almost run into infinity.

It is true that my Government can bear the cost of importing up to 500Million CDs but the fact remains that I personally do not understand the Software or what it's used for, as such I can't propose it to the senate this is one aspect that we have to discuss in detail about, preferably via my private email which am presently using to write you.

Kindly get back to me so we can discuss about this software and it's benefit to the users if it's beneficial then I promise we can impose it on my country just like Microsoft and make money out of it like you proposed but most important is that you get back to me with details.

Best regards

Abubakar Maikafi
Email: maikafiabubakar@gmail.com
Phone: +234-07025419252.

He is obviously after full CD sets of Debian if he wants half a billion CDs. I am not in a position to supply this quanity of discs, but if you are, please feel free to contact Abubakar Maikafi about his needs.

Usually I only get unrelated spam or resumes from Indian coders looking for .NET on Windows work via my Debian Consultants listing. This even slipped past spam assassin and made my morning.

Tobias Schlitt has just posted some slides from his talk entitled "6 essential PHP development tools in 60 minutes". I flicked the 90 or so slides in PDF format, they pretty much mirror my development environment.

Tobias left out 2 must haves from my personal list. Vim, the only editor I can use for any prolonged period of hacking (go easy emacs fanbois). Although not really a PHP tool, Firebug, is an essential tool for any serious modern web application developer,

With this environment hacking on PHP based web apps should be a breeze.

As a side note I am starting to play with git after watching Linus' Google Tech Talk on it, and I am starting to like a it, so maybe soon it will be s/svn/git for me.

The second Open CeBIT in Sydney ended last week. Forming a section of the much larger CeBIT expo, Open CeBIT focused on open source technologies and solutions. I was involved in three stands: BizCubed (my employer), Linux Australia and Open Source Industry Australia.

In the market, FOSS is clearly maturing and becoming more mainstream. At a CeBIT a couple of years ago, I’d be answering basic questions like, “what is open source?”, “what is Linux?” and “how do you make money?” This year, I didn’t get any questions like that at all. Most people knew something about Linux and FOSS, and just needed some direction to get started.

We had much interest in community and general usage at the Linux Australia stand. Our Fedora, Ubuntu and Edubuntu discs were popular. Of immense popularity were our OLPC XOs, thanks to OLPC Australia. Visitors were genuinely interested in the units, and I didn’t hear any negative feedback at all. I do believe that a lot of people did understand that this is an education project for children in the developing world and not just a laptop project.

At the Open Source Industry Australia stand, I spoke to many people who were interested in deploying FOSS solutions to solve specific problems. Many of these people would not have considered FOSS in the past, so clearly our message is resonating.

Coming up in a couple of weeks (June 14-15) is the Education Expo. We’ve always been successful there, and all signs point to us repeating that.

LotD:   MacGyver is favourite disaster hero

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.

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These guys are hilarious.

If you haven't checked it out, check out their TV show as well - It has stars Arj Barker and Kristen Schaal.

Here is an example of one of their songs. I think it's one of their better ones ;-)

"Marty Toohey is giving up World of Warcraft - while he still can.

WORLD of Warcraft (WoW) terrifies me. A picture of me, or someone a lot like me, was surely in the minds of marketers when the game, a virtual online world of swords and sorcery, was released in 2004. I am a lover of many things fantasy; I have some disposable income and leisure time; my childhood was dominated by video games; I am a touch obsessive-compulsive."

You can check it and digg it up at http://digg.com/gaming_news/WoW_How_I_kicked_the_habit

Hello. It is with my deepest regret that I am ending the podcasts indefinitely. This means that there won't be any Full Circle Podcasts or Penguin Central Podcasts for a while yet as I set myself to deal with real-life stuff (as Ron adequately put it on the FCM site). You can still read my thoughts on the blog section on the site.

Thanks to those who have supported the podcasts in the last year, notably E-Camm who donated a licence of their Skype Call Recorder for the show, and both shows many panelists which include:

Robert McCurdy
Dean Jansen
Justin Gerace
Alan Pope

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Dealing with Gigabyte support can be a frustrating experience. They only offer support via their website. Once they reply to your enquiry which can take several days, you get a response telling you to visit their website to read the response, and you can reply. This process means it can take several weeks to get a clear and final answer.

In my case I was trying to get a fix for what I thought was a flakey BIOS in my Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2L. Although Gigabyte claim that their QFlash BIOSes can be loaded independently of the OS the box is running, they only supply them as Windows binary self extracting archives. Gigabyte tech support aren't much help, suggesting that users can just extract it on a Windows box. There is an alternative.

The Gigabyte QFlash binaries are simply self extracting rar files. The following steps make it easy to update Gigabyte QFlash BIOSes on a linux box (albeit with non free software).

• Download the firmware from Gigabyte
• cd /path/to/gigabyte-fw.exe
• unrar e gigabyte-fw.exe
• cp firmware.fw /path/to/usbstick
• Reboot computer and select flash BIOS from USB

If all goes to plan you should now have a new BIOS and not had to use a Windows machine to do it.

A post today on the Ajaxian blog about a javascript based version of Super Mario Kart, reminded me of some of the other great classic games ported to javascript. Below is a quick list based on my bookmarks and other stuff kicking around on my laptop.

• Lemmings (my favourite)
• Tetris
• Frogger (forgive them for using Comic Sans)
• Donkey Kong (runs a little too fast on my laptop for my liking)
• PacMan (the graphics aren't true to the original, but the game play is)
• Super Mario Brothers (link lifted from Ajaxian too)

I wish you luck getting away with slacking off in the office while playing these in the office.

Feel free to suggest others in the comments

Not long before my old laptop got to the end of it usable lifespan I started playing with the Zend Framework in my spare time. One of the cool things about ZF is that it wants to use friendly URLs, and a dispatcher to handle all the requests. The downside of this approach, and how ZF is organised, it works best if you use a Virtual Host per project. At first this seemed like a real pain to have to create a virtual host per project. One Saturday afternoon I worked through the apache docs and found a solution - then I found it fantastic. Rather than bore you with more of my views on Zend Framework, I will explain how to have a virtual host model that requires a little work up front and is very low maintenance.

It gets tedious copying and pasting virtual host config files each time you want to start a new project, so instead I let Apache do the work for me.

I added a new virtual host config file called projects to /etc/apache2/sites-available. The file contains

UseCanonicalName Off

LogFormat "%V %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b" vcommon

<Directory /home/dave/Projects>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.2
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.2>
	ServerName projects

	CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access_log.projects vcommon

	VirtualDocumentRoot /home/[username]/Projects/%1/application/www
	AccessFileName     .htaccess
</VirtualHost>

The important bit is the VirtualDocumentRoot directive which tells Apache to map a hostname to a path. I use an IP address from the 127.0.0.0/8 range for the virtual host, so they aren't accessible to the outside world and I don't have to worry about it changing every time I check locations.

All of my projects live under ~/Projects and each one gets a directory structure that looks something like this.

[projectname]
  |
  +- notes - coding notes, like grep output when refactoring etc
  |
  +- resources - any reference material or code snippets
  |
  +- application - the code for the project
     |
     +- www - document root for vhost

There are usually other paths here too, but they vary from project to project.

To make this work there are few more steps. First enable the new virtual host

$ sudo a2ensite projects

Don't reload apache yet.

Next you need to add the apache module

$ sudo a2enmod vhost_alias

Time to edit your /etc/hosts file so you can find the virtual hosts. Add a line similar to this

127.0.0.2 projects phpgw-trunk.project [...] phpgw-stable.project

Now you can restart apache

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

This is handy for developing client sites - especially using drupal.

Now my /var/www/index.html is just an empty file.

I am getting a bit bored with adding entries to /etc/hosts all the time. If I get around to adding
http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2005q3/000361.html">
http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2005q3/000361.html">
http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2005q3/000361.html">dnsmasq with wildcard hosts to the mix, I will post a follow up.

This setup is based on my current dev environment (Ubuntu Hardy), but it also works on older versions of Ubuntu. The steps should be similar for Debian and derivatives. For other distros, it should work, just how to make it work may be a little different. Feel free to post tips for others in the comments.

…When I’m not working on linux, I’ve been working on some websites. Mainly blogs, but also some ebay affiliate sites that are usually attached to blogs. I’m trying to get 30 up to start with, but I’m not very commited, I’ve got five going, oldest one is five months old. Once I hit 30, I’ll aim for 100 ;);

I got interested in SEO for some reason, and have been honing my skills with these sites with the intent to make a little money. If I can make $1/day per site, that’s $10,000 a year. Very acheivable.

The basic idea is to pick a phrase, maybe a three word phrase, that has 100,000 hits or less in google and 100 searches for it a day (there’s various way to determine search volume, such as google keyword tool, google trends, and a few free SEO type sites). That will give you a good chance of getting on the front page of google for that phrase in the first week and getting some traffic. If you don’t hit the front page of google straight away, you might have to wait six months or so. You need to be patient in this game.

So far, with one blog that was very targeted I got the seventh result in google almost instantly. With another site that wasn’t so targeted, I’m nowhere to be seen. So with that last site, I’ll build up ten articles, and keep an eye on it for six months. With the first site, I’ll try to post once a week and build a few links by submitting articles to howto sites, and directories. In five months, it’s paid for itself already with only a few hours work put in to it, it has seven articles, traffic is increasing every month, I’m getting natural backlinks and subscriptions to the feed, as well as a few artifitial backlinks I’ve made. I’ve started targeting keywords that have more search volume.

To target a phrase, put it in the title, h1 tag, and anchor text in each post pointing back to the main page. Each page should have a unique title, though. Also put it in the anchor text of external links.

What I really enjoy is on page SEO and ad placement and look, what I don’t enjoy is creating artificatial links with the intent of getting an artifically high google rank. Even though google says SEO isn’t spam, I can’t help but think it’s spammy.

But I’m enjoying creating content, and studying SEO and marketing. I made my first ebay affiliate sale sale after 50 hits, very exciting. I might have a crack at amazon afiliate links next and incorporating ebay into wordpress, rather than a separate page.

BTW, targeting internet savvy people isn’t the easiest way to make money, they are blind to ads. Best to go after non techy people. I’m running ads on this site, but it’s dragging my CTR down. I’ll give it a few more months and then turn them off.

Just got to get these 30 sites up…

Post from: Chesty's Blog

In My Spare Time…

Lately, I’ve been thinking more than ever about ways to promote free and open source software to a non-technical crowd. This has largely been prompted by the Education Expo in Sydney, for which I am co-ordinating the Linux Australia stand (Stand F9). Currently on my mind is Open CeBIT, which is right around the corner. I’ve been doing some (fortunately not all) planning for two stands, my employer’s and Linux Australia’s.

Here are some thoughts I have had regarding FOSS marketing. It’s a bit of a jumble, but hopefully it comes of some help.

• Marketing is just structured, methodical, non-rabid evangelism. It isn’t inherently dirty, and it is not synonymous with advertising (advertising can be a part of marketing, but the two aren’t conjoined). We in the FOSS community need to get over the stigma that is sometimes attached to ‘marketing’, so that we may harness it for good and not evil.
• Identify your target audience, then determine what kinds of questions they will be asking/thinking. This is Marketing 101, but it can be easy to lose sight of. While can be good to cast a wide net, being tactically focused can often yield better results. For the Education Expo we have a leaflet specifically for students, and for CeBIT we have one for businesses.
• As a follow-on from the previous point, know whom to keep on-side. While your school/university might be using Microsoft products, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in bed with Bill Gates. Don’t assume malice when the more likely reason is simple ignorance or misunderstanding. Writing an accusative article in your student paper might give you a temporary sense of satisfaction, but such a hostile approach is more than likely to backfire on you and cement the Establishment’s negative (or lack of) opinion on FOSS. Try to gently educate, not censure.
• Relevant case studies are pure gold. If you’re dealing with the education sector, talk about successful school deployments, interesting projects like One Laptop Per Child and appropriate devices like the Asus Eee PC.
• Referencing honest, independent studies can be much more persuasive than referring to press releases or vendor-sponsored reports.
• There are some angles that might not directly apply to the target professions/market, but might peripherally be of interest to people. This includes things like the benefits to the local economy and industry, the environment, government and so on.
• Most people either have children, are children or have a soft spot for children. FOSS is great for kids and education, so be able to talk about that! Parents are always looking for ways to get their kids engaged in fun and constructive activities, if only so that they can have five minutes of peace and quiet in the house
• Focus on value, not cost. It might not cost anything to acquire and use FOSS, but people are naturally sceptical of things that are promoted as having no cost (and really, who can blame them?). Leading your argument with “it’s free” leaves people to wonder if there is a catch or if the product is of a lesser quality. To take OpenOffice.org as an example, it compares very favourably to Microsoft Office in terms of functionality and of course freedom. To stress the ‘freeware’ angle is to sell it short, and could leave your listener to believe that it’s just an ‘el cheapo’ knock-off. The fact that many companies (e.g. Sun, Novell, IBM) contribute to and benefit from OpenOffice.org’s development is evidence that it is of a high standard and is of economic value. Firefox is a great example to use, as almost everyone has some familiarity with it. Firefox has benefited greatly from Google and AOL, to name but two major contributors. In turn, these companies have built business models around it (not so much AOL these days, but they are still probably the largest contributor overall).
• FOSS is very pro-free-market, and is in fact similar to the ideal held by many economists known as perfect competition. As already mentioned, Linux has and continues to be beneficial to a very wide range of companies and industries.
• Freedom is vital, but I find that people normally don’t understand if you begin your explanation by talking about distributed development or Software Libre. Start by talking about more obvious benefits, like software quality, rapid development, long-term affordability, reliability and so on. This will inevitably lead people to wonder how this can be achieved, and of course the answer is that it is all Free Software. Then you have your opening to talk about software freedom and the FOSS community, and it will seem much more relevant to your audience. This isn’t a matter of de-emphasising Freedom, but rather a way to prepare your audience so that they can be more receptive to it.
• Of course, there are the age-old arguments versus Windows surrounding speed, viruses, and so on. But it is better to keep the Microsoft-bashing to a minimum. Going off on an anti-Microsoft rant only fuels those who like to falsely label FOSS supporters as communists/anarchists/anti-capitalists.
• Nevertheless, proprietary software is potentially capable of matching FOSS for quality, speed, security, etc.. The one thing they cannot match is Freedom. Freedom is our fundamental advantage.
• Analogies to parts of everyday life can help to make people connect with the ideas behind FOSS. Simple things like sharing and modifying recipes, lending a book, opening the bonnet of your car and remixing music are already accepted (indeed, expected) by the general populace, and have direct parallels to the principles of FOSS.
• Speaking of analogies and examples, appropriate ones are closer than you may think. Just about everyone uses FOSS in some form or other. Firefox, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Apache are all great examples. There is nothing to be afraid of.
• Mac OS X users are already prolific users of FOSS, as their operating system contains some BSD, Samba, CUPS and more. They are familiar with FOSS without even knowing it.
• EULAs and DRM mean that the software or media file that you just bought isn’t really owned by you. Your rights are restricted and can be revoked at any time. This should be cause for concern for any consumer.
• It might help to capitalise Free Software in documentation, as a means of emphasis and to differentiate from freeware.
• Be honest! Free software is inherently honest and accountable by virtue of being open. We should be using his honesty and openness as our advantage. Remember that there’s a difference between explaining something in an attractive way and outright lying. Don’t make FOSS sound better than it really is. Nothing is perfect, and if you make FOSS sound perfect you’ll likely be met with suspicion. Linux isn’t Windows — it does look an feel different. But it’s not necessarily any better or worse (depending on the particular software in question), it’s just a bit different. If you lead people to think that OpenOffice.org is the same as Microsoft Office, they might rail against it at the slightest difference they find. It’s different, but certainly no more different than Office 2003 is from Office 2007. At the end of the day, it’s about managing expectations — portraying FOSS in a positive light but not creating unrealistic hopes. The last thing we want are a battalion of users disgruntled because they expected FOSS to be able to vacuum their house. Those people will be far less likely to try FOSS again, even years later.
• As a corollary of the previous point, advocacy is about managing expectations. Set realistic expectations and people will be less likely to be disappointed in the longer term.
• Avoid sounding like you’re selling snake oil. Copious use of all-caps, bold text and exclamation marks runs the risk of making your well-intentioned writing look like just another scam.
• Be positive! People don’t want to read bad news, and there’s plenty of good stuff to say about FOSS. Honesty takes priority, but phrase it well.
• Be prepared to fight FUD, but remain positive.
• Free software is more trustworthy. Would you trust your privacy and sensitive data (Web browsing history, e-mail, financial records, etc.) to non-auditable software? Identity theft and other forms of cybercrime are a major and underappreciated problem. The old assertion that nobody would bother to “hack” into your home computer is misleading, as most intrusions are made by bots and worms.
• A picture can tell a thousand words. A video can tell a million. A good screencast works wonders. If you’re running a stand at an expo, have a monitor playing a pile of screencasts in a continuous loop, with subtitles (because people are unlikely to be able to hear anything on a crowded show floor).
• Internationalisation and Accessibility can be powerful drawcards for some, especially those of non-English speaking backgrounds.
• Not everybody loves FOSS (yet), but few can argue against the merits of open standards. Most FOSS is built around open standards.
• Open standards are at least as important as Free Software. Don’t conflate the two — proprietary software can employ open standards. Even if someone rejects OpenOffice.org, I’d feel some solace knowing that they’re converting their MS Office documents to PDF (an open standard) for sharing with others.
• Make it as easy as possible for people to get involved. Hand out CDs or DVDs with software useful to your audience, like Ubuntu/Edubuntu and the OpenDisc/OpenEducationDisc. Don’t expect people to jump ship straight to Linux. Let them get their feet wet first with FOSS apps on Windows, LiveCDs, dual boots and so on. Baby steps are much easier to make than massive strides.
• Welcome people to get involved in your community. Ask them to join your mailing lists. Invite them to your next LUG meeting. Make sure they are fully aware that there’s a vibrant community out there to help them. They can even make friends and employment/business contacts.
• There’s only so much that you can include in a short article/spiel, so be sure to refer to other resources that have more information. Quote or link to sources if you feel they do a good job — there’s no sense in trying to reinvent the wheel. Nobody wants a link farm, though. Be selective in your references so that people don’t feel overwhelmed.
• And finally, keep it short and sweet. I’ve listed a lot of points here, but if you tried to cover them all in one go you will end up with a speech/document that is unacceptably long or lacking in depth (like this one! ). Split them up, or structure them so that the basic message is passed early on, with the rest being elaboration/explanation.

We’ve got lots of good stuff to say about FOSS, but what matters is not so much what we say but how we say it.

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
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I'm going to be holding a podcasting webcast in a couple of weeks time. I'm going to be presenting the "Podcasting - It's Not As Hard As You Think" presentation that I gave at the Making Links Conference last year and I'm going to be doing it via the dimdim.com web conferencing system.

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Those who remember my ancient quest for the perfect IRC solution might be interested in ancient quest for the perfect IRC solution might be interested in these posts by Aaron Toponce explaining how to couple a remote irssi session with GUI notification. I’m still quite happy with my current Bip + Xchat combination, but I’ve always lusted after the 1337ness of irssi. Icecap looks intriguing, but my first instinct tells me that their solution is over-engineered.

Note: If you see duplicated words in the above post, I am aware of them. Wordpress is doing something funny and I can’t figure out what it is. When I get the time I’ll upgrade to 2.5.

LotD: Ubuntu theme for Symbian S60v3 (works on my Nokia N95)

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Well... the first budget for the new Labor Federal Government and there have been some changes to the way that purchased computer software (or software licenses) are depreciated, with regards to tax right-offs.

Australian IT News Article.

The depreciation period on capital expenditure on business software has been increased from 2.5 to 4 years. This was projected to lead to $1.3 billion dollars of government savings up to 2012.

This money is then going towards a National Secondary School Computer Fund (NSSC) of $1.2 billion which is to pay for computers and communication technology.

So.. where is the incentive to make more use of Free and Open Source Software?

Indirectly, I think that this is an excellent budget for FOSS.

The proposal is for individual schools to be able to receive up to $1 million dollars as a grant. This is targeted spending, and the schools would need to justify the way that the grant gets spent. To work properly, this would require that the schools have freedom on how they spend their grant money. Schools could choose either to buy the 'latest and greatest' (typically this will be Apple), or they could extend their spending power by just buying hardware and installing Free and Open Source Software on top of this (eg. Ubuntu).

The usual benefits would then also apply.. Schools would be able to offer all the software that they use to their students to take home; upgrades and security updates would be available free of charge; students can start to learn about the Free and Open Source Software community and participate and contribute the Free and Open Source.

All good...

So what about businesses?

Businesses will carry an increased tax burden for an additional one and a half years, over the next 4 years. In a tightening economy, this maybe enough of an incentive to switch to Free and Open Source Software. If businesses do take up Free and Open Source Software en-mass, then the education fund could be significantly less than projected. This could, in turn, drive the adoption of FOSS in schools, as funds for computer grants become tighter.

So, watch the space. The budget assumes a status quo which may not continue. If this changes, FOSS is an attractive proposition for those people that would then like to make use of it.

I am a music student, and hand writing music is one of my hates (the other ones are loops and tablature). There have been many a notation program to fall in my hands, but none of them have been any good (notably Finale Notepad, Denemo). With the high praises that my muso friends gave of the new Sibelius 5, I thought it was time that I gave it a shot.

Some of the features that interest me are Panorama mode (where you can view your sheet music horizontally without page layouts (a bit like Google Docs), and a mode where you can write music that is set to video.

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Tonight I had the pleasure of watching Iron Man. And it really was a pleasure.

It has been a while since I've seen such a well put together movie, which only had very minor flaws. I had seen the trailers for it a few times, and I was looking forward to the movie for some time, but it still managed to beat my expectations many times by the end of the film.

I really suggest getting down to your local cinema and watching it (even if cinemas can be overpriced!).

Check out the trailers for yourself at the official Iron Man website.

PS. The comedy in it helps to break things up - and the robots are just so funny .. especially the one who mans the fire extinguisher.

It can be amusing when news articles or blogs are written about a report/study that has only been released or read in excerpt. Small snippets can be extremely controversial on their own, and are easily taken out of the context of the gestalt article.

Such has been the case with the announcement of the Standish Group’s report, titled ‘Trends in Open Source’. The report is available in full to Standish subscribers, or for a fee of $US 1,000 per copy. Standish themselves chose to drum-up publicity in a press release two and a half weeks ago:

Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies.

Some commentators pounced on this in defence of FOSS, and in doing so played right into Standish’s hands. A week later, other reports chose to focus on the technical perceptions of FOSS solutions, in particular security. Some of these articles basically said, “we haven’t been able to read the full report, but this is what we’ve been told”.

More informed accounts have hit the virtual presses in recent days, and it’s been revealed that the report is very positive overall with regards to FOSS. When iTnews asked me for comment, I was assured that the report had been thoroughly read. I said a lot of things, but the quotation that made the final cut is the following:

FOSS is inherently compatible with a free market, and hence with business. There is no closed-off ‘command economy’ that is characterised by proprietary software companies. The software and its development are totally open to the world.

Following the interview, I tried to distil some key points about FOSS:

• The keys are transparency and accountability, as well as freedom over your own information and independence from vendor lock-in.
• Most FOSS is based on open standards, which means that users/companies are not tying their data/processes to one vendor or piece of software. Some might be wary of FOSS, but I don’t think anyone can argue against the merits of open standards.
• There is plenty of FOSS that works well on proprietary platforms (like Windows). There is no inherent tie-in with Linux.
• FOSS has been most successful where it isn’t noticed. This can be in embedded devices, or in popular desktop applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
• Most people might think of a ‘computer’ as a desktop computer, but most of ICT (and ICT growth) is actually elsewhere (servers, consumer electronics, mobile phones, telecoms, embedded, supercomputers, etc.). Linux and FOSS is far more popular in these fields.
• Most of the Internet is based on FOSS and open standards built around FOSS. For instance, TCP/IP networking was built for BSD UNIX (which is open source), and the majority of Web servers run the open source Apache web server.

Obviously there are more points than these, but I deliberately kept this as a quick ‘off the top of my head’ exercise as a means of preventing it from growing into an encyclopaedic tome.

LotD: Ubuntu theme for Windows

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
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I arrived back in Bergen late last night after spending another day the PHP Unconference in Hamburg. I even managed to get one speaker to do his talk in English, which made things a lot easier for me.

My brain started to adjust to German a bit more, which made things easier than on day 1. Overall I think I understood about 25% of what was being discussed, which sound like a waste of time, but that 25% was pretty good quality. Also the discussions in the corridors was great too. At the end of the day the language spoken isn't very important when compared to the ideas shared.

For me, the only attraction of web based social networks, is to provide a backup of my addressbook online. FOSS on the other hand is a global "social network" that is real. Events like linux.conf.au, the PHP Unconference in Hamburg, Bar Camp Melbourne and other similar events are a vital part of the networks - they provide the space for us to meet and discuss ideas.

I also used the trip as an opportunity to catch up with Christian Böttger, Release Coordinator for phpGroupWare. Not only did we discuss the project, but we caught up on how business and life in general was going. It is always good to catch up with Christian, I just wish I had more than a couple of hours to spare.

My next couple of events are locked in. Wednesday night is drinks with Johan Gunnarsson from phpGroupWare, at the airport in Copenhagen. Overnight Google emailed me a confirmation for the Google Developer Day 2008 in Sydney on June 18, there is some interesting stuff on there too - less FOSS centric but still seems pretty cool.

I spent yesterday at the PHP Unconference in Hamburg. None of the sessions were in English, so that meant I really struggled with some of the sessions, while some of the others I could pick up some of it.

Between sessions I meant to meet a few people I had chatted with in IRC, but never met in meatspace. I always like to be able to put a face to a nick or blog, then have a beer or 2. This is exactly what happened last night.

I managed to land a big thick Ajax book (in English), which was pretty cool - something to read on the plane back to Australia

It is sad that phpGroupWare doesn't have the "brand recognition" it once had. Hopefully we can turn that around later this year if we get a release out.

I am skipping the morning session, and hope to catch some good sessions this afternoon.

For the record, the Norwegian company I work for isn't eZ.

The last two weeks have been quite eventful. Each of these probably deserves its own blog post, but since I don’t have the time to write them all I’ll just give a summary.

Document Freedom Day, 26 March

The first annual Document Freedom Day (inspired by Software Freedom Day) was celebrated globally. In Sydney, the celebrations were hosted by Google at their offices, supported by the Internet Society of Australia and the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG). As the SLUG representative, I was asked to say a few words about our organisation and its relevance to document freedom. Not having time to prepare, I managed to ad-lib a speech, drawing on memories of what I had written before on the Domesday Book and Domesday Project. I’m not an experienced speaker, so I’m very glad that it came out well.

Senator Kate Lundy and David Vaile delivered great talks that made us think about openness of information and their importance to society. For the most part, we didn’t mention the war (which unfortunately has been lost), but there was no escaping acknowledgement of the Waughs. Anyone disillusioned at the state of politics in Australia ought to speak with Kate. Even after 12 years in parliament, she is still inspiring.

All in all, it was a fantastic night. Thanks to Alan Noble, Andrew McRae and the other folks at Google for making it happen. Andrew and Sarah Maddox have written good summaries of the evening.

I would have loved to have taken Kate up on her invitation to join her ‘Foundations of Open: Technology and Digital Knowledge’ local 2020 Summit, but alas a trip to Canberra for one day was a bit much. I’m glad to see it all went well, though.

Sydney Linux Users Group Annual General Meeting, 28 March

What can I say? Thanks to everyone in SLUG who supported my candidacy for the role of President. The new Committee looks like a great mix of talents, and we already have some good ideas in the pipeline. The next twelve months is looking to be exciting indeed.

We had the first gathering of the new Committee on Sunday. It was a handover meeting, with the old Committee members present to pass on their wisdom and experience to the new. My sincere gratitude goes to the departing Committee members. I feel truly honoured to have worked with them over this past year.

Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report 2008 launch event, 1 April

Free software and free beer! It appears that with FOSS, you can have your cake and eat it too

Note: there was no cake — but there were Iced Vo Vos! Sweet!

It’s great to finally have some & Community Report">authoritative statistics to back our cause. Common myths were dispelled, and we had confirmation of things that seemed so obvious to us but might have been less so for others.

BarCamp Sydney, 5-6 April

BarCamp 3 was notable for expansion to two days of revelry. The venue migrated from UTS for the first two BarCamps to the UNSW Roundhouse for the third, which despite the longer commute I feel was a good move. Attendance did seem thinner than in previous years. This was probably due to visitors spread over a larger venue and across two days. One thing I like about BarCamp is that I get contact with people and ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t notice from FOSS gatherings like SLUG. BarCamp has considerably more proprietary software developers and entrepreneurs. Less Google, more Microsoft. As much as I love FOSS, I do like to see what’s happening in the rest of the ICT universe.

I made an effort this time to attend talks that were less technical and more business or personal development oriented. Stand-out speakers included Nick Hodge, Matt Moore and Richard Hayes.

Perhaps the highlight was the Saturday evening. Mike from Atlassian led us through a few rounds of Werewolf, a variation (and an improvement, IMHO) of the classic Mafia game. I still can’t believe that we didn’t deplete the bar tab that Mike set up for us. We’ll have to have SLUG’s DebSIG present at BarCamp 4

LotD: OpenOffice.org en masse in NSW schools!

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
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Microsoft claim that their UAC security prompts in Vista are designed to annoy you. I’m trying hard to take them seriously and to not laugh them off… but did they really think it’d work? OEMs and users have been disabling it in droves. Other users have probably taught their muscle memory to automatically click the Continue/Allow button without the slightest acknowledgement or thought. I think Microsoft need to get their act together when it comes to UIs. Some of their recent efforts have been frustratingly inconsistent.

A major reason given by Microsoft in their UAC scandal was to encourage developers to avoid privilege elevations as much as possible. A noble cause, especially in the security-inexperienced world of Windows development, albeit poorly executed. It reminds me of Apple’s perpetual opposition to the multi-button mouse. One stated reason is to enforce more ‘sane’, ‘usable’ and consistent UI design, and overall I think they’ve done well. They don’t ban multi-button mice (‘XY-PIDSes’?), but given the simple one-button default there’s less need for them. I might prefer using a conventional 3-button scroll mouse, or even Apple’s own Mighty Mouse (a cleverly-disguised multi-button mouse), but I don’t lose any functionality by not using them.

It goes to show how much the graphical interface can be influenced by its physical input, something a lot of us don’t acknowledge in today’s world of >100-key QWERTY keyboards, multi-button mice and multi-finger touchpads. The real innovation in that space seems to be happening in the mobile and embedded sector, the iPhone being a good example. Players of games on both desktop computers and games consoles might notice the difference in ‘look and feel’ between games designed for keyboard/mouse versus control pad. Particularly for action and strategy games, ports from desktop to console (or vice versa) often aren’t successful. The software was designed with the assumption of particular input devices, and anything that deviates from this will also alter the feel of the game.

LotD: Your Windows licence fees paid to make this

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
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I know it's been a while, but I figured I should make mention to my new "rig" I got.

I decided it was time to upgrade, and for now, I will probably most likely use this as a gaming box, and eventually it will become my general desktop machine.

Specs

• Intel Quad Core 2 Processor (Q9450) - 2.66ghz each core.
• 4gb of DDR2 1066mhz (for the technical, 5-5-5-15)
• 2x500G Seagate Sata HDDS (its not really meant to be a storage box)
• Antec Nine Hundred Case (but this case definately has drive space!)
• Gigabyte 9800GX2 1GB (naturally it's PCI-e)
• And for those who care, motherboard is a EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 (nF780i SLI A1 Version)

So far, since getting it, I have been playing games on it nearly non-stop, something I have missed doing for such a long time. Sure I had the my Console games, but nothing really beats PC Gaming -- And it's true!

Some of the games I've been playing include Assasins Creed, SWAT 4, HL2, Empire Earth and Battlefield 2142.

I did do a 3d Mark rating of it, and it seemed to perform quite well -- of course no where near what the other machine rates at!! (Yes, that's right, it is running Vista -- not because I really want to, but because unfortunately, if i want to run Windows Games, I'm going to need a Windows Install, and in my honest opinion, Cedega is yet to get you close enough not to need one..)

In the next few weeks I will install Linux on it (onto the second hard drive it has), and will post about how that performs. Hopefully I can find something that will challenge the video card under linux (oh and I will give Cedega another try under this machine to see how it goes).

For now, Adios!

I promised way back in January that we’d release a video of that month’s SLUG meeting — our up-close-and-personal with Microsoft. We up-close-and-personal with Microsoft. We did just that a month ago, but I totally forgot to mention it here.

I know, I suck.

Anyway, you can get the video and slides here (the links in the original announcement are no longer functional). It’s been pointed out to me that the slides in the video vary slightly from the PDF, but the difference is minimal. It’s three months old now — so don’t expect any revelations — but it’s still an interesting watch.

LotD: Save money by buying directly from the USA (for Australians only)

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Saluton, kaj bonvenon homoj :D

In other words, welcome to the site. I know that I haven't been updating the blog as often as I should, and I haven't released a Penguin Central since Christmas. I am currently working on FCP #2. I am unsure of when the show will be ready for release, but I am hoping it will come out soon.

On other news, the upcoming Hardy release is only 7 days away. I must admit, I am not as hyped up as I was for the Gutsy release; but the upgrade should prove to be an excellent release.

Hope to see you around soon

Ĝis la revido!

Simon and Lindsay: EasyTAG is indeed a useful tool for tagging many music files at once. While EasyTAG does automate a lot of the work, it is still quite a laborious process. This really grinds when you’re trying to manage a large music collection. What if your tagger worked more like your ears and brain — it just listened to the music and worked out what song was playing?

Enter Picard, stage left.

Picard ‘listens’ to your music and ascertains an audio fingerprint of each track. Using this information, along with more traditional data such as existing filenames and tags, it consults various online sources to deduce the details of the track and populate the metadata fields. I’ve found the results to be amazingly accurate. Sometimes it finds multiple matches, and it can occasionally get confused if the same track is available on different albums (e.g. a single, an original album and a ‘best-of’ compilation). If you have some idea of what the track is, you can lend Picard a hand by manually adding a more useful filename or some tags. This is where EasyTAG works well with Picard, since Picard isn’t geared towards manual tag editing. Still, it’s bloody impressive nonetheless.

As an album-based tagger, Picard behaves somewhat differently from file-based taggers like EasyTAG. It can take some getting used to, and it might be less accurate for people who prefer to collect single songs and not entire albums. If you’re like me and do compile full albums, it can do clever things like ascertain that you have the ‘White Album’ (or part of it) if it sees ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ as well as ‘Revolution 9’. The developers have recognised that the UI does need some love, but once you’re used to it it isn’t too bad.

Picard is a mass-tagger, so drag a whole stack of music files onto it and watch it do its work. It’ll try and group your music into albums. To correct allocations, drag their entries to arrange them in the way you please (or drag them away if nothing is suitable). Depending on how esoteric your music tastes are, you should find that most tracks are handled fairly accurately. If you sign up for a MusicBrainz account, you can submit your changes for others to benefit.

Addendum: If you’re using Ubuntu, don’t forget to install libtunepimp5-mp3 for MP3 support.

LotD: Excellent speech by Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop Per Child. I would especially recommend that the naysayers listen to it.

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
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This is a quick note for those who haven't caught up with the changes. My personal blog no longer resides at this address, instead I've moved that across to http://me.jamespurser.com.au.

Instead, jamespurser.com.au is now my business site. So if you need to update your feeds please do. 

The title will become my most used phrase over the next couple of weeks. As I bash this out, I am on the train to catch a flight to Bergen, Norway. Over the next 2 and a bit weeks I will be meeting with Sigurd and the guys from Resight to discuss the project and the next stage of development.

I will be making a side trip to Hamburg, Germany to attend the PHP Unconference on the 26/27th April. As it is an unconference, the program isn't decided, but the attendees list looks interesting.

During this trip I have decided to give twitter a try. I have had an account for almost a year, but never used it. When travelling I want to blog, but usually don't have the time, now I don't have an excuse. You can keep up on what I am doing via my twitter stream.

In more web 2.0 compliance news, I have started using my flickr account. I have installed the flick posting client on my N95. Combine that with the location tagger, it should be easy to keep track of what I was doing when and where.

At this stage I won't be linking either service into my RSS feed, but that may change if I really like them.

PS Watch this space for some geek posts in the coming weeks. I hope to blog about my new Dell D830 running AMD64 Ubuntu Hardy once I get all the issues resolved.