Planet Ubuntu-AU

Robert Collins: Switch

2010-07-23T11:24:19+00:00

No, not the bzr switch… rather the book : http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752

Read it, its solid.

Dave Hall: Travelling, Speaking, Scaling and Aegiring

2010-07-22T12:23:18+00:00

The next couple of months are going to be a crazy ride. I will be visiting at least 7 countries, speaking on 8 or more days in a 5 week period. The talks will be focused on Drupal and Aegir. My schedule is below.

Horizontally Scaling Drupal - Melbourne

On 7 August I'll be running a 1 day workshop around the theme of horizontally scaling Drupal. The content is built on the knowledge I developed building, deploying and managing around 2100 sites for a client. This event has very limited capacity and has almost sold out.

DrupalCon - Denmark

Denmark is hosting the European leg of DrupalCon this year. I will be attending the full conference. I won't be presenting, but I will be getting involved with some of the BoFs. I had a ball at DrupalCon San Francisco earlier in the year.

Efficiently Managing Many Drupal Sites - Slovakia

After spending a couple of days recovering from DrupalCon, I'll be teaming up with the crew at Sven Creative in Bratslavia, to run a 2 day intensive workshop on horizontally scaling Drupal and development workflows. For more information check out the workshop website.

Free Software Balkans - Albania

On the weekend of 11-12 September, the inaugural Free Software Balkans Conference will be held at the University of Vlore, Albania. I'll be there speaking about Drupal and Aegir. In addition to this I will be running half day build your first Drupal site workshops around the country. The dates and locations for the workshops are still being finalised.

OSI Days - India

On my way back to Australia I will be taking a side trip to Chennai, via Delhi, for OSI Days 2010, Asia's largest open source conference. I will be presenting sessions on Aegir and Drupal. This looks like it will be a huge event.

Other Events

I've launched a new site workshops.davehall.com.au to list my training and speaking engagements. As dates are locked in I'll be adding them to the site.

If you would like to meet with me while I'm on the road, add me to your tripit network, follow me on identi.ca or twitter or add me to your network on LinkedIn.

James Purser: Thoughts From the Train - Throsby - My Really, Really Safe Seat

2010-07-20T22:13:32+00:00

I live in the federal seat of Throsby, which encompasses a fair chunk of the Wollongong and Shellharbour LGA's and reaches into the Southern Highlands. Created in 1984, it has only had two representatives in the 36 years of its existance, both Labor. It is what could be called the stereotypical safe seat with Labor sitting on a 16.5% margin and a very large rusted on voting base.

Politically this means that Throsby tends to be used to parachute in Labor candidates, is usually at the back of the line when it comes to election sweeteners and generally gets put waaaay down the priority list for the other parties.

Just a quick aside - I'm sooo not a fan of the head office selecting candidates model that the ALP and others use. While Jennie George has proven herself to be a good representative for the region and the Labor Candidate Stephen Jones is proving that he's treating the campaign seriously, the idea that the rank and file should be overridden so easily just doesn't sit right with me.

Anyway, back onto topic.

Part of what makes Throsby a safe Labor seat is the attitude of the other parties to trying to capture it. It's a vicious circle - it's a safe Labor seat so we won't waste money on trying to capture it, so it continues to be a safe Labor seat. Oh they'll put up candidates, because they can't be seen to be dropping the seat altogether, but the campaigns are usually limp to non-existent, leaving most people to wonder who the hell it is that is looking out at them from the ballot paper.

Take for example the Nationals candidate for Throsby, Alan Hay. The only information I could find on him came from the nationals own website (he's listed under NSW candidates). From what it looks like there isn't even a brochure site for him, hell, he doesn't even rate his own page on the Nationals website.

The Liberal candidate, Juliet Arkwright at least warrants her own page on the Liberals web site, but they seem to have forgotten what she looks like, and if you want to contact her, you apparently need to go via the Liberal party offices in Sydney.

Peter Moran, the Greens candidate, also gets his own page , no, the woman dominating that page isn't the candidate for Throsby, no matter what the site says. She's Lee Rhiannon, a senate candidate and obviously more important when it comes to getting elected than Peter Moran. However if you persevere and scroll down you will actually find content from Peter himself.

Before I finish, I would like to point out that the one who seems to be doing the most work to take the seat is the one who probably needs to put in the least amount effort. Stephen Jones, the Labor candidate has been out pounding the streets, has his own web site, twitter account (which he actually utilises to communicate with people) and more.

I may not agree with his parties policies but Stephen Jones is showing a hell of a lot more respect to the people of Throsby than the others.

James Purser: Thoughts from the Train - The Election Campaign So Far

2010-07-19T21:23:39+00:00

So I'm on the train heading to Sydney and I thought I would put down some thoughts on the election campaign so far.

First off, what the hell happened to running an election based on the idealogical differences between the parties? Right now we have a choice between a party that is hesitant about doing anything to tackle climate change, is happy to play on peoples ill informed fears of a miniscule group of people and is happy to simply follow the polls, and a party that is hesitant to do anything to tackle climate change, plays on peoples fears of a miniscule group of people and is happy to play to the polls.
Please tell me I'm not the only one who's sick of being treated like a moron by the parties? Are we, as a country so backwards that we can't be trusted with big words and actual explanations of policies?
On that note, does anyone expect the proposed Leaders debate to be an actual debate or just talking points at ten paces. If it's going to be the latter then I think I'll switch off. I'm pretty sure that the debate between Jimmy Smits and Alan Aldas characters on West Wing has spoiled all real life political debates for me.
Enforced preference deals truly suck. Parties should not be in a position where they get to direct your preferences. The senate voting system should be changed to remove the need for above/below the line voting and optional preferencing should be introduced.

Well that's my thoughts from the train for this morning.

Dave Hall: Western Digital to fix Licensing?

2010-07-18T13:50:53+00:00

Over the last few months months I've been corresponding with Dennis Ulrich of Western Digital (WDC) about my concerns with the EULA for the My Book World Edition (MBWE) and their obligations under the GPL. To say it has been a drawn out process is an understatement.

It has taken some time to get WDC to understand the situation. There has been confusing messages about what the situation is with the EULA, the GPL and what license covers what pieces of code. The bottom line is that currently users must check the header of each file to ascertain which license applies to it, even though the downloads are marked as GPL.

Although WDC is moving slowly, they do seem to be commited to making the situation clearer in the next iteration of their MBWE product line. Based on a recent phone call with Dennis, the legal and engineering teams are working together to ensure various licenses complied with and their software engineers are aware of their obligations.

The next version of the MBWE is likely to ship with a revised EULA and properly inform the users of their rights under the GPL. This text is still being developed. At the same time it is still unclear if WDC will backport their changes to their existing NAS products. As it is a simple string change it shouldn't be too hard for them to dedicate a few resources to audit the code and update the strings.

It is unfortunate that WDC appears to have little interest in developing their MBWE product range as a hacker friendly FOSS product. It appears the licensing fix that will be implemented by WDC will more clearly delinate the FOSS and non free components of the MBWE firmware. Clarity is always an important legal consideration, but doesn't help foster a community. WDC seem to have little interest in fostering a hacker community around their products. This is an unfortunate decision by the company.

Many manufacturers of embedded devices only start releasing source for their firmware after being caught out for violating the GPL. WDC is to be commended for complying with the requirements of the GPL from the start. Altough there is no legal requirement for them to make the web gui code and other non free components available, WDC already does. It would be disappointing if they chose to take a backward step and stopped distributing parts of the firmware.

It is possible, and perfectly legal, for WDC to stop distributing the source for the proprietary components. At the same time it would not take much effort for them to release the whole platform as GPL or another FOSS friendly license. WDC is already required to do a code drop every time they release a new version of their hardware or firmware. I suspect it would be faster and easier to push all code to a public git repository than pick through and dump selected components as tarballs on a website.

WDC already have their support team dealing with customer bug reports. Maintaining a mailing list, a bug tracker, a wiki and maybe a public source code repository on somewhere like gitorious is likely to take less than 1 full time employee. The benefit for WDC would be great.

Not only is the hacker community likely to contribute bugs fixes and propose or even develop new features, they can help increase sales. I'm sure the good will generated by the switch to truly open approach to the MBWE product line would outweigh the cost of the additional resources required.

Let's hope Western Digital's fix is a FOSS friendly one. I will post more news as things progress.

James Purser: Planning Alerts Android App - Version 0.6

2010-07-12T11:55:46+00:00

Okay here's the next release of Planning Alerts AU.

This version now checks to see if GPS or Wireless Location Detection services are activated and prompts you if they aren't. Changed the Icon and marker graphics (if anyone wants to contribute graphically, please feel free :)).

So here it is:

Planning Alerts AU - 0.6

IKT: WordPress 3.0

2010-07-11T12:10:06+00:00

Upgraded to 3.0, everything looks nicer.

IKT: Bored?

2010-07-11T12:04:10+00:00

Yeah me to.

James Purser: Planning Alerts Android App - Version 0.4

2010-07-10T02:07:23+00:00

Okay, here's version 0.4 of planningalertsau, the android app I'm building based on the Planning Alerts API.

In this version I've fixed the following:

Map crashes when there are 0 alerts

Added About dialog
Preferences Menu option now works in AlertsDisplay
Alert TextView now clickable (calls AlertWebDisplay and displays Planning Alerts Page for specific Alert)
AlertDisplay now shows a message if there are no results

Now, there are still councils for whom Planning Alerts doesn't have results for and they are still looking for help, so if you want to contribute please head along and let them know

As always if you have a bug, please submit it here. It would be helpful if you could include the following information:

Suburb
State
Postcode
Longitude and Latitude

It'll help me when testing to see if the issue is a Planning Alerts or planningalertsau issue :)