I was clearing away some old email folders, and came across this Star Wars gag from an email I recieved in 1999. I laughed my pants off at the time. Then I found it again 7 months later and remember laughing so loud in the BCG Auckland office that people came to check if I was OK! So for posterity and your enjoyment, I present to you:

25 LINES FROM STAR WARS THAT CAN BE IMPRESSIVE IF YOU SUBSTITUTE THE WORD "PANTS".

1. A tremor in the pants. The last time I felt this was in the presence of my old master.

2. You are unwise to lower your pants.

3. We've got to be able to get some reading on those pants, up or down.

4. She must have hidden the plans in her pants. Send a detachment down to retrieve them. See to it personally Commander.

5. These pants may not look like much, kid, but they've got it where it counts.

6. I find your lack of pants disturbing.

7. These pants contain the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it.

8. Han will have those pants down. We've got to give him more time!

9. General Veers, prepare your pants for a surface assault.

10. I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants back home.

11. TK-421. . . Why aren't you in your pants?

12. Lock the door. And hope they don't have pants.

13. Governor Tarkin. I should've recognised your foul pants when I was brought on board.

14. You look strong enough to pull the pants off of a Gundark.

15. Luke . . . Help me take . . . these pants off.

16. Great, Chewie, great. Always thinking with your pants.

17. That blast came from those pants. That thing's operational!

18. Don't worry. Chewie and I have gotten into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.

19. Maybe you'd like it back in your pants, your highness.

20. Your pants betray you. Yours feelings for them are strong. Especially one. Your sister!

21. Jabba doesn't have time for smugglers who drop their pants at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser.

22. Yeah, well short pants is better than no pants at all, Chewie.

23. Attention. This is Lando Calrissean. The Empire has taken control of my pants, I advise everyone to leave before more troops arrive.

24. I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.

25. You came in those pants? You're braver than I thought.

I will watch this with great interest - there is a bootable demo CD that you can download which I will try. Apparently ex-Be developers should be able to do a fairly simple recompile of their code, which could mean lots of nice multimedia apps very soon :)

Also note that you may see references to a proprietory License - but the project has infact just switched over to the LGPL in order to attract more developers.

Although I like the sound of the linux kernal approach, OpenBeOS is actually showing quite a lot of progress, with nearly all of the major code segments in beta or late alpha...

These surveys have been so publicised in the Linux press that I imagine the results will be next to useless, but I went and filled it in anyway.

The Linux press is making a big deal about how the results of the survey won't be published. I don't really see that as an issue - it's a voluntary commercial survey - they can do as they darn well please with the results.

I did fill in the survey (it's kinda long and annoying - I usually avoid surveys like the plague - especially phone ones that will "only take 5 minutes of your time", I always transferred them to Tim ;)

There are some silly multiple choice options in the survey, possibly there to filter out stupid respondants, like:

What organizations would you recommend use Linux?
   Organizations that want to send a message to the greedy computer industry

The highlight of my responses is my answer to the freeform question:

List the top one or two possible improvements that you would like to see made to Windows Server.
   * more standards compliance
   * less kb articles giving a solution as "this is by design"

Feel free to comment with your responses.

I mean, I use emacs for goodness sake, I'm not averse to confusing interfaces with oodles of key combinations to remember ... when it delivers positive benefits. info may have some nice features, but for the purpose of concise software manuals, it offers me none. Ever tried to print a manual in info and have it look nice?

man in a shell is great - it's piped through less so I can search it, scroll back and forth etc.

xman sucks - a good X man browser that let you search within the man page and jump to headings or click on references would make it really useful.

I love change. I hate change for the sake of using the politically correct (read GNU) tool.

• 108 different implementations of the Towers of Hanoi including a towers of Hanoi ICMP server...
• 55 Operating systems on his Apple PowerBook - including Plan 9 and IBM DOS 1 through 6, although noticeably missing NextStep and Darwin (there's a gimme right there)
• A dozen obfuscated code entries
• A $2.56 reward check from Professor Donald E. Knuth from MIT - for finding an error in the book "The Art of Computer Programming"

VMWare was in talks with Microsoft about a potential takeover earlier this year, but an agreement was never reached. Just as well too - VMWare is probably the best server virtualisation product in town, and is very good at running quantities of Linux, BSD and Windows servers on big servers.

I know there are pro-Microsoft or even Microsoft-neutral people reading this thinking "wow - he's a raving open-source/Mac person", well, just take a look at what has happened to Connectix VirtualPC since Microsoft bought it. VirtualPC is a similar virtualisation product to VMWare but is known best as the software that lets you run Windows on a Mac.

Guess what client operating systems the new version released by MS supports? Linux? Nope. Solaris x86? Nope. FreeBSD? Nope. OpenBSD? Nope. BeOS? Nope. QNX? Nope. Windows? Why of course ;>

I'm not looking forward to the bill either - if I knew it would be so long I probably wouldn't have used my Compuserve global dialup roaming account...

For those unfamiliar with Big Mouth Billy Bass, it's a cheap animatronics toy fish mounted on a trophy plate that wiggles it's tail and sings (with lip sync).

The goal of the Big Mouth Billy Bass hacking project "is to use any Linux device--desktop or embedded--to make the Big Mouth Billy Bass say or act any way you want! That's right, we want to convert Big Mouth Billy to the least expensive peripheral you'll ever buy."

The original project proposal contains somewhat loftier goals:

By adding this functionality to the bass, in addition to networking protocols, the bass will be transformed into an H.323 compliant video teleconferencing host. It will be possible to use Microsoft NetMeeting or CUSeeMe to connect to your bass at home and talk with your loved one ones!

"The Saddam capture was a case of mistaken identity" said Donald Rumsfeld this afternoon.

"At first we thought he was delierious, but when he kept telling us that his reindeer were on the roof it became clear that we had in fact captured Santa."

When quizzed about the reliability of the American military in identifying known terrorist ex-heads of state, Rumsfeld replied "How were we to know that Santa was of middle eastern origin?"

Well there was very good news overnight. You know we were thrilled when we heard from the Americans that they'd confirmed his identity. They were good enough to let us know before they made any public statements. It's a great blow for the insurgents, it's a reward for the coalition that has obviously been suffering considerable casualties and I think a great morale boost for the Iraqi people. They really know that he's now gone forever and they can go about their future with much greater confidence.

Good news indeed!

The site also has nice info and pictures of cute Mac history. I always wanted an Outbound when I was a kiddie: Macintosh set your mind free. Now, set your Macintosh free. Lightweight. Powerful. Affordable. Don't settle for deskbound when you can be... Outbound.

Tram Town pointed out that the official Sony history omits some interesting failures such as the Elcaset.

This led me on an interesting (but time wasting) internet trawl for discarded audio recording technologies. Of course everyone's favourite is the 8 track cartridge :) I would love to get my hands on one of these 8 track players.

Some of the 8 track fanatics are a bit crazy, I mean "accordianed tape can be carefully ironed straight with a not-very-hot iron, when the tape is protected on both sides by cloth or paper." ?! Hmm, except I can actually imagine myself doing that...

It's open source, and it's as addictive as I remember Tetris being when it first came out. It's actually a very similar concept - kind of like tetris upside down with discs that have gravity fields.

RedHat users will find pain free installation RPM files at this site: http://oandrieu.nerim.net/frozen-bubble/

The main site downloads page includes versions for Windows and MacOS X, but I haven't tried them yet...

Can you resist not opening this e-mail

As simple as that. I looked at it for about 10 seconds... and then opened it. It was, of course, spam. But I had to be sure.

Damn reverse psychology.

She didn't have to do much other than quote Bill to make an interesting article, so that's what I'm going to do!

Bill: You don't need perfect code to avoid security problems ... there are two other techniques: one is called firewalling, and the other is called keeping the software up to date.

I can just imagine Dr. Evil or Homer Simpson making quote marks with their fingers like an advertising exec while saying "firewalling". Who does he think we are? True a lot of networks are embarrasingly lacking in protection, but to use a condescending phrase like "one is called firewalling" is just plain rude.

My other favourite quote is this next one - I think I understand what he is saying, but you can never be too sure...

Bill: Actually, all the forms of Unix (as well as Linux) have had more vulnerabilities per line of code. They don't propagate as much because they're not as dense as our system is, so the things that prevent the propagation are particularly important for our world.

So is he saying that Windows is bloated and has way too many lines of code? Is he under the misapprehension that installing a Windows operating system turns the users PC into a small collapsed star? Or is he just saying that Windows is plain stupid? If Unix has less lines of code and, undeniably, similar levels of functionality, then it's code is actually more dense...

To be fair, the people employed by Microsoft because they actually know what they are talking about when it comes to security distanced themselves from Bill's "You don't need perfect code to avoid security problems" stance, with sensible stuff like:

Software should be secure by design, secure by default, and secure in deployment. ... There are two major kinds of security defects, Input trust issues, and everything else.

As Lynn suggested, I think Bill probably earned himself a few words from his security business unit. One comment on the article said "Stop Pointing Fingers at the User and Competitor". Yeah. It makes holes in the air and the Angels fall out.

Of course to get tcl 8.4 I will need to upgrade to AolServer 4.0 :( but then I will get package support as well :)

So to assist the lazy and paranoid, you can now comment anonymously! Note that you can only edit your prior comments if you created them as a logged in user - you also still need to register to post to the forums.

In addition, I have also enabled commenting on book reviews, so comment away :)

This link (http://newton.kallisys.net:8080/) is served to you by an Apple Newton 2100. You may need to reload it once or twice to make it work.

If you don't know what a Newton is or why this is cool, then I won't try to explain, or it will make your head hurt.

Ok so I'll try ;) Imagine a palm pilot, but designed many years before - with natural handwriting recognition that is only now being equalled in some handheld devices (most, like current PalmOS devices, are getting worse...). Then imagine running a public webserver on it.

If you still don't see why that is cool, then you are truly not a geek (but then you're probably quite glad about that).

Note that:

He currently works on projects involving kernel hacking and low-level cross-debugging. When the stupid debugger doesn't crash, he often needs to stop the server to use the two PC-Card slots.

Reminds me of the potato powered webserver. Yes the much publicised one was a hoax - but this one http://d116.com/spud/ appeared to be the real deal. Unfortunately it is now offline after the owner had had it with rotting potatos!

It turns out that the publisher of the book "Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?" (one of the earliest starting points of the JFK conspiracies in 1964) received subsidies totalling $672,000 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s!!! This and other information nuggets are held in the Washington Post article linked above (You need to complete a quick survey to view the article for free).

Thanks to Phil's Blog for the pointer.

Conspiracies sell!! The advertiser link at the bottom of the linked Washington Post article (debunking the conspiracy theories) is a JFK Conspiracy book, promising "Startling revelations from MD who tried to save JFK" for just $16.99! available, of course, on Amazon.com!

I'm sure Michael Jackson's lawyers won't be too happy seeing these top ten customer recommendations listed against the new Michael Jackson best of CD (which I will buy, since I love his music).

I must say, I am quite surprised there is a book with the title "The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things" on the shelf!!

Thanks to Phil's Blog for the link.

Now you can relive those glory days in your commuting time with the Frodo Commodore 64 emulator for PalmOS :) Check out these screenshots: http://frodopalm.sourceforge.net/gallery.html

One day when 3 opens up my Motorola a920 I can port the EPOC Frodo (http://e32frodo.sourceforge.net/) to UIQ Symbain devices.

I like people who take things seriously!

If you take your typing (and RSI) seriously, the best keyboard on the planet is the Kinesis contoured range (http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm). I'm still saving up for mine though...

Aaron's blog entry about procrastination by tech workers (link above) is so true!

I'd write a summary, but you can read it for yourself :P

Well, I guess it was his grandson holding the baloon - I couldn't see because whoever was holding it did not come higher than the window sill.

My second thought (after a mild curse) was that I wouldn't want MY son being driven around by someone who could barely make out the line markings. Since I'm not even married or have any children, that's not a problem I'll be having any time soon.

But THEN I had the interesting thought that is actually worth writing here (sorry for the previous filler - my English teacher always did use a lot of red ink scrawling waffle across great swathes of my essays...)

I thought about how this old guy may well be fearful of cars, Sydney traffic, and automatic traffic lights. Such things would have seemed fanciful in his younger days of horse drawn milk carts and gas lamp lit streets (I'm guessing he was over 80).

THAT made me wonder what technology advances, that would sound fanciful now, will become reality and scare the pants off ME when i'm driving my grandson home from the virtual mall in my banged up old hovercraft...

Interesting way to think about what the future holds...

A while back I blogged an entry about The story of Mel, a Real Programmer, a story which is nowadays legend in the circles of true nerds (like me 8-). The story was posted to a usenet newsgroup by Ed Nather in 1983. You can believe that it was 1983 because noone posts to usenet anymore. If they do, they don't call it usenet. Even if they do that they CERTAINLY don't give their email in UUCP form. (His UUCP email was, by the way, utastro!nather - so short! People would have chosen employers just to get an email like that!) Anyway, back to the story, which opens with the following paragrahs:

An article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement, "Real Programmers write in Fortran". Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code - not Fortran, not RATFOR, not even assembly language - Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers, directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Mel, because that was his name.

I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corporation, a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.)

The trouble was, no-one knew who Mel was! (Inquiring minds need to know these sorts of details...)

Well in 1994 a guy by the name of Bill von Hagen stumbled across some manuals referring to a programmer of the Royal McBee Corporation called "Mel Kaye" and asked "Could this be the one true Mel?". How exciting!

More recently, images have been published of some of Mel's hand written coding sheets (here and here). These images come from a guy called Robert Lilly whose first programming experience was on a Royal McBee LGP-30. He also posts some manual images. Further geeky details of the Royal McBee line of computers (including the full text of an LGP-30 Programming manual) can be found at this link.

Gee I love this stuff - it's in my genes. Maybe that's because both my parents were programmers! (Are you reading this Samuel ;)

The two Allington Bridge controllers witness Brains talking into his watch
Allington Bridge Controller: He's still at it, poor fellow. Seems to be under some delusion that he's in charge of the rescue.
Dave Clayton: We're desperate enough, even to listen to him!
Allington Bridge Controller: Yes, but he's just suggested they should fire missiles!

Japanese phone firm NTT DoCoMo has created a wristwatch phone that uses its owner's finger as an earpiece.

The gadget, dubbed Finger Whisper, uses a wristband to convert the sounds of conversation to vibrations that can be heard when the finger is placed in the ear. -- news.bbc.co.uk

A phone that uses a wristwatch and a finger seems incredible. If you don't want to listen, you touch your thumb or in a neat reversal of human behaviour, take your fingers out of your ears. -- Phil Baker

At last - we are finally entering into the 21st century! I seem to remember another phone company made a rather bulky wristwatch phone some time ago, but you had to plug in a headset.

I was wondering how you would get your phonebook in - of course the obvious answer is bluetooth, but I still love the idea of the timex watch that could scan in barcodes to set appointment alarms from your PC!

Assuming bluetooth, then you could also use a dialler application on your organiser for when you needed to dial a new number.

When can I get one?!

Thank's to amazon.co.uk for the above Thunderbirds quote (here) and to my rediculous memory that forgets important appointments, but remembers fine detail about marrionette dialog many years after I watched it! You can see some stills from this Thunderbird episode at ThunderbirdsOnline.co.uk.

There still isn't much, but This Newsforge article has (toward the end) a nice summary of the players and whether the author (John O'Sullivan) thought they were winners or losers in the saga and why.

Soekris Engineering have some really nice x86 compatible boards with built in ethernet, compact flash and PCI, as well as hardware crypto card for accellerated VPN work. The quality of their website suggests that they are very good hardware engineers ;)

This leads to a number of very cool things:

1. you can read some reports I wrote at Uni that are still quoted in numerous papers and articles on the net. One such report is Groupware & Intranets-Driving efficiency and effectiveness in business. Another popular one was The Problems of Urban Sprawl in Victoria, and How to Solve Them. You can still find people referencing that article if you google for my name. (Note that the copies of the articles linked here were on a server called users.webtime.com.au, an ISP that I designed and implemented with Rusty for my then employer - the original articles were hosted on my uni account which has patchier wayback archiving.)
   
   Or how about this caustic article which was me pretending to be a newspaper writer for some uni assignment: The time & money wasting computer
   
   All this and more can be read on my super quality homepage - dated March 1996. The humour page has some still-funny stuff. (I seem to remember it was the big re-design. I'd hate to see the original version!! The earliest files in the wayback machine are dated 1996, but the server was having trouble when i tried to go there.)
2. (yes, the first one was a long expose of my writing talent ;) The other cool thing is a Wayback link. Drag that link to your browser's link bar, and click on it when you are viewing a page and want to see an old version. For instance, if you get nostalgic for the good old days of yahoo - go to www.yahoo.com, click the Wayback link, and you will find an early 1996 yahoo homepage linking to interesting news stories like "Lotus exec sees huge business-to-business Internet market" and "Gates says NT 5.0 to enter beta this fall". Did you know that in 1996 you could view the yahoo directory in 3D VRML?
   
   Or, for the Apple nuts, the 1996 homepage of www.apple.com tells us about Apple announcing a "new version of the GeoPort Telecom Adapter Kit, increasing modem speed to 28.8 Kbps" WOOHOO!!

As if in sympathy, I have had more email requiring my URGENT CONSIDERATION (why are they always in CAPS? Maybe they are observing CAPS LOCK DAY Thanks to Tim and/or Russ for the link - can't remember who ;)

I have a TrendMicro anti-virus and anti-spam product on my server (which is great with viruses, but not 100% on spam), and Mozilla's Bayesian spam filter on my mailbox (which I can't trust to auto-delete my spam since sometimes it's too aggressive) and my life is better but not awesome.

Maybe it's time to try out my friend Matt's spam product Alien Camel - looks neat :)

Thank's to the Monty Python spam sketch for the title!

According to this Australian Associated Press report, an Australian man has been arrested in rural NSW in association with the Nigerian Bank Scams. It seems that some people were indeed gullible and foolish enough to fall for these hoaxes that caused the rest of us much amusement at their silliness.

The power of the Internet on global commerce extends through all facets of life - even the illegal. It is amazing to think that a man who lives in a town outside of Dubbo can con people in Europe and the US to think that they are dealing with a former African head of state/businessman/banker etc. To the length that they parted with (presumably a total of) hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It will be sad to no longer receive emails from Barrister Williams Akim the lawyer to the widow of the Late Gen. Sanni Abacha former Nigerian Military Head of State who died mysteriously as a result of Cardiac Arrest and his cohorts. Sadly I suspect that someone will fill the shoes of the current scammers - in fact it is likely that more than the three arrested people are perpetrating the scam around the world (it's hard to patent an illegal scam - but i'm sure it's not impossible ;)

In the mean time, here is the article: On the road to nowhere

This is where I go to relax when my computer get's the best of me. If l ever forget why I moved to Sydney, this reminds me of at least one of the reasons!

Speaking of Sydney and sporting events, has anyone else been following the rugby world cup? How much does everyone love the Georgian Prince, Victor Greenwich Dadianov?! Apparently if not for heightened world cup security, his ceremonial get up would include a dagger, sword and ammunition pouch (according to todays SMH). I would hope NORMAL security would prevent that!

ooh-here comes my meal ;)

Next i might go for a walk to give you a closer view of the bridge :)

I think I have the relevant hacks in place to avoid compressing files sent to buggy browsers (like IE5), but if you have any wierdness please let me know.

Also I am about to cut in half the length of history shown on my homepage. If you want to read more entries, you just need to click on the Blog tab at the top of the page.

Well the news feeds were fun, but they chewed up unnecessary bandwidth - so they're gone.

But, in testing right now, is live photo-blogging from my shiny new 3g phone (more about the phone later).

In essence, I can take a photo from my phone and email it with some text to a special address at my server - where it will be automatically blogged here. (There is more to it than that, like passwords, user matching etc, but that's the gist of it).

It should be up and running this afternoon in a functional way - but it's pretty hacked right now. Ultimately it will be an extention to the OpenACS weblogger package (and use the content repository and all the other OpenACS goodness).

Watch this space!

I love the London Underground (or The Tube as it is affectionately/derisively known). You can see some photo's I took when I was in London earlier this year in my photo album (Underground Photos).

I just stumbed across a very cool website devoted to the disused platforms and stations of the tube by a guy called Hywel Williams (cool name). The main website is at this link. It's so comprehensive I haven't had time to read it all yet, but my favourite so far is his tour of the disused platforms of Holborn stations which include offices and a dormitory used during the second world war - very cool!

Sharp eyes will notice that there is a new blog listed over there on the left in my daily must read "More Blogs" list.

Phil Baker is a man with a sharp mind, keen sense of humour, good taste, and the pastor of a great church in Perth - River View church.

From Australian politics to his somewhat banal humour (that's for sucking me in with the dictionary.com gullible joke :P ), it's the Phil Baker we know and love!

It's late, I'm tired, and I'm writing an overdue report - normally I would be grumpy as all get out, but I'm not!

I'm listening to the new album by Darlene Zschech called kiss of heaven, and it's cool! Right now the last track is playing, which is a cruisy cover of U2's song Walk On.

It's a very accessible mix of songs and styles from the U2 cover to an orchestral version of Shout to the Lord.

Darlene's heart really comes through the music - in fact through the whole project itself, as some of the profits will be going straight to Mercy Ministries Australia, which Darlene and her husband Mark look after. (Mercy Ministries Australia is a non-profit organisation that looks after and trains single mums and other young women how to do life well by teaching them Biblical principles and God's love. Mercy Ministries of America was founded by Nancy Alcorn).

kiss of heaven is being distributed through record stores globally by EPIC/Sony music, and Christian bookstores by Integrity music

(You can order kiss of heaven from amazon.com with this link.)

Today marks the sad close of (for the forseeable future) supersonic passenger air travel. Concorde posted it's final commercial fare paying flight, from Heathrow, London to JFK, New York. Unfortunately I have never had the chance to fly on it :( when news broke earlier this year it would be retiring, I tried to book a frequent flyer seat - unsurprisingly they had all gone.

Amazing Concorde facts (courtesy of ba.com and other sources):

• She stretches up to 10 inches in flight
• The wingspan is less than that of slower passenger jet's due to the use of vortex lift
• Her four Rolls Royce engines make more than 38,000 lbs of thrust EACH (with after burner)
• She is travelling at 250 MILES PER HOUR groundspeed before she even leaves the ground! That's over 400 kilometers per hour!!! Sure would give my Honda S2000 a run for it's money down the straight ;)
• Travel time from London to New York is less than half that for a conventional passenger jet - combined with the time difference you land in New York before you left London.
• Concorde has clocked up more supersonic flight hours than all the Air Forces in the world.

You can read all the current news surrounding this flight with this google news search: external link.

I was alreasy cursing OpenOffice, my affinity for beta versions, even an instance of aolserver that was chewing cpu for my inability to add an extra bullet point to my document.

The problem was, it turns out, that one of my disks was full. Deleting some ancient repositories in my CVS tree put it all back to rights.

I need one of those new 300 Gb hard drives!

Yes I know - this example isn't really a great example of Occam's Razor, but it made for a snappy title ;)

You can check them all out as they are revealed, on this dilbert.com web page.

Am I missing something? Can someone explain why this website (titled Matrix XP), has any interest value at all?

DB from Tram Town says

I'm not sure that I fully understand this, but folks better read than me probably will.

Those of you who lack the joy of a thorough knowledge of Apple Computer history will miss the irony in the advertising deal between Apple/iTunes and Pepsi (read more about the deal in this Mercury News link).

It is an incredibly shrewd plan, in my opionion, which should secure the windows installed base of iTunes, and thus boost iPod sales (which seem to be the very profitable main beneficiary to Apple of the iTunes online store - selling more than two a minute at last report).

Thank's to DB of Tram Town for the link. I must go dig up a good Apple biography to read again. DB (or Semi - I forget who's pseudonym is which) if you are reading, can I borrow one off you next time I'm in Melbourne?

You will also notice a new "Recent comments" box to the left of this page. Clicking on the link will show you the object that was commented on and the comment itself.

The OpenACS Core Team (or OCT for short) elections completed last week, and the worthy elected members took effect as of today.

Congratulations to all the electees! The election results can be viewed at this link.

OpenACS is a democratically managed open source project, and the OCT is elected to make key decisions pertaining to the direction and management of the product. More information on OpenACS (a version of which is used to run this site) can be found on the openacs.org website.

I've been meaning to add this for a while, and it's not finished yet, but here it is anyway.

You will notice there is now a News tab at the top of this page. Based on the OpenACS news-aggregator package by Simon Carstensen (now of Collaboraid). The changes (apart from cosmetic ones) are mostly to make a public set of feeds available to all site readers (the standard news-aggregator package is designed to let all users maintain their own set of news feeds, this functionality may come to mark.aufflick.com one day...).

Feel free to let me know if there are any news feeds you would like me to add :)

Paul De Jong gave a great address about temptation and how it is a turning point where you can choose blessing instead of allowing guilt to blurr your thoughts and head towards compromise. (Luckily he communicated better than I can at 1am...)

Off to bed now for an early start to tomorrow's sessions.

or something like that. Actually, Bill said

developing its next generation of Windows operating system software will cost as much as it cost the United States government to put a man on the Moon (not an actual quote)

Yeah, because mankind has never produced a graphical computer operating system before...truly groundbreaking stuff that.

In other quoteable quotes from the same off the cuff interview, Bill answered a question about whether Linux featured in his dreams with

if Alex (the interviewer) meant did Linux comprise a threat, well at one time the Armies of OS/2 said they were coming (not a real quote)

Roderick W. Smith has continued his excellent series on NewsForge about maintaining linux file systems with an article about Recovering Linux files and filesystems.

The previous articles (such as Resizing and defragmenting Linux filesystems) are all available by clicking the "Last time" link at the start of the article.

..the wrong way! Thanks to Rusty, we have another entry for the StupidBase:

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q131109

When you run Explorapedia and use the Exploratron to look at the Earth spinning, the Earth rotates in the wrong direction.

Exploratron - sounds like something the new governor of California might drive around in ;)

The last few logs have been increasingly far apart. Partly because of a deluge of client work, and partly because of the impending version 5.0 release of OpenACS (OpenACS people - don't forget to vote this week in the Core Team elections!).

But partly, because it's hard to pick out and summarise interesting stuff when there's just too much of it! From SCO vs. IBM to the Matrix being released in IMAX format to insane legislation being passed throughout the US... the world is busy!

So I must get back to work - time to write a to do list...

Now that I have upgraded my workstation, it is the painful time of finding and installing the usefull bits that make your workstation home.

First, I had to deal with the instability of sawfish under gnome-2. There appears to be a specific gnome-2 version of sawfish - but it is at version 0.0 and I couldn't get it to ./configure without errors. Too boot, it appears unmaintained... It turns out, however, that 1.3 works ok, and is easily compiles from source (although my favourite win3.1 theme still has minor problems with the transient window style :( ).

Next, my attention was drawn to emacs. GNU emacs of course. See this link for one view on the GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs holy wars. Note that I have no recollection about why I chose GNU Emacs over XEmacs - I think it just felt like "the right thing to do"! As opposed to why I chose Emacs after over a decade of using vi/vim - Emacs makes you more productive, period.

Anyway, back to the point, after copying and pasting some juicy bits from my backed up .emacs file (thank goodness), I remembered that the standard gnuserv/client wasn't up to chop, and that I had been using someone's re-package of the more advanced client/server functionality from XEmacs. In case anoyone (like me) ever needs reminding, Melynda McDonald & Martin Schwenke have some very fine emacs hacks on their website.

That should keep me happy for today (I have real work to do...), but I am still searching for a replacement window-list widget to replace the lame gnome-2 one (as per my previous rant).

It seems that my Apple Newton 2000 finally has a potential successor. Although I have recently become quite fond of the handwriting recognition of my Newton, grafiti 2.0 is still my favourite input method.

Don't be so shocked! One of Jeff Hawkins' masterstrokes in developing the original palm pilot was that everything was well road tested. His famous block of wood (i tried very hard to find a picture of the block for you - if anyone has one - please post a comment!) proved the physical form factor, and graffiti as a popular input method was poven by the runaway success of the graffiti for newton commercial software package (it probably also made a tidy sum of money to boot). It was subsequently included in the Apple Newton Enhancement package, and I'm sure Apple paid a pretty penny for that.

Sadly, it seems Graffiti is on it's way out. This business week article gives us some interesting facts: New PalmOne devices already use Graffiti 2 (which isn't really Graffiti due to a wierd lawsuit from Xerox). And all new Handspring devices will use keyboards because they are more popular than graffiti driven devices. With who? An ancient breed of monkeys with 2.5mm diamater fingers?

Anyway, back on topic - the PalmOne Tungsten-3 is one sexy pda. the screen is getting bigger (a Newton-replacement requirement) and can be rotated into landscape (another requirement). Of course all the fixed external keyboards won't play with landscape mode - but there is always the external Newton keyboard with adapter ;) (assuming you can still get serial cables for Palm's)

It also has bluetooth built in, so forget about cables to sync with your PowerBook or dial-up with your mobile - now you can irradiate intimate parts of your body while your pda and mobile happily chat to each other via Gigahertz band wireless...

Well, I have finally upgraded my Intel SGI workstation. I first installed RedHat 9, which would have been a breeze if I hadn't been to stingy to download the third cdrom .iso image ... it took me about 8 attempts to build a package selection that didn't need disk 3...

Then I cross-graded to Ximian Desktop 2, which was almost a breeze with their cute

wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

So all is well! I didn't like metacity much, so I have switched to sawfish (the gnome 1 default window manager), but unfortunately the win3.1 theme that i fell in love with doesn't work properly with current versions of sawfish :( and the sawfish-ui preferences app is a bit broken. I guess I will have to compile it myself as I suspect the redhat sawfish rpm doesn't quite understand the Ximian installaion of gnome.

All in all I am now a happy camper. Oh, except the gnome 2 window list applet blows... and despite Havoc's insistance that it does everything you need, try puting it in a vertical toolbar - yuk.

And if you are still reading, I am truly sorry for boring you to tears with my computer shenanigens! (Ok, so that was just a good excuse to use the word shenanigens!)

Not that this is a new idea at all, but it's good to see more of it - and it's in Denmark, where the pastries are so good it's hard not to want to write about it. Oh, and the people are pretty cool too! (Hi Lars, Peter and Maria :)

But the link itself: Denmark Gets Wi-Fi " tells us that a compnay called RedSpot has started targeting non-DSL areas with WiFi, starting in Aarhus (I can hear the automated train announcement already...).

RedSpot reckon they need 20 subscribers to set up an area - I wonder if they actually make a profit at those numbers. One suspects not, unless they do something funky like setting up the base station at one of the subscribers houses, or they have a very good deal with the power pole company...

Update: Speaking of Denmark, I'm pretty excited about a forthcoming venture: Skrifter - The best of Denmark for your Home & Family. More news as it comes to hand :)

``The great thing about mod_rewrite is it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail. The downside to mod_rewrite is that it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail.''

-- Brian Behlendorf
Apache Group

``I had a source code management problem, so I started using CVS. Now i have two problems''

-- Anon

Powerhouse youth at my church had an 80's theme tonight, so in commemoration, I am running a windows 3.1 window theme on my Linux SGI workstation.

It is surprisingly nice - what would be REALLY cool would be a Windows 2 theme that prevented your windows from overlapping (nice license agreement Apple ;)

But Carsten Clasohm's photo's in his personal website are enough to make my jump on a plane right now.

Breathtaking Amazing, and Cows!

James Hunt is obviously an out of the box thinker from IBM - he has written this article on a neat idea of his to build a new startup process using make.

Sounds dumb, but think of it - gnu makefiles allow us to very simply define dependancies, and parallelize execution based on these dependencies.

Worth a read if you like that sort of geekiness, or if you are designing a custom corporate build and halving the boot time will make you popular...

In 1990 Michael Jackson was hospitalized for chest pains, on my birthday!

This amazing fact came from the VERY comprehensive Historic Events & Birthdates site run by Scope Systems.

Scope Systems seem to be some kind of electronics repair company, so I guess the staff just have a thing for interesting trivia facts! They claim over 3 million hits - I hope they're not paying for outbound traffic...

While surfing the ICANN site, I noticeded a memo on the future of the now very fragmented whois system: external link

Dubbed the "wildcard" service, Verisign (the US for profit company that manages top level domains .com .net and others), Verisign's dns servers dynamically generate bogus records that redirect you to their own search site, eith (of course) paid advertising...

For example, www.cndsuidghsdjkfh.com will take you to sitefinder.verisign.com - ICANN (the US not-for-profit organisation responsible for many of the technical standards of the Internet) has issued an advisory asking Verisign to retract this "service" while it completess technical studies into the ramifications.

For a start it means that when you register a domain name it will take another 450 or 900 seconds (the timeout given with the wildcard dns - depending on your ISPs dns settings) for the name to come into effect, and I am sure there are more nasty side effects I have not had the time to think of.

The Register points out that this destroys the usefullnes of checking for spam by checking that the sendors domain exists - since now every .com or .net permutation resolves correctly.

If you do a dns query for a non existant domain in a Verisign name space, you get an "IN A" record with the IP address 64.94.110.11 - which takes you to sitefinder.verisign.com - real nasty :/

The title of this blog was snarfed from the following The Register article: external article

Slim Dusty, Australia's most well known and well loved country music singer, died in his bed yesterday after a long battle with cancer: external link

We will miss you Slim, and I hope you have found a place where the pub never runs out of beer.

Here is a bunch of cool things I have stumbled across recently:

• /dev/bollocks - from Lars Pind's blog

  A Middle-manager emulator for the Linux Kernel.

• The Lost Art of Correspondence - VERY worth reading! - from Tram Town

  "It's very simple. I write letters to people and post their responses."

• Cool systems to project video into thin air (or actually, slightly thinker air...) - Wired Magazine

For anyone who had been trying to (unsuccessfully) use my blog's RSS feed, you will be very pleased to know it works again, this time with the correct urls!

Speaking of favourites, the University of Minnesota Chemistry department has posted a webpage with instructions for making your own Silly Putty :)

My favourite US city now has a very cool commuting option:

Entrepreneur equips luxury shuttles from Boston to New York with satellite radio and bandwidth.

Not as much fun as the T, but probably comfier and with wi-fi what more reason do you need! And the bus route might even use The Big Dig :)

This UTAH high school student should make all physics geeks feel inadequate: external article

Looking at Farnsworth's plans [for a nuclear fusion reactor] for the first time, Craig and his father both had the same thought: Now there's a science project.

About 30 such devices exist around the country, owned by such entities as Los Alamos National Laboratories, NASA and universities. ("I bet I'm the only high school student that has one," Craig Wallace said.)

I wouldn't want to be the guy having to justify Los Alamos's next round of budget requests!

The week of an F1 race is always a problem - it's not until wednesday that I have caught up on enough sleep to feel human again!

Monza was a pretty good race - the last third or so was a little predictable, once Montoya seemed to have lost his will to catch Michael, but as has been the case recently, the start and first few corners were pretty exciting, as this photo of Alonso threatening to take off shows!

Next stop Indianapolis :) For those of you who don't have a good grasp on why F1 is the most exciting and technically interesting racing format, F1.com has a great series of articles on the different technical and strategy aspects of F1 racing. For F1 news, check out f1racing.net.

Or not... as the case may be with Apple Open firmware:

ATN 107666 : Open Firmware: Password Not Recognized When It Contains the Letter "U"

Solution:
Don't use a capital letter "U" when setting up an Open Firmware password. Change your password if necessary.

Okay...

Thank's to Rusty for that stupidbase entry!

Well, Youth Alive NSW Big Exo day was last Saturday - and it worked! If I didn't know better I would attribute it to a combination of skill and luck, but the truth is that the whole day's success is a testament to God's miracles.

I also learnt a lot - pulling a major youth festival together in six weeks. Thank's to everyone at Youth Alive NSW and follow me network for the opportunity.

Check out a very small sample of the day (with photos).

Limited oak means less UNIX: they're not expensive, only hard to make.

While researching the SCO cases, I have come across some really cool Unix history and trivia! Unix has a very rich heritage, which goes a way to explaining it's maturity, power, complexity and quirkiness. It also, Dr Warren Toomey is quoted as saying in this SMH article, the reason why SCO has absolutely no idea what it does and does not own. Allegedly SCO did not even have a copy of the Sys III code (which it owns), and also apparently AT&T included a lot of university research code (much from Australia) without attribution (which SCO does therefore not own).

More cool stuff courtesy of The Unix Heritage Society:

Back around 1970-71, Unix on the PDP-11/20 ran on hardware that not only did not support virtual memory, but didn't support any kind of hardware memory mapping or protection, for example against writing over the kernel. This was a pain, because we were using the machine for multiple users. When anyone was working on a program, it was considered a courtesy to yell "A.OUT?" before trying it, to warn others to save whatever they were editing.

Now I am well known for compiling and running OS's for the joy of it, but I am bemused that people would spend serious time bringing "the features of 4.4BSD to the PDP-11s with 22-bit addressing" in 2.11 BSD. Or maybe I'm just getting boring.

Footnote: the quirky UNIX branded goods featured in this blog entry can be found at this link.

I discussed Novell a little in my blog entry on Sun's Mad Hatter project below, but along with their acquisition, Novell has announced a bold new strategy revolving around linux.

In a nutshell, they plan to attack the server and desktop. The server side of their strategy is currently the most clear:

• Unbundle the file, print, office, directory services, application services from Netware and serve them from a linux platform
• Offer clients the choice of a Netware or linux kernal inside their Novell server
• Remove the dependancy on the Novell login client and open up directory authentication to java etc.

Their approach to the desktop is less clear. Novell has no track record as a desktop company - their few forays (like GroupWise) are great products - but far from run away successes. Partly because they are a bit quirky, which you can get away with on a server but not a client, and partly because your CIO is unlikely to have heard of them.

Novell's recent acquisition of Ximian points to their desire to be a force in the open source desktop world, as does the recent statement of CEO Jack Messman:

Desktop Linux is seen by many in this industry as the next big thing. Novell intends to be a catalyst in this development

It will be very interesting to see what comes of this - Novell with Ximian rock the services and productivity side of the equation - Sun have StarOffice... let's get ready to rumble!

References:

• Novell eyes role of Linux champion [vmunet.com]
• Novell details Linux plan [vmunet.com]
• ximian.com
• novell.com

As reported throughout the computer press (Wired article), a guy called Vince Briel is making and selling $US200 replicas of the Apple I. Worried about the IP (intellectual property) contained in the Apple I ROM and unable to get an answer from Apple, Vince contacted Woz directly. Woz was, as you would imagine, amped that Vince was making the relicas and gave his personal OK. It turns out Woz had already released the code and schematics to the infamous Homebrew Computer Club before he and Steve Jobs comercialised it, so it was already in the public domain (I can't imagine Woz put a copyright disclaimer in his code - very un-Woz-like).

I especially love how Vince spent days UNimplementing features in the modern chipsets he is using (I mean how boring would life be if you could backspace!). Unfortunately ASCII encoded keyboards are hard to come by these days, so the replica has a PS2 port. Urgh - he could at least have used ADB and then we could use a IIGS keyboard...

The one missing feature is the cassette interface - so no storing your programs. Apparently someone is workin on it. Besides, you need the cassette interface to generate audio into your hifi - or was the on the Apple II only?

Also those of us who have a luxurious 625 scan lines on our TV will need to dig up an NTSC format monitor from somewhere...

The world has outgrown SMTP, it's as simple as that. It's old, insecure and unreliable in it's implementation variety. I have been advocating for a while an IPV6 style long term replacement strategy for Internet email transport, but in the mean time (or possibly forever) we must live with what we have.

Without getting into the slightly complex political ramifications, we already have cheap or free and open options for digitally signing and/or encrypting email that integrates with popular Windows, Mac and Linux mail clients.

One very thorny issue, however, is the whole CA (Ceritificate Authority) structure and the associated costs. But there are simple solutions that while not 100% perfect, are 110% better than unprotected email.

One of the pieces in the puzzle is running your own self-signed CA. For a small business (or large business), however, the supporting infrastructure of a self-signed CA can seem daunting. Mostly, it's just because the commandline arguments of the OpenSSL software is complex and sometimes reverse-intuitive. A recent O'Reilly Network article (available at this link) has some good instructions about OpenSSL CA's and PKI (public key infrastructure), but it's ideas about making s/mime email parts at the commandline are not what I would consider to be best practice!

Virginia Tech has settled on an 1100 G5 cluster for their new supercomputer. Apple/IBM's system/CPU offering beat Dell, HP, Sun and others (AMD, Intel and Sparc offerings). OSX or Darwin will be used as the host OS - ostensibly because the linux gcc port is not currently optimised for the G5, but I would imagine that Apple's diffs could be easily imported.

It will be very interesting to see the assembled system head to head against similar clusters.

Microsoft and Be Inc. settled their law suit with Microsoft paying Be $US23 million plus costs. Again, Microsoft avoids having to admit that they illegally squashed a competitor operating system, but they achieved their aim of protecting their turf for a relatively small sum. Be will apparently now fold, using the monies to repy creditors and shareholders.

It's so sad because BeOS was such a sweet OS. I really think it had a chance to carve out a niche in video and animation, kinda like a new age Amiga (not to be confused with the new Amiga OS).

Oh well, I still have my BeOS Book (with R1 PPC cd sealed in the back - filed along with my mint condition eWorld book + cd!) when I want to reminisce. Of course there are still people keeping R5 alive: BeOS 5 Personal Edition ; and an open source clean room implementation of BeOS: Open BeOS

Telstra (Australia's incumbant near-monopoly telco) has launched a project code named Firefly aimed at reducing the TCO of their desktops.

Nothing particularly new in that. But in addition to the expected Wyse thin client option, the bulk of the test revolves around users with Linux as their desktop - and the application suite of Sun StarOffice, Ximian Evolution and the Mozilla web browser.

In fact, Telstra CIO Jeff Smith was quoted as saying "I would see a big movement from Windows and Unix to Linux". Wielding a $A 1.5 Billion IT budget, he is not a man to ignore!

Perhaps the biggest impact on this for the rest of the Australian IT community, is that it gives a ringing endorsement to Linux and Open Source technologies. Mr Smith was also very clear that Sun's SunOne strategy and product line was more comprehensive than Microsoft's - which opens the way to completely remove even Microsoft Exchange from the backend.

On the heels of Sun's own announcement of their Mad Hatter project, things are staring to look rosey for Linux on the desktop. Interesting times we live in.

Interestingly, there was no mention in the article of testing a directory system to potentially replace the horrendus Active Directory from Microsoft. With the obvious strong Sun partnership Novell's NDS (or eDirectory as it seems to be called now) seems like a non-starter, and LDAP is yet to have the sort of corporate products around it that Telstra would be looking for - it will be interesting to watch Apple replace NetInfo with LDAP over the coming iterations of MacOS X. But wait a minute, I hear you ask, didn't Novell buy Ximain last month? True, so guess we should also expect Evolution to integrate well with Novell Groupwise in the future, which in turn integrates well with eDirectory (of course), and since the demise of Banyan, eDirectory is probably the directory system most capable of handling an organisation like Telstra... and eDirectory supports LDAP, and will increasingly integrate with Linux via Novell's Nterprise Linux Services

Speaking of Apple and MacOS X, both are noticeably absent from the Telstra picture. Telstra has never been very cosy with Apple - their cable internet product still barely supports the OS. Optus, the main rival to Telstra, was once a very large Apple user, but increasingly less so.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic! You can read an article about the Telstra announcement in today's Australian IT section, or online: external link.

PostgreSQL Inc has a policy that they open source all commercially released products within 24 months of initial release. How cool are they?!

Replication has been a serious lack in Postgres. While I have yet to try out eRServer(the product name), assuming it is even half decent, it opens up Postgres as a much more solid competitor to Oracle, and (in my opinion) completely removes just about any reason to use MySQL except for very simple very speed intensive mostly read only database requirements. Apologies for the poor grammar and structure - it's late ok!)

You can read the announcement here (email archive) and here (pdf).

eRserver is "a trigger-based single-master/multi-slave asynchronous replication system" - when i have had a chance to test it out, I will be sure to post my findings here.

CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) is the version tracking system of choice for most Unix developers and others. As it is now a standard part of MacOS X, and it's developer environment, it will hopefully start getting a bit more friendly.

Kevin O'Malley of the O'Rielly network has just written a third part in an excellent CVS tutorial for MacOS X developers. (I'm sure there's a joke involving an O'Malley and O'Rielly...) It is actually good for any beginner CVS users as it also talks plenty about the basic concepts and command line tools. I like it anyway. You can read the article at this link.

Yesterday I presented two lectures to The University of Sydney Web Engineering Group. Thank you to Rafael Calvo for the invitation.

The first lecture covered business workflow modelling using Finite State Machines and Petri Nets. The second introduced the OpenACS Workflow package and discussed how to use it to implement workflows in web applications.

For those who are interested, the slide sets and reference materials can be found on my business website by following this link.

Thanks also go to Lars Pind who gave me the great pleasure of working with himself and Peter Marklund at Collaboraid earlier this year. I'd love to say that I helped develop the workflow package, but i think my name can go against a handful of Oracle specific queries - and I helped keep them amused with colourful Australian words like strewth and crikey!

The Microsoft stability team got right onto the RPC vulnerability ... as soon as they had nailed this nasty problem.

Q826081 : Resuming the Computer After Suspend Mode Distorts the Video in Full-Screen Mode for the Pinball.exe Program

Thank's to Matt for this stupidbase article.

As SCO continues to hit the media with press releases and other FUD, more evidence of their own foolishness is appearing. Here is another analysis of some of the alleged infringing code by Greg Lehey (warning: this link includes photo of bearded unix hacker! This is a fun site to explore if you are a true geek - Greg uses Makefiles to render some of his pages..., and he is from Adelade no less).

This analysis seems less one eyed than those by other pro-linux writers, and it shows an understanding of some deeper nuances in the code (such as 32 v 64 bit numbers). Greg's summary points commenting on SCO's presentation are:

• Neither example shows any current infringement of SCO intellectual property in the Linux kernel
• The first example appears to indicate that SCO, far from being an industry leader in UNIX technology, still uses the original, primitive version of malloc(), a central kernel function, a version which everybody else gave up years ago
• The second example says nothing about Linux, since it's obviously not SCO code. It does, however, suggest that SCO is abusing the BSD license
• Presumably SCO thinks these are some of the best examples. If this is the best they have to offer, they don't have a leg to stand on

Article : external link (parental advisory: geeky code excerpts in this article)

And you know that you are pushing all the wrong buttons when you spawn an entirely new family of spoof internet websites. For your enjoyment (courtesy of We Love the SCO Information Minister), my favourite SCO spoof is A VERY FUNNY SPOOF A LA THE NIGERIAN BANK CONS.

Other interesting links from the same site:

• A timeline of Unix history - 16 A4 pages (not for the faint of heart!)
• Xenix history - the origins of SCO UnixWare, right back to a version for the Apple Lisa and PDP-11!

Everyone's favourite proprietory Unix vendor is going to have their very own Linux distribution, oficially called the Mad Hatter project.

Sun has posted screenshots and a brief discussion of Mad Hatter on their website: external link.

Initially it seems a bit late to be entering the now consolidating distro market, but Sun's strategy options have a few major strengths, and only one of them is lot's of money.

Firstly, the product will integrate StarOffice, Sun's cheap answer to Microsoft Office. StarOffice is the wealthy parent of the open source OpenOffice.org project, and is now a reasonalby mature and effective alternative to MS Office.

Secondly, the bundled Ximian Evolution email/pim client will include a connector for Sun's Sun ONE messaging and calendar server, so Sun is offering a one stop office productivity solution. The only real options in this market (for linux clients) are Microsoft Exchange (with Ximian connector), Samsung Contact and now Sun ONE. Group calendar services are currently a stumbling block for many small businesses switching to Linux.

Thirdly, they have the name and reputation that promises stability and support. Or at least it has that appearence, and it is the appearence that matters when you are presenting to a board or CIO.

Their commitment is questionable though. For instance, the aforementioned PR release talks about how Mad Hatter fits into Sun's overall software strategy, and then links to a pdf to read more about that. I am struggling to see where the linked article refers to the stages referred to, or even where a desktop distibution fits in the strategy at all... Possibly in project Orion, but I'm not sure. You can read it here and tell me if youcan make any more sense of it!

But all in all I think it is good news. Certainly another big name in the arena should help squash the silly SCO induced fear in some management staff.

I just had this link emailed to me by my friend Macca - it's very cool. It appears to be an entry in a crazy Japanese talent show, and they must have rehearsed it for AGES.

The first link I posted doesn't work any more, but the original link appears to be:

• http://www.ntv.co.jp/channel/kasoh/kin10.html

For those of you without Windows media player, you can view a slightly poor quality flash version at:

• http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/pingpong.php

Speaking of the Matrix, an old favourite of mine:

If "The Matrix: Reloaded" were a gangsta rap video

For those of you who have been living on another planet for the past few months, SCO is suing IBM for alegedly submitting some code (and therefore intellectual property) from commercial UNIX code (that is now owned by SCO) into the open source Linux kernel project. Apart from IBM breaching their license to use the alleged code, the other implication is that every linux user is running software that requires license fees to be paid to SCO.

Now I'm no lawyer, and i don't know what the implications are for the period of time that we have been running SCO code (if the allegations are true), but the press reports of a massive problem for the future of Linux are surely overstated because the pieces of code are supposedly not large, and so replacing them with freshly developed code will be simple - even if it is maybe not quite as efficient - thus turning the latest kernel releases back into fully legal GPL code.

So that said, the evolving arguments are actually quite interesting. SCO has finally shown their code chinks they alledge were stolen by IBM, albeit to people signing a non disclosure agreement. Various commentators who have seen the code have commented that at least some fo it is previously published code covered by public use licenses (the BSD license in one case) and also that some of the code has already been superceded by new code in current kernel versions.

An excellent analysis of the pieces of code is witten by Bruce Perens in this article: external link.

As you would expect from IBM, they have counter sued with various suits, including claims that SCO has violated the GPL opensource license in a number of cases as well as violating four IBM patents. A discussion of these issues can be found in this news.com article: external link.

Initially this looks like a corporate IT and geek advocate saga - but the mainsteram media is weighing in with articles in major dailys on a regular basis. Not since the Microsoft antitrust trials has an IT story prompted such strong and sustained media debate. And it's a passionate debate, with phrases such as Of course, Heise's statement is nothing but moonshine that's based on an intentional misreading of the U.S. Copyright Act that would fail on any law school copyright examination. and for SCO to continue to use Open Source/Free Software while attacking others for using it is the epitome of hypocrisy.

In the end, I suspect the whole thing will fizzle into an expensive bad idea hatched by some genius inside SCO who just didn't think the whole thing through very carefully. As Fran Foo of ZDNet Australia says in this article, perhaps it is time to just ignore SCO...

It's time to launch my new website - and in the true fashion of tidying your bedroom because you have far too much study to do - I am possibly the busiest I have ever been, and I am launching my new personal website.

Crazy! It has been waiting in the wings for too long, so I have finally given it the last burst of effort it needed to be finished and here it is. I hope you like it - more photos and writings will come in the near future. In the mean time make yourself comfortable, post me a message in the forum, read the book reviews, and let me know if you find any springs showing through the upholstery.

A few weeks ago I started helping my friend Mike (CEO of follow me youth entertainment) with the event planning and running of the Youth Alive Big Exo Day day program.

And believe me, it's big! Bands, motorcross, BMX, skate park, film festival, market stalls, basketball, hip hop, breakdancing, tennis, carnival rides, food... you name it, it's there!

Located at the Sydney International Tennis Centre, it adds another Sydney Olypic Park venue notch onto my belt, and although crazy and stressful, it's going to be awesome - or should that read exo...

It has finally happened - after 4 glorious years holding the top status level of Qantas frequent flyer, I have been demoted to Gold.

The very sad news came to me when I was trying to book a last minute (as always) frequent flyer seat to the Gold Coast for a meeting and the friendly Qantas booking agent politely told me "I'm sorry Mr Aufflick, I am not able to open up additional frequent flyer seats for gold frequent flyers"...

I think gold frequent flyers still get called sir though...

(Yes, I am a tosser!)

Well here it is - Mark Aufflick's Blog #2. I aim that this one will last longer (the last one was really more of a travel log than anything else) and have more interesting content (well I can try).

This site is currently rated beta quality - over the coming days photo's and more will be added before it is widely released.

Mark.