I am a Canadian citizen living in Montr al.
I'm sad and disappointed at the Conservatives party's politicking.  You
appear to be opposing tax cuts.  You appear to be opposing paying down
the national debt (Which was largely created by a conservative prime
minister).
You and your party keeps chanting that the Liberals have lost the "moral
authority" to govern while at the same time acting like children who
won't play along with others.  Nothing in your current behaviour would
inspire me to vote for you.  I would expect Her Majesty's Loyal
Opposition to conduct themselves in a better manner and I feel strongly
that if anyone has failed to govern effectively in this minority
parliament, it's you.
I urge you to stop trying to get an election called two months earlier
than it would come anyway, I urge you to move to a platform of fiscal
conservativeness which supports the sitting government in debt
repayments, and I urge you to begin working on keeping Qu bec in Canada.
I see these as the highest priority items for the House during the last
6 months of this government.
Acknowledgement of receipt is kindly requested.
Tks,
Jeff Bailey

Yesterday was a very, very intense day, and I had lots of fun. Clint, sladen and I headed to Chinatown walking, with a few detours to be able to checkout Manhattan's skyline. The view from the other shore is awesome, even with the two towers missing. When I compare the current view with how it was four years ago, I understand how much the city has changed without them. They were so impressively big that I just can't picture them too well in my mind.

The skyline of South Manhattan We walked over the Brooklyn bridge, giving me other very cool views of Manhattan, while I hammered Clint with questions about this and that. I saw that since 9/11, you can't go past the Town Hall. "Security reasons", of course. I was very surprised to see police cars in every single street. It's like a Police State, and if you ask me, it didn't make me feel safer. After some walk, we finally got in Chinatown, which is the craziest place ever. People sell stuff on the sidewalks, and many streets are packed with people. We had to meet with mikah, biella, dilinger and his cat at some Chinese place for breakfast/lunch. The place, as Chinatown itself, was crazy. As soon as we sat down a few waitresses landed a few plates on the table, without asking or anything. A few minutes later I could see that the way they serve you is going around with carts with lost of food, and you either want it or not. We left dilinger at the metro station, and moved on to the SoHo. I wanted to go to the SoHo Apple Store to see if they knew about replacement Spanish keyboards for my Powerbook. My powerbook was bought in the US last year, so it has a US keyboard. This is mostly ok, but only mostly as it's missing a key. After SoHo, we went back to Chinatown to pick up bubbles. It was nice to see her after Debconf, and she made the effort to come just for a few hours even if she was ill and had lots to do in Philly. We headed to South Street Port, where I had a long chat about Cuba with micah while we sat on a bench looking at Brooklyn bridge. And then, we gathered all our braveness and headed to the heart of the beast, to the kernel of the system. We walked into the Financial District, and soon enough I was walking in Wall Street no less. If I breathed hard, I could smell the money. The road was paved in gold, and there were skyscrapers everywhere. I discovered the rulers of this world had opened a "public space" in JP Morgan's building. To their despair, probably, it had been taken over by the poor. I wonder what Bloomberg will do about it. As I walked up the street, a strange feeling in my heart grew and grew, until, behind a corner, I saw it. The source of all evil was ahead of me, guarded by George Washington himself.

The New York Stock exchange and it's black evil aura of Capitalism I was standing ahead of this building where so many people behave like bastards everyday, pushing millions to povery for a bit more profit margin. The doors were closed and surrounded by security officers, which despite being asked politely, didn't let us in for "security reasons". Next to it was the Church of Capitalism, at the end of the street. It's curious that such an old church still stands where it was build near the harbour probably a century ago, now surrounded by some of the most modern and tallest buildings in the planet. And then, we visited the bull, which I didn't know is the "friendly" symbol of how Capitalism works.

I had Capitalism by the balls We moved down to Battery Square, past the old US Customs building with the four statues representing the four continents. We saw the damaged sculpture which lived in the WTC, and sat down at the pier to watch a beautiful sunset over the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty seen from South Manhattan At that point, biella and micah had to meet some friends at one cinema to see the Wal-Mart documentary. We went to a funky place to have some tea, decided to go see Times Square and then walk to Central Park. At the time, mako was arriving to NYC on the Chinatown bus, so we agreed to meet in a restaurant to have lunch. Paul Sladen finally managed to get lost, after many tries during the day, and wasn't seen until we got back home. Mako and Mika waited for us at the door of an... ethiopian restaurant in the SoHo, despite Mako knows I can't stand spicy food. But in the end it wasn't so bad, I just needed a few more glasses of water than average. And I finally got to know mika, after lots of time of chatting over IRC. Greg, SPI's lawyer, also appeared, and was a nice addition to the group. Mako knew where to take us after that. The Belgian bar was packed, but there was a private party in one of the spaces and we took over some of that space. After a few rounds, we were ready to leave the pub and go for Falafel and some tea. I was terribly falling asleep though, so instead of tea we took a cap back to Brooklyn, where we found Paul waiting at the door. After an hour of inflating a mattress, we were ready for sleep, at 4AM. It didn't look like the morning after would be very productive...

Om Malik: “[O]n this Web 2.0 highway, there are three exits: Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.” That’s a clever soundbite, and perhaps it’s true from the venture capitalist’s point of view, but I think it misses something fundamental: That the real attraction of the new web platform is that components don’t have to be rolled up into one big monolith anymore to integrate well with each other. We’re entering into a world where lots of little, independent component providers will be able to coexist and thrive alongside the platform vendors. Why? The platform vendors no longer have such a chokehold on distribution that the best the component providers can hope for are a few years of prosperity before the platform vendor notices there’s an interesting little market emerging around a particular component, integrates the component into the platform, and renders the independent component unnecessary. In the old world, a component provider’s prosperity was often its ultimate undoing. I’ve always sympathized with the platform vendors’ (OK, Microsoft’s) argument that this kind of integration is done in the interest of customer convenience—I for one don’t want to buy an operating system only to have to go out and source my own, say, memory management and data compression components (something, if you remember, we had to do in the MS-DOS days). In the old world, that probably meant going out, buying more software, and dealing with the headache of getting it installed and integrated. It was simply more convenient for the customer for the popular components to find their way into the platform, integrated and ready to go with no assembly required. In the new world, though, sourcing a component is no longer a heavyweight operation. By and large, the components themselves are free, and thanks to open APIs and data formats like RSS, it’s now possible to integrate those components into larger applications with comparative ease. Granted, the applications of today are largely ad hoc “mash ups” without an intermediating platform vendor in the traditional sense, but it won’t be long, in my view, before vendors step into that role and make writing such applications as systematized an operation as, say, writing an application for Windows or Linux is today. Yes, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are probably those vendors. Yes, the component providers probably hook into their platforms as the primary vehicle for monetizing their wares. However, without the same level of control over distribution that the old world enjoyed (not to mention the proliferation of open APIs and data formats), the big guys will have to coexist with the little guys. The platform vendors will compete by providing the most compelling incentive to the component providers. In old world terms, the platform with the most ISVs will win. This bodes very well indeed for innovation in the new “Web 2.0″ world. Above all, the days of the platform vendors integrating all the components into the platform to the exclusion of independent providers have come and gone. Thankfully.

As I've mentioned before, I'm trying to write a 50K-word first draft of a novel during November. Writers, published and unpublished alike, tend to look for useful-esque procrastination activities, called cat-vacuuming because ... erm, if you vacuum your cat now, it won't shed later, or something. I did say useful-esque, did I not? By the way, the term originated in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition, I think in the late 1990's. Honest. I was there, lurking. Anyway, for this Sunday afternoon, my cat-vacuuming took the form of programming in Haskell. Specifically, I wrote a sample answer to an exercise in the course I'm currently giving at the university. The exercise asked for drawing a particular fractal. I did that and found the result less aesthetically pleasing than I had thought when I drafted the exercise. So I fiddled with my program and ended up with this: Of course, the new program does not solve the exercise as specified, so I had to back out the change (I did leave a note about it in the comments). The program remains private until the exercise sessions next week.

David Berlind: “[P]icture a world where, instead of carrying a notebook computer with you everywhere you go, and instead of having power-drinking desktops in every corner of your house, all you have is a USB key that you take from one dirt cheap thin client to another. On that key is not just all of your personal data (that is stored in the cloud but replicated to your USB key for offline usage), but perhaps a small Web server and some applications, both of which are thin-client friendly.” I’m in complete agreement that the thin client/web application computing model is the wave of the future, and that the days of the fat client as the primary mechanism for monetizing software are numbered. However, I don’t buy into the notion that software-as-a-service displaces the traditional fat client entirely, for one very simple reason: It’s going to be a while yet before we have truly ubiquitous network connectivity. Sure, perhaps if you live in the San Francisco Bay area or in a similarly technology centric place, it’s easy to buy into the notion that it won’t be long before we’ll all be connected all the time. However, we can’t lose sight of the fact that a vast majority of the population doesn’t live in a world where technology billboards dominate the morning commute. Heck, my cell phone doesn’t even work when I visit my grandfather in rural Indiana—the notion of an omnipresent wifi fabric built from community hotspots is a long way off there, to put it mildly. And even when we do get to the day when we have ubiquitous connectivity, we’ll still want caching for optimization and replication to eliminate the single point of failure problem, not to mention the ability to retain control over our own digital lives. So, I view the thin vs. fat client juxtaposition as being not so much about user experience—AJAX has shown us that remarkably good user interfaces can be built on the web. It’ll be more about caching and data replication, two very important considerations in any distributed system. I think most people are missing that. David, as usual, appears to get it. My prediction: Applications will increasingly move to the web, so you’ll be able to get to your data anytime, anywhere, and from any connected device. No surprise there. But the majority of the time, when you’re using “your” client device (whether it’s a PC in your home or office or a handheld device or something that lives on a USB key and securely attaches to the network via some device that’s outside of your administrative control), you’ll still primarily interact with the web through a fat client of some sort. To be sure, the fat clients of the future will look a lot different from the fat clients of today. Hint: “Fat client” doesn’t have to mean “self-administered”. Perhaps the fat clients of the future are delivered on demand or via independently developed components that integrate into some larger framework. Perhaps it’s as simple as running a web server locally. But the fat client in whatever form will still be the primary interface the vast majority of the time. That’s why I don’t buy for a minute that Web 2.0 is yet another death knell for Microsoft. They’ve obviously got a great fat client story, and in case you haven’t noticed, they’ve just woken up to what’s going on around them. By the way, this is the area where I think Linux on the desktop could have the biggest impact—it won’t be about who has the better desktop or who can replicate the popular fat client applications of today in open source. It’ll be about who can mold Linux into the fat client framework of the future, seamlessly integrated with applications and services delivered via the web but open. If I were Microsoft’s competitors in this space, namely Google and Yahoo, I’d be spending a lot of time thinking about this. In today’s fat client world, Microsoft is between them and their customers more often than not, and if the past is any indication, they’ll be able to use this position to tremendous advantage.

After a not-so-easy ride with James Blackwell, and the last minute surprise of Paul Sladen joining us, we arrived in New York. The sky was dark already. Instead of arriving at 15:00 or so as expected, we arrived at something like 20:00. Behind, we had left great perils like an empty gas tank and finding no gas station, and noticing one tire could use some pumping; evil officials at the US border not liking the fact that it was the first time I entered the country, which involved fingerprints and a smily face at the customs offices after a long wait; a great meal (after a long wait to get served) at probably the best restaurant in the whole State of New York; the three of us becoming terribly sleepy half an hour after resuming the drive, and having to stop for a short nap and stopping for gas once again around 70 miles away from NYC. When we did arrive, we managed to get lost a few times around the city. We crossed four bridges on our way to Brooklyn, which accidentally let me admire the Manhattan skyline by night, and finally, got to Clint's place. When we were parking, I noticed the tire was mostly flat now. Surely not the best way to land in the city. We also found out Clint and the rest had left for dinner after a long wait, as neither they or us expected to arrive so late, and we were way too freaked out with the crazy traffic and finding our way to phone them. After a while, both problems were sorted out; Clint appeared and James was able to leave. James, thanks for all you did! I owe you a big one next time! We spent some time with Clint, dilinger, biella and micah, saw the great view of Manhattan from the roof of his appartment, and eventually went to bed. Apparently, they are taking me to a place called "Dim Sum" for breakfast. I wonder how dilinger's cat tastes.

So, the D-I team again made it: a new release of the "installer with no name yet" happened. First of all, yet another occasion to publicly reward Joey Hess work. Joey has managed to lead this work for five and a half years. I think that we all agree that without Joey's work, we wouldn't have such a nice installation system for our distribution. Joey now gives the lead to Frans Pop. Knowing Frans as we know him now, I'm confident that the good work will go on. Joey will have more time to hack in various parts of D-I or lead the testing security team. From my narrow point of view, I'm again proud that we cover more and more languages. The official announcement mentions 9 of them. We can add Vietnamese to it, even if the installer has a broken display in second stage because of a now solved localechooser bug. As a consequence, we continue to paint the world map in red. The next big push on that matter will be the release of a graphical version of the installer (an alpha version is already advertised) which will support the rendering of the various languages from india for which translation is on its way.

Cleaning my apartment is a bit like going on an archeological dig: A dried spaghetti noodle... when did I have spaghetti for dinner? Oh, yeah, three weeks ago.

(Tall Dark and Mysterious: See You in Ten Days)

<p> Just a few days ago, <a href="http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/">yum</a> entered <a title="Yum for Debian" href="http://packages.debian.org/yum">Debian</a>. Why is this interesting? </p> <p> Well, if you happen to be using <a title="virtual machine monitor" href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/">Xen</a> on Debian then you can easily create yourself a <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com/">Fedora</a> installation. </p> <p> You only need to perform <a title="Install a Fedora system in a Xen instance" href="http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraXenQuickstart#head-e41e7bbdd3c94366a44cf4ba609172f87b94d6d2">Step 5</a> on the procedures listed here after doing an <code>apt-get install yum</code>. Note, you'll want to make sure that rpm is setup correctly (<code>mkdir /var/lib/rpm; rpm --initdb</code>) before you begin. </p> <p> It is always interesting checking out the competition. Soon you be singing along to <i> <a title="Yummy yummy yummy" href="http://lyrics.rare-lyrics.com/O/Ohio-Express/Yummy.html">I've got love in my tummy</a></i> </p>

<p> Zeeshan Ali <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/zeenix/diary.html?start=77">writes about Finnish women</a>. Onella is actually one of the better bars in Helsinki, hopefully you discovered the two "secret" bars after the inital heavy-metal one. The first is your typical dance-floor, the other is a uniquely Finnish experience. </p> <p> Basically it consists of drunk Finns, mainly drunk Finnish women, getting up on the table &mdash; dancing as best they can &mdash; and singing along to all the recent songs. <strong>Except it is all in Finnish!</strong>. Every song you know, and some you wish you didn't, will be sung, the audio will sound familiar but the words are Finnish. Distinctly odd. </p> <p> Yes, Zeeshan, Finns are very weird. I can not imagine anything like <a title="No secrets in Finland" href="http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2005-11-02T150542Z_01_EIC254324_RTRUKOC_0_US-FINLAND-WAGES1.xml">this</a> happening anywhere else. Even the BBC's <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4384992.stm">Night out in Helsinki</a> is fairly tame to my experience at Debconf5 </p> <p> Over the course of many nights, I saw </p> <ul> <li>Drunk women falling off tables (many times &ndash; and cute ones too!)</li> <li>People punching fists into windows</li> <li>Large brawls</li> <li>Pepper spray indiscriminately bandied about</li> <li>Bottles being thrown &ndash; by the bar staff at customers</li> </ul> <p>It makes for lots of fun adventures &mdash; If you ever meet <a title="Horms" href="http://www.vergenet.net/~horms">Simon Horman</a>, he can fill you in far better than I can</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.stillhq.com/">Michael Still</a> <a title="trackback pings" href="http://www.stillhq.com/blosxom/000007.html">writes</a> about <a href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/">Trackback pings</a>. </p> <p> I'm still not used to blosxom and how everything fits together but I thought I'd enumerate the plugins I've installed. </p> <dl> <dt><a href="http://www.insanum.com/downloads/BlosxomV2/categorytree.gz">categorytree</a><dt> <dd>I've actually got this named as 01categorytree, so it runs first, but it gives me the listing of topics I've posted too</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.hecker.org/blosxom/extensionless">extrensionless</a></dt> <dd>I'm a big fan of <a href="http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI">Cool URIs</a>, this helps me almost get there. Bonus points to those who can work out where I don't quite make the magic happen seemlessly. Oh, named 02extensionless.</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/atomfeed">atomfeed</a></dt> <dd>As every good blogger knows, syndication is the name of the game. While you got use the deprecated RSS, <a href="http://atomenabled.org/">Atom</a> is where is it at. I've actually disabled RSS feeds in preference to atom</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/breadcrumbs">breadcrumbs</a></dt> <dd>On permalink posts, you'll see a click-trail. All professional websites have them, so I figured I should too.</dd> <dt><a href="http://molelog.molehill.org/blox/Computers/Internet/Web/Blosxom/Calendar/">calendar</a></dt> <dd>Presents a calendar with all the posts you've done on various days highlighted, so you can quickly determine when someone has been sleeping or has been an insomniac</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/config">config</a></dt> <dd>Comes with the Debian blosxom package, and originates with the author. Allows you to customise configuration dependant on where the post is in your heirarchy and other magic.</dd> <dt><a href="http://my-security.net/bloxsom/directorybrowse.txt">directorybrowse</a></dt> <dd>If you have deep category hierarchies this makes all the elements of the paths clickable. It's cool, you want it.</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.hecker.org/blosxom/plugins/feedback">feedback</a></dt> <dd>Part of the blogging scene is to allow other people to comment upon what you've written. This gives them comments and trackbacks. I've modified this somewhat and still need to fixup how comments are previewed but otherwise this plugin is gold</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/flavourdir">flavourdir</a></dt> <dd>Also part of the <a href="http://packages.debian.org/blosxom">blosxom</a> package, this means you do not have to have your blog entries intermingled with the page templates (known as flavours) used to display them</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/interpolate_fancy">interpolate_fancy</a></dt> <dd>For large plugins, like feedback, you might end with some text on your template that you only want displayed some of the time. This enhances blosxom so your template (flavour) can have conditionals, comparisons and whatnot.</dd> <dt><a href="http://noone.org/blosxom/multcat">multcat</a></dt> <dd>Not everything can be easily catagorised into one thing. This lets you put a post into multiple places. It'd be nice if all the categories a post was under was displayed as part of the category path</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.insanum.com/downloads/BlosxomV2/rendertime.gz">rendertime</a></dt> <dd>Calculates the amount of time the page took to render</dd> <p> On my todo list is to convert from a table based layout to a fluid CSS one. It'll probably be a 3-columned look with fixed-width sidebars since negative margins looks are harder to get right.</p>

<p> Or '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moblog">mobloging</a>' for short. Basically it is using your mobile phone to add content to your blog. All very interesting, except when you get to the details. </p> <p> <a href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/">Stewart Smith</a> gave it a whirl ([<a title="first attempt" href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/?p=503">1</a>], [<a title="take two" href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/?p=504">2</a>]) with fairly predictable results. This is because the message you might receive is dependent on the phone manufacturer <em>and</em> the <aabr title="Multimedia Messaging Centre">MMC</abbr> does to your message. And that is before it might be mangled along the way via email. </p> <p> Basically most phones (or MMCs) will convert the content to either <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32">Base32</a> or, more commonly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64">Base64</a>. Generally the MMS is composed of only two parts, and then sent to an email address. From there you'll have to write something that takes the email and converts it into a blog entry. </p> <p> A while ago a friend of mine wanted to do the same, so I wrote some perl to do it for him. It seemed to work for him (with some tweaks) and it might be enough for you too. You can grab it <a title="Code to help with mobile blogging" href="http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/moblog--devo--1.0/">here</a> However you might find it simpler to use <a href="">GNU Arch</a> and register <code>http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/</code> and then browse in <code>wildfire@progsoc.org--projects/moblog</code>. </p>

<p> <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2005/11/02/0">James Henstridge</a> notes that <a href="http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/zeroconf/">zeroconf</a> can cause large amounts of network traffic. Yes, that was true back in July. A <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/317655" title="bug 317655: Zeroconf crucifies the network">bug</a> was filed and then fixed within 2 days. </p> <p> This was because I was at <a href="http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/">DebConf</a> and able to see how zeroconf performed in a large environment. Basically there are two tests you do to determine whether an <abbr title="Address Resoultion Protocol">ARP</abbr> packet is destined for you. And at the time, zeroconf, was only doing one of them. </p> <strong>Update: 18:20 AEST</strong> <p> <a href="http://www.davyd.id.au/">Davyd</a> asks why would you use zeroconf over <a href="http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/">NetworkManager</a>. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, but I feel the design is wrong. </p> <p> I do believe there should be an <em>overall</em> co-ordinating process looking after networking on the user-space side of the fence though. I've been thinking about writing something which would do it too; but I haven't fleshed out my ideas enough to commit my editor to coding. </p> <p> Oh, one bug that NetworkManager does have is that it only allocates <abbr title="Internet Protocol v4 Link-Local">IPv4LL</abbr> addresses when it fails to acquire one from the DHCP server. This is wrong and goes against <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3927.txt" title="Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses">RFC3927</a>. </p>

# metadata <p> I woke, not for the first time today, and there were people all around. Dressed up and talking. And drinking. </p> <p> Ahh! I'd fallen asleep at a bar. <em>Again</em>. Fortunately that is enough off a clue for me to realise that I should go home. Getting home, is where this adventure starts. </p> <p> I started off at <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Cruise.aspx">Cruise Bar</a>, which has a great view of the Opera House [<a title="Sydney Opera House in the afternoon" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-in-afternoon.jpg">1</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at dusk" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-dusk.jpg">2</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at night" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-night.jpg">3</a>] and (somehow) staggered my way to the <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Ship_Inn.aspx">Ship Inn</a>. Unable to flag down a cab in this area &ndash; lots of people going home around 23:00 &ndash; I resolved to get myself to North Sydney, where lots of cabs are. </p> <p> For those of you unaware, Sydney Harbour Bridge now has security personnel stationed at all pedestrian entrances and across its length. At least six of them "patrol" the bridge. </p> <p> By "patrol", I mean of course you'll be queried as to why you wish to cross the bridge. <q>Mate [sic], you can't cross the bridge. You aren't allowed here</q>. <q>Mate, are you fucking deaf?</q>. (on radio, to pals)<q>Yeah the fucking wog is crossing, shall I intercept him and hold him?</q> </p> <p> Followed while crossing the bridge. In my case I had (at one stage 3 security personnel behind and adjacent to me and 3 policemen ahead of me). And abused (I was repeatedly cursed at, racially slurred against, by the people from IVS Security) during your walk over the bridge. It amazes me that they even had police waiting to talk to me. Fortunately I know that the best thing you can do when confronted by the police is not to say anything. </p> <p> In this case there is nothing they could do -- since crossing the Harbour Bridge, and not responding to the security guards who harass you is not (yet) a crime. Today, 2 Nov 2005, though the Parliament of Australia is rushing through laws which might mean that I can be "detained" and held incommunicendo indefinitely. </p> <p> These laws &ndash; part of the War on Freedom &ndash; would make the rest of this entry illegal. </p> <p> I've been thinking about terrorism and Australia. How would you get access to restricted locations, determine sensitive areas and generally get information not available to the ordinary public? Become a security guard. </p> <p> In Australia, things like <a href="http://smh.com.au/news/national/braindamaged-man-told-to-pay-up-after-bashing/2005/11/01/1130823210703.html" title="victim of security guards">this</a> are not uncommon. (c.f. David Hooks killed by a security guard; a female security guard shooting someone, etc.). Worse is that security guards often enjoy a fairly close relationship with the Police. Meaning that if you join up, you also get to know some of the procedures that might be applied to deter you. Bottom line: every security guard is a potential terrorist. </p> <p> Terrorists, like modern-day Politicians, seek to curtail the liberty of others for their own purposes. The best way to do this is by planting fear and doubt into the hearts and mind of the general populace. In America, this was done via the September 11 plane hi-jacking; in the UK, by exploding bombs on the mass-transit system there. </p> <p> How, or where, should Australia be targetted? Australians are renowned world-travellers (I believe the figure is that 10% of Australians are outside the country at any one time), so attacking transportation isn't the way to go. You need to go after the life-style. </p> <p> Large community events, like Melbourne Cup day, the various Grand Finals and, of course, Cricket would be the perfect targets. High visibility (the media are already at these venues!), high impact (you are talking 30,000+ people in these stadiums), for minimal cost (a stadium has few seating area &ndash; probably 6 to 8 attackers could bring down most stadiums). </p> <p> Another good location would be to pick your local Westfield shopping centre / mall. Lots of people, lots of fear instilled. Plus we'd be rid of the stupid things. </p>

<p> First post. I too have decided to get into the whole blogging scene. </p> <p> I looked around at various pieces of software and only <a href="http://www.blosxom.com/">blosxom</a> and <a href="http://pyblosxom.sf.net/">pyblosxom</a> fitted my criteria. </p> <p> My criteria was pretty simple: <ul> <li>Plenty of features (comments, calendar, categories)</li> <li>No database (even though I prefer <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/">Postgresql</a>, I didn't want to have to learn a schema if I decided to migrate or it all went cactus</li> <li>Vibrant community</li> </ul> Both blosxom and pyblosxom have those but I found it easier to get blosxom setup and running. Eventually I'll write up a colophon about what I have and how it is configured. However, please excuse the very rudimentary setup I have &mdash; it'll get better in time. </p>

Tomorrow I leave Montr al, Qu bec and Canada and will move down to the US, on my way to New York City. This part of my stay in North America is a bit (others would rather say "totally") improvised, and the plans are not too accurate even now, 8 hours before our departure. The first idea for this was to travel on a night bus from Montr al to Boston, meet mako and mika and then move to New York City during the weekend. The unavailability of any buses that did this route in less than thirteen hours made me look for alternatives. Chatting with mdz, I found out he was flying with Mark and Jane to NYC very early on Friday night, on the private jet. Sounded like a plan. Only it had a big flaw: non commercial flights entering the US require visas for everyone aboard, apparently. If you don't have it, the reports say you're really, really fucked up. So, having no visa as I don't need it in normal conditions, this was discarded too. Finally I learned that jblack was driving down to Pennsylvania after the conference. I asked him if it was possible to go with him on his way South, and he said yes. He could drop me in the nearest point to Boston, or drive me straight to NYC. As NYC is the easiest for me and jblack and Clint has no problem with hosting me one extra day, that's what we're going to do. (After having everything more or less clear, Paul Sladen came along and proposed yet another plan involving a bicycle and hitch-hiking. I was able to say no, though.) Here starts this crazy road trip. Wish me luck, and see you in NYC!

Whilst I can’t claim to have done anywhere near as much for Gaim as Christian Hammond has, I did contribute to Gaim some time ago, and for my efforts I managed at least to attain the status of “Crazy Patch Writer”. However, I gave up trying to contribute to Gaim about three years ago. After starting out as the Debian package maintainer, and one of the founders of #gaim (yes, I know, I’m sorry, it wasn’t always like that), I spent about two years submitting patches which were ignored by almost all of the developers, being forced to beg people with access (including the support/bug triaging guy, who doesn’t really code C) to review and commit them. At the time, nobody was being given CVS access because of a recalcitrant and unresponsive former developer holding the reigns of the Sourceforge project. A few developers came and went, and in what I thought was a miracle, the now lead developer was made an administrator of the Sourceforge project and gradually started handing out access to other people who had been contributing. Except… I was passed over time and time again, and other contributors who had around for less time than myself were given access. I could accept this if I was given some justification, but I was ignored when I asked about getting CVS access and never given any reasons, despite having contributed hours and hours of my time and helped rewrite and clean up sizeable chunks of code. It actually had me close to tears on several occasions, and still upsets me a huge deal that no explanation was ever offered to me. After starting out with packaging work in Debian, Gaim was the first project where I became involved with actual development, and I learnt a great deal from hacking on it, but when I started at university I decided I’d spent enough time pouring my heart into such an unwelcoming recipient, and I moved on quietly.

When I took over organising the CLUG meetings, I managed to replace most of myself with a small shell script (I even have the t-shirt). Now that I'm leaving Canberra, Steve Walsh has kindly taken over the running of the script. So I've done a bit more work on the script, and added a public front end to it, and made an RSS feed (my very first). So until yesterday, to work out the fourth Thursday of the month, I'd been calling a Perl script that used Date::Manip, when I decided to investigate doing it with PHP natively. Tony gave me some initial code, but I ended up with this:
function nth_day($instance, $dow, $month, $year)

    $first_dom = date("w", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1, $year));
    
    if ($first_dom <= $dow)
        $first_instance = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1 + ($dow - $first_dom), $year));
     else
        $first_instance = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 8 - ($first_dom - $dow), $year));
    

    $instance_we_want = $first_instance + (($instance-1) * 7);

    $date = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $instance_we_want, $year));

    return $date;