I’m pleased to have prompted a bit of a discussion on the linux-aus mailing list about Linux AU and the relationship with NZ. James Purser kicked things off with a blog post on Friday and so far the discussion is going really well. I’ve outlined a few more of my thoughts below. I think the issue of national identity is probably the key to this whole discussion. It is important for the NZ community and LUGs to retain their own identity and not be subsumed into Australian identity. When Craig, John and I started the Linux NZ discussion, it came in part from a fair degree of envy from what we were seeing Linux AU acheiving. If you read our initial invitation it was quite clear that we were looking for support to “duplicate” Linux AU into NZ. We didn’t get there, and after taking a month or two to think about it, I believe that trying to duplicate Linux AU into NZ was the wrong approach to take. As beneficial as it would be in terms of creating a distinct identity there are far too many other things that it just doesn’t make any sense to duplicate at all. LCA, the podcasts and Advocacy preparation are the three key things that pop immediately to my mind and I’m sure there are others too. I think the biggest thing we learnt from our LinuxNZ endeavours is that we don’t (currently?) have huge numbers of people available to do things in NZ, and we are always going to suffer from problems of scale to some extent. In many ways the more duplication we can avoid the better. That allows us to free what people we do have to focus on the things that are NZ specific. This is the key reason that I’m pushing to see if there is support for Linux Australasia. It’s not that we want LinuxAU to adopt or subsume NZ LUGs, the idea is that LinuxAU would grow to include NZ and become a bigger, better and more inclusive organisation as a result. I guess the flipside for Australians is that the resulting organisation would be less nationalistic…. More on that in a minute. ISON probably fits in here too, I only just become aware them yesterday so I’m still reading their site. However my impression is that while it is definitely an organisation we should be linked with, its aims and goals are orthogonal to what I’m trying to achieve by proposing Linux Australasia. The impression I’m getting from talking to Pia, and lurking on this list is that LA is working very hard to empower the members to be the workers rather than the committee. With the committee providing the organisational oversight, legal structure, vision and authority needed to keep everything hanging together. I think it’s a great strategy, and would fit in perfectly with the bigger, broader Linux Australasia that I’m proposing. Give NZ members the opportunity to work on the press, publicity and advocacy sub-committees too and you’re pretty much there in terms of
achieving Linux Australasia! The sub-committees as a whole can work on their specific areas (avoiding unnecessary duplication) and then the
NZ/AU components of each sub-committee can do the necessary (hopefully minor) localisation work if and when required. Following from this, if there is a need for a more nationalistic component then it’s simply a matter of creating a sub-committee to do the work required to “promote national identity”… perhaps we need to have FOSS competitions across the ditch so we can beat each other in something other than sport… Plenty to think about and as many have pointed out the key place to resolve all this is probably going to be at LCA’06 in Dunedin. I think as James has pointed out though, it is going to be very beneficial for us all if we can do much of the talking beforehand and at least get an idea of where everyone is at, even if we are poles apart in terms of what we think.

Well, I've switched blog software. WordPress is great, but recently I've been wanting to develop more things to put on the page, and the model that drupal uses is much easier to handle and seems much more flexible. The developers seem to have much more open source mindset - I don't know why, it's just a perception thing. It gives me much more control over which articles which go to different syndication places, like the LiveJournal feed and Planet Debian. Drupal also makes it much easier for users to setup their own feeds for categories, if some people are only interested in say, the book or movie reviews. I also made a new theme which is pretty minimal. I'm hoping to add more features in the near future. A short list, which is probably not comprehensive:

• Book Reading/Review Sidebar
• Movie Review Sidebar
• A little color, possibly some icons
• Revamp the TrainSched page

As Benjamin Drieu noted, ccache is a wonderful tool. He complains about the configuration needed, which in the Debian package is really, really small. Just do PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH in your .bashrc or .zshrc and it will be used for all compilations. Very useful and less cumbersome than creating the links in ~.

John Ringo is known for writing military science fiction. I therefore was a little surprised to find out about Ghost, which, according to what I knew at the time, is a James Bond story, set roughly in the real world. Well, I’ve always liked “special agent” stories, so I read this book. First impressions: Interesting stories; it was more a collection of connected novellas than a novel. Certainly not for everyone: there is a lot of explicit BDSM (read: very rough but consensual sex) and even an explicit aggravated rape scene. Single agent overpowering multiple terrorists. Nuclear explosions (I’ve said it before, a book which depicts a nuclear explosion, cannot be all bad). More than one miracle recovery. A protagonist who certainly is not a good person. An overall first impression was of a former military guy writing out a fantasy, sort of literary self-satisfaction. I didn’t think much good of this book at that time. I later found out that this book was intended to start a new series. Now, I had actually heard of a follow-up book, but I had figured it was more of the same, and I wasn’t interested. Instead, the tone shifts a lot. The Ghost becomes a significant part of the main character’s backstory, but that’s all that it is: backstory. I have now read a part of the sequel, and it has changed my prespective on Ghost. As a standalone book, Ghost is a horrible book, and I would not recommend it, because the brutality in it has no meaning. But as the prequel to a different series, it gets meaning; it becomes a sort of character study of a man who has vicious demons inside him and is barely able to control them, and channel them for doing good (and once loses control of them). So, Mike Harmon is an ex-SEAL, discharged on medical grounds, who is a conservative jerk according to his fellow history undergrads. He likes to stalk young coeds, and one day, as he is doing so, he accidentally witnesses a kidnapping. He follows, and discovers a terrorist plot. He kills the bad guys (most of them, anyway), and follows up on the trail of other, already kidnapped women. He hitches a ride on a plane and ends up … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll rate this book 8/10, with the warning that the book contains explicit descriptions of extreme sex and even rape, in addition to the usual jamesbondesque explosions and stuff.

OMG! I would have never believed this if I hadn't seen the videos with my own eyes: Richard M. Stallman of GNU and Free Software fame singing various songs, and Gilberto Gil, famous musician and currently Brazil's minister of culture, jamming on his guitar. Unbelievable. (via Boing Boing and netzpolitik.org )

I recently tried and adopted ccache, which (quoting its webpage) acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in a 5 to 10 times speedup in common compilations. I must say I was sceptical, but ccache really works great, specially when you have to compile again and again the same code, like a Debian package which you have to clean but which source code remained the same. The only glitch is installation. If you wish to use it by default for all your compilers, there is still some manual configuration. I'd really like it to provide an alternative to, say, cc.

This musical Russian roulette thing that's been going on lately in Planet Debian is not a new thing. It made rounds in the Finnish blog circles in the beginning of December. Here's my list (I made a twenty-song list, not just ten-song like most):

1. Jethro Tull - Acres Wild
2. Cliff Eidelman - Surrender for Peace (Star Trek VI soundtrack)
3. Miljoonasade - Paskanmarjat
4. Roxette - Fireworks
5. Verdi - Alfredo! Voi! (La Traviata)
6. Ultra Bra - Hei kuule Suomi
7. Cincinnati Pop Orchestra - Back to the Future theme
8. Johann Sebastian Bach - Blute nur, du liebes Herz (St. Matthew passion)
9. Verdi - Annina? (La Traviata)
10. Miljoonasade - Radiorakkautta
11. Pave Maijanen - Palava syd n
12. Nirvana - In Bloom
13. Albert Prefjean - Sous les toits de Paris
14. (unknown horrible synthesizer thing) - Thunderball (James Bond)
15. Sibelius - String Quartet D minor op. 56 "Voces intimae" I Andante - Allegro molto moderato
16. Emmi - No Nothing
17. The Kings of Convenience - The Girl from Back Then
18. Maija Vilkkumaa - Kristiina
19. Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Oh, Boy!
20. Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Valley of Tears

I saw Ruby the Rival via an article on Lambda the Ultimate, and of course it tickled my interest in the diffusion, rise, and decline of programming languages. The guys they picked to interview have pretty good commentary - I found it thoughtful and insightful. Robert Cooper's comments to the effect that you should do the easy things first and make the complex stuff available are spot on. Simple stuff has got to be simple in order for the language and its libraries and applications to scale down, and without scaling down, you leave yourself vulnerable to someone who is willing and able to get people started with something easier than what you're offering. Bill Venners points out that the Rails folks have done a very good job of marketing what they've done. Agreed. It's been hard to see the opposite effect in the Tcl community, which has some really good technology that has been sold very poorly. Speaking of which, James Duncan Davidson says Ruby doesn't have a "compelling" gui toolkit. It has Tk though, and if they do their homework, will soon have Tile. And that's not bad... maybe it's not the glitziest thing out there, so I could see why it might not appeal to a Mac guy, but on the other hand, there are countless very compelling desktop apps waiting to be written that are interesting to people for what they do, not just because they are slick looking. And frankly, it's not like Java is that hot in the gui space in any case... Mini-Language Only tangentially related to the above, I found this while looking at ofbiz, which looks to be a pretty good system for what it does. However, the "scripting language" doesn't really make sense to my way of doing things. Look at the example towards the end: http://www.ofbiz.org/docs/minilang.html That seems like an awful lot of verbosity for something that doesn't absolutely need to be edited by a computer.