Blog Without An Important Name

I now have the maximum possible number of assurance points for CACert, 150. This means two things. One is that I can now get SSL and email certificates that last two years, and the other is that I can now allocate points to others.

So if anyone who happens to be in the same place as me (generally Dunedin, but right now various bits of Australia) wants some, they should get in touch.

A nice side effect is that there is now enough people in Dunedin to get another person up to the required 100 points so they can then allocate them, so the region can now bootstrap itself fairly easily.

Today was apparently the hottest day Sydney has seen so far this summer. As someone who finds 25 degrees uncomfortably warm, the 35-40 degrees we had today was a bit much. It didn’t help that most of what I was doing involved walking from Pyrmont (where I am right now) to The Rocks, and back in the middle of the day.

However, it was good. I was meeting a couple of people from the conference for a final lunch thing at The Australian, where they have regional beers, and a range of pizza. As toppings, we had emu, crocodile, and kangaroo. Crocodile and kangaroo are really quite good it turns out. Emu is not very remarkable.

Later that evening I went for a BBQ, and had kangaroo meat then, too. It’s extremely good like that, and apparently cheaper than regular steak.

It just makes me wonder what kind of reaction you’d get if you were cooking kiwi on the BBQ. Quite different I’d expect

My NZ SIM card has failed, and due to some weirdness of Vodafone, I can’t access voicemail by calling the international number. So should you need to reach me, I can be found at +61415951810 until the end of January (when I return to New Zealand). Email should be pretty reliable too, if you don’t mind waiting a bit.

I’ll also try to update this with more descriptions of talks from the conference. Although, planning to do that didn’t really pan out for last year, so I’ll make no promises.

(Jono Bacon)

Jokosher is aimed at being an audio production tool for Gnome, to replace things like Cubase. Jono is of Lugradio fame, and spent some time complaining about the lack of good audio mixing and editing tools on Linux, so the community got Jokosher started.

It’s looking quite good, and hopefully a near final release is coming out around March. I liked the approach they took to developing the GUI, basically questioning everything, and so it results in a nice simple and sensible-looking application.

The talk consisted of Jono providing background to the project, covering the design decisions, such as why they use things like gstreamer, python, and so on, followed by a demo of it working (mostly, it was from head).

A good effect of this project is that it’s stress-testing the gstreamer framework, and apparently has resulted in a large number of bugs being removed and features added/polished. So this will mean that a lot of audio-related stuff will work better.

(John Stowers)

John’s showing off a program called Conduit. It’s a really interesting looking application that is used to move data from one application to another (or visa-versa). The kinds of things that a looks like it can do at this stage is synchronising a folder of pictures, and flickr, or Tomboy synchronising notes onto an iPod. I think I’d use it mostly to keep a backup of phonenumbers on my cellphone. It does things like conflict resolution, too. Oh, and moving things between machines (e.g. keeping tomboy notes in sync)

Apparently it mostly works with D-bus, which is nice because it’ll encourage apps to use that.

I’m going to have to check this out when it comes out in Ubuntu, apparently a stable release is aimed to go with GNOME 2.20. Don’t know when that is supposed to be, but current Ubuntu is 2.16, so I guess a year or so.

I’m currently sitting listening to Keith Packard talk. He’s good at it. He’s discussing all the new developments in X.org. As always, it’s looking quite good. Finally, things like dual-head and plugging extra monitors into laptops will just work automatically. Apparently, it’ll no longer be actually possible to do it from xorg.conf, instead it’ll all be done by commands to the extension that controls it. So, GUI configuration and so on. That’ll be great for using things like Linux laptops for presentations.

The other half of his talk is about stuff that’s happening to Intel drivers. Well, actually, starting with some interesting history on video cards and how they were developed. He also says that they have the goal of of ensuring that drivers are available in X.org as soon as a chip is released. That’s good. Otherwise, it’s just covering how Intel interacts with the community. That is to say, well. Everything open source, public and well supported.

It was a fairly mid-to-high level talk, but interesting to see what’s going to be happening on that front.

A few days back I posted this, where I mentioned the lack of wireless access at Christchurch airport. Today, I got a reply saying that they’ll be doing something about that. I’m pleasantly surprised that a company like that (I always think of airports as kinda staid and conservative, that may not actually be the truth) actually monitors ‘blogs, and that they’d take the time to reply.

On the note of wireless, wireless at the conference seems to be a bit intermittent, but I’m not sure if it’s the actual network itself, or my card. I’m suspecting my card more and more. Periodically it seems to just drop out, and to get the drivers to activate it again requires a reboot. It’s a Belkin 54g card, but with a Broadcom chipset and using the bcm43xx drivers. If it’s a real issue, I can try ndiswrapper, but I’d like to not do that if I can get away with it (there is some hope here that someone reading this at the conference will be willing to find me and help me fix it

Now I’m in Melbourne, I arrived yesterday. It’s a cool day here, only about 24 or so I managed to get sunburnt, which is something that hasn’t happened in Dunedin for a while.

I’ve just been doing stuff with family. There’s a thing on tonight I wouldn’t mind going out to (this), but I’m still quite tired and don’t think I’ll have the time before I fall asleep, so I might have to pass. Will have to see if there’s anything of that type happening in Sydney.

Anyway, nobody here knows the password for the WEP encryption on the wireless, so I’ve got to get this laptop back to breaking it, so I don’t have to plug it in in the office.

On Sunday at about 11, I fly up to Sydney to validate the excuse for my Aussie holiday with a conference. Yay!

So I arrived at Christchurch airport, thinking that I could use the three hours spare I have (at around 4 in the morning), to update this. However it turns out that there is no public wireless at this airport. Dunedin, and even Invercargill airports have the Telecom hotspot things, but here all you can see is encrypted airport management networks, and the occasional other thing which I assume is people with wireless devices around.

Due to watching a few things on the bus trip up, I also need to have the laptop plugged in for an hour and a half until it recharges. It’s probably not going to get all of that, that would take right up until the time I need to go into the boarding lounge, or whatever it is you do within the hour before you get onto a plane. I wouldn’t mind trying to find somewhere to nap for an hour or two, too.

Regards the bus - I took the KnightRider bus up, which times things fairly well for early morning flights. However, an important thing to keep in mind is that it’s bloody uncomfortable. The seats aren’t really designed for sitting in for 7 hours or so, with someone else beside you. I also only discovered at the second-to-last stop that the seats can go backwards. Had I known it earlier, then it would have made my attempts at sleeping a lot more successful. I probably wouldn’t use it again unless I really needed too.

Anyway, that’ll do for now, now I’m going to pay the departure fee thing, and find somewhere else to charge the laptop, hopefully where I can lie down. This also won’t get posted until I’m in a place with wireless or at least ethernet.