Older blog entries for mtearle (starting at number 34)

LCA2002 & Debian mini-conf - Brisbane was lots of fun, scarily similar to Perth. Memorable presentations where Bdale's on porting to PA/RISC and ia64, Samba 3.0 by Jeremy and Andrew and Tinmith Augmented Reality by Wayne Piekarski

LCA2003 - Perth won the bid to host the 2003 incarnation of linux.conf.au, organisation continues apace. I've been roped into handle the finances and be a stunt James. Due to the vagaries of .conf.au administration, our website can currently be found at conf.linux.org.au

Work - Looks like I'll be doing much more stuff with MySource. If I'm good, I might get to do some calendaring stuff....

IV - Sang the Rachmaninoff Vespers at The Sydney Intervarsity Choral Festival 2002. Russian is fun to sing!

Australia is a small island - Random house guest (hi Striker) last Tuesday from Evil House (a supposed relation of the spankyhouse) who lives with part of a cool ska band named Halfdave who I saw just before IV....

life - continues to amuse, abuse and confuse

advodiary - Woohoo! XML-RPC goodness!

Another year over And a new one just begun - 2001 passed boggingly quickly, much more than I had anticipated. Happy New Year!

R is for Reverse Engineering - Currently reversing engineering the EPROM from the Snack Vending machine that the University Computer Club owns for hardware compatibility reasons and to get it on the Internet. Needing to brush up on my HC11 assembly.

X is for XML-RPC - Currently toying around with it for two projects - the first being a library system for the local SciFi club and the other being a calendaring/scheduling project that is still just a nascent thought. The perl RPC::XML module rocks and so does the test page at www.dscpl.com.au that I can debug my server with. XML-RPC seems to be one of those technologies that is going to quietly take over the world.

O is for Open Source - Wading into that discussion, Open Source is not dead for the same reasons that Cuba is still exists as a communist state, they both work for the people involved. (Cuba was one of the more successful communist states till the mid 90s, and yes, I'm making an ironic comparision to the gee pee ell)

L is for linux.conf.au Plane Tickets are in hand and conference rego is just about to be paid this week, it's going to be lots of fun again (and will probably do wonders for my enthusiasm)

W is for Work - Been playing with a cute Australian Content Management System called MySource and submitting patches back. It's rather featureful and useable unlike some of the other web projects I've seen.

B is for Backup - 'nuff said. The simple joy of hard drive failures.

Teachers - My two friends who are both teachers, Fi and Liz, seem to be the most affected by current events. It must be painful to encounter the ingnorance and hope of the schoolyard teaching our youth who have no perspective of what happened.

diaries - mbp and sethcohn both aptly summing up the past 24 hours as the dust settles. Another diary caught my eye with the mention of the word PEACE, it was certainly shattered on Tuesday and shocked the world. The world needs leadership toward it, currently peace is only a luxury to those who can afford it.

The United Nations seemingly is our last best hope for that currently but given that even affluent countries such as Australia, who are signatories on the Declaration of Human Rights, can afford to ignore it (with respect to recent asylum seekers) and countries such as the United States of America refusing to sign up to treatries on the use and prohibition of landmines for domestic political reasonings, where are the right thinking men of the world?

The Most Isolated Capital City In The World - Living in Perth provides an interesting and detached perspective on world events. Perth is closer to another country than to our nations capital. I was out having a few drinks with friends to celebrate my recent graduation at my local tavern when someone came in and implored us to turn the television on. My friends and the other people their just stood there in shock at the footage that was appearing on the screen. Some of us quite visibly shaken. A comparision I heard today is that this will be a defining moment for our generation akin to the assasination of JFK or the Munich Olympics and we'll ask each other where we were it happened.

What makes it even more touch home is that we know people via at most 1 or 2 degrees of separation that were in the Manhattan area when the collapse happened. It makes me extremely thankful for the quality of life that we have here and my thoughts go out to those more directly affected. Perth is so remote from anywhere useful apart from a submarine base that it makes it an unattractive target and that our tallest building (50+ stories) is rather than a monument to capitalism it more to its failures and excesses.

The media frenzy is reminiscent of the Gulf War but without the anticipation. I hope we don't see Fortress America come into existance, that would be a very sad thing.

life - I've just acquired three letters after my name B, C, & M. After eight and half years about bloody time! :)

websites - yakk - that's the scariest design yet!

ObHacking - Got the Wizard PC FM Radio working with my linux box, now to write some evil code to grab speed camera locations and feed that into sphinx...

Tampa - As yakk and gbowland have noted, it's all FSCKED. The Australian Government really needs to get a picture of how to behave in the wider world rather than making policy on the run.

patch karma - got around to posting a couple of patches/bugfixes to Mailman to SourceForge and the mailman-developers list, however still have to update my other mailman patch though....

life is good - ... but less so for other people I know

Graduation - in approximately 17 days. Confidence is high, I repeat, Confidence is high. I'm kind of missing study and/or a significant other to regulate my life - my days seem very full and unable to get some quality time to myself (or more importantly catch up on my pile of books to read). How do other people balance their lives between work, life and hacking? For example I want to spend some time of Reefknot but other things are distracting me or taking up my time.

random hacking - the UCC mail server decided to eat its hard disk so I've spent my spare time over the last couple of days resurrecting it's mail config - including some custom patches for local features to Mailman. Likes my xmms-cdread hack I must get around to submitting both upstream.

Home, Sweet, Home - we have way too many computers in the house, approx 15 at last count....

RFT - Terracon is over for another year, RFT went well. RFT may or may not be a radio station in the style of Radio Goodies, yes, meglomaniacs are welcome! Had a reasonably large collection of mp3s (5+7+2+9 = ~23G), using dbmix to do computerised mixing, xmms and a reasonably hacking xmms-cdread plugin (the hack basically was - it didn't do CDDA off SCSI cdroms correctly - hacked it to use the cdparanoia backend and another hack to not constantly read the table of contents off the CD whilst stopped). (Although part of me wonders what Debian 1 would have been like...)

University - It's looking as though I'll pass Vision, 33/40 in the lab work, only need 17 for the exam - average is 34.1 for the exam so the probabilities are with me, should find out in a couple of days

Home, Sweet, Home - Have ISDN at home, much goodness, stereo in a rack, now just to get the level of crap down...

Work - New office and desk of power(tm), already feeling more productive.

Hacking - I might even get some of that done in the next fortnight, wish me luck ... damn life conspiring against me :)

University - So long and thanks for all the fish ... finished my last exam today, hopefully forever, but I'm not counting my chickens just yet. Hopefully this means I'll be more useful in the global scheme of things but ...

Home, Sweet, Home - Still needs to be cleaned as we have only just moved in, crap still everywhere. We've already re-arranged the computers three times though....

ObHacking - the debian kpkg stuff is really nice...