Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Yes, this is quite belated. I’ll explain why in a subsequent post.

linux.conf.au this year was in Wellington, New Zealand. It just keeps getting better! It’s always great meeting people you otherwise only know online. I was especially impressed by the OLPC NZ team.

Immediately following linux.conf.au, I jumped on a plane to Christchurch to embark on a week-long tour of the South Island. Long story short, it was the time of my life! I made some amazing friends. I also saw and did incredible things, including:

• awe-inspiring views of glaciers, glacially-formed landscapes, turquoise-coloured rivers and lakes, beautiful skies and more
• helihike: a helicopter trip onto a glacier, then hiking on it
• a night on a boat on Milford Sound, probably the most beautiful place on Earth
• every extreme activity I could get my hands on, including:
  • three bungy jumps (thrillogy combo): Kawarau Bridge (43 metres), Nevis (134m) and Ledge (47m)
  • two swings: two of the scariest jump styles — Backwards and Gimp Boy Goes to Hollywood
  • a 15,000ft skydive
  • the Triple Challenge: a Shotover jet boat ride, followed by a helicopter transfer to rafting on the Shotover river
    
    
  • a wilderness safari along the Dart River, including walks through forests and a scenic jet boat ride

I have most of my photos online now:

• 2010-01-24 New Zealand holiday, Day 1, pt 1
• 2010-01-24 New Zealand Holiday, Day 1, pt 2
• 2010-01-25 New Zealand Holiday, Day 2, pt 1
• 2010-01-25 New Zealand Holiday, Day 2, pt 2
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 1
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 2
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 3
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 1
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 2
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 3

I think what surprised me most was how adventurous I can be when I’m not in my ‘natural habitat’. I’m not normally a thrillseeker at all, but in NZ I made the decision to take a holiday from myself as well as from work and home. I even made a concerted effort to not touch computers at all. My phone was offline for most of the trip (I was using it as a camera). I never thought that being cut-off could feel so liberating.

©2010 Sridhar Dhanapalan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.

I don't agree with the assumption that bigger cities are better... I certainly don't want to live in a Sydney of 10 million people -- especially given the poor basic infrastructure investment evident in that city. So, why aren't we having a discussion about population growth instead of just blindly growing to 36 million people in 2050?

This is clever.

This clip is awesome. I'm sorry, I promised myself I would cry.

If you’re ever in the situation where people try to convince you that a commercial application is better than an open source one because “you never know what is going to happen to the open source one” (rather than technical merits) then this little story might be handy to keep in mind.

Sun Microsystems had their own “Single Sign On” product called Access Manager, which they open sourced back in 2008. Now when Oracle took over they decided it wasn’t really their thing, and so shut it down, for reasons best known to themselves. Now had this still been a proprietary application that would have been that, dead, finito, it is an ex-parrot, it has ceased to be. But not with this one, as in the best (worst?) zombie movies it has risen from the dead again (or to keep the Python sketch going, it muscled up to the bars of the cage and ‘Voom!’):

But here it comes the awesomeness of the open source community: A Norwegian company called ForgeRock has stepped up to give OpenSSO a new home and continue developing OpenSSO under a new name: OpenAM (because of trademark issues with the name). They claim they will continue with Sun’s original roadmap for the product, and they have started to make available again all of the express builds, including agents, that were removed from OpenSSO’s site, and a new wiki with all the content that once was available at dev.java.net.

So the real power of Open Source isn’t that people will magically keep things going (they are just human after all) but that if *you* need to keep something going then you can, despite what any company says..

This item originally posted here:



Why Open Source is Good

Ada Lovelace Day will be Wednesday 24th March this year, ie, this Wednesday. The idea is to recognise and improve knowledge of women in tech and science, and you blog (or podcast or etc) about a woman you want to recognise. Quite a lot of people I read online did this last year, so here's your reminder to go for round two.

GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are  a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.

The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.

We started with some project updates:

• SipWitch – a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
• Bazaar – I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we’re focusing on now and in the future:
  • short term: merging and collaboration:
    • merge behaviour
    • conflict behaviour
    • develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
    • looms to be polished, or pipelines extended – something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
  • long term
    • continuing optimisation of network and local perf
    • meta-branch operations – mirror collections of branches,
    • work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
    • easier ‘get up and go’ for new contributors
  • now and forever
    • keep fostering community growth
    • we’re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there

Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:

• accessibility since 1st boot
• reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) – this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
• nonfree firmware issue

–lunch–

John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.

Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.

Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.

Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/.  24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!

GNU advisory board discussion…   too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.

One complaint I often hear about Humbug is how difficult it is to attend our weekend meetings due to our Saturday timetable.

In an attempt to make Humbug a little more accessible I’ve got some week-night room bookings at Brisbane’s Central Library, from six to eight pm.

I’m calling these meetings Humbugmeta for the time being.

These meetings are much shorter than the regular Humbug meetings, so I expect they’ll be different in style.

Plans are very fluid at the moment, possible things to do are:

• talks
• workshops
• computer help
• presentation practices

As Humbug likes to see itself as an umbrella group, these bookings are available for use by any tech / design / edu group if they need a space for whatever reason. I’m particularly hopeful that groups will use the space for speakers that have a wider audience than their own group.

Wifi should be available to those with a library account.

The actual dates I’ve got booked are:

• March 24
• April 29
• May 14
• June 21
• July 22
• August 25
• September 22
• October 28
• November 25
• December 22

I’ll be shutting up a little early this Wednesday to attend Pecha Kucha.

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions and of Ubuntu 10.04 Server for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2. Codenamed "Lucid Lynx", 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop and Netbook Editions continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a streamlined, smoother boot experience.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install-time cloud setup.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

The Ubuntu 10.04 family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today.

Desktop features
————————

Social from the start: We now feature built-in integration with Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook, and other social networks with the MeMenu in the panel.

New Design: Cleaner and faster boot, new notification area, new themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Choose any folder in your home directory to sync, choose from millions of songs for purchase in the Ubuntu One Music store. Watch http://one.ubuntu.com/blog for the launch of the Ubuntu One Music Store public beta.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1 for details.

Server features
———————-

Cloud computing: The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud installer has been vastly improved in order to support alternative installation topologies. UEC components are now automatically discovered and registered, even with complex topologies. Finally, UEC is now powered by Eucalyptus 1.6.2 codebase.

UEC and EC2: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS continues the tradition of official Ubuntu Server image releases for UEC and for Amazon’s EC2, giving you everything you need for rapid deployment of Ubuntu instances in a cloud computing environment. UEC images, and information on running Ubuntu 10.04 on EC2, are available at:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/beta1

Stability and security: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS brings many improvements over Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to keep your servers safe and secure for the next five years, including AppArmor profiles for many key services, kernel hardening, and an easy-to-configure firewall.

Ubuntu Netbook features
———————————-
Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment.

It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.

Kubuntu features
————————

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS will be the first LTS to feature KDE 4 Platform and Applications. KDE 4 has come a long way since its early releases and is now suitable for the high demands of LTS users. Being an LTS we have focused on bug fixing and stability for this release, but we did find time to add features such as touchpad configuration, Firefox KDE integration, Kubuntu notification improvements, and cross-desktop systray menu standardisation. Kubuntu features the Plasma Desktop while Kubuntu Netbook Remix comes out of preview status with the Plasma Netbook workspace.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LucidLynx/Beta1/Kubuntu for more details.

Edubuntu features
————————-

Edubuntu in Lucid features a more complete live environment containing more software from universe and all existing language packs as well as our usual educational software in their current version. For Lucid the text installer has been removed and so is LTSP for the time being. We expect to have LTSP back on the DVD for the next beta. The DVD is then much smaller than it used to be but will still provide a complete education environment based on Ubuntu Lucid.

Also included on the Edubuntu DVD is a small repository containing the required packages to transform the regular Edubuntu desktop into a LTSP server or install the Netbook edition interface.

Mythbuntu features
—————————

Mythbuntu 10.04 introduces MythTV 0.23. This new version is significantly faster and should feel more responsive and stable than older versions. It also integrates better into the OS with better support for things like ConsoleKit and Upstart.

Please see http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23 for more details about changes introduced in 0.23.

See http://mythbuntu.org/10.04/beta for information about the Mythbuntu beta release.

Other
——-

* On the Desktop: GNOME 2.30, KDE SC 4.4, XFCE 4.6.1, OpenOffice.org 3.2.0, X.Org server 1.7.5

* On the Server: Apache 2.2, PostgreSQL 8.4, PHP 5.3.1, LTSP 5.2

* "Under the hood": GCC 4.4.3, eglibc 2.11, Linux 2.6.32.9, Python 2.6.5

The full release notes can be found at
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta1

About Ubuntu
——————

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

To Get Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1
———————————————

To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 from Ubuntu 9.10 or Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LucidUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 here (choose the mirror closest to you):

Africa:

* http://ubuntu.saix.net/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (South Africa)

Asia:

* http://mirror.rootguide.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (China)
* http://ubuntutym2.u-toyama.ac.jp/ubuntu/10.04 (Japan)
* http://mirror.khlug.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Korea, Republic of)
* http://ubuntu.qualitynet.net/releases/10.04 (Kuwait)
* http://ftp.mtu.ru/pub/ubuntu/releases/10.04 (Russian Federation)
* http://tw.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Taiwan)
* http://ftp.linux.org.tr/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Turkey)

Europe:

* http://ubuntu.linuxbe.com/10.04 (Belgium)
* http://ubuntu.ipacct.com/releases/10.04 (Bulgaria)
* http://hr.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Croatia)
* http://releases.ubuntu.mirror.dkm.cz/releases/10.04 (Czech Republic)
* http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (Denmark)
* http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Estonia)
* http://ubuntu.trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/releases/10.04 (Finland)
* http://ftp.oleane.net/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (France)
* http://ubuntu.mirror.tudos.de/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Germany)
* http://speglar.simnet.is/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Iceland)
* http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Ireland)
* http://releases.ubuntu.fastbull.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Italy)
* http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04 (Netherlands)
* http://no.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Norway)
* http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/ubuntu/10.04 (Portugal)
* http://rs.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Serbia)
* http://ubuntu.cica.es/releases/10.04 (Spain)
* http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Sweden)

North America:

* http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Canada)
* http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirror.yellowfiber.net/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)

South America:

* http://ubuntu-cd.innova-red.net/10.04 (Argentina)
* http://mirror.pop-sc.rnp.br/mirror/ubuntu/10.04 (Brazil)
* http://ubuntu.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/10.04 (Brazil)

Rest of the world:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Great Britain)

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

The final version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is expected to be released in April 2010.

Feedback and Participation
—————————————

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on FreeNode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

More Information
————————

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

[Discuss Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 on the Forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-announce mailing list by Steve Langasek on Fri Mar 19 16:32:05 GMT 2010

The SA State Election is coming up fast with only hours now until polling booths open. If you have turned on your television or your radio during the campaign you would have to wonder if sledging the competition was good marketing? My count, based on the number of advertisements I viewed presenting either the 'what we will do' versus 'what the opposition won't/hasn't done or have done wrong' approaches you will find the ratio is about 1:5. Is this an effective balance - really?

None-the-less the election will still be here soon and votes will be cast. This week has seen two major thoughts in my mind beyond each individual party's policies. The first comes from the movie 'Looking For Alibrandi' where a student participating in an inter-school speaking competition suggests that voting is not about getting the right party in but keeping the worst party out.

The second actually came as I left 'Live at Five' on Sunday where there was a movie review that I caught the end of. I have no idea what the movie was but the reviewer caught my attention only because what he was saying about the movie resounded with me in respect to the election. He said that one of the things that the movie shows that you need to consider is not just what you gain as immediate benefits but also to put thought into what you then loose in the long term as a result of those decisions.

Crazy, eh, that a movie review that was, by divine plan, speaking to the heart of what this election will really be about as we started our drive home. That it could speak into how I will consider my actions when I make my vote count tomorrow. Have you considered the impact of where you place your trust or, rather, where you avoid those you mistrust?

Disgruntled Lego Customer

The process of acquiring a Mindstorms robot kit has left an extremely bad taste in my mouth.  Lego apparently has something of a reputation for openness with the Mindstorms Kit (although the programming software is both closed and won’t run on Linux – and you’re not licensed to develop commercial applications with it).  However, they do not seem to have a reputation for free trade.  Pricing for the kit on Amazon equated to about AU$330 delivered (Amazon have just sent me an email suggesting I buy it from them based on my earlier searching – which has set off this post).  This compares very favourably to local pricing of AU$450 (not delivered).   Or, it would compare favourably if someone was willing to ship one to me from overseas.  While there are a couple of small places that will, they don’t have the volume, so shipping costs are very high.  Amazon claims “warranty issues” as the reason.  For a bunch of plastic which runs off AA batteries, and for which an identical product is sold here?  GMAB – I call baloney.  I can only assume that distributors have been heavied by Lego.  This reeks of market segmentation.

In rough terms,  for every two sets an Australian school can buy,  a US school can buy three.  Yet another example of how copyright hobbles innovation in this country.

This is cool. but the ZP1320 geiger counter component seems hard to source.

These high speed photos are cool.

I need one.

I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get GnuPG to sign a file with multiple keys. It's not at all obvious from the man page, but you can use the -u option multiple times, with each key ID that you want to use.

Julien's blog post reminded me that I needed to announce that I'm in the process of transitioning to a new key myself.

I've been meaning to do something about the whole weak 1024-bit DSA key thing ever since everyone started freaking out about them, but I liked how well connected my old key was. Oh well. Time to suck it up and start over.

Here's my transition document, now that I've figured out how sign a file with multiple keys

Subtitled: David Pennock’s Wall-Street pick up lines

Dr Pennock’s latest post is about fitting stockmarket data — he comes up with a nicely matching randomly generated histogram based on a Laplace distribution over the daily log differences (that is, take the log of the ratio between daily close prices — so if you gained 20% in a day, take the log of 1.2). As well as pretty pictures, logs of differences have the nice property that their sums and averages are actually meaningful — if you invested $p, at an average log difference of x over n days, then your total at the end of the n days is p*enx.

Dr Pennock doesn’t state the figures he came up with, but by my maths (well, R’s maths assuming I issued the right incantation, and Yahoo’s data) the 60 year average (between 1950 and 2010) daily difference for the S&P 500 is 0.0004596 (with a variation of b=0.006505). Annualising that (ie, multiplying it by 365) and converting it to a percentage ((ex-1)*100) gives an 18.2% annual return over the fifty year period. All very reminiscent to the way of thinking about interest via logarithms I posted about some time ago.

Of course, you only get that result by averaging some really good years and some really bad years, but there’s no reason you have to apply the model to exactly that fifty year period — you could, eg, apply it to 365 49-year periods starting anywhere up to a year after the start of data.

One of the things Dr Pennock notes is:

At the aggregate level the stock market is well behaved: it’s randomness is remarkably predictable. It’s amazing that this social construct — created by people for people, and itself often personified — behaves so much like a physical process, more so than any other man-made entity I can think of.

If the stockmarket were a random physical process — like beta decay or similar — the parameters pulled from the statistical fitting would have a physical meaning, and scientists would look at them to see if they were fundamental constants or if (and how) they varied depending on external influences. These parameters probably can’t be given too much meaning because they only relate things to the US dollar, which has all sorts of other influences, but at least we can have a look at how the parameters change over time.

(I sat up late reading Feynman anecdotes last night. I’m trusting taking a physics-esque approach to questions will be a short-lived consequence)

Anyway, taking 20-year periods gives us 40-years worth of data points (ie, investments beginning from 1950 to 1990; or equivalently ending between 1970 and 2010). Graphing the mean and variation for 400 of those periods gives something like the following:

An interesting thing to note from that is that the mean is both positive and fairly consistent — meaning that if you invested your money in the S&P 500 for 20 years, it doesn’t much matter when you did it, the log of your daily returns would average between 0.00025 and 0.0005 (generally in the 0.0003-0.0004 range) — which by the maths above means an annual return of between 9.5% and 20% (generally 11.5% to 15.7%), which compounded over 20 years is between 521% and 3757% (generally 794% to 1757%). It’d be interesting to see how that changed when adjusted for inflation.

The other interesting aspect of that chart is that the variation seems to be gradually increasing — meaning that while the overall result of the 20 year investment is roughly the same (in so far as a 6x return and a 38x return is “the same”), on a day to day basis you can expect to see both larger gains and larger losses in more recent investments.

If you start reducing the investment period things get a bit more lively, though. With a ten year investment, if you have particularly lousy timing you might have no more money than you started with:

The variation isn’t as stable here either — you can pick some periods of fairly constant variation, some increases and this time even some decreases. There’s also a very sharp increase in the variation fit for investments that span the last couple of years.

Shortening the period still further to a five year investment gives us the possibility of ending up with less cash than we started with:

Though it’s worth noting both that losses are still pretty rare at that point (pretty much limited to people trying to cash out during the 1970s by the looks), and that even investments that ended anytime in the past five years or so look like they should have made a reasonably healthy profit (financial crisis or not).

Investing for a period of just one or two years is still somewhat reasonable, but you’re starting to have some bigger risks of losing money, and it’s getting hard to predict just how chaotic things are going to seem if you check your net worth every day.

Of course, the modelling is breaking down at this point too; without lots of data, guesses at the mean and variation aren’t going to be incredibly meaningful. So if you shorten the period further, to just a month or a quarter, you get pretty useless results:

In general, though, the Laplace analysis seems to support ideas about index funds and long term investing being productive and relatively save ways about dealing with the sharemarket, and possibly provides some interesting ways to analyse different funds.

At least, if I’ve been doing my maths right, anyway…

There is a small but thriving market here for batteries, motors, controllers, and most importantly the peripherals that bind them all together. The problem for most hobbyists - and that which puts them off committing more money sooner - is that each one of these parts has to be individually sourced, often from the USA or China. Few people like paying thousands of dollars, including lots of shipping fees and import duties, and waiting weeks or months in order to find out whether the part they've ordered works with their planned setup or not. Having a local supplier would mean a lot more purchases.

Sure, there's EVWorks over in Perth. Dennis has been relatively helpful to my enquiries and stocks a good range of batteries and other things. I'll probably buy most of my stuff from him. But he's very busy, not only with running the store but with his own instals, and I still begrudge having to freight a hundred odd kilos of batteries across from Perth to Canberra. Having a supplier in Sydney or even Melbourne would cut down on that considerably.

If I was able to, I'd do it; but overcommitment and inexperience prevent me from pursuing it. So I'll have to hope that someone else takes up the baton.

I really would have thought that Virgin American could have done better than this.

It is my pleasure to announce a new project to better the Ubuntu.com website experience, specifically for users who prefer a language other than English. The new project, called Website Localization will put a short (4-5 word) message on any www.Ubuntu.com <http://www.ubuntu.com/> web page directing users to more resources in their preferred language.

This project has two main parts to it. The first part of the Website Localization project is the technical aspect of the project. It is the goal of the project to create a script that will pull out of a users web browser their preferred language. After obtaining this information, the script will cross reference this language against a list of languages that have approved resources offered, and then display a short link to their languages landing page.

The second part of this project is creating landing pages for as many resources as possible. This part of the project will be done by LoCos and the i18n team. The landing pages will be on the wiki, and will be ever changing to direct users to the best information that we can give them.

Currently, the goal is to have the project completed and implemented by the end of May. I would also like to have a working demo of the project by April 19th so that we have plenty of time to fix any problems that arise prior to the final implementation of this project.

I can’t do all of this myself, so I am going to need help from the Ubuntu community. At this point, I need some assistance with the technical side of the project. I need a few people to create the script that will detect the users preferred language, and then show them a link to the landing page in their language. If you have the skills needed to help out with this Website Localization project, please send me an email with your name, launchpad account, a little bit of information about the experience you have and your general ability (time zone, and anything else that may help me out). My goal is to get a group of a few people to work on the technical aspect of this project and have a meeting in the next few weeks to discuss the project in a little more detail, and determine the best way to make this happen.

[Discuss the Ubuntu.com Website Localization Project on the Forum]

Originally sent to the loco-contacts mailing list by Chris Johnston on Wed Mar 17 19:32:43 GMT 2010

Well, it's been a month since the initial demolition started

It's nearly finished.

We had a slight bit of scope creep in that we decided to redo the floor now as well. This was brought on by the fact that the new cabinets didn't quite meet up with the footprint of the old ones, on one side, leaving maybe a 5 centimetre gap between the new cabinets and the floor.

I wasn't a fan of having to haul the fridge and stove back into the living room again at some point in the future (the fridge is too big for the doorway and needs to have its doors removed) so it seemed like the best thing was to do it while everything else was being done.

Fortunately, it hasn't blown out the overall time of the work, as we're still waiting for the counter tops to be cut or manufactured or something. The ETA for them to be installed is Friday or Monday.

So in the meantime we got just the kitchen floor tiled.

The plan is to replace all of the floating wooden floor with tiles, but just not right now. To do the rest would involve faffing around with the downstairs bathroom, and pulling out the washer and dryer, as well as the hot water heater. Doing that now, on top of having all of the kitchen stuff in the living room just gives me the heebie jeebies, so the compromise is to keep the existing flooring for the rest of downstairs, and just buy enough tiles to cover it later. Maybe at Christmas time, if we go back to Australia, we'll get it done then while we're not around to be disrupted.

When they ripped up the floor in the kitchen, some huge cracks in the slab were immediately apparent, so they had to put down some DITRA as a foundation to prevent the tiles cracking as a result of the slab expanding and contracting.

The tiling should be finished by tomorrow I hope, and then we have to let the grout cure for 72 hours before we seal it.

The one small delay we've had was due to a miscommunication with the kitchen company: we'd never ordered any handles for the cabinets and drawers, so they only got ordered after the cabinet installation was completed. Had we had them on hand, we could have started occupying the cabinets and drawers already, which would have reduced the chaos in the living room a bit. Oh well.

Blow-by-blow photos of the work so far (I'm lacking photos of the cabinets with the doors on) are here.