I'm Only In IT For The Chicks

Copyrighting: Let's Make Lawyers Rich Off Bullshit

2006-11-20T00:30:00.000+10:00

Copyright - TM - Pat. Pending - Registered - U.S. Patent 475382949404107462

I have lived my life for the last 7 years in complete denial of the concept of a copyright. I think that copyrights are complete bullshit. To start the argument, the only time that a copyright should be enforced is when a marketable product has been copyrighted and somebody else copies the idea/product and sells it for money (money can mean for profit or for a non-profit cause - it still earns money).

I am so upset about the issue, I am going to write the harshest curse word in a blog to date..

Fuck you answers.com

Why am I so upset by the issue when I have lived side-by-side with it for 7 years - because of this article below - copied verbatim. Here's a protest blog mofos, don't be so supportive of the Indie scene then stoically claim that the article is copyrighted - you guys are trying to c$$h in on "Indie". In the words of one of the most Indie bands of all time - "get off the bandwagon, put down the 'andbook"..

[TheAge | Text-only index]

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Where are all the protest songs?

Date: November 4 2006

Gabriella Coslovich

IF YOU ever doubted the market power of the fame factory that is Australian Idol, take a look at the ARIA charts: for the past three years, the country's top-selling singles have been spun by an Idol graduate. Last year, it was Anthony Callea's The Prayer, in 2004 it was Shannon Noll's What About Me (a cover of the old Moving Pictures song), and in 2003 it was Guy Sebastian's Angels Brought Me Here.

Soapie stars and Idol alumni dominate the Australian music charts — and it hasn't entirely been the intervention of angels that brought them here. The influence of prime-time television, the might of marketing, the support of profit-driven record companies and high rotation on commercial radio might have had something to do with their celestial success.

"What about you indeed?" came the rejoinder at the ARIA awards on Sunday night, as one of Australia's music legends, erstwhile Midnight Oil drummer Rob Hirst, took to the stage to accept the band's induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame. Using the ultra-mainstream pulpit for more than a gushing thank-you speech, Hirst beat on his political drum as forcefully as he ever did when he played with the Oils.

"Vietnam inspired some of the greatest protest songs ever written. Not so now, surprisingly, even when hundreds of thousands of Australians crowded our streets to demonstrate their opposition to another senseless war," Hirst told the audience and legions of television viewers.

"It may be that complaint rock is still being written but (is) ignored by an industry hypnotised by get-famous-fast TV shows. Bless you John Butler, but you should not have to do it all by yourself," Hirst said, referring to the popular roots musician, environmental activist and staunch independent who has broken into the mainstream.

Hirst added, in a not-so-veiled reference to the policies of the Howard Government: "Of course, everything eventually turns around, as Bush's predecessor of two centuries past, Thomas Jefferson, observed. He said: 'A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over. Their spells dissolve and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles."'

Hirst's speech was an incantation in itself, a provocation, a challenge to the industry and musicians to produce songs that matter, as Midnight Oil did in their heyday, with thumping political anthems such as Beds are Burning, Power and the Passion and Blue Sky Mining — which they famously played on a flat-bed truck outside the headquarters of the Exxon corporation in protest against the handling of the Valdez oil spill.

But how fair were Hirst's comments? Has the Australian music industry all but stopped nurturing talented, original and socially engaged songwriters to walk the get-rich-quick path presented by Australian Idol?

Are Australian musicians avoiding the fraught subjects of our times— the Iraq war, global warming, the erosion of civil liberties in the name of freedom and democracy, racism fuelled by the politics of fear and "nation building", spurious "Australian values" and the sidelining of indigenous issues? Yes, there's plenty to shout about, so where are the smouldering protest songs?

"I suspect they are being written, but they are not being promoted," Hirst told The Age this week, on his way to Newcastle to run songwriting workshops.

Richard Kingsmill, the music director of Triple J radio, confirms those suspicions, saying independent bands are out there, recording on self-funded labels that allow them artistic freedom — but their music is largely ignored by the commercial networks.

"If you were a general music lover, you might think there are no political songs being written," Kingsmill says.

"If Australian Idol is all you watch, and the Austereo and DMG networks are all you listen to, then you're never going to hear anything remotely political … it's all feelgood pop or retro rock.

"But trust me, political songs are being written, recorded and released all the time in this country. We have boxes of anti-Bush, anti-Howard, anti-Iraq war, anti-racism, pro-choice, pro-environment CDs, all from contemporary local acts."

The hip-hop scene is particularly rich with protest songs and alternative voices, says Kingsmill, pointing to groups such as the Herd, Def Wish Cast, Hilltop Hoods, Bliss N Eso and Muph & Plutonic. In the folk-roots scene, bands such as Blue King Brown are reflecting on the times, and even in the oft-dismissed mainstream rock arena you'll find incursions into politics.

"Powderfinger write political songs, always have," says Kingsmill. " Like a Dog and The Day You Come are both good examples. Powderfinger just do it in a more subtle way than the Oils did, I guess. You have to read between the lines a bit more with Bernard Fanning and his lyrics."

No need to read between the lines of Sydney hip-hop outfit the Herd's 77%, a seething, indignant rap in broad Australian accents about the dire state of the nation, which points out, among other things, that "Captain Cook was the very first queue-jumper/and it was immigrant labour that made Australia plumper".

With hip-hop beats as stirring as the Oils' trademark drumfire, the song's chorus sums it up: "Wake up, this country needs a f--king shake up."

Yet Herd manager and band member Tim Levison would be the last to compel artists to be political. "Lord knows we have experienced enough of a backlash for being political," he says. "However, you would hope that in any healthy society there would be artists speaking honestly about the political situation of the day."

Triple J continued to champion 77% despite the furore it provoked and the single was voted onto the station's Hottest 100 for 2003. The only Herd song ever to be picked up by commercial radio was its cover of the classic Redgum anti-war song I Was Only Nineteen, but it's not much of gamble, really, to play a song that has already made it onto the country's hit list, about a war that is over.

"Midnight Oil being inducted into the Hall of Fame is a reminder to people that you don't have to toe the line and make safe music to further your career," Levison says.

But even Midnight Oil was an exception. No other Australian band before or since has had such prolonged success with such explicitly political songs and actions. The great anti-war anthems of the Vietnam era hailed not from Australia but America — songs such as Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising and Who'll Stop the Rain and Bob Dylan's Masters of War, Blowin' in the Wind and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. Perhaps the best known peace chant came from John Lennon and his Japanese muse, Yoko Ono, who recorded Give Peace a Chance in Montreal in 1969 during the second of their bed-ins for peace.

In Australia, the first anti-Vietnam song didn't appear until 1969. Written by Johnny Young, Smiley was inspired by the conscription of teen star Normie Rowe. As documented by ABC television's Long Way to the Top music series, Australian pop stars were drafted by the music industry not to sing protest songs but to entertain the troops.

"Australian music is about rock'n'roll and let's party. It's anti-intellectual," says Shane Howard, who wrote 1982's land rights anthem Solid Rock, which became a huge hit for his former band, Goanna.

Politically charged music that has broken into the mainstream has been all too scarce, Howard says.

"Yothu Yindi (with Treaty), Midnight Oil, Goanna, Redgum — that's pretty slim pickings over 30 years," he says. "I think Rob's pretty close to the truth when he talks about John Butler being the lone voice of dissent in Australian popular music, and popular is the key word.

"Given that we are entering an era of even greater concentration of media ownership, it will become even harder to hear dissenting voices."

But Michael Parisi, president of artists and repertoire at Warner Music Australia, says that just because musicians aren't making songs with an explicitly political edge doesn't mean they don't have opinions or care about social issues. Even so, for him, politics is not rock'n'roll.

"I have always come from the romantic school of rock. I have always felt that music is meant to be an escape, where rock's meant to be fun," Parisi says.

Warner Music, is apolitical, he says, but the company has also consciously eschewed the fast-track Idol phenomenon.

"We don't see it having long-term value for our business," he says.

Warner does fund artist development, but commercial success is the bottom line — if a band doesn't cut it, it's dropped.

John Butler, who is now in Los Angeles mixing a new John Butler Trio album, doesn't have a problem with Idol. Record companies have long constructed bands, he says.

"Weren't the Temptations and a lot of those soul-singing all girl and boy groups constructed by Motown and the like? Hell, some of them were pretty good and a lot of them didn't even write their own songs," he says in an email.

However, he does object to the prefab-style bands and artists clogging the airways.

"They have a place, but it's a bummer to think that so much great original Australian music won't really be realised by the Australian mainstream just because the industry won't take a risk," he says.

There are always the exceptions that break through, the Butlers and Midnight Oils. In the end, what matters most is the song. Music appeals to different people for different reasons — melody, rhythm, lyrics, message, humanity. Midnight Oil's throbbing pub-rock style appealed to young men in the 1980s in much the same way as Wolfmother's apolitical retro-rock appeals to a new generation. One can be fairly sure that there were Oil fans around who weren't primarily attuned to the politics.

"A good song crosses all boundaries, no matter what the topic," says Butler.

"Take Beds are Burning. Yes, it was about the state of Aboriginal Australia, our racist history, past and present, and reconciliation, but it didn't get too specific. Instead, it asked a simple question of all of us: how can we sleep when our beds are burning? Well, how can we?"

He names a couple more — When the River Runs Dry, by Hunters and Collectors, and the beautiful, poetic From Little Things Big Things Grow, by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody. "Without a good song, really, ya got nothing. Political, love song or otherwise."

Gabriella Coslovich is The Age's senior arts writer.

This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.

[ TheAge | Text-only index]

That's my protest.

ODP - Open-source Demonstration & Presentation

2006-03-28T21:14:00.000+10:00

Intro

At the last HUMBUG meeting - 25 March 2006 - I introduced the fellow HUMBUGGERS to the concept of running Ubuntu on SunRay thin-clients. Thanks to my boss, I was able to demonstrate the setup to the audience with hardware borrowed from work. The presentation also afforded me the opportunity to spread more of the good word on Ubuntu.

Open-source

Although the SunRay Server Software is due to be open-sourced, the entire presentation was carried out using mostly open-source software. The content of the talk was about running a soon-to-be open-sourced solution on an open-source operating system; the presentation was delivered using open-source presentation software running on the same open-source operating system. The content and the presentation itself were the visible parts, however, the open-source controlling of the show was the truly interesting part.

*"open-source" will not be used again in this blog.

The presentation was controlled using my bluetooth phone, following on from the discoveries at nerd.conf.au 2006. Using the "Presenter" screen on the SonyEricsson K750i, the keymappings did not require further configuration to seemlessly control the OpenOffice2 presentation. I decided to go one step further and map two keys to turn the volume up and down within Gnome. Why? To have a presentation with funky pre-presentation music of course (when plugged-in to the room's audio system)..

Does that mean I helped Ubuntu to 'rock'?

Demonstration

The demonstration had followed the presentation, although this blog post is ordered in a different way. First demonstrated was the SunRay 1Gs capability to use a DVI monitor followed by the search for the DVI-to-VGA converter to continue the demo on the projector.

On the projector, I proceeded to login to the HP Small Form Factor PC with 2G of RAM running Ubuntu. Once logged in, I showed the audience a locked-down GNOME desktop environment similar to the end product of my CorporateUbuntu wiki page. I rounded off the demonstration with the awe-inspiring (OK - not that exciting, but still nice) smartcard portable session demo, along with telling the punters that they can carry their sessions on a smartcard around their house. Ending on the smartcard note was a pre-cursor for the lengthy Q&A session followed by the ensuing "swarm" around the presentation table.

Presentation

Along with the great bells-and-whistles of my phone, the presentation went quite well. Based on my wiki page - UbuntuOnSunRay - the talk provided additional commentary on why the combination of Ubuntu and SunRay was chosen along with some general background information on the two components. I finished off the presentation by outlining the future for the co-existence of Ubuntu and SunRay.

At the end of the talk and demonstration, I listened to many good questions from a noticibly engaged audience. Prior the beginning of the talk, a HUMBUGGER had let me know he picked up a SunRay 1 (superceded model) off Ebay for $12 - that was a great answer to the "How much does a SunRay cost?" question, before answering a guestimate cost for the current model. The end result of the presentation was sparking alot of interest in the use of SunRays at home on a Linux-based OS like Ubuntu.

The presentation is available for download at Ubuntu Australian Team Talks.

Doco: Making It Simpler For The End User

2006-01-29T15:55:00.000+10:00

Intro

Two disparate sources of documentation for Ubuntu have emerged over the last two years - the official Ubuntu documentation, including the official Ubuntu Wiki, and the Customization Tips & Tricks forum on the official Ubuntu Forums. Although the forum has served its initial purpose, on its own, it is an unmanageable documentation facility. Hence, under the direction of two forum admins, the Ubuntu Document Storage Facility (UDSF) was born to organise and collate the contents of the forum.

Different Projects, Same Goals

Understandably, the UDSF admins are proud of their site and have put in a great deal of their time into setting the wiki up. But what they have done is duplicate an existing official mechanism, the Ubuntu Wiki.

Ubuntu is a very open community, if you feel something needs to be improved, put your hand up then lend a hand. The Ubuntu Wiki needs the help of those involved with the UDSF to help restructure it into a lean mean doc machine.

Promotion of the UDSF

Several influential Ubuntu Forums staff actively promote the UDSF as a source of information in their post signatures, with no accompanying references to the Ubuntu Wiki. Promotion by the Ubuntu Forum staff has two negative effects:

Ubuntu Forums staff became staff members because they answer the most questions, therefore their avid promotion of an unofficial documentation source without the dual promotion of the official source creates confusion amongst impressionable new users seeking help
The UDSF, indirectly, supports the continuation of the unmanageable documentation created within the Customization Tips & Tricks forum

The Official Ubuntu Forums admins and the UDSF admins have been invited to a joint meeting with the Ubuntu Documentation team to open formal dialogue about integrating better with the Official Ubuntu community. The invitation was also posted in the forums and personally sent to each of the interested parties.

Ubuntu Wiki vs Customization Tips & Tricks Forum

I have stated multiple times that the Customization Tips & Tricks forum is unmanageable without an additional service. Any additional services, be it the UDSF or a team that copies the posts straight into the Ubuntu Wiki, is an unneccessary overhead to producing documentation.

Forum posts are static and are only good for static communication, like asking questions, not for providing quality documentation. The current support mechanism for the shortcomings of the forum posts, the UDSF, is privately run and has a scheduled downtime of 6 hours each week.

Let commonsense prevail, create your documents in the Wiki and discuss the document on the Forums. Issues of licensing and archiving will become non-existant. The guidelines for creating new wiki pages are just guidelines, that is the reason for using a wiki, documents are corrected and kept up-to-date because of constant public peer review.

Miscellanea

I became an Ubuntu Member this week at the last Community Council meeting that was held. Many thanks to Jorge Castro for his positive blogging about my work. As a result of my membership, I have joined the Ubuntu Documentation & Wiki teams, and began contributing to the Ubuntu Desktop Starter Guide for the upcoming Dapper Drake release.

I nutted out the appropriate keymappings for my SonyEricsson K750i to remote control beep-music-player via Bluetooth as a continuation of the work carried out at nerd.conf.au 2006. It looked really cool when I demo'd it at HUMBUG last night and I will document the steps in the next few weeks on the Wiki. I am in contact with the GBTcr guy as well to get that promising app running on Ubuntu. Also watch the Ubuntu Wiki in the coming weeks as I await the results of a guy I helped to setup his mobile phone as a modem via Bluetooth. An overhaul of the Bluetooth doco is on the horizon..

Keeping along with my focus for Ubuntu being a premier choice for business desktops, we should also "keep up with the Jones'" in the kickass department. A strong focus from the Ubuntu community on documenting how they've made Ubuntu really rock (I had to use that word) by getting it to do awesome things, eg. Bluetooth remote control, could make Billy G's keynote address (video) (transcript) at last year's CES seem laughable.

Life As A Linux/Unix Admin In A Linux/Unix World

2006-01-22T10:13:00.000+10:00

Intro

The catalyst for the writing of this post is the forum post - Life as a Linux/Unix admin in a Windows world - and the fiery reply by the user 'broom'.

In the company I work for, Windows PCs would account for around 5% of the user desktops and the number of Windows Servers could be counted on one hand (with no thumb and two fingers missing). Solaris is heavyweight champion of our world, however, Linux is up on points in the early rounds for the battle of the desktop.

It has been my focus over the last 4 months to migrate our rock-solid Solaris 8 CDE user environment to an Ubuntu Breezy Badger GNOME user environment. Other desktops that were tried included Solaris 10 Java Desktop System 2 (GNOME), SUSE 9 and Fedora Core 3 & 4, with Ubuntu coming out the winner on functionality and stability. The desktop OSes also had to run SunRay Server Software (SRSS). Part of the success for the lack of Windows relies on the use of SunRay Thin-Clients.

Although the author of the article mentioned above paints the picture that he was/is in the warzone against Windows admins and how Linux was superior in a number of areas, working in the environment I work in isn't the Utopia that he seems to paint..

Support

The argument of having support contracts when you already have experienced admins is baseless. Although the author of the article brags about how he doesn't need support contracts for his Linux servers and uses the support on Windows servers as a point to undermine the admins, I think the amount of time to have issues resolved is greatly increased.

Support contracts are there as a backup and do not make the admins look incompetent. We have Sun support contracts for all of our production servers and have had to put calls through on multiple occasions when errors appear in the messages file that look suspicious and a google search does not find the answer for. In contrast, when multiple bugs have occurred on the new Ubuntu desktops, the onus rests completely with me to log bug reports and work on the fixes.

The open source community is great for helping each other out, however, most are not paid to sit in front of the bug management systems 8-hours a day/5 days a week and as a result there can be long delays in getting issues fixed or not fixed at all. Although I will aim to start working on bugs more at work, I find myself logging all the bugs at home in my own time, because of the amount of time it consumes. Convincing my boss to purchase a support contract on the Ubuntu desktop through Canonical is also going to be tough as the driving reason behind the migration was that it was "free".

Windows v Everything Else

I would say that Linux as a business desktop, in principle, far outweighs the cost and the insecurities of an equally-locked down Windows desktop. Running Linux over a thin-client architecture and setting up Windows servers to serve applications via rdesktop or Sun's Secure Global Desktop can get around the compatibility arguments.

The current situation still needs greater improvements.. Evolution needs to be made more stable and needs to integrate better with major email servers, OpenOffice shouldn't blackout the corner of the desktop on large spreadsheets, etc, etc.. The principle of having a locked down GNOME 2.12 desktop looks great on paper, but I feel there are a few more versions to go before it is rock-solid. The rock-solid achievement will be hard to attain given that GNOME is constantly changing it's suite of apps in each version and it has a lack of super strict rules for letting new additions in.

I will continue to support that a Linux thin-client desktop is a better alternative to running Windows on PCs, however, I would really like to say that it is a rock-solid alternative to Windows.

'broom's Reply

The more I network and talk with Linux/Unix professionals, the more I find that there are a large-number of narcissistic 'bettermen' out there, out to prove the point that they work on bigger and better things and earn more cash than you do. I think it is OK to list your experiences and what you work on, but don't then use it to start off a penis-size competition.

Penis competition aside, I do whole-heartedly agree that mouthing off all the time about how wonderful Linux is will set the author up for a big fall. Just like riding a motorbike, almost every rider falls off once. Along with the aggressive boasting about Linux, going behind your bosses back to his superior is just plain unprofessional and, in my eyes, makes him look like another stupid tech-head with no business skills. Gone are the days when propellerheads could hack away on Linux/Unix boxes in a locked room, IT dudes must also be able to act as part of the business world as well, I learn this more each day.

Unix User Group = A Unique Microcosm

2006-01-15T23:46:00.000+10:00

Intro

After having a work colleague in my ear all the time about going along to the Unix user group that he attends, I finally decided to not only have a look, but to also join the group. Twenty bucks and a form later, I am now a card-carrying member of HUMBUG - Home Unix Machine Brisbane Users Group. Card-carrying proof:

The main reasons for joining are to network with other Unix professionals, advocate Ubuntu, help out new and potential Ubuntu users and, most importantly, I joined up for the chicks.

The First Hour

Being the first time I have ever stepped into a classroom at UQ, I made a mistake of just remembering the number of the room. I had the right building and the right floor, but there were multiple 201 rooms.. The lettering scheme didn't quite seem to make sense either.

When I rocked up to the correct room, there were two guys sitting well apart from each other both seeming quite happy to sit there in silence. The room lacked any insignia

and even the multiple switches that were strategically placed around the large room seemed to blend into the decor. "Is this Humbug?" I asked one of the gentlemen, then after receiving an affirmative answer, I just started rambling on about how I work with the guy who usually comes to these meetings, etc, etc. The group secretary stops me from continuing by saying that the other guy is new and doesn't seem to care who I know..

After handing over the money and forms, I get to business on starting to log some more Ubuntu bugs. During the setup, I get started on configuring my machine to pick up the dhcp and have no luck with a half-assed attempt at trying to connect to the WLAN that was available. I wouldn't mind writing some doco for members on how to get the right settings for all the available services, perhaps a wiki if it fits in with the ideologies of the group. I lurve doco.

During working on the laptop a few discussions have started off very quickly and everyone has a general good amount of respect for each other with some interesting points being raised. During the first hour, a chap from Kingaroy had arrived to chat about Linux and get some general help. Kingaroy, although it sounds like an awesome name for a multinational conglomerate, is a small country town that is 3 hours drive from Brisbane. Kingaroy even has it's own LUG (Linux User Group).. It was very interesting to see how far somebody would come to get to the meeting.

The Centre-Of-Attention Discussion

About two and a half hours into the meeting, I was running from computer to computer helping out two different guys with their Debian systems, trying to get one guy's EPSON printer working through CUPS and another guy's apt-get services working through the proxy at the meeting.

On Saturday night I had plans to go out and have a few beers with some mates, so I had to cut the night short, real short.. My problem was that I was loving the whole "oh do you use a Unix-based OS? get out of town, so do I" environment so much that I would easily be speaking to somebody, then mid-sentence I would start helping somebody out with their problem, then start talking to somebody halfway through the problem. Basically, quality of work and quality of teaching had declined because I had to go elsewhere. I have learnt the lesson of only helping one person at a time, if possible. It would not have been as bad as it was if I was staying on, but I wasn't.

During my frantic bashings at a keyboard, a guy with no PC next to him was lying back nonchalantly across a few tables and proclaimed that he does not think that Linux has a place on the desktop market. People who work with me would know that's a really good way to fish me in for an argument. I am a very passionate proponent of replacing Windows the world over with Ubuntu both at home and in the workplace. It can be done.

What had followed was me proclaiming back at him that I completely disagree with what he had just said. My vocalness and the fact that his group of surrounding yesmen had not offered one retort left me in bad position with the status quo. I had disagreed with a little aggressive-assertiveness with a loud clear voice. It was the Good, the Bad and the Ugly - high noon. I am certain at least one of these goes down at every meeting at every UUG/LUG about something. I was also without backup as my work colleague did not attend and I was attending my first night, so nobody would have any standings on whether they believed my ramblings or not.

MindJet/Freemind

The argument was somewhat of a farce with his winning point being about the fact that if it didn't run MindJet, it would not work in the desktop market. He won because it was going nowhere and the fact that I hadn't heard of MindJet before had worked to lessen my perceived level of general IT knowledge. I asked attentatively if he could briefly outline what it was about, etc. during which it sounded like another wanky-buzzword management tool. He would be classed as a MindJet advocate.. He went on to tell me and the rest of the room of how it helps him out for his line of work which did make it sound useful.

After researching MindJet, I would have to come close to saying that it does seem to be classed as a killer app for business and it could easily be used in the home. However, during the debate, somebody had asked the other guy about Freemind, which he had stated that it was terrible with the yesmen collectively nodding their heads to. Open source apps always start off terribly, especially something as big as Freemind, that's why people collaborate and work on such projects. I am certain that Freemind would have some financial backing and it would be in line for alot more. This is a definate "watch this space" project.

So-called Linux desktop killers like MindJet and AutoCAD do not have the potential to stop the ever-increasing momentum for large-scale Linux desktop rollouts. Solutions currently exist for a central Windows server to serve out applications to Linux desktops via Citrix or the now freely-available Sun Secure Global Desktop (formely Tarantella). The rdesktop package could also provide the required access to Windows apps. In regards to AutoCAD, it has been noted that it cannot be run over Citrix, but that doesn't mean that other innovative solutions do not exist for it be shared for users in thin-client environments.

Conclusions

The opportunity to interact with the pro-Unix userland in person is a great experience and would be a great experience for users of all skill levels and interests. The flipside is that it can be likened to a real-life IRC room, with hidden hierarchies and cliques outside of the executive. I do enjoy confrontation on an academic level and I am looking forward to the next meeting. I would even like to convene a talk on why I think Linux can make it on the desktop and then hear his reasons on why he thinks it can't - instead of the ad hoc one-sided discussion that had taken place. Keep in mind that this was my first meeting, it would be unadvantageous for my cause to speak over somebody who's opinions were being followed by at least a few people and questioned by none.

Miscellanea

My flatmate had returned from her gallivantings around the South African countryside with the following gift:

and pictured on the front are..

Ubuntu Beads!!!

No, these are not Canonical-sponsored beads, they are Ubuntu beads.. The Ubuntuness gets better with the description on the back:

"The Ubuntu beads are a symbol of the spirit in which Wild Africa Cream is created. Ubuntu embraces the African tradition of goodwill and sharing between people."

It figures too - it's quite a nice drink..

nerd.conf.au 2006 - Brisbane

2006-01-11T16:15:00.000+10:00

Quick Facts

IT Dude
Injured back at the gym
Doctor's orders - no alcohol for the weekend
Flatmates were away for the weekend
Multiple kickass IT projects to complete

Setup

I began on Friday afternoon by unloading my car filled with goodies and converted the dining room into nerd central. Whilst setting up, the following had transgressed:

took my shirt off - 'IT guys are so hot!!' - Paris Hilton
started blogging the weekend
made sure that the music was pumping out of my laptop
put the rug down infront of the table to protect the carpet for my office chair
relocated my speakers to the table

tough
geek

nerd.conf.au setup pics..

Oh what's that in the background, oh that's the view from nerd.conf.au..

COMPLETED - 1837 - 20060106

Bluetooth Remote Control

The time between between me reading about this setup and me buying a bluetooth adapter for my laptop was 10hrs, 1hr if you don't include the time I worked today.. This was a seriously 'fully sik bro'(tm) project that I looked forward to not getting to work.

Inside this large box is..

my new bluetooth adapter..

Everything underneath the adapter can go in the bin (windows drivers, warranty (fingers crossed), regulatory compliance notices, etc).

Next step was to check out the BluetoothSetup page on the Ubuntu wiki. Albeit, a generally OK wiki, I did hit a sticking point that I should not have had to, sudo hidd --search would not pick up my phone (which is HID-compliant). I will further research my shortcomings with this section of the page and edit it. Even though this section did not work, I did try hcitool scan which indeed confirm that I haven't purchased a dud.

After confirming the underlying protocol stack was working, I tried my hand at GBTcr. What a challenge that was. After spending hours debugging Makefiles and the configure script, try running the following command prior to following the instructions contained on the site:

sudo apt-get install libbluetooth1-dev libsdp2 libsdp2-dev g++ xmms-dev cvs gnome-bluetooth libgnomeui-dev libbtctl2-dev libgnomebt0-dev libxtst-dev

* Minor gripe: The problem with a fair portion of the documentation out there on installing from source is that the developer forgets the fact that they have already have installed a gazillion development packages prior to testing their installation instructions. Developers need to perform a clean install of their package onto a clean installed OS - this has been made alot easier with the VMWare player. The VMWare Player allows users to run a pre-created VMWare image, such as the Ubuntu image and is free of charge.

Part of the experience of getting GBTcr to run was understanding configure and Makefile errors alot better. In a very high level way of describing things, if the Makefile complains that it cannot find a file named config.status (/bin/sh: ./config.status: No such file or directory), it is a good chance that the configure script that was run prior to make did not fully complete and exited earlier without providing an accurate error message on the command line. The creation of the config.status file is usually the last step of the configure script. Debugging can be performed by looking at the last line that was output by the configure script inside the config.log file, in my case it was 'checking for GNOME'. Inside config.log, I had discovered that the configure script had bombed out because of the following error:

Package libgnomeui-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libgnomeui-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libgnomeui-2.0' found

Basically what this had meant was that the configure script could not find the libgnomeui-2.0.pc file on my system. The best way to obtain this file is to search for the file in the Ubuntu packages site to identify which package you need to install. The package required is usually a similarly-named dev package. On my last error that I received on trying to make GBTcr, I was lucky to put the right string into the Ubuntu packages search box. The make command had failed with "/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lXtst". I had just searched for a package named Xtst and then installed the dev package.

Now it was time to run GBTcr, yay! I tried to follow the instructions posted with no luck connecting back to the PC. Basically my "Accessories" menu remained grey and I was not prompted on my phone to authenticate back to the PC to control it. My phone is a Sony Ericsson K750i (w/2 mpixel camera!) which differs from the phone Herman Vega had used to document GBTcr, a Sony Ericsson T610. To get to the Accessories menu on a K750i, go to the menu, Settings, across to the Connectivity tab, then down to Accessories.

The only way I managed to initially connect to the phone was to run GBTcr as root via sudo ./gbtcr. When I had run it as an unprivileged user, and sometimes when running as root, the connect had failed with the following error: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character (84). I have no idea why the error would appear sometimes and not others whilst logged in as root, and no idea why it happens to an unprivileged user. I did find one document that had discussed the error occuring over Bluetooth networks, however it was written in Catalan and it has been a while since I have brushed up on my Catalan (and a while since Google/Altavista have brushed up on theirs as well). I may approach the Catalan Ubuntu users group (if there is one) to assist with translation.

Another funny quirk was that when the PC connected to the phone, the phone displayed the "Allow this device to access the Internet through your phone" prompt instead of the "Allow this device to use your mobile phone as a remote control" prompt that I received in the steps below for remote controlling my laptop.

I will contact Herman Vega with my findings and seek to work through the operation issues that I am having with him. I would really like to see this program running on Ubuntu. If I do have some success, I will put in some solid work on the doco for the project, then I will make this my first Ubuntu package I have created to get into the Universe repository. It is still early days..

All hope was not lost for the cause of supreme Bluetooth awesomeness. On my phone there is a Remote Control application in the Entertainment menu. It even has the Bluetooth icon next to its menu entry. Now this was a "fully sik bro"(tm) discovery. I did manage to use each of the three menu items of the Remote Control - Presenter, MediaPlayer and Desktop - pretty much what GBTcr offers is already on my phone. The Remote Control runs over the HID protocol and can be setup with these instructions (phone instructions are denoted with a ):

press the middle button above the directional pad
Bluetooth
Visibility
Show phone
Turn on
My devices
Add
select your computer and enter the pincode contained in /etc/bluetooth/pin
hcitool scan # to obtain the MAC address of the phone's Bluetooth adapter
sudo l2ping 00:12:EE:0A:0A:0A
return to the previous menu
Visibility
Hide phone
sudo hidd --server
sudo hidd --connect 00:12:EE:0A:0A:0A
"(your computer) requests to use your phone as remote control Allow?" Yes
"Allow connection" Always

Now this part is a little tricky, basically you have to be watching your phone screen when you attempt to connect to it to watch when the Bluetooth icon on the phone changes to display the two little blue arrows. My phone is my camera, so I cannot pictorialise this, well, I could by stealing the icon off someone else's page, but I only will if there is a demand.

go to Entertainment -> Remote Control and have menu ready to select which type of remote control to use
sudo hidd --connect 00:12:EE:0A:0A:0A
as soon as the Bluetooth icon changes to show the two little blue arrows on the end of the "B" - press Select on the phone and you should now be able to remote control your PC/laptop

The final result is I have two options for remote controlling my laptop using Bluetooth: GBTcr and my phone application. GBTcr needs to properly pair with my phone to allow me to access the menu. Using my phone needs me to find a solution to properly bind my phone keys to the right actions in the individual programs.

The Presenter menu in my phone worked a treat with OpenOffice2 Impress with the keymappings mostly covering all the options needed. The same went for the Desktop menu, which provided such options as ALT-TAB and a "current window <-> previous window" button. The problem was with the MediaPlayer menu.

After trying different media players such as xmms, beep-media-player, rhythmbox, totem and realplayer, I had no luck with finding a player that had matched what was being sent by the phone. Realplayer did come close, however the MP3 output is fairly terrible. I had also played with various plugins for xmms and beep-media-player, with no luck. System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts provided no help either and it also did a good job of disabling my 'P' and 'A' keys. I read up about Banshee, but I do not want mono on my low-spec laptop as I already have one bloated virtual machine (java) installed. Basically, to get it working, I need a way to map the keycodes sent by the phone (captured by running xev) when I connect my phone to the laptop.

COMPLETED - 0135 - 20060107

WEP to WPA Migration

Ever since I had purchased my SMC2835W PCMCIA card, I have been a little disappointed that the Prism54g working group did not acheive WPA and now there is a complete new focus. I am glad that they have restarted the project that had seemed to be stagnant for the end half of last year. I came across the WPAHowTo on the Ubuntu wiki and it states that wpa_supplicant -h lists the chipsets that it supports, which includes prism54. As an aside, I am not interested in getting ndiswrapper to work on my laptop for WPA, because 1. it is not Open Source and 2. it uses too much Windows stuff for my liking.

After spending hours trying to setup WPA for my wireless card, I had re-discovered that prism54 still does not support WPA and, at this point, it appears that it won't in the future either. I don't think this is a "watch this space" subject. It is somewhat disappointing as it bucks the trend in linux hardware projects which are thriving at the moment.

During the attempted WPA setup, I had came across some issues to do with the running of wpa_supplicant. The following error occurred when I first attempted to run wpa_supplicant:

error:25066067:DSO support routines:DLFCN_LOAD:could not load the shared library

This error was caused by a missing library and I have subsequently updated the WPAHowTo on the Ubuntu wiki, along with other corrections including the fact that prism54 is not supported.

COMPLETED - 1500 - 20060107

Network Setup

My trusty ADSL modem was dug up to provide the switch configuration needed for the next set of projects. My laptop will provide the uplink to the Internet via the wireless PCMCIA card. All other devices can access the Internet by using the laptop as their default gateway. As I did not wish my server to speak with anything else but my laptop and vice versa, a single crossover cable will be connected to the laptop when the need arises.

The main objective was to get everything onto the same subnet. As all devices on the subnet had static addresses, I had decided to turn off the DHCP capabilities in the ADSL modem and turn it into a pure switch. I had to initially configure the laptop's interface to access the ADSL modem to access the configuration pages. After turning off the DHCP on the ADSL modem, I also turned it off on the laptop as two of the other machines had to provide DHCP to a device on the network.

COMPLETED - 2310 - 20060107

UbuntuOnSunRay Bug Hunt

I carried out a full installation of the SunRay Server Software 3.1 on Ubuntu Breezy Badger as per the UbuntuOnSunRay page on the Ubuntu wiki. The purpose is to confirm all bugs/issues and to notify/discuss the bugs/issues encountered in order to have them resolved.

Although I have lost count of how many times I have performed the steps needed to get a working UbuntuOnSunRay/CorporateUbuntu server, I still manage to get snagged on something. Well, even though I thought I was using my mickey-mouse, no-mistakes doco, room for improvement still exists.

During the new installation, no new bugs/discussions were started as the existing bugs were reproduced and the existing bug documentation was improved. Bugs and discussions will continue to be added during the next few weeks.

COMPLETED - 1410 - 20060108

UbuntuOnSunRay Failover

The last alternative configuration of the SunRay Server Software (SRSS) that needed testing under Ubuntu was the setup of a failover group of SunRay servers. The intention was to see what advantages failover provided and to see how the failover had worked between the servers.

The preparations for setting up the failover between the servers was an interesting part of the project. I had to perform the following on either one or both of the servers to prepare them to be part of the same failover group:

uninstall SRSS
change IP address
change /etc/hosts file entry
disable LDAP authentication
disable NFS mounts
disable Automounter
change DHCP server settings
reinstall SRSS

I had managed to not only perform the above, but I had also managed to setup a failover group running on Ubuntu. I will be documenting troubleshooting steps when I break the CorporateUbuntu wiki up into smaller wikis for the serious issues with NFS and LDAP. I will also be documenting in another wiki on how to successfully change the IP address of a SunRay server.

What does a failover group provide? Not a great deal. It does not provide shared session management, meaning if one of the servers goes down, you will still lose you current session and have to login again on the new server. The only evident function a failover group seemed to do is to replicate the LDAP configuration of SRSS and to ensure that members of the failover group were serving the same versions of firmware. My $0.02: Failover - not worth it..

COMPLETED - 1720 - 20060108

Packup

The proceedings of nerd.conf.au 2006 drew to a close at the completion of the SunRay Failover project. The need for some serious packing-up music arose and was met with the loud playing of Baha Men - Who Let The Dogs Out.. The one-hit-wonder gem was followed by more early 2000s cheeze: Bomfunk MCs - Uprocking Beats, Bomfunk MCs - Freestyler and Bloodhound Gang - Bad Touch. Lucky for me last.fm was down, so my profile remains untarnished by a badly taken tangent. The end result of the energising music can be viewed below along with a belated Christmas present I had received that afternoon, a book about the humble dodo:

COMPLETED - 1840 - 20060108