Plantagenet Penguinista

Viktor Olliver is telling us about his Replicating Rapid Prototyper, a discussion which involves weapons, drug paraphernalia & kittens. Well... he is from KiwiLand, where they have odd things like Kia, Moa, & so on. This includes making its own parts, so of course a RepRap can build more RepRaps... which presents a problem for competitors, because the more of them you have, the more of them you can have. Oh, yes, & there are aspects to this little gadget like the ability to help in making the drugs to which the paraphernalia apply: making them for your personal use does not involve paying any royalties or the like. Or in other words, drugs you make for yourself are essentially free. The... implications... are kind of interesting. It took about 18 months to develop from scratch to the point where it was able to self-make parts, & 24 months to ramp up to building an extruder which could extrude another extruder, so at the current rate of improvement, & noting that th...

The birds I saw wandering around the airport (some of them, anyway) also frequent the Uni. Here’s some of them playing together outside Economics & looking rather decorative: No bell-birds involved here, although some of them do wax rather strident if you upset them. Especially if it involves food. (-:

...with an official name-tag, so now I feel kind of complete. (-: This afternoon, we totted up the conf bags, & there were enough left that I’ve scored one of those as well. Finally, we have a Linus sitting here in Copland Theatre (which I’m managing) — who has been given an OLPC for his children — learning about Sun clusters from David Miller.

In Clinton Roy’s presentation on ANTLR I heard a serious mention of Niklaus Wirth’s creation, the Oberon programming language , something which has not hit my radar in about 25 years. So... in amongst all of this new, shiny LCA technology, there’s definitely some hysterical^Hhistorical context, as well.

This was another presentation well worth attending. It was inspiring to watch crew who regularly have to face people who don’t use (or maybe don’t have) a sense of humour, yet who manage to adroitly dodge the “ dumb blonde ” (bitumen blonde in one case) tag, presenting information with enough detail to be informative, yet brief enough to remain thoroughly human & personal. Strongly recommend experiencing this crew, should we be blessed with their presence again.

This was great! Held at the Markets. “Markets?” Ayup! We all got a wad of little voucher cards to spend, & had the fun of wandering through the markets finding meal items. This sounds a little bit... informal, but it worked well. Everyone got to eat what they wanted, when they wanted, & had a little sport discovering the best items available. I had a marvelous collection of curries dubbed “Taste of India” followed by some “dumplings” (doughnut-like stuff cooked up into golf-ball sized nuggets, with chocolate && || honey) & a rather fulfilling caramel thick-shake, & got to explore random little stalls offering stuff like nougat || chocolate-skinned liquorice. Oh, completely business-deductible, as well, since I had a work chat with Marc && discussed PLUG’s future with a handful of Perthians. <digressing> Train this morning was funny, rode alongside a very pretty (nice-pretty rather than simple show-stopper) l...

This was truly excellent. I was dubbed manager for Old Arts A at the time, but had almost nothing to do since Akkana was pretty much self-managing, self-timing, the whole enchilada. Her presentation was very practical & personal, without getting gooshey, & featured a python named “Pearl” — to the consternation of the language aficionados — & it mentioned Joao, a Brasiliano bloke who was very helpful when I first got into GIMP script-fu . Akkana well earned her speaker’s presents, & I even got to make a valid funny: she’d been working with a demo-script called “blobify” in script-fu, switched to Python & couldn’t think of a name for that version of her script, so I suggested “blobipy” which was promptly accepted & used. The delegates (audience) did well for themselves, too, with a few short, interesting questions.

One thing I like about escalators in Melbourne is that they have an overtaking lane: travellers routinely & willingly keep left, allowing an overtaking column en route. This really helps one to gain an extra 30 or so seconds per level in order to catch a tram when one’s train has to meander slowly across tram lines, so becomes a little late. The Central escalators were a tad scrambled this morning, with many stopped (some blocked off, some not) & several running downhill in the absence of any obvious demand, so this little escape route worked out to be quite convenient.

Well... we needed another one , didn’t we? (-:

I happened to be “wandering past” (dropping an AV kit to) Jonathan Oxer today, at his Distro Summit , when it struck him as likely that I might just happen to use a Linux distro, so he asked if I might give a short presentation on it. This, opportunistically , is how I gave a short presentation on Mandriva to about 2 dozen geeks. Mandriva started life as Mandrake , a derivative of Red Hat , then was forced by Hearst Corporation to change its name. Choosing “Mandriva” to reflect the acquisition of Conectiva , Mandriva shouldered its way through the financial morass caused by this Intellectual Property row, pressing on to remain a useful community presence . With The Penguin Liberation Front flying in formation, Mandriva offers a range of products from the free/Free, totally Open distribution through PLF-assisted codec-enhanced versions to the Commercial-including “Professional” edition, with associated costs (or lack of) & levels of support...

Helping out at the Distribution talks has been very informative, especially the inside view of dispute resolution from the Debian (works at hp) representative. Also learned some completely new stuff about how Gentoo got started, & about Oracle’s synopsis of RedHat interaction.

These things are terribly addictive. There’s chocolate stuff, strawberry stuff, cherry stuff, caramel slices, coconut stuff, effectively a solid trifle, shortbreadey looking things... yeah, & so on. They’re a terrible health risk, not because any item is dangerous by itself, so much as there being so many of them just to hand... & they all seem to be kind of fattening... & tasty... & going very rapidly...

Steve Hanley still seemed to be quite functional despite being half asleep (top half) yesterday . He was still pecking away for most of the afternoon on his little bike-stickered laptop, while holding sensible (as in, rational) conversations with those about him. Have to confess that I’d have just about walked into the ground if asked to operate on even twice as much sleep. Round of applause, that Steve. Seems to be operating reasonably sanely today.

Apologies to anyone I’ve distressed through being too conversational while running around doing Conf stuff. I’ve been told — quite plainly — by one organiser that this is not helpful, & I do appreciate the direct, clear, manner in which they made their point — I’ve become thoroughly allergic to the process of having to guess my errors based on vague mumbling & random non-hints. I would like to remind anyone else who has the slightest worthwhile criticism to make that I don’t bite, & do appreciate concrete feedback (& occasionally more fluid & agave if less formal feedback, thanks Andrew :-), especially if it can make what I say & do more lucid & useful. Oh, yah, & I feel impelled to mention that the enormous range of people one deals with in being part of the Conf is separately rewarding. The variety in personality from bouncey to quiet, down-home to technophile, juvenile to experienced, all genders, sizes & r...

Despite lack of screen (thanks, Uni’s room logic) & lack of audio (ditto), I got to sit happily in front of a dozen early-risers & open the Edu MiniConf this morning, with Mr TwinHead DuraBook facing the audience (who couldn’t clearly see same) as a stand-in for a 3m projector screen. Slideshow/talk went reasonably well, even got to answer a few questions. I’d had a mini-inspiration last night, so instead of spending the early morning trying to get my notes printed, I worked most of them into the slide-show instead. Spent some time afterwards helping with the Rego desk, got to know a few of of the other participants somewhat better. Met some Perth crew I haven’t seen for years, plus a handful of people from outer (ie not Western) space... was relaxing & enjoyable. Slide-show is here . PS, Oh, & Naughtons’ do excellent chips. PPS, & the Uni’s provisioning (“Functions”) crew know where to get truly excellent biscuits....

Follow this trail for a simple guided tour of the way to LCA2008. View the tour, save the images, suspend your laptop, then later resume & stroll along to follow it yourself. LCA2008 promises to be even greater than any previous — even discounting Rusty’s words — & I’m privileged to have contributed a tiny part to the launching of it (ask Steve, Ryan, Erin, Donna, Janet or some others what a large part costs to contribute, & even people like Kev from the Uni have done small things (which accumulate to be large things) to make it possible). There’s a few others I’d like to walk this simple little track with, but feelings of unreasonable terror — plus embarrassment — invented & used against me by different others prevent this even being foreseeable. Such is the dented, flawed nature of the society we live in, very glad am I that we don’t all get a heavy dose of it.

...the perfect time to go crashing about in a block of units, slamming doors & switching on loud HipHop music. Just mentioning this so a meat-head set of locals might notice this little issue & make a point of switching their brains on when they awake. Seem to still be rowdy & angry after last night’s Australia Day fireworks ’n’ stuff.

It seems that Io’s little volcano (Tvashtar) actually isn’t — a volcano, that is. At about 300km radius on a moon of 1800km radius, Tvashtar ought long ago to have simply split the moon in half — if it was indeed a volcano. This also opens the question of how Io managed to dredge up the energy to toss so much hot rock around. There are many structural parallels between Tvashtar’s plume & a solar flare, which are not shared with definitely-volcanic objects, so now all we have to do is get astronomers to admit that there is (another) plasma feature kicking around the major planets. Hmmm. Not so trivial. (-:

It took a while for this to sink in, but after some conversations with an amazing variety of people from Perth, WA , I’ve come to realise why a particular puppet show went undetected for far too long. Puppet show? That’s where someone (herein, “the Puppet Master”) invents a look-alike for a significant person in their lives, then starts reacting to the puppet, not the reality. This sounds silly, but for modelling purposes the puppet has some significant advantages over real life, an obvious one being that the puppet will do what you tell it to, whereas real life is seldom so accommodating. There is a big disadvantage, of course, in that you don’t have the “name” (character & authority) of the one you’re Puppetting — & we all know that bad things happen if you walk up & arrest someone “because I am a policeman,” but two bad things happen because not only to you have to be a policeman, you have to also have a...

Went for a wander through Dandenong Valley Metropolitan Park this morning, to be greeted by the cheerful song of some bellbirds. This was quite refreshing since it’s been decades since I’ve heard them directly. I might be able to weasel some sounds of a phone or tease sounds out of a still-cam video track to publish later (tomorrow?).

...& also moved or packed a huge amount of schwag, including shirts, diaries, mini USB mice, all kinds of stuff. So... no kittens or pizzas, but still some singular items & — thanks mainly to Kim & Steve — plenty of wireless & wired LAN. Byte me! (-: Also good to be worn out from simply doing too much rather than for medical or social reasons. Plenty of Adelaide people involved in this Vic conference, would be good to see them go native again soon.

Ran into a Zimbabwean lass yesterday on a Glen Waverley train from town, who is learning to be a doctor at Deakin University . She was en route to her course, so literally training to be a doctor. What was special in her case was her character: she had that careful, humble personality which values people enough to avoid short-cuts, & to do whatever it takes to be sure that she has hold of the right answer (sometimes literally “a solution”) each & every time. This tall, dark & handsome lass is one of a long series of people I’ve intersected recently who have chosen an occupation a long time back, dedicated themselves to doing it well, & are starting to see results. It’s inspiring to see this occuring again & again without any fluffing around, mysticism or fancy phychological processes involved. In some cases even — AFAICT — in the complete absence of any second-person encouragement.

Countryside on the way over was a bit bereft of capturable icons but the ride was gentle & the seats comfy. Food was a tad pricey (e.g. $3 for a Mars bar) but went on special for the last 15 minutes. Kerry & Haylie were cheerful & helpful plus David & Pat(rick? Irishman) buzzed about the place doing stuff like finding stuff & people. Kerry was pretty amazing as she had wanted to work right where she is since 7yo, started real-life work at 15yo, & was all settled in a train by 17yo. Her hubby works in a car factory & they seem to have made their off-work moments meet up with mutual happiness (for 7 years? some considerable time, anyway). Power-sockets located under the bench in the dining car, so 4 passengers spent most of the trip there. Think they would do well to bolt a 4-way plug-pack adjacent each seat, later they can get fancy with a satt link & wireless routers. (-: Aaaanyway, have things-to-do teed up for today & tomorrow, schedules for Conf ...

...I ran across a few distractions, a glimpse of which is/are included here: Much else there & in Barker, had a chat to the postal pixies, apparently they’ve had another Mt Barker 6324 postie actually come in & work there before. All day transport ticket here is $3.80 rather than $3.20, much of a muchness. Oh, & thanks to the authors of jpegtran & ImageMagick, which made sorting this lot out (losslessly, for the rotation) fairly trivial.

Have “suffered” some hospitality from Janet & Kim (& two woofers), found it to be quite productive. Had a chat with Jenny Gillett from IT Share (also a midwife) about recycling old machines (conf stuff) & RAID1 settings for her server (CK stuff). Got to see some amazing push-bikes, including a penny-farthing & an “ordinary” tall bike, in the process of watching a “3D Radio” presentation. This was quite informal & very enjoyable, a lesson in impromptu community contribution to what is basically a commercial prospect — done, as mentioned, quite informally & basically because the participants enjoyed doing it, & the listeners enjoyed participating.       Here’s a one-minute dump (34MB, AVI) of the performers, different to 3D’s presentation as it includes sight, & the sound will be quite different (includes crowds, much lower quality audio). Kim & Janet are right up in the hills, so...

Friday was kind of busy, but I did one thing (finally) which I think nobody can criticise. After visiting a workplace in town, grabbing lunch at Govindas, & visiting the Perth library to renew a book so I could read it on the ’plane to Adelaide, I wandered down to the Perth Underground railway station to catch a train up to Joondalup to finish (most of) the things I needed to do then. Sitting on the northwest end of the platform, I noticed a lady (maybe late 30s, turned out to be from Ethiopia, tucked in the right-hand corner there near Sudan, Kenya & Somalia) was sweltering in the heat, & carrying a load of present-like shopping. Now, I had packed a “recycled” 1.25l softdrink bottle with rainwater to hand to Mwikisa (Zambian fellow boarding with Mardie) when he finished his shift at Joondalup Hospital at 15:00 <1>, so I handed her this, a most welcome gift. Her reactions were simple, pleasant, uncomplicated thankfulness. Mwikisa did get his drink (wh...

Went shopping for a wireless card yesterday to fit to a Zambian student’s computer so he could use it (& the internet) in his room instead of using up the remaining space at the kitchen table. Without long cables cluttering the hallways. The supplier was out of stock (Xmas rush). So today I check back in while getting something else; still out of stock. I cycled a couple of kilometers further down Wanneroo Road to Navada to ask about something different, & noticed shiny new TP-LINK boxes on the shelf behind the counter. Questions produced a PCI wireless card for $5 more than the “on special” price of the other supplier. Since TP-LINK gear seems to have about 2-3x the range of more typical stuff as well as being reliable, this was a bargain. The other item I got requires Compact Flash for storage, but alas, the written specs in the manual say “MMC” flash rather than standard CF or the common SD. None of the computer people had any. So on the way bac...

A piece of the silly social games which were played against me is that I will be either dead or massively defective. What this means in practice — since I appear to have failed to fulfill that role — which is meta-OK since I’m supposed to have failed at everything anyway — is that I get treated like a demented child, told nothing because there is nothing — by definition — which could possibly be important to me. A significant part of those omissions has been what the Perth Linux community went out of their way to do for me while I was badly injured <*>. About the only hint I got was complaints about the nature (too techie) of an MP3 collection which was made up for me. In this last week, however, I’ve stumbled across a few people who have carefully explained some of the (apparently many) awesome things which were actually done. Since I’m sure that you haven’t been properly thanked yet, please allow me to start thanking you her...

Just meandered into thinking about how attached I've grown to this great, flat city. I know people from Mandurah (inclusive) to Brighton (inclusive), from Fremantle (inclusive) to Chidlow (hi, Greg & Linda!), a span of about 120km x 60km. Drop me anywhere in the city & I wouldn’t be more than about 15 minutes’ walk from the home of someone I know. Greenwood? Kardinya? Rockingham? Claremont? Armadale? Guildford? Bickley? Bullsbrook? Wanneroo? Whitfords? All covered, & more besides. OK, so what kinds of people? 8 weeks to 88 years (inclusive). Men, women, children. Married, single, unsure. Hard workers & slackers. Techies, sportsmen, beauty queens (hi, Mon!), salesmen, drivers, teachers, nurses, doctors, shrinks, musicians, ambulance drivers (hi, Greville & Allana!), photographers, vets, well... the list goes on. In have “pet” shops for everything under the sun, many of them quite conveniently located. I can get advice on everything from buildi...

Where is the ideal place to have a private conversation? Why, over your mobile ’phone from a train, of course, & do stand at the joint between carriages, so you’ll have both sitters & standers to hand. Then ring a friend who’se just had a baby, only to discover (loudly) that a pair of mutual friends have separated. At this point, it seems necessary to say something like “between you & me...” then continue the discussion even more stridently. Maybe 30 people were fascinated to learn the recent amorous history of two people who weren’t even named. Loudly.

The OK shop was open yesterday, so I dropped in & looked. As well as the almond jelly, they had a few cans of grass jelly, so I’ll try a smoothie-ish thingy made with that instead, a few hours from now. At $1.35 a tin, that represents an actual saving in food costs compared with raw fruit, always a welcome feature. Simple little distractions like this can be absolute life-savers when the rest of your life is turning to crushing, grinding horror. Well... not absolute life-savers as such, but they do tend to blunten the edges of some sharp real-life problems. (-: This is not such a related problem, but... :-) it looks like I’ll be wandering across to Melbourne next week — possibly via Adelaide, & with a likely diversion to Sydney — so if you want something lugged across there (or back) I can probably squeeze up to a PC-sized box into the suitcase. This needn’t be anything technical, could be conference documents, photo prints, a huge box of chocolat...

I noticed that I felt drained when dealing only with certain people. Always those people, no others. This began to puzzle me after a while, & since it was a small but definite subset of the many people I deal with, I guessed that there was a pattern involved here, so I went looking. Lo, & behold! I found the Spiritual Vampire, also known as the Spiritual Parasite, Psychic Parasite, Energy Vampire , Psionic Predator, Pranic Vampire, & a whole collection of other things. What is a Spiritual Parasite? It’s a person (any person, regardless of size, gender, country, race, etc) who basically “feeds” from your spiritual energy, draining you & in extreme cases driving you to suicide. That’s an extreme case, though, as typically they are more likely to be a boring, wearing acquaintance — or a dear friend(s) who are constantly offering advice & “helping” you to “solve” life’s problems. It’s almost a defining cha...

Modified my breakfast recipe a fraction today, & the result was an unbelievable improvement for such a very small change: few bananas (3 today) tin of almond jelly (540g) slosh of milk (rough guess, 200ml) dash of cream Whizz whole lot up in ThermoMix (any blender would do, TM handles big lump of jelly (plus bananas) very well), & eat.

Agoraphobia at first sounds harmless, as “fear of open spaces” but in real life it’s a bit more serious than that. It becomes fear of just about everything. A very bad combination for this is strong pride, so that you mask the effects as much as possible. The nett effect in my case has been that SWMBO fell sucker to some people who assure her that practically everything she decides ( except where it crosses their own expectations) — no matter how ridiculous, destructive or painful it actually is — will work out just fine & safe. This gives them inordinate control over her, masquerading as personal independence, & the result so far has been to separate us, cast strong fear over our little childrens’ lives, & suddenly bust up contact arrangements, leaving me $1800 short on airfares (plus another $300 for earlier booking moves) & sans children. Oh, the above expenses fielded on a Disability Pension. I don’t think you need to ha...