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?).