Remix07

Remix07 looks awe­some (and cheap). I’m already booked out for that week, which really sucks… even fly­ing to Mel­bourne and stay­ing overnight it looks like it’ll be a fan­tas­tic con­fer­ence for… not lots more than a reg­u­lar (i.e. non-MS sub­sidised) con­fer­ence in Syd­ney. Its con­tent is out­side the scope of what I’d usu­ally be inter­ested in devel­op­ing with, but I admit now to my insa­tiable curios­ity into Sil­verlight, WPF, and the subtly-hinted-at media stream­ing aspects of the con­fer­ence. Plus they’re giv­ing away Expres­sion Web to atten­dees, which would nearly ‘pay’ for the trip any­way. Sigh. Maybe next year.

The Arden Shakespeare series, the next month, CYIADA update

Offi­cially what I’ll be try­ing to acquire when I buy Shake­speare from now on. I have their The Winter’s Tale title, and it is noth­ing less than spec­tac­u­lar. It even includes as an Appen­dix the com­plete text of Pan­dosto. The Tri­umph of Time. (the pri­mary source text for Shakespeare’s play). Pages 181 – 225 are devoted to this text alone… very cool. I do won­der if they do the same with texts such as Ros­alynde as appro­pri­ate, or if this par­tic­u­lar edition’s edi­tor was feel­ing par­tic­u­larly benevolent!

Either way… highly rec­om­mended editions.

Also to acquire when next book shop­ping: Alice in Won­der­land, for some opium-fuelled hol­i­day read­ing. And per­haps Hitchhiker’s Guide to see if I can endure it nine years from when I last tried… less likely fuelled by opium, but from all reports it sounds bizarre enough to war­rant sus­pi­cion of the involve­ment of some other mind-altering substances!

Hol­i­day read­ing = after June 22nd, where­upon my last exam occurs. Then, off to lead on a study camp (per­haps time for read­ing? I can jus­tify Alice as being in sup­port of the HSC Eng­lish ‘jour­neys’ core!) for a week, three days back home in Syd­ney (undoubt­edly to be insanely busy) before going away to New Zealand from the 4th to 16th of July. My how time flies. I may or may not be at uni­ver­sity in an equal capac­ity next semes­ter due to a whole bunch of things, pri­mar­ily related to its per­ceived impor­tance and myr­iad other oppor­tu­ni­ties that are crop­ping up all over the place. It would be, for exam­ple, nice to have some money in exchange for funny hours in the form of more work (which I think I pre­fer to reg­u­lar and bor­ing hours) and not have to pur­sue use­less assess­ments (I speak of one par­tic­u­lar sub­ject that has copped flak on this blog over the past few months) around this.

The CYIADA thing is pro­gress­ing nicely. Michael came on board about a month ago as chief code mon­key, which has been nice coz I’ve been spend­ing a bit more guilt-free time in Pho­to­shop. There is a two-fold rea­son for that, first of which being I don’t feel like I need to try and pro­to­type any­thing on my own, and the other is that now he’s devel­op­ing stuff, there’s an immi­nent need for front-end to make this thing saleable! We’re close to land­ing on a new name that doesn’t sound like some­thing you’d use to gas peo­ple with.

There’s a meet­ing tomor­row arvo wherein we will speak of many things (except per­haps for shoes and ships and ceil­ing wax and cab­bages and kings), involv­ing a progress update, an exten­sive argu­ment about names and inclu­sive­ness, prayer, another argu­ment about launch dates and where/how it’s going to be hosted, who’s pro­vid­ing SMS, how much money we’re plan­ning on los­ing and for how long, how we’re going to pro­mote it, open sourc­ing things we write, and lots lots more.

I should really update the CYIADA project blog, too, but we haven’t got stag­ger­ingly good read­er­ship over there any­way (well, not com­pared to here, though per­haps more after South­ern Cross’ cov­er­age — at the end of that arti­cle, which is effec­tively buried online, though less so in print… iron­i­cally we need online read­ers far more than print ones!) so hope­fully that will wait until we set­tle on a new name (and asso­ci­ated domain name acqui­si­tions take place).

Oh and in unre­lated news, my cam­era turned up. It wasn’t in Selo’s car. This is a good and a bad thing… good because I have no money to spend on a still cam­era right now, bad because I have no rea­son to buy a new one even if I did :P It’s still got another six months of life left in it I think, though it’s look­ing pretty abused. Still takes decent pic­tures. I’m so happy with its per­for­mance over the last two and a half years (link goes to first pho­tos I took with it), seri­ously. I will strug­gle to make up my mind when it dies about what kind of cam­era to get… a larger SLR would be more use­ful for pro­duc­tion stuff and night time things, but this is so portable… I don’t know.

And there is a decent sized blog update.

Now, I should stop pro­cras­ti­nat­ing and pre­pare to kick off some fairly press­ing free­lance work when I get back from uni tonight! Uni assess­ments, also, are prov­ing to be rather wor­thy of pro­cras­ti­na­tion. Ahhhh… I keep remem­ber­ing “one more thing” to write about: 28 Weeks Later proved to be a seri­ously scary zom­bie flick. Saw it with Ben and Tori last night. Was ulti­mate year 10 flash­backs, only with added alco­hol and late nights with­out con­cerned parentals! We went to Pizza Hut all you can eat after­wards… its so dis­gust­ing but such good fun :P

As for the movie… it’s quite messy. But it was spec­tac­u­larly pro­duced… I need to re-watch the first one, but I’m pretty sure it was much more in-your-face sus­pense­ful. It sets up for a third film at the end, which vaguely irri­tates me, but… well, rumours have it that it’ll be capped at a tril­ogy only. And this was a really good sequel, so I don’t think it’ll mat­ter too much. Wikipedia has full spoiler detail for 28 Weeks Later… See the film first instead if you can nor­mally han­dle that sort of thing.

# by Josh on May 24th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

OpenID again

I’ve men­tioned OpenID here and here before (the first only in pass­ing), in the con­text of frag­ment­ing social net­works and Live­Jour­nal. By the way, check out the sec­ond of those posts… for meta-writing/meta-blogging, it’s (IMO) sur­pris­ingly good! I was pleased.

Any­way — OpenID is still around 10 months later (though the spec was last updated around the time I last wrote on the mat­ter), WordPress.com have announced they are now an IdP for it, and it seems every­one wants to be a provider, not a con­sumer (in OID spec par­lance, con­sumer means the web­site request­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion of an Iden­tity — “end user” is the term given to an actual human user).

In fact, Ma.gnolia.com is the only OpenID con­sum­ing site of con­se­quence that I’ve encoun­tered thus far in my trav­els. Which is, to say the least, slightly perplexing.

I’m aware the whole point of OpenID is that it’s a vastly decen­tralised spec that enables myr­iad providers to exist, but it seems some­what redun­dant (in the sense in which that means “point­less, with­out pur­pose”, not failover-type redun­dancy) if there does not exist a sin­gle con­sumer of consequence!

And, let’s face it, why should being a con­sumer be attrac­tive? You know less about your cus­tomers, they can bail on you more quickly, and… all of a sud­den, adver­tis­ing is the only way of mon­etis­ing a web­site. Jan­Rain oper­ate “MyOpenID: Your first (and last) iden­tity provider”, as well as a cou­ple of ser­vices that use OpenID, and have (to my eyes, at least) no con­ceiv­able way of gen­er­at­ing rev­enue at present.

Which is poten­tially fine, but com­pletely stu­pid if that’s hap­pen­ing on a wider scale. As a con­cept, OpenID has much to offer — I just wouldn’t use it in CYIADA. I might con­sider it for smaller projects (com­mer­cial clients), but, really, I think it’d have a bet­ter chance if Myspace were an OpenID provider. And we all know what they’re like when it comes to web stan­dards (and gen­eral usabil­ity issues)!

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of the pop­u­lar­ity of up-stream providers if you want to ver­ify against some­thing other than OpenID (like, for exam­ple, someone’s Google account — which you can do quite eas­ily using var­i­ous API tools they pro­vide). With any­thing youth tar­geted, there’s a spe­cial impe­tus that we don’t really see in other places. I read this absolutely hilar­i­ous com­ment on a great analy­sis of an arti­cle about Myspace:

It’s easy to imag­ine teenagers as a pack of wilde­beests on a grassy plain, sim­ply run­ning with wild abandon.

Why yes, yes it is. They’re not (arti­cle has more on this), but the bot­tom line is if you’re using exter­nal ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vices, you’re depen­dent on the exis­tence and longevity of these ser­vices for the exis­tence and longevity of your ser­vices, not the least in user pro­fil­ing and build­ing up mean­ing­ful mar­ket data so you can adjust your mix to a known audience.

OpenID feels like a won­der­ful tech­nol­ogy in a chicken-egg sit­u­a­tion. It’s still just too bloody geeky for your aver­age LJ user to get on board with. And they’ve got it easy. For any­one else, it’s com­pletely impossible.

Here in Syd­ney, we could prob­a­bly get away set­ting up ver­i­fi­ca­tion against Win­dows Live sim­ply because that’s what peo­ple use here, as I have noted before (about halfway down the post linked). But devel­op­ing dif­fer­ent autho­ri­sa­tion schemes as a mat­ter of local­i­sa­tion is most def­i­nitely not in my book of best prac­tices (if I were ever to write one :P) — so, instead, frag­mented Inter­net iden­ti­ties persist.

That bugs me.

If you have any answers or thoughts… let me know. Blog about it and send a pingback/trackback. That’s one of the few open stan­dards that’s worked well on the web, albeit with plenty of spam abuse, but there’s of course the prob­lem that not enough peo­ple are socially blog­ging aside from soft­ware devel­op­ers and design geeks and… what­ever cat­e­gory I fit into (“web strate­gist” is still what I’m call­ing myself… we’ll see how much longer that sticks) — so, of course, there’s no instinct to reply in this manner.

In the same way, devel­oper and busi­ness instinct is to build your own authen­ti­ca­tion and pro­fil­ing plat­form. Is it worth resisting?

Job ads galore

And another one on Syd­neyAn­gli­cans for good mea­sure. You don’t have to be an Angli­can and pos­si­bly could get away liv­ing some­where other than Syd­ney to do the job!

Job ads are mar­gin­ally expen­sive… we’d bet­ter get some appli­cants from those two!

# by Josh on March 2nd, 2007 Tags:
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Seek IT: Web Programmer for new Christian youth site

Fancy that.

Please be pray­ing we find some­one good (or, suit­ably sin­ful but repen­tant and appro­pri­ately tal­ented, because there’s nearly no such thing as a good person).

Ad proper after the break: Read the rest of this entry »

Who gives a Cheney?

So some Amer­i­can rocks up and Syd­ney stops. There were more police than civil­ians in some parts of Syd­ney last night (Cir­cu­lar Quay), pub­lic trans­port is stopped, pri­vate vehi­cles are allowed in, and it must have cost an absolute for­tune in overtime.

All for some Amer­i­can power-behind-the-throne. If he’s going to be the key string-puller, he should at least stay invis­i­ble so we don’t need to con­cern our­selves with his (admit­tedly unwel­come) presence.

They were block­ing all use­ful traf­fic (but let­ting pri­vate cars through? Bizarre…), and claimed to have been using snif­fer dogs on the cars they were let­ting through. Yeah, right. I didn’t see a sin­gle dog last night. I was wear­ing a back­pack the whole evening. OH, LOOK, THERE GOES A TERRORIST!

No-one stopped me…

Then, after hav­ing blocked off half of the north­ern CBD, police stop a protest from going ahead on the grounds that it’s going to cause traf­fic chaos. Like that was a con­sid­er­a­tion a few nights back.

And, whilst I’m on this lit­tle soap­box, what on earth is a “law­ful protest” about? “Oh, here you go, protest in a nice lit­tle out –of-the-way place where no-one can see you, much less be seen by the per­son you’re protest­ing about/to. Just… stay away from the Rocks and everything’ll be okay.”

Because I’ve seen so many rabid gun-toting uni-students try­ing to blow up the US pup­pet­mas­ter. Nev­er­mind that Aus­tralia has far-more-sane gun-control leg­is­la­tion than the US does… John Howard isn’t the cen­tre of all this rub­bish when he trav­els to the US, even, and yet over here we’ve got to keep unarmed pro­tes­tors a good cou­ple of kilo­me­ters from their tar­get in case they pull out… well, something.

Mean­while, I don’t know whether I should be sat­is­fied or frus­trated that I was wear­ing a con­spic­u­ous black back­pack all evening around var­i­ous protest sites and didn’t get glanced at once.

Go home, Cheney. You’ve wasted enough of Sydney’s time and resources already.

# by Josh on February 23rd, 2007 Tags: , , , ,
| 4 Comments »

I am what I am because Ubuntu is not

I got sick of wanky pseudo-African named-operating systems.

Actu­ally, that’s a lie, but I’m feel­ing a lit­tle vit­ri­olic (oxy­moron?). Ubuntu didn’t work at all, and of a sud­den Cen­tOS did. It’s not quite as pol­ished but I could grow to love it (maybe). I just need to look past this whole RPM thing, which really is ugly com­pared to the breadth and depth of apt options avail­able. IMO, of course. And the whole ports gig just scares me so I’m gonna stay away from FreeBSD here for a while longer (until this one breaks in another two years?)

I’d for­got­ten how much work I’d put into mak­ing Samba shares behave as well as they had been for the last for­ever, too. And was con­vinced there was noth­ing of value left on the com­puter (I didn’t delete the home direc­to­ries, just in case… that was really easy because they’re even on a phys­i­cally sep­a­rate vol­ume, it was basi­cally less effort to just leave them there) and con­se­quently (yet again) deleted a MySQL data­base with StuffOf­Value™ in it. In this case a CYIADA sur­vey data­base I’d built because there were no other options avail­able and (you prob­a­bly guessed it) I hadn’t sorted out host­ing by IT at work yet.

So the aim now is to setup a sim­i­larly solid server that’ll last me another two years, bar­ring hard­ware upgrades (this thing desparately needs more RAM even though it’s got half a gig – I have no idea where it all goes). This time around it’ll be more web-production-esque in its role, which basi­cally means it’ll have more than just being a quiet Samba PDC and file server and web dump­ing ground on its plate, at least until every­thing I’ve got planned for it today reaches matu­rity, or my sit­u­a­tion changes to the point that pay­ing for a VPS or real ded­i­cated server some­where else is a viable option. Loki does, indeed, work quite well, but I can’t screw with it quite as much as some things make me want to (not that I’d want to do that to Loki… in between cat­a­strophic hard­ware fail­ure it’s amaz­ingly sta­ble and the lack of gen­eral screwing-around-ness is prob­a­bly a big part of that! Prob­a­bly… :P)

No aspi­ra­tions sur­round­ing the idea of a media server this time around. Though there’s a pos­si­bil­ity I’ll look at maybe build­ing a ter­abyte RAID server later this year, which would mean rethink­ing whisper’s role some­what. It’d prob­a­bly be relo­cated to down­stairs (it’s cooler there) and replaced by a case with bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion and requir­ing bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion. The EPIA board I’ve got isn’t pas­sively cooled, but I reckon it can deal with get­ting toasty that much more because it’s got a fan stuck to it. It’s a bor­der­line fan require­ment, any­way — the hard dri­ves get hot­ter than the proces­sor (high­est I’ve seen the dri­ves is about 62° C, the proces­sor would only hit 55, tops) on forty-something degree Syd­ney days. If the stor­age upgrade is called for I’d prob­a­bly look at get­ting some­thing with a bit more grunt though, just because if the space requires bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion then that lets me stop con­strain­ing the sys­tem power accord­ing to temperature!

Any­way. Now I’m a Cen­tOS kid. Which makes me feel kinda dirty inside because of the whole Promi­nent North Amer­i­can Upstream Provider All In Title Case issue, but I think I can live with myself for the time being.