December 29, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
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As 2011 comes to a close I’d like to offer everyone a big best wishes for the holiday season and 2012.
Throughout the next 12 months I will be looking to consolidate my 2011 career change and complete a number of other initiatives.
With two days of 2011 to go, have a happy New Year and all the best in 2012.
November 30, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
0 comments
Last week I attended an Optus function where the company’s director of government and corporate affairs, Maha Krishnapillai, was farewelled for his new role at Australia Post.
Since the move was announced earlier this month rumours sprung up that AusPost was planning to become Australia’s next mobile service provider. All parties concerned have hosed down the overblown claims of a “full on” assault on the telco market, but the appointment does make sense when you look at how AusPost’s business is changing.
What began as a social service has now morphed into a commercial business that is aggressively pursuing many diverse interests. I recently had to PAY AusPost to verify my identity whereas JPs have to do it for free.
AusPost still maintains a monopoly over regular mail services, but the rise of Internet shopping has given rise to a healthy parcel delivery service on top. The other signigicant change is with its post offices turning into post “shops” selling everything from cards to computers. The local post office is more like OfficeWorks these days.
One of the most marketed services of recent years was the ability to use a post office as a payment gateway for all types of bills. Great if you want to pay a bill (which can be paid online at home) in person, but not so good if you want to duck into a post office and buy some stamps (which are still sold there, BTW). Every post office I’ve been to in metro areas always seems to have a queue 20 people deep. My local one, at the back of a newsagent, has managed to remain hidden from the bill-paying crowds.
Today a new report tells us a 24×7 parcel pickup service is coming to a post office near you.
So that’s where the mobile service provider speculation comes in. AusPost already sells SIM cards and mobile handsets, so it’s now completely unreasonable to suggest it will become the next MVNO.
The point of all this is very interesting. An organisation that was designed to provide a specific service has been forced to “reinvent” itself to provide very different services ostensibly to “grow the business” in order to compete in a “free market” capitalist economy.
And AusPost is not the only government organisation to radically change its business model in response to operating cost pressures. Banks and the Big T telecommunications company are doing the same.
Who knows in years to come we may go to our local post office to make a phone call as the delivery of snail mail had long been deemed economically unviable.
October 31, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
1 Comment
Last week former Computerworld editor Andrew Birmingham wrote an opinion about News Limited’s decision to throw a pay wall in front of the online version of The Australian.
Read it at CIO online here.
Nice piece AB – who incidentally goes to great lengths to distance himself from any conflict of interest relating to his previous role at Fairfax and his new role as independent media commentator – but there’s one part of the whole pay wall saga that is worth keeping an eye on in addition to raw revenue: How slapping a pay wall in front of a B2C Web property affects the advertising dynamic for the publisher.
What I mean by that is if you’re a marketing director with a large B2C brand under your watch you want to reach as many consumers as you can with your campaigns. And the busy news portals reach people in their millions over the course of a campaign – something that is immediately jeopardised by pay walls.
Now, I won’t postulate on the motives of publishers when it comes to choking established audiences with pay walls – hey, they might even want to get rid of B2C ad campaigns – but risk is obvious. If you’re a bank, telco or (dare I say) airline, why would you bother running a campaign in front of 10,000 “qualified” eyeballs when your goal is to get your wares in front of 1,000,000?
It can easily be argued that pay walls allow for advertising on landing and “teaser” pages, but even then a lot of the engagement is lost when a prospective reader realises the article is blocked and simply surfs elsewhere.
So in summary pay walls are risky when retro-fitted to existing, open-access Web properties. They are risky not only because of the requirement to get paid subscribers, but for the dramatic change in reader numbers and the corresponding advertising audience they present to marketers.
September 30, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
0 comments
I fired up BlocksNet the other week when investigating some cross-platform, online backup options.
BlocksNet is developed in Ruby and after some “bringing together” of the package and its dependencies for my Linux distribution it worked quite well.
The BlocksNet concept raises an interesting question: should we trust P2P systems for secure data backups? BlocksNet is private as you control who you share data with – it can be one or a set of known nodes. And BlocksNet’s public TCP port is 1984…
If data is scrambled across an arbitrary set of nodes and only retrievable from any node with the software running is it fundamentally more reliable and secure than a traditional star topology backup architecture? Moreover, could we trust our encrypted data to be spread across a public P2P network for even greater redundancy?
Today more and more people are trusting Cloud backup services like Dropbox and Spideroak for their data storage so people are willing to give up control to third-parties, but P2P on the other hand is still a “dirty” abbreviation.
It seems as though BlocksNet wasn’t designed for backups, but that is one interesting use case.
Ideally, a P2P backup system would allow you to add directories to the system which are then propagated around the network and encrypted. Access from a local file manager is really a must if it is to be practical. BlocksNet is Web-based and I haven’t investigated whether it integrates with local file management tools.
Anyone know of an open source, P2P backup app? I already use a star topology backup system but it would be good to have files accessible in a consistent way across all my Linux and Windows systems without having to continuously run sync tools. Further investigation is required.
Perhaps it’s not a “backup” app that I’m after but something like iFolder that maintains a persistent file state between nodes and a server. It would be good to have the server part optional.
Something like: install the client on all nodes in your private network (LAN or WAN), designate shared directories, add each node to the network, enjoy automatic replication and fault-tolerance between all nodes. So no matter which computer you log on to you always have all your working files available to you. From there traditional point-in-time backups can always be taken. Snapshots and deduplication would be something that could be integrated but not necessary. This way you could use a central server but it’s not a single point of reliance – it’s just another node on the network.
Something to think about.
August 30, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
2 Comments
After more than 11 years as a technology journalist with IDG Communications I began a new role as a senior analyst with Telsyte this month. Telsyte is a local ICT research firm based in Sydney – see Telsyte.com.au.
My reason for the move relates to needing a change more than anything else. I must hold the record for the tenure of a cadet journalist and I think I owe it to myself to branch out a little.
I certainly won’t rule out any return to journalism, but for now I’ll have to settle for the odd freelance job when it pops up and I’m still hoping to make LCA where there are always juicy stories waiting to be discovered.
Thinking back over the thousands of articles I have written, the thing I will miss the most is helping to publicise small open source projects and community initiatives which may not have otherwise had a voice. But I already have some ideas on how I can still help make that happen (all under Creative Commons, of course).
I’m also pleased to say my replacement for TechWorld, Rohan Pearce, shares much of the same software interests as me. And if you’re an aspiring IT journalist I highly recommend IDG as a place to begin your career.
If you are an independent software developer or open source project contributor and need any advice on relating to the media do drop me a line and I’ll see what can be done.
As for my new role I’m enjoying it a lot (I lasted longer than a week!) and we have a number of exciting projects in the works due for release later this year.
Starting a new job with a new company has injected me with a feeling that’s difficult to describe. It’s like beginning your career all over again. Someone has already joked that I need to stay with the company for 20 years to double my old record 
. At Telsyte staff can bring their own notebooks and other devices and we have Ubuntu servers running Samba for file serving.
Incidentally, overlooking my seat from the desk directly opposite is a miniature plush Tux figure. I’ve had to say to myself a few times ‘it’s just a coincidence’, ‘it’s just a coincidence’.
Until the cunning plan eventuates…
Tux looking over me.
July 26, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
0 comments
This article published on ZDNet.com today is a nice reminder of a story I broke almost a year ago.
Today’s news:
My version (August, 2010):
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/357531/ghost_sun_schwartz_chides_oracle_google_lawsuit/
The follow-up is quite timely given the ongoing legal saga between Oracle and Google. And, as Steven J Vaughan-Nichols rightly points out, Oracle has pulled Schwartz’s original blog post. People will just have to trust us it was indeed there.
Great minds think alike, then again fools rarely differ.
June 29, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
1 Comment
Just a quick post to say how much I love Kate – KDE advanced text editor – that is.
Dynamic syntax highlighting, syntax keyword checking and spell checking all in one clean, simple and easy to use interface. Working on multiple files is a breeze as you can cycle through them with the alt-
Today’s tip: you can download new syntax highlighting definitions right from within Kate itself.
Basically, Kate delivers much of the functionality of an IDE while keeping itself true to its text editing roots. And it even supports Vim editing (well, a good subset of it anyway) mode!
Check Kate out at: http://kate-editor.org/.
May 31, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
0 comments
I finally found the time to decommission my last OpenSUSE installation. And believe me it wasn’t before trying to save it.
It was a 11.1 system on my parent’s desktop with Internet connectivity via a wireless card. The hardware is nothing flash – recently modern with nvidia graphics.
The system was first installed as version 11.0 and I successfully upgraded it online to 11.1 with zypper. There was no reason for me to believe it would fail further online distribution upgrades so after backing up the home directory (to DVD and USB key) I attempted to go to version 11.2. As a failsafe I also downloaded the latest version (11.4) on DVD in the event I would need to upgrade it from optical media.
Why upgrade at all? Well, in addition to the fact that 11.1 is no longer supported with package updates, that version also had problems with digital camera support. It would mount okay, but manual intervention was required to view photos in Nautilus.
So the story goes:
11.1 to 11.2
Packages downloaded and installed okay. System booted and wireless network was okay. The problem? There was a problem somewhere among X, Compiz and GNOME. The desktop would “start” and appear, but not all the icons would load and I couldn’t start any windows/apps. Not good. After some time trying to fix X and restarting gnome-session, gdm, etc without success, I was left with little other options than to try to move to the newer version, 11.3. As it happens, 11.2 is just out of support as well.
11.2 to 11.3
Again, the packages downloaded and installed fine and the distro seemed to successfully upgrade to 11.3, but unfortunately no luck. The GUI was still non-functional. With my patience rapidly wearing thin I dusted off the 11.4 DVD and had one last throw of the dice.
11.3 to 11.4
This was done the old-fashioned way where the packages are already on the DVD and installed directly. Surely this would safe the system and bring it to a working state? Things started out well, X and wireless networking were detected by the installation system and the packages were installed without any apparent issues. Unfortunately it just wasn’t to be. After the installation and reboot the display was still non-functional and as an added bonus wireless networking no longer worked. How can the display and networking work during the installation process and then manage to fail when the system is installed? Go figure.
So at the end of the day I went from a working system and upgraded my way to a broken mess. With my patience well and truly worn out I blew OpenSUSE away with Kubuntu Natty. Why Kubuntu as so much complaining about the six monthly upgrade-and-break cycle? It was mainly due to time. I actually had a Chakra CD handy, but knowing the Kubuntu installation was likely to be shorter I proceeded with that. I can always re-image it again in six months time.
The result? Kubuntu setup the display, wireless networking with ease and now I have a fresh KDE desktop with all the main desktop apps. I also got the printer to work with a little poking, but that’s the topic of another blog.
I must say I was very impressed with the Kubuntu installation process and given its roots in Debian I like to think online upgrades are far less likely to result in a complete system breakdown a la OpenSUSE.
Of course, this is an Ubuntu distro we’re talking about here so something simple had to be a miss. When I inserted the DVD with the home backup on it the system failed to detect it and I had to mount it manually. I’m happy to report that in Launchpad, but I remain perplexed as to how so much usability engineering can go into Kubuntu yet something as basic as inserting a data DVD requires manual intervention.
Where to now for OpenSUSE?
While it’s unlikely I’ll use OpenSUSE again anytime soon, I think it’s a good distribution that seems to have lost its way in recent years. Okay, there was a chance that a fresh installation from the 11.4 DVD may have been fine but by that stage I wasn’t willing to give it another chance.
The biggest problem I can see is it’s quite a complex distro with a lot of software options and specific management tools – from YaST to Zypper. What can it do to remain relevant amid all the uncertainty with its corporate overlords? Here are my ideas:
It’s always going to be tenuous relationship between commercial Linux vendors and the wider community, which is why I prefer community-oriented distributions. Canonical dropping GNOME for Unity is a classic example of how the community has little or no say over the direction of a commercially-backed Linux distribution. In the case of OpenSUSE’s desktop, the community actually voted to return KDE as the default, something that didn’t go down too well at Novell given how much the company had sunk into Mono development.
With the three main Linux distributions (OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora) all heavily backed by commercial vendors what’s your choice of community-driven desktop? Mine is Chakra GNU/Linux right now. And it’s likely to stay that way.
April 30, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
0 comments
When I first laid eyes on Beyond Capricorn: How Portuguese adventurers secretly discovered and mapped Australia 250 years before Captain Cook at Hyde Park Barracks last year it immediately became high on my to read list.
It turns out Gosford library has a copy so I borrowed it and proceeded to devour every page with excitement.
First a little pre-history.
In popular history it is well accepted that British navigator Captain James Cook was the first European to discover Australia. He set foot on the East coast in 1770 and proclaimed it New South Wales.
[Note: Having read Captain Cook: Obsession and betrayal in the New World by Vanessa Collingridge I immediately appreciated the theme of Trickett's work, which was first proposed by George Collingridge in the late nineteenth century. But that's the topic of another book review]
We now know, thanks to corroborating archaeological and documented records, there was a rich pre-Cook age of European discovery of Australia from 1606 to 1770.
Spanish navigators de Queiros (Portuguese origin) and Torres (Torres Straight bears his name) either sighted and/or set foot on the Australian mainland towards what is now North Queensland and English and Dutch explorers like Dampier, Janzsoon and de Vlamingh did the same on the western and northern coasts.
There was also French discovery beginning at the time of the first British settlement by La Perouse and his two ships. Unfortunately, the Astrolabe and Boussole never made it back to France.
The pre-Cook discovery of Australia is a fascinating topic. Only by investigating it do we come to appreciate the impetus for further discovery and eventually colonisation.
Of course, it is only fitting that Terra Australis Incognita did indeed exist as it was first postulated by ancient European and later Renaissance philosophers a large southern land mass was necessary to “balance” the seemingly top-heavy Earth.
Beyond Capricorn attempts to complete the story.
Trickett, a science journalist, pieces together a collection of hard evidence, anecdotal folklore and shrewd speculation to arrive at the conclusion that is was in fact sixteenth century Portuguese mariners who where the first Europeans to discover Australia’s East and West coasts.
With the size and capability of the Portuguese empire at the time it’s certainly not an unreasonable possibility. Modern reporting tells us of the former Portuguese colonies in the East of Sri Lanka, East Timor and Macau, but little is said of how such colonies could have existed under the dominion the apparently diminutive West European nation, often overshadowed by its larger neighbour Spain.
During the age of discovery, however, the Portuguese empire was anything but diminutive. Trickett begins by reporting the scope of Portuguese naval capability and examples of journeys made across the Indian ocean.
The book then centres the discovery of the illusive “Island of Gold” around two explorers – Diogo Pacheco and Christopher Mendosa.
Trickett corroborates the known voyages of these two men with whatever evidence there is from Australia to establish a case for this little-known chapter in Southern Hemisphere history.
If Trickett is correct, during his adventure to the Kimberley, Pacheco was the first white man to set foot on Australian soil as early as 1520. Yes, less than 30 years after Columbus set foot in America. He never made it back though, losing a battle with the local Aboriginal tribes.
Then, between 1520 and 1530, Mendosa sailed his way down Australia’s East coast and then later the West coast charting most of the inlets along the way.
To arrive at such conclusions Trickett relies heavily on the Dieppe Vallard maps. The maps were originally sketched on Portolans (animal hides), supposedly intercepted by the French from the Portuguese at sea and then redrawn in colour back in Europe.
Other evidence includes cannons, pots and even a sinker found off the Queensland coast.
Am I convinced? Hmmm… maybe.
At the end of the book you just wish there was more evidence on Trickett’s side. There’s plenty of piecemeal “evidence” and speculation – including seemingly far-fetched explanations that some Australian Aboriginal place names are of Portuguese origin – but there’s no definitive hard evidence that closes the loop and categorically proves Trickett’s theories.
Beyond Capricorn is certainly interesting reading and Trickett is sincere in his intentions, however, we may never know for sure if pre-Cook European discovery of Australia pre-dates the seventeeth century.
March 27, 2011
by Rodney Gedda
0 comments
I’ve noticed a few more KVM-based hosting/Cloud providers out there.
Most mass-market hosting services seem to be built with OpenVZ or Xen, but KVM is slowly gaining popularity. It has the advantage of being integrated into the standard Linux kernel, which (in theory) should reduce the integration work required by the hoster.
There is Elastichosts, CloudSigma and xotHost.
The only local company I know of using KVM is http://www.labyrinthdata.net.au/ in WA, but I’d love to hear about more.
Is KVM the way of the future for public Cloud computing? For starters, it has the advantage of being a pure open source project unencumbered by vendor interests.