The MON Blogs

LCA2006 Day Three

28 January 2006 – 10:26 am

Friday – the second last day of LCA2006.

The keynote today was Damien Conway – of Perl fame talking about Perl 6. I can certainly see why he is such a popular speaker. His comparisons of why Perl is better than Java were excellent and certainly added alot of life to the presentation. I’ll definately have to look into Perl 6 when it’s released – it’s looking like a really cool language.

The augmented reality system developed at UniSA looks really cool. They were demonstrating a Quake like game which is superimposed on the real world. It was pretty cool! The technology is still very cutting edge though – it crashed a few times… But you get that when things are this shiny and new. The outline of the seminar is here.
Aside from the conference, there are a lot of other things to do in and around Dunedin – unfortunately due to time constraints (and not being able to drive here) I’m kind of limited to the stuff I can visit. Fortunately, Dunedin is a small city so walking is feasible. The railway station is a great example of the days when Dunedin was a goldrush town – the amount of detail in the building is crazy. It certainly makes good ‘ole Central station in Sydney look bland.

Also today, I visited the institution in Dunedin that is Cadbury. Being guided around a working chocolate factory is a great way to be put off chocolate – in particular watching 1 tonne of liquid chocolate fall from the ceiling into a vat has a really disturbing effect. I was suprised though to see the number of different products in NZ that we don’t have in Australia. In particular the Pinky and Perkynana bars – although my new favourite are the marshmellow fish (which I first encountered whilst freezing inside the Waitomo caves… but thats a different story).

Back to the conference: Rasmus this afternoon presented another seminar on PHP – this time focussing on security. Some of this was really interesting – the amount of effort needed to drastically improve security is actually very little. Remembering to do this on every variable supplied by the client isn’t.

During his presentation Rasmus used a self-developed tool to audit some of the most common problems and it was amazing to see fairly prominent sites failing these tests. I won’t go into the detail since it is posted on his own site.

I’ve now been in NZ for 20 days and I’m approaching the end of my trip. It’s a little sad actually… It will be nice to go home though. I’m starting to wonder if my computer will fire up after this much inactivity… It’s never been off for this long!
That’s about all I have to mention right now. I’ll post about day 4 a litle bit later!

By devslashtux | Posted in linux.conf.au | Comments (2)

LCA2006 Day Two

27 January 2006 – 12:21 pm

Today I attended the OpenLayers Seminar, the Building Rich Web Applications with PHP5 by Rasmus Lerdorf himself and the Google BOF session.

OpenLayers looks cool but isn’t quite up to the level where it will challenge the maps API’s offered by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Speaking of Yahoo! Maps, Rasmus Lerdorf talked about using Yahoo! Maps API with PHP which gave some really cool results.

The Google BOF session was also cool with Google staff explaining the setup of hardware inside Google. They said that they no-longer leave hardware dead in the racks – its cheaper to fix or replace dead hardware than leaving it using up space and power. They also mentioned that Python is used pretty extensively inside Google – I’d never really though of Python as a full general purpose language… Maybe I should look into that! The Google guys were also giving out notepads, pens and flashing badges. Again, anything free from Google is cool – yes, I’m aware that most their services and API’s are free…

The conference catering is certainly good. Between breakfast at Unicol, morning and afternoon teas I’m only needing light meals! No sitting in seminars thinking “damn I should have eaten lunch!” This morning the chinese food boxes full of chocolates, toffees and lollies were great – perfect for those little sugar fixes over the next few days.

More information about the conference as I can be bothered to post it!

This morning at the Linux TCP Developments and Kernel Developer Social Interactions keynote, Intel were handing out 64MB USB sticks to those in attendance. Unfortunately for me, I don’t really know or care about TCP/IP and the Kernel…

Going in search of dinner though, the Poppa’s Pizzeria had ‘run out of pizza…’ Instead of going to any one of Dunedins wide range of cafe’s and take-aways with good food for some reason I ended up at Dominos (it was almost 9:00PM so most places weren’t taking orders anymore). But as usual, fast-food tasted better here – not that I’m extensively eating fast food (since it’s crap). But the pizza base was crispy and light, the toppings tasted good and the cheese was stretchy. Most importantly, it was nowhere near as greasy as it would have been at home. Come on Aussies! Let’s not put up with crap fast food anymore!

I’ve got some photos up on Flickr of the conference and Dunedin for your browsing pleasure.

By devslashtux | Posted in linux.conf.au | Comments Off

LCA2006 Day One

26 January 2006 – 7:38 am

At the first full day of LCA2006 the first round of tutorials and seminars took place.
I attended the Open Source Graphic Design tutorial – without a laptop unfortunately. It was quite interesting, but for someone already trained and experienced in Adobe Photoshop, The GIMP isn’t quite the same, but it’s slowly getting there – and I still need to deal with PSD files from other people… It’s one bit of commercial software I’m stuck with.

At least on the server I’m free to run Linux, PHP, MySQL etc. That is when I’m not doing .NET. Yes, another case of my educational institute being pro M$…

Google is feeling generous here at LCA2006, last night hosting a happy hour at Bennu bar in Dunedin. It was certainly a happening event with several hundred linuxheads converging for the free beer, wine and softdrink. A cold beer tastes alot sweeter when Google pays for it. Although, are they now tracking our usage patterns with the embedded Googlenanobots?

Tomorrow promises to be an exciting day full of interesting topics!

By devslashtux | Posted in linux.conf.au | Comments (1)

New Zealand and linux.conf.au

25 January 2006 – 12:28 pm

Kia Ora!

Greetings from Aotearoa! Otherwise known in English as New Zealand.

This is a land with incredible scenery, sheep and an uncontrollable urge to jump from high places.

I’ve been here since the 9th of January and only now can I be bothered to make a blog post about it. The fact that I am now at a computer technical conference though means compys are handy.

In the past 15 days I’ve travelled over thousands of kilometers of water, seen rainforest and glaciers at the same time (Fox Glacier does this!), mountains and sea (Milford Sound) and plains that are dead flat as far as the eye can see. In just a few hours of driving the scenery here can change completely – as can the climate!

With my Contiki tour complete, I’m now at linux.conf.au held this year at the University of Otago in Dunedin, NZ – au temporairly stands for Australasia.

There are now a few days of Linuxy goodness, seminars and tutorials – unfortunately I don’t have a laptop with me – I feel a little out of place.

Excuse the brevity of this post, I’m getting back into the Linux action!

By devslashtux | Posted in linux.conf.au | Comments Off

“More smart” should be “smarter”, anyway

22 January 2006 – 2:08 pm

Louie the Fly is approximately 588 times the age of an average house fly. This is perhaps strange since he is the mascot of a fly spray.

Indeed, it seems Mortein not only fails in killing the bad-guy fly (he has a gangster hat and smokes a cigar!) but gives him some freakishly prolonged life – if he doesn’t escape the spray by flying away and then reaching back for his hat, he somehow has risen from the grave by the next ad. The Mortein website http://www.mortein.com.au/mortein_frameset.html recognises this flaw, but makes the odd point that “This might explain some of his continued success: in a sense, the consumer is not involved in killing, and yet at the same time can see that Mortein is effective in removing the ‘mighty unclean’ Louie.” This is highly contradictory and reminds me of George Orwell’s doublethink concept from 1984 – that you can hold two contradictory opinions of something. The consumer will still be involved with killing, just because ‘effective’ replaces ‘deadly’, and ‘removing’ does ‘killing’. And because something is ‘mighty unclean’ (ah, grammar. You can even download the song from the website if you want), does it mean we have to kill it? Mind you, I’m not up for giving a fly a bath.

By Snaykeemcgee | Posted in Random | Comments (2)

My Milford Track and New Zealand Trip

21 January 2006 – 1:11 pm

As you may have read both Drew (Devslashtux) and I have been in New Zealand on holidays. Not the same holidays, it was just a co-incidence that we both planned trips to New Zealand at the same time. I left for my trip on the 6th and got back on the 18th of January. Drew left on the 9th and is yet to return.

The main purpose of my trip (which I took with my family and some close family friends) was to complete the Milford track, a four day 53 kilometre walk.

Map of the Milford Track

We flew into Queenstown on the 6th over snow capped mountains. The plane only just skimmed over the top of the mountains. To the right of the airport are the massive Remarkables mountain range, over 2000 metres tall. Queenstown is one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever been too, rivalling some of the places I saw in Alaska.

We then travelled to Te Anau which was the starting point for our Milford track walk. We had one night there and left early morning the next day for the walk.

The Milford track walk takes four days and is 53 kilometres long. We had to carry all our food, clothes, utensils, everything. We stayed in huts with no showers, just a matress and a common area with gas cookers. There are 3 huts and 40 people stay in each hut each night. The walk was one of the best things I have ever done in my life. It follows a river up a magnificent valley with snow capped mountains walling you in. But the track itself travels through rain forest.

On the third day we climbed 500 metres out of the valley over a mountain pass 1100 m above sea level, between a two mountains 1700+ metres tall. Then we walked into another valley on the other side and descended 1000metres in to the floor of the other valley. Part way down we detoured to Sutherland falls, the largest permanent waterfall in NZ and the 5th tallest in the world.

The rivers were flooded from heavy rain and the water coming off this fall was unbelievable. To imagine what it was like to stand 20 metres away from the fall, imagine the heaviest storm you’ve been in and double it. The water was shooting off the rocks like rain so hard it hurt your eyes. None the less 6 of us worked our way around through a swollen creek and stood behind the fall, behind the main curtain of water. It was amazing. The closest thing I can imagine to being in a hurricane. There was so much water it soaked right through our water proof pants and rain coat.

Sutherland Falls

(The above image is of Sutherland falls. On the day we stood behind it the falls were swollen with rain and there was far more water coming off the falls)

On the last day there was a massive storm. 250mm of rain fell in less then 24hours. We had to ford dozens of swollen creeks as the mountains flowed with hundreds and hundreds of waterfalls. The rain was so bad that the 50 guided walkers who stay in different huts and were walking 1 hour behind us had to be helicoptered out of the track past the flooded creeks. If we had left 1 hour later that day we would have had to have been helicoptered out as well.

The next day was perfectly clear. Its amazing how quickly the weather can change in one day when you’re in the mountains. One day an unbelievable storm that flooded the track and caused landslides on the road to doubtful sound (forcing our cruise today to be cancelled). The next day perfect clear weather without a cloud in the sky.

Because of the landslide we changed our Doubtful Sound cruise to one on Milford Sound. It was so different to see Milford Sound the next day. All the water falls that had been there the day before during the rain had dried up.

We spent that night in Te Anau before driving to Queenstown for two more nights. In Queenstown we went jet boating and bungy jumping which was great fun. We went on the Ledge Bungy which uses a body harness which allows you to take a running jump off the platform.

After our two nights in Queenstown we headed up to Franz Joseph glacier for two nights. There we stayed at the Glenfern Villas which I can highly recommend. The best accomodation of our trip (and we had some good accomodation I might add).

After those two nights we went onto Christchurch for one night then it was back home to Sydney.

This was the first time I’d been to New Zealand (which is a shame since it’s so close. I’ve been to many other countries but never before to NZ). I really loved the place. It’s scenery was amazing and the people were very down to earth. I’ll be travelling back there as soon as possible, hopefully to ski some of the great mountains we saw while over there.

Oh and before I sign off, I’ll leave you with my bungy photos:

Stay tuned for Devslashtux’s trip report which I’m sure he’ll post upon his return.

Cheers,

Colonel.

By Colonel | Posted in Travel | Comments Off

Musings on my general apathy towards writing at the moment

3 January 2006 – 10:23 pm

I recently had a conversation with a good friend of mine. For the purpose of privacy, this friend has asked me to conceal his identity.

The conversation I had with Mr A occurred at a local sandwich shop I like to hang out in, not far from where I go to pick up my dry cleaning each week. Usually A and I discuss philosophical issues, current events, politics, etc. Occasionally we consider matters of a more personal note.

On this most recent meeting Mr A raised with me some problems he was having with his writing. Mr A and I are alike in that we both dabble in writing as side projects. Mr A is a noted food critic, while I’m of course a well known script writer, as well as biting social critic and political cartoonist.

Mr A had been having trouble coming up with inspiration for a review he was attempting to write on a little Italian restaurant he had visited two weeks ago. Apparently he was having trouble remembering how exactly the second course had reminded him of a little known battle which had occurred towards the end of the Crimean War.

I attempted to console him but my efforts were rather hollow as I had never before suffered the dreaded affliction commonly referred to as writers block.

But I did relay to him the problems I had been recently having with my writing.

Recently my mind had been clear and was revealing to me many secrets of the universe. These flashes of brilliant inspiration left me dizzy and excited and I felt a great need to record them so that the entire world could bask in my limitless wisdom.

But soon the inspiration would pass, and I would have recorded nothing.

Mr A thought this most strange and asked why I did not instantly race to the computer to record my thoughts.

I replied that I had recently felt a general apathy towards my writing. I could not bring my self to write any thing more complex then a few short Deonistic poems like:

I can’t fly
But I can dance
And if I dance
Oh noes, my nose
That cat stole your nose!

I told Mr A that at first I had thought that I could not just write my thoughts straight down. I needed a medium. So over the last few weeks I had mastered (in no particular order) oil painting, air brushing, photography, web page design, Cajun cooking, bonsai and the tambourine, but nothing could adequately convey my true thoughts.

So I decided I needed more inspiration to fuel my passion for writing. In one frenzied night I flew through the works of Kafka, Kant, Joseph Heller, Arthur Miller, Joyce, Shakespeare, Dickens, Wells, Tom Wolfe, my mind was spinning with all the secrets of the universe.

I fell asleep assuring myself that tomorrow I would write the greatest cantos the world had ever seen.

That night I dreamt that I was back at my old high school. I was being chased by no less then seven six foot tall Chicko rolls. As fast as I ran they were always just a few steps behind me. Finally they caught me and dipped me in Tabasco sauce. (No mean feat since they had no arms, and I seem to recall the whole event being aided by an eight legged hippo)

I awoke the next morning in a cold sweat and when I sat at my computer to write all I could manage was “I am not Shakespeare’s pantaloons”.

Mr A suggested that I had best not eat fried chicken before bed.

I thanked him for his advice and paid the bill for the both of us.

On the way home I was struck in the head by a flying saucer and required seventeen stiches in my pineal gland.

(*Note, the above events may not have actually happened)

By Colonel | Posted in Random | Comments (2)

Happy New Year

1 January 2006 – 1:54 pm

Happy New Year!

It’s a time for celebration, reflection and to look foward to the coming year.

For us – the MON Team members – 2006 is just another new year with our members returning to their studies. Although with the end in sight now for several of us the prospect of the ‘real world’ is starting to loom large.

But lets not get bogged down in the future! Right now we’ve got photos of the fireworks from the New Years Eve festivities in Sydney!

Everyone present last night decided that NYE in Sydney is possibly the best NYE celebrations anywhere in the world – combined! I’m not sure if it actually is – everyone has a home-town bias, but it was certainly spectacular.

So once again, Happy New Year from Sydney!

Note to self: Pack a tripod next year…

By devslashtux | Posted in Random | Comments (5)

MONSTOCK 99

28 December 2005 – 11:27 pm

It started one fine morning when we all arrived at devslashtux’s for MONSTOCK. I dont want to overhype how the day was, but as the only person present at all of Woodstock, MONSTOCK and landed on the moon this was the greatest of the three.

Our main task was to record the Fishflywest radio play – which was pretty much the only thing we actually achieved. To summarise MONSTOCK it was great periods of inactivity brutally punctured by devslashtux doing something. He edited the entire radio script painstakingly whilst the rest of us fooled around, talked about the future of West Africa and drinking Solo and orange crush (not the REM song, however I have never heard it, colonel just told me. I mean, perhaps I should know actually being every member of the band, but whatever I dont pay much attention).

We started to procrastinate early in the morning when we had a visitor who disrupted our proceedings for the following few hours… however somehow we managed to record all the parts – with myself as the Narrator, Colonel as Philby and Snakeymcgee as Ninjo with devslashtux filling in the incidental voices.

We wrote a few fish fly west episodes, two infact – snakeymcgee wrote one (with a new remix extended edition ending by me) and another by myself – which fueled with the MON spirit and a triple shot of pan galactic gargle blasters I wrote the greatest fishfly west ever, it was so great that at one point, somewhere between revealing the meaning of life and solving world hunger all the fish suddenly flew east, much the chagrin of Oliver Cromwell.

We then adjourned outside to where our Grill Seargent cooked us up some fine meat – a traditional MON helping of snausages and steak. It was grand, right up until the point where the universe imploded. Then it was slightly less grand.

From that point onwards the evening wound down, with much gesticulation from myself about the blogosphere, and how it was the death of journalism, devslashtux actually managed to finish the editing, and was proclaimed the only member of MON to actually be capable of doing anything. The rest of us commited suicide as a public service.

Thus from beyond the grave I give you this fine report of the proceedings, and I cant wait for MONSTOCK 2006 – which has already occured, as I am from the future and the past simultaneously (whilst still maintaining my whalelike self) and it was grand. And had 10000 people present, 9400 of whom were Nelson Mandela.

You can listen to Episode 1 of Fishflywest here.

Below are some photos for your perusal.

Matt in Space!!

Grill Sergeant

Comrade Dwewsky

Matt, Deon and Alex in reverse order

Deon looking Jaques Cousteau'ish

We hope you’ve enjoyed (and been utterly terrified) by this insight into the world of Middle of Nowhere Productions.

By Dex | Posted in MON Productions | Comments Off

2005 Draws to a Close

28 December 2005 – 10:57 pm

Well, as 2005 comes to a close we wrap-up the biggest year for MON Productions yet by adding more content and more fun and excitement.

So far this year, we’ve already created a new website merging The Bird Goes ‘Round, The Infinite Universe and Three Random Characters and the original MON Productions website into one megasite. We also created a brand new project – Fishflywest, the adventures of Ninjo and Philby.

Now, we add 2 new episodes to Fishflywest as well as the first episode of Fishflywest the Radio Programme! It is now available for your listening pleasure at http://www.monproductions.com/fishflywest/podcasts/EpisodeOne-lofi.mp3

MONSTOCK 2005 came to a close tonight – the 28th of December – hosted this year by Drew (devslashtux). But we’ll leave details about this for another post.

2006 promises to be an even bigger year – kicking off with MONSTOCK05-06 on New Years Eve/Day! With, over the next few months, Zoltan the Assassin coming to the big-screen (if you have one).

Happy New Year 2005 from the MON Team.

By devslashtux | Posted in MON Productions | Comments Off