Optus Mobile Outage

Optus mobile users were not happy here in Brisbane when they couldn't use their phones yesterday due to a software issue. Story coverage here and here.

Presentation: Paul Cormier from Red Hat at QUT

Yesterday, Paul Cormier, Executive Vice President and President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat gave a talk titled "Red Hat and the Open Source Software Business: from boxed software to a half billion dollar server company" at QUT.

Paul made two points that stand out in my mind:

1. The primary differentiator of an open source project software project (compared to closed source) is in the ability to build a community of people around the project.


2. He sees Red Hat as taking open source work and packaging it in a way that is palatable from an enterprise perspective. Specifically, providing stability and backward compatibility for a 'long-enough' period of time.

If I consider Scala in this light, it is currently doing well on the first point, but not so well on the second. Given that the primary users of Java are enterprises, this is important if mainstream penetration is an objective.

Having said that, I think there is a time when the cost of backwards compatibility outweighs the benefits and my threshold seems to be a fair bit lower than that of the average enterprise. In this case, I think enterprises would do well to step back and consider the real costs in doing a software project in Java (or Ruby/Groovy for that matter) and seriously consider the potential benefits from more advanced programming languages.

Introduction To Computational Logic

From Saarland University: Introduction To Computational Logic.

Includes lecture notes and references to literature.

Introduction To Logic

Carnegie-Mellon Open Learning Initiative: Logic and Proofs course

FileVault and EncFS on Mac OS X (Leopard)

In the past I have used FileVault in attempt to protect files in the event of my mac falling into dubious hands. I find it frustrating on a few counts:

• the root user can access your files while you are logged in


• it regularly asks to reclaim space when logging out, making logging out much slower

On my linux machine I am using EncFS, which is working out well. So I thought I would try and install EncFS via MacPorts. I ran into all the following issues:

• boost 1.34.1 still won't build on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard


• MacFUSE 1.7 fails to build


• encfs: configure fails

Then I ended up with an error I couldn't find a solution for:

$ sudo port install encfs
---> Building encfs with target all
Error: Target org.macports.build returned: shell command " cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_fuse_encfs/work/encfs-1.4.2" && make all " returned error 2
...
FileUtils.cpp:163: error: 'make_binary_object' was not declared in this scope
make[2]: *** [FileUtils.lo] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

So I uninstalled MacFuse in MacPorts and used the installer from the MacFuse homepage. After installing EncFS from here and a reboot, I had success.

UQ Student Infomation System Error

Tried to access my class timetable from the my.UQ website.

SmugMug

SmugMug doesn't have a free account, but it does have a 14 day trial.

As soon as you try and upload some photos, you are forced to categorise them in a gallery. I find this frustrating and instead prefer how flickr works - upload photos and organise using tags and/or sets (similar to galleries) afterwards. So as a workaround I created a 'Default' gallery, which contains all photos I don't explicitly put in other galleries.

As mentioned in my flickr post, I found viewing photos in a gallery more efficient than in a flickr set due to the thumbnails being present. There is also the flexibility to choose from a number of different layouts for each gallery. On the downside, a long description for a gallery takes up a lot of screen real estate at the top, pushing all the photos down. The navigation for some photo actions seemed a little inefficient as it requires clicking on the Photo Tools drop down box and then selecting the action to take.

The first step in improving privacy for family photo sharing is to create a SmugIsland. I set 'Hello world!' to 'No' and 'Hello smuggers!' to 'No - make me an island'. You can set a site-wide viewing password. However, this disables showing a map on your homepage. Google Maps is used and apparently Google requires that all usage of Maps be done without requiring a password. I was also confused by the privacy settings in a gallery. Even though I had setup a SmugIsland, a gallery privacy settings seemed to show that it was public. Supposedly this is correct and the gallery will inherit my SmugIsland settings.

To use maps requires getting a Google Maps key, which is very simple. From there on though, I had very little success with maps. It looks like you can only set the location of photos individually. Once configured I could see a map of my photos that I had set a location for, but a non-logged in user (e.g. family) just sees an empty box where the map should be. When I was logged in and clicked on a pin on the map, it zoomed in, but then showed no photos. This feature just does not seem to work with SmugIslands.

At this point I stopped further investigation as the negatives outweigh the positives. Looks like I will be using flickr.