Mark Staples

The NICTA lab where I work finally moved offices into a newly constructed building in September.

The new building’s great - it’s such a nice change to have some natural light, and they’ve also installed a world-class coffee machine in the lunch room. The “designer rust” panels on the side of the building tend to polarise people, but I love them.

There were a few teething problems. For example the “green” automatic office lighting switches were insensitive and on a short timer. That caused plenty of comedy moments with people having to regularly stand up and wave their arms around to escape from the darkness into which they’d been plunged while they working. But that’s all being sorted out now. Some of the finishing decorative touches are being applied internally.

All we need now is a grand opening!

We moved house mid-year, away from convenient-but-noisy Leichhardt off to green-but-distant Thornleigh.

We were first home buyers. The increasing rental prices and soft purchase prices had been slowly changing the economics of rent-vs-buy decisions in Sydney. It might still not have been wholly rational to buy, but non-monetary issues tipped us over the line - issues like control over our own space, and slack landlords. That made it hard to deal with quality of life problems like rampant peeling paint, recurring mold, and increasing plane noise.

The subsequent financial crisis has put us in an interesting situation. Inflation is high (good in principle for home value) and interest rates are falling (good for repayments), but in practice home values are falling (bad) and unemployment/job security is worsening overall (bad). What will happen next? The only certain thing is that things will change! Still, the macro-economic issues aren’t as important as our individual circumstances, which seem to be fine at the moment (touch-wood).

As a place to live it seems to be working out fine. It’s great to have a back yard and a leafy environment. We can (and have begun to) do massive amounts of work inside and in the garden! But now we have the satisfaction of knowing we’re improving our own home value and not someone else’s.

Today, version 7.04 (”Feisty Fawn”) of Ubuntu Linux was released. Yay! Earlier this week I installed the Feisty beta release, and rediscovered Linux happiness.

I first started using Linux at home in the mid/late 90s, installing Redhat Linux 4 on a second-hand PC. I faithfully followed the Redhat releases, installing Redhat 6 on a new PC, and eventually upgrading to Redhat 9. Then, Redhat went all “enterprise”, and stopped their free package update management service. My old Redhat 9 box slowly became impossible to maintain. Maybe Redhat thought focussing on the enterprise was good for them - and maybe it did help their stock price for a while. At the time there was no credible transition (e.g. to Fedora), and so as a home user I just felt abandoned. Now I think Redhat’s getting what’s coming to them.

To successfully install Redhat 4, I had to host a private “installation party”, and buy pizzas for the Linux geeks who came around to mess around with OS configuration files on the command line. For a while I thought my Feisty beta installation experience was going to be similar. The desktop install stopped half-way through (ubiquity crashed), and then the alternate install managed to corrupt my software RAID configuration before failing. But finally the alternate installation worked without software RAID. Afterwards I was left in 800×600 screen resolution for a while, until I discovered some advice on the net about using dpkg-reconfigure.

There are still dome problems remaining now I’ve finished the installation. My box won’t poweroff when I shutdown. And, it’s still hard for Windows and Linux boxes to play nicely together on my network. I can share files in one direction but not the other, and it hasn’t “just worked” setting up my Linux box as a network print server for its local printer.

But, these are minor problems that don’t diminish my renewed Linux happiness. The desktop menus are clean, the system administration tools work (apart from the problems noted above), the package update management is fantastic, I like the use of sudo for root-less security, and it’s very neat to be asked to install system features only if/when you need them. Now we’ve upgraded, our scanner finally works, and we’ve been able to install Wesnoth to keep Liam occupied these school holidays.

Joe Hurd is in town - he’s been working with some other local researchers on how to verify probabilistic computing systems. We were looking for some place to meet and catch up with each other, so I suggested we go to the Linux Conference Australia 2007 Open Day.

It was an interesting afternoon - a whole lot of exhibits, talks, and free food.

There were things like non-standard UI devices (dance mats, Wii Remotes, body/motion-detecting cameras) connected to Linux, Linux on amateur rockets and amateur satellites (“running Debian unstable”), commercial-and-homebrew Linux PVRs, a homebrew Linux-based Segway, and a homebrew Linux-based 3D-printer (“prints 1cc per hour”). Oh, and flashing fridge magnets from Google.

I took along Liam, my grade 1-aged son. I sat him down in front of one of the One Laptop Per Child laptops - there were three of them there at an exhibit. (These are the $100 laptops that you can’t actually buy yourself, even for $300.) We played around, and had someone run us through a demo. I don’t know… Liam happily uses both Windows and Linux at home, but he (and I) were a little stumped by the OLPC user interface. Maybe it was just our previous experience tainting us, but it seems a little strange to put a “non-standard” GUI on a mass-market item. Though I guess if it sells in the volumes they’re hoping, maybe it will end up being a “standard”!

A couple of weeks ago I acquired a new PDA - a Dell Axim x51v, partly to replace an increasingly flaky Handspring Visor that never really recovered completely from a cracked case and an accidental soaking. The Axim is so much nicer - mainly due to its VGA screen and multimedia capabilities.

Mobile WiFi is nice, to check the news, the TV guide or a weather forecast. But extended web surfing is a bit painful.

Mobile Internet Explorer isn’t that great - why is there no Mobile Firefox? Asking this question promoted me to search for one, and it appears that Minimo is it. However at the moment it runs slowly, and has no bookmarks. So although it renders pages slightly better than MIE, I don’t think I’ll switch yet…

In changing my device, I’ve also changed from PalmOS to MS Windows Mobile. In Windows Mobile it feels like the full complexity of Windows is hiding beneath a thin veneer, whereas PalmOS felt more like an black box appliance.

Windows Mobile 5.0 is new-ish, and I’m finding that many of the Windows Mobile 2003 programs are incompatible. Most plugins for the Today screen don’t work, which is annoying. I’d really like to see battery status on the Today screen, but don’t know how to do that. Microsoft ActiveSync 4.0 is a bit dodgy too - when it loses connection it can’t reconnect without rebooting my laptop. Bluetooth sync just doesn’t work.

What does work? Magic Button has been indispensible. GSFinder+ and Total Commander have worked around limitations with the built-in file explorer. I’ve got no idea why a program like TCPMP isn’t included as standard by Microsoft. (Luckily open source saves the day.) Clanger Theremin keeps Liam entertained, and Nethack keeps me entertained.

Now I’m on the lookout for a more protective case, and also a compatible keyboard.