I had to laugh today while reading the NZ Herald when I came across the an article entitled Using the net to get the story. The article talks about the rise of Computer Assisted Research (CAR) and prominently quotes Francis Till, the webmaster and a technology contributor for the National Business Review. Mr Till says that CAR can be used to "produce better-researched, more in-depth articles"! I wonder if perhaps Mr Till is thinking of well researched (not!) articles like his vitriolic attack on Linux and Open Source Software published in the NBR several weeks ago.
Apart from the incredibly unprofessional tone of the article, it appeared to rely almost completely on facts from Microsoft press releases and made many factual assertions that have since been thoroughly refuted.
The irony of the author of such a badly researched article wanting to teach other NZ journalists how to use the Internet to research their article is hillarious.
A few weeks ago I had a chat to Karin Purser of the Linux Australia Podcast Service. Karin regularly compiles the Linux Australia LUG Roundup, which does an excellent job of keeping people informed about what is going on in other LUGs around Australia, and now New Zealand. This month they decided they wanted to talk about WLUG and one way or another I ended up as the person to talk to.
The interview is now online and apart from being a bit long winded and sounding a bit poncy in a couple of places I think I did an OK job of describing WLUG and the state of Linux in New Zealand. I need to remember not to talk so much in response to questions in future!
Grab it from the following locations:
or see the Linux Australia Podcast Service Homepage for links to torrents of both files.
I think what I’ve come to realise over the past month is that our efforts to create a Linux NZ type organisation may have been misfounded. Linux Australia is already showing a great deal of support for NZ (LCA’06 in Dunedin, WLUG in the LA Lug Roundup, etc), so perhaps we should be pushing to have this support formalised and extended. Worth thinking about some time in my opinion.
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Stumbled across a blog post earlier today on a cool new “connection sharing” feature in SSH 4.0. Basically it multiplexs multiple SSH sessions over a single TCP connection so that subsequent sessions don’t suffer the key exchange and round trip setup delay. Given that I use SSH extensively to a small number of hosts pretty much continuously during my work day this sounds like a very handy feature for me.
Read more at: http://little.xmtp.net/blog/2005/11/04/ssh-connection-sharing-c-visibility-share-libraries-and-gcc-attributes-oh-my/
In other knews, I’ve been doing some more hacking on darpwatch as a result of some patches I received, so there will be a new release happening soon there. I’m still battling away against Glade, GTK# and F-Spot in my quest to get all my photos exported out of gallery and into a nice F-Spot + Original setup.
Updated PHPwiki packages have been built and have been pending upload for a week or two now, but my sponsor is quite busy at the moment, so there is a bit of a delay at that point inthe path. If you’re desparate for the new packages you can grab them from http://www.mattb.net.nz/debian/.
