Planet Ubuntu Australia

Sigh, so that happened

So two things happened today.

The first was a near riot that necessitated the evacuation of the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader from an awards ceremony meant to highlight the work of emergency workers.

The second was WIN Television blowing it again.

If you haven't caught up on the events today then I heres a brief timeline I've put together from various sources:

Earlier today in Sydney, Tony Abbott made comments indicating that he thought it was "time to move on" from the thinking that led to the Aboroginal Tent Embassy being set up forty years ago.
Tony Abbott travels to Canberra to attend the awarding of the inaugeral National Emergency Medal along with the Prime Minister.
People at the Tent Embassy hear of Tony Abbotts comments and are, it could be said, greatly miffed. They are then told that he is actually in Canberra, not far from the Tent Embassy itself.
A number of people decide that they're going express their anger at the Opposition Leader and Prime Minister. They surround the restuaraunt, a glass walled building and start yelling and slamming on the glass.
Police are called and the Prime Ministers security detail advises her that the situation is getting dangerous and that she should leave. The PM agrees and also indicates that they should escort the Opposition Leader as well, as he doesn't have his own security detail.
The PM and Opposition leader are rushed out of the building surrounded by the biggest scrum of security personel. The PM trips on the way out and it appears the opposition leader is helped along by the security personel via the method of grabbing his belt and pushing.

That's it in a nutshell I think. I've probably missed something but that's what I've managed to pull out of the media.

Needless to say as I watched the tweets fly by with all sorts of claims and details (the original tweets I had seen claimed that the PM had been crash tackled by a protester), I waited for any sign that the MSM had picked up the story. It didn't take long for the papers to run with it, and the TV networks at least squeezing in an extra news bulletin to cover the basic details.

Well, most of the networks.

WIN Television's Wollongong station couldn't even be bothered following channel 9 by putting on an extra news bulletin after Wriddhiman Saha lost his wicket. Instead WIN simply continued on with it's pre-planned ads and it wasn't until it broadcast the 9 news bulletin at 6pm that the news finally reached the airwaves.

I basically have three things to say:

To Tony Abbott, on this day of days, a day which a large part of the indigenous community views as the day they started losing their rights, to suggest that perhaps the Tent Embassy wasn't needed was either a dog whistle of epic proportions, or simply a case of shoving both feet in at the speed of sound.

Oh and as for the snide little raised eye brows and snark when Gillard offered to remove you from the situation, that just makes you look like a petulant little child.

To the protesters, you did yourself and your cause no favours today. You managed to rise to the bait and make yourselves look like a rabble. And getting cute by offering to give the PM back her shoe tomorrow if she comes by the Embassy just really doesn't help.

Finally, to WIN Television. Convergance is coming, and it's not going to be nice to those who aren't ready for it. You've known about this for years now, unless you start doing something soon, you will be left behind.

Anyway, that was my Australia day, how was yours?

Blog Catagories:

Politics

media

convergance

James Purser

On Bogans and Racism

So, last night I got into one of those twitter arguments that I tend to (I have a bad case of "Someones wrong on the Internet").

In this case it was triggered by the following tweet:

Redglitterx: how do you know if youre an elitist, smug, over-priviledged racist? you make bogan jokes

Now, if you're not sure what a bogan joke is, a bogan is a name for someone who is considered ill-educated, with low income and not only ignorant, but revelling in their ignorance. As you may have noticed, this is actually a stereotype, a cardboard cutout that people use to mentally slot a group of people into the social heirachy. In this way, calling someone a bogan is very much LIKE racism.

However I have never considered the term itself to be racist.

This may be one of those cases where a term is whatever anyone wants it to be, but I really think that it doesn't help anyone to try and conflate anti-boganism with racism. If nothing else, "bogans" don't face the same extreme issues as those who suffer from racism. Bogans are not likely to be physically attacked because they are bogans, there is not a continual low level campaign by large sections of the media to seperate them out from the rest of the population, and let's be honest, there is a hell of a lot of government policy that is aimed at placating and winning the votes of those who might be called bogan.

As I said at the beginning, calling someone a bogan is like racism in that you are using a stereotype to mentally sort that person, just like calling someone an eastern sububs nancy boy, or a north shore soccer mum.

Sridhar Dhanapalan

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-25

Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes http://t.co/F0ojnKxD #
Allow me to express my gratitude to the #lca2012 organisers for a brilliant conference! #
Sick of Sydney? http://t.co/JewJPoIv #
Interview with OLPC CTO about XO-3
http://t.co/zmh6VOkz #olpc #
Fuseproject Unwraps The Third-Gen One Laptop Per Child: A $100 Tablet http://t.co/jzuqqBSn #olpc #
Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class http://t.co/AK1b7Ogm #
@threethirty it means a tablet based on standard Linux — Fedora, GNOME, Sugar, etc. See the talk at http://t.co/dYbj5ECb #olpc #olpcau in reply to threethirty #
@kattekrab you can probably do 70, but we don’t want to push it #olpc #olpcau in reply to kattekrab #
@kattekrab have you seen http://t.co/IjsGlYVN ? Happy to chat if you have further questions! #olpcau #olpc in reply to kattekrab #

IKT

v0.4.5 out

Fixes another awesome crash, download here:

https://github.com/ikt/ium/downloads

Scott Sinclair

Now available via IPv6

Quick Update - This site is now available via IPv6.

You don't have to do anything special, you will just use IPv6 if it is available and you have preferences for IPv6 connections.

If you want to test to see if you can get to the IPv6 site, try visiting http://v6.nullis.net

Joel Pickett

proof-reading en_AU translations

A lot of work was done in these past couple of cycles to get the en_AU locale into shape. We were hovering around ~43% translated (around 185,000 strings to go) at the natty Ubuntu Global Jam — http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-au/817/detail/

Since then, we’ve managed to translate the lot, only having to search through the new strings trickling in for the Precise cycle – averaging around a couple of hundred new strings per week.

Consider the below workflow, replacing STRING with the en_US string that you’re trying to find/fix, eg. color, cell phone, meter, dialog – etc (the comprehensive list – English Translation keywords):

mkdir ~/en_AU; cd ~/en_AU
wget people.ubuntu.com/~jpickett/translations/en_AU-20120118.tar.gz
tar xvf en_AU-20120118.tar.gz
cd en_AU
grep -i "STRING" ./* > ~/STRING
grep -i "msgstr" ~/STRING > ~/result
less ~/result
...

The output in ~/result will show all the strings that may need to be fixed. The simplest way to do this is to have a tab open for each batch of templates, ie:

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU?batch=300

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=300&start=300

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=600&start=600

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=900&start=900

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=1200&start=1200

This makes it super easy to Ctrl-F through the lists and find the package that the typo/mistake resides. You’ll also want to periodically check for the new tarball to make sure you have up-to-date .po’s and that you aren’t rechecking files that you’ve already fixed

There’s probably a billion ways that this could be done easier/faster but for now, that’s the way it’s being fixed

Although translation into en_AU may not be the most important goal we have in the Ubuntu project, I firmly believe that it creates that *finishing gloss* that reflects what the Ubuntu en_AU translators have achieved.

James Purser

Talks to catchup on

Okay so I missed #lca2012 this year. However because the LCA team is awesome (continuing the grand tradition of awesome LCA teams), the talks have started appearing on the linuxconfau2012 youtube channel.

Squeeee.

Now I have a number of talks to watch on the googletv thing:

Tux in Space: High altitude ballooning - Joel Stanley,Mark Jessop

Lego + Kids + Arduino - James Muraca

Making video streaming interactive, heckling user groups from the clouds!

Android Accessories Made Easy With Arduino - Philip Lindsay

Desktop Home Hacks - Allison Randal

Now these are just the one's I want to watch immediately. If you have a love of hackery, FOSS and all things shiny then I think you need to go through those talks and queue them up on your device of choice.

Also remember, the videos will be made available on the Linux Australia Mirror shortly, so you will be able to grab all of the talks and watch them whether you're online or not.

As I said before: Squeeee

IKT

Stephen Colbert – Colbert Remix Challenge – Remixing is ok – FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU Comedy Central

Ok, so it starts off innocent enough, I caught a glance at this gif animation:

Is that Stephen Colbert at a rave? That is awesome!

So I’ll just watch the episode on the official website.

GOD DAMN IT!

Ok, not a problem I’ll watch it on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgVzcWGi4QA

:/

Camcorder recording a television screen, that’s alright I guess, but I’d rather get the actual show itself.

1. Can’t legally watch the show in any shape or form
2. Head to bittorrent sites, found the show!
3. 0 seeders :/
4. Stumbling upon a random related website I notice the embed video works!
5. I’ll just grab the URL of the stream and download it, too easy
6. Spend an hour looking for an inbuilt header checker/stream finder for chrome + firefox
7. Spend an hour or 2 looking for a stream finder for ubuntu
8. Try 2-3 different programs, including get_flash_video and rtmpdump
9. Wireshark! I’ll just use wireshark and grab the URL from the packets themselves!
10. Ok. ok. I can’t see it. It’s an encrypted RTMP stream. O.O
11. Notice all of the other programs are windows only
12. Login to windows, proceed to download all 40 different stream/header/rtmp finders
13. 2 of them actually work but refuse to download because Copy protected files can’t be legally downloaded? wtf?
14. It’s now 3-4 hours after point 1, I DON’T EVEN CARE ANY MORE JUST GIVE ME THE DAMN FILE
15. The alternative Replay Media Capture offers is Replay VIdeo Capture, it’s pretty much just fraps. http://applian.com/replay-video-capture/
16. Oh ma gawd it works
17. The result of my 5 hours of effort:

Thanks a lot Viacom/Comedy Central, serves me right for trying to watch your content

IKT

Story of my life…

Allan Armstrong

#18 – Brighton Beach Sunset (21/1/12)

Taken on my phone. I’m a week behind because I got major sunburn from this outting and have not been able to move.

Allan Armstrong

#17 – Night Life

I need to clean my lens.

Allan Armstrong

#16

I promise I’m not dead. I’ve had to deal with a lot of personal stuff recently. I’ll get back into it from now on

Sridhar Dhanapalan

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-18

Spilt my mocha on the keyboard. Lucky it is an XO #olpc #
@LGnome funny you mention that. Wait for my talk at #lca2012 #olpcau in reply to LGnome #
The writing’s on the wall for pen and paper (specific mention of OLPC AU) http://t.co/ZckDOTrh #olpc #olpcau #
@danjonharris happy to chat in reply to danjonharris #
I support #wikipediablackout Show your support here http://t.co/eHryy8Zo #

IKT

A bike shed of a conversation.

I’m slowly getting into arch linux, never noticed this before but it can sum up a lot of conversations I’ve seen on the Internet.

“What is it about this bike shed?” Some of you have asked me.

It is a long story, or rather it is an old story, but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early 1960s, called “Parkinson’s Law”, which contains a lot of insight into the dynamics of management.

[snip a bit of commentary on the book]

In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the age of the book.

Parkinson shows how you can go into the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

In Denmark we call it “setting your fingerprint”. It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say “There! I did that.” It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING

That is genius!

IKT

9/11 “Truthers” – Ok I think this is going a little bit to far…

Browsing around the 9/11 videos you get the feeling some of the people commenting aren’t very good at thinking.

Here are some of the better ones:

Obviously…

O.O! Maybe they used the DEW:

What other reasons could there be?

The CIA needed a budget boost… right…

This was debated on a video which featured a CGI military plane flying into a building.

Arguing that 9/11 wasn’t a CGI animation is just 1 step to far for me. Just give up, go home, don’t waste your time, they don’t believe what the government tells them as only sheep do that! But they’ll happily swallow anything they read on a conspiracy forum, no matter how dumb.

Funny how that works.

Allan Armstrong