Diary

I haven't posted for a while, because I've moved all my ranty political posts to my new blog. Hopefully, the signal-noise ratio has improved around here to some extent.

I also note too that my certification level has returned to Earth. Maybe somebody's tuned the trust metric?

LCA2004

I took a week off and forked over my own hard-earned for the trip to Adelaide to rubberneck all the FOSS action at LCA. So far it's been pretty good, although I eschewed the OSS in Government track (which I originally registered for) in favour of more technical content (and more time hanging out at the Apple booth).

I met a couple of people I hadn't seen in a long time. Also took some photos as some photographic proof for my mates back home in Brisbane. By all accounts, the top hackers seem like personable, approachable, likeable guys, and the atmosphere is fantastic. It's not hard to see why the likes of Linus Torvalds like LCA.

Tomorrow, the conference itself starts and I'll have huge dilemmas choosing which talks I want to get to. Decisions, decisions :)

Election

A state election was called today in my home state, and less than two hours later, I got a call from my buddies in the ALP asking for some help with letterboxing. Those guys work fast.

I think I'll leave speculating about what's going through Beattie's head for my blog. Nevertheless, with the start of the major project at work, the upcoming state and local elections and my renewed committment to training, I expect to be very busy indeed!

berend de Boor seems to be embracing his new role the stand-in reactionary dumbass for mglazer. Dude, you come across as an ignorant knee-jerk dittohead. Lose the politics already.

What is it about these twits and their blind worship of authority and the free market?

And a correction, dimwit: both major parties are so far Right, it's not funny. The Democrats are pro-market conservatives with a marginalised fringe elements of liberals. The Republicans are a group of hard-Right proto-fascists. Most of the Right in the rest of the civilised world is still way left of the US' notion of "centre".

Detecting libexslt

I'm currently fixing a little problem with a program I use at work. I had to add a call to exsltRegisterAll() from libexslt (the library that's bolted onto libxslt that implements the EXSLT XSLT extension functions) to fix the problem.

Now pkgconfig has configurations for libxml and libxslt, but some bright spark forgot to allow programmers to add support for detecting/linking-in libexslt. There's no M4 script included anywhere in libxslt either to do the job. Necessity is the mother of invention, I guess.

A Veteran Applauds KB Toys

Is this open letter addressed to the same vicious neo-Fascist who occasionally crapfloods Advogato?

Even if not, it's still an interesting read, and a fine example of how incredibly ignorant, blinkered and gullible some people can be.

Does anybody else find it odd that it takes an average user three hours (and then giving up) to attempt to configure a USB flash stick to auto-mount upon insertion, just to save three seconds typing a single mount command, just a tad stupid?

If I amortise that enormous waste of time over the number of times I'll be plugging the device in, I'll have worn out a dozen of them.

My apologies to the hotplug people, but judging by the obscene apparent complexity of the Linux hotplug framework to configure, it's an exercise in false economy.