Archive for April 2004

Leadership in Debian

So, back in the mists of time (ie, slightly over a month ago), David Welton asked Do you think it’s possible for Debian to have a leader anymore?. I made a few comments in response, which in part might be summarised as Debian having an unreasonable culture of blame on its leadership, leading to people […]

Fake Categories

The Planet Debian aggregator has confused me a bit — it’s meant to be a “community” thing, and be about things that aren’t directly Debian related, but on the other hand, I ramble on about boring Australian political stuff that can be pretty boring. Up until now Planet Debian has just snarfed my Debian section, […]

Quality Reporting

Here’s the story: Australia’s inflation rate lowest in 4 years CANBERRA, April 28 (Xinhuanet) — Australia’s annual inflation rate slowed to 2 percent, the lowest since December 1999, official figures released on Wednesday show. The news.com story‘s headline is Living costs rise slowest in 4 years, the Herald Sun says Inflation at four-year low, Yahoo […]

Digital Agenda Review v the Free Trade Agreement

The Attorney-General’s department says this about the Digital Agenda report: Current Status of the Government’s Review Phillips Fox conducted their research and analysis independently of the Government. During the term of the consultancy the Government negotiated with the United States a Free Trade Agreement. The Government is now moving towards signing its Free Trade Agreement […]

Phillips Fox Report Out

It’s out! Recommendation seventeen is choice: That the definition of TPM in section 10 of the Act be amended so as to accord with the interpretation favoured by Sackville J in Stevens, at first instance. That the permitted purposes in section 116A (3) be amended so as to clearly allow any supply or use of […]

Debian Release Delayed

…news at 11. UPDATE 2004/04/27: Welcome to the 11 O’clock news. Our lead story tonight: Debian Release Manager doesn’t know how to spell “effect”.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Good lord. Challenged with this massive redesign, incorporating a near 100% decrease in oh-so-lameness, all I can come up with are a few minor tweaks (mostly: titles are permalinks and you can hover over the title to see the section. woo. excitement). Oh well, there was a reason I chose to name my blog as […]

Musing about Musing

One of the things I like about blogging is that there’s no requirement to do a good job — it’s just my ramblings, on my website, covering whatever my fancies might run to. That’s particularly nice in that it gives me somewhere to just whine or ponder about whatever I might like — I’m not […]

Activist Complains, Quits

Newsforge reports that Clay Claiborne is quiting as President of the Los Angeles Linux Users Group. Why? Because he’s unhappy about Iraq, of course: Claiborne: I’m glad they’re starting a LUG in Baghdad and I’m glad Hussein is gone. I just don’t think it had to cost maybe 20K Iraqi lives and how many Americans’ […]

Ripped Off

The Advanced Algorithms class I took never looked like this. I wanna be a lawyer.

Firmware, the GPL and Debian, oh my

Norbert Tretkowski’s unhappy, apparently: Most of our users don’t care if this firmware is loaded by the Linux kernel, or by the hardware itself. They don’t care if this firmware is part of the Linux kernel, or if it’s sitting on-board on that hardware. It makes no difference, they just want to use their fucking […]

JSCT FTA Inquiry

From my email today: Thank you for your interest in the Committee’s inquiry into the Australia USA Free Trade Agreement your comments are appreciated and will be formally acknowledged in due course. Fran Wilson Office Administrator Joint Standing Committee on Treaties Sweet. In other news, the JSCT public hearings start their Oz tour on Monday, […]

The Threat of Globalisation

The Daily Ablution complained to the BBC about a poll they ran that concluded US is bigger threat than terror. Well, that was the headline, anyway; the real conclusion was that the US and globalisation combined were a bigger threat than terror, at least given the online poll they did. Apart from being an online […]

Dubya and Gay Marriage

The world’s an odd place. In this year’s State of the Union, and as one of his election platforms, President Bush has supported the push to reserve marriage in the US for straight folk. Various sensible folks were naturally outraged at this, just as other various sensible folks have been concerned to various degrees by […]

Submissions to Parliamentary Commissions

So, Mary Gardiner, civic-minded lady she is, mentioned that she was going to have a go at making a submission to the senate on the FTA and it’s effect on Linux and free software and that she’d probably put whatever she came up with online. Michael Davies replied that You aren’t allowed to make your […]