Neither rhyme nor reason

You might have read here my post on the rumours of the HP 2133 Mini-note. About a month ago I managed to coerce one of the first 5 in Australia from the hands of the HP sales team here in Sydney. Because I didn’t want to annoy them and destroy the supplied Vista installation, I was limited to how much testing I could do with Linux on this. We did setup an 2GB SD card with Ubuntu that worked quite well. Certainly the Ubuntu desktop was a lot smoother in terms of performance than Vista. I also had a go with the SuSE image that comes with the Mini-note, though didn’t want to let it install to the hard disk. Again it ran quite well.

As far as a mobile device you can actually use it is way up there. The keyboard is really as big and useful as they claim, certainly better than some of the competition. Having a full aluminium shell makes it feel very solid, and should standup to everyday knocks and just shoving it into a bag - its main target market is college and school students, so it needs to hand. The screen is very clear - but of course being only 9″ diagonal wide-screen, I’m not sure I could use it as my main screen every day - the VGA port would definitely be made use of.

I took it along to the monthly SLUG meeting and follow-on dinner to give it an informal spruik. It provoked quite an interest and envy - I expect it might make a few people’s wish list. Unfortunately I had to give this one back. I think it is quite likely this form-factor is on the rise, particular as performance actually becomes useful, and battery life allows one to work on the road (though at the moment a spare battery is a necessity to cover a full working day). There is only so much you can do with a PDA or a Smartphone - a ultra-mobile mini-notebook with good networkability and running a nicely integrated version of Linux may well “make it”.

The photo below show it running Ubuntu next to my regular laptop (with a 15.1″ 4:3 screen).

On Sunday 1st June Riverview College hosted the first OLPC Australia Techfest. Its aim to stimulate interest in supporting the OLPC project in this region from a technical point of view was well met. We had about 50 or so delegates. The two main presenters were Martin Langhoff and Joel Stanley. Martin has primary responsibility for the XS, the School Server. Joel has been an intern with OLPC in Boston last year, and has intimate knowledge of XO innards. There was a good mixture of delegates, those that have had quite a bit of exposure to the project, and those only learning. There were a few people interested in working on the content and documentation which was great to see. There is a large general open-source community in Australia, so I feel sure given a little bit of a push there is likely to be strong interest in supporting this project in the region. While the technology itself is becoming quite mature, with many 100s of 1000s of machines heading to the field as we speak, regional customisation support for local deployments is going to needed. OLPC Australia sees its “target market” as not only Australia and New Zealand, but also the large number of Pacific nations. I would certainly like to be involved in deployments, assuming I can set aside the time and money for this.

Ok, so I, for a while like Jeremy have lamented the disappearance of the URI scheme (the "http://” bit ) in URLs when seen in advertising and the like. Maybe it’s because my day job is basically a network (and security) consultant. Making communication happen through network protocols is my bread and butter. A full URL spec like http://www.abc.net.au/news is unambiguous in intent. It describes to a suitable application which host to connect to, on what port, and what protocol it should talk with. It also indicates the particular datum of interest.

But there are two aspects to review in Jeremy’s argument. Firstly, how do humans recognise that abc.net.au/triplej is a contraction of a URL? Secondly, is there really a technical need to specify the protocol?
As far as “knowing” that a string of text is a shorthand URL, we can look for the following telltales :-
1. There might still be almost deprecated URI scheme (http://) as internet jargon that they learned circa 1994 (for the average Joe Blow at least).
2. We know that www means World Wide Web.
3. Words punctuated only by “.” and “/” is normally an internet thing.
4. The letters in URLs are most always in lowercase.
5. They are familiar with the common TLDs - “.com“, “.org“, “.au” and so on - another dead giveaway.

So what happens when URIs become non-obvious because some of the this distinguishing marks are missing. (I am not a linguist or semanticist so I may well have this wrong)

Jeremy has already seen the demise of point 1. The same goes for point 2. When I was a lad, domains always had separate host records, so company.com.au would always have a host www.company.com.au to provide it’s web prescence. Mail to joe@company.com.au almost invariable was steered by the MX record for the domain to mail.company.com.au, the mail host. Not so today. Maybe it was the fact that doubleyoodoubleyoodoubleyoo is hard to say (which is why some trendy geeks say stuff like dubdubdub or wahwahwah. Point 3 is interesting, again back in the 60s you always wrote abbreviations with fullstops/periods in between the capitalised letters. Like A.B.C. or C.S.I.R.O or the Man from U.N.C.L.E You just don’t do that now. So now basically those “.”s have been repurposed as domain name delimiters - and I reckon that this is actually the strongest clue we have now. With point 4, domain names are can just as easily be uppercase (DNS is case insensitive) but the file part of the URL often is not. Because UNIX systems were ruling the roost when web servers first were deployed, and we tended to write all file names in lowercase, this idiom seemed to stick. Finally for point 5, it ain’t so easy nowadays. Jeremy’s domain name is under the “.name” TLD, but what about .museum - does anyone even know that http://australian.museum is a valid domain name?

But anyway I guess us humans cope, and if the publicity gurus do misjudge when they prepare their ad copy, then they don’t get hits on their website. So I guess the URLs that aren’t real obvious get removed from the internet gene pool through natural selection.

On the second aspect, around the idea that there are protocols on the ‘net other than HTTP, does it really matter? Firstly HTTP is almost always the starting point in any case. If you do need jump from HTTP to something more private like HTTPS then the browser will do that for you. If you need to stream multimedia then the .m3u file you hit will redirect you to something more appropriate. And semantically the combination of your client application and server might be able to determine what you intended anyway. For instance if you type arnoldschicken.com.au into your phone, I reckon it should just give you the option to dial their nearest store. Or type arnoldschicken.com.au into your GPS navigator then it should by default set the nearest store as your destination. The semantic bit could either be derived from the user-agent, or possibly the device could add context either through a URL (say arnoldschicken.com.au/locations might return a list of parseable locations for the GPS or arnoldschicken.com.au/phonenumbers could return a list of numbers (that could be connected via SIP). Alternatively standard SOAP calls might be invoked to give similar information. Certainly more work can and should be done in this space. So I guess defaulting to HTTP may well make sense for when people initiate the connection - if needed the application then switches to the more appropriate protocol or scheme when it needs to.

So in conclusion, while “http://” might be dead, humans are pretty smart in recognising truncated URLs, and machines will get better (if not already) help us make better use of these. (And just for a final point - how many of just bang a few letters into the Google search bar and get what we want to find pretty quickly in any case!)

Sometime you would have to wonder whether logic totally escapes CIOs. In an article making comment on the The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report 2008 prepared by Waugh Partners, ZDnet put out an article entitled “Open source barred from Australian government”. What I found particularly curious was a comment from the CIO of the Australian Tax Office, Bill Gibson. In it, he says that he “is concerned that open source software could not be as easily scrutinised as proprietary software”. This is probably a paraphrase from an earlier published interview by Zdnet where he is quoted as saying - “We are very, very focused on security and privacy and the obligations that we have as an agency to ensure that we protect those rights of citizens’ information in that respect. So, we’ve continued to have concerns about the security related aspects around open source products. We would probably need to make sure that we will be very comfortable — through some form of technical scrutiny — of what is inside such a product so that there was nothing unforeseen there.”

So how does he “scrutinise” proprietary software? I guess at best, you might be able to get to see the source code, but the license to see is usually going to be under a NDA, and it is unlikely one organisation is really going to have the skills and resources to examine all the code. And even then there are going to be dependendent libraries that you may not be able to have source code access. But in most cases, you will only be able see your software as a blackbox. If you do perform security analysis you will always limited in what you can test in this case. I just don’t see how with a blackbox you can successfully search out all the nooks and crannies with a high level of confidence.

Only with open source code to you, and the “many eyes” out there, do you have the opportunity to truly scrutinise the code. You also then are able to create and receive patches for any found vulnerabilities. Clearly the bad guys have a similar opportunity to review the source, but the evidence overwhelming supports the idea that open source inherently is less likely to have hidden security flaws and is able react to unforeseen attacks with greater rapidity.

I would be really interested to find out who Bill Gibbons has been taking advice from on software security.

Well it seems the rumours were right - HP have launched their EEEpc competitor, the HP 2133 Mini Note PC. (OK, they are my employer, and yes I have been looking at some of the internal info for some weeks). It is definitely being marketed at the education market, but clearly any user with a need for a proper PC and wants absolutely minimum weight will clearly like this.
It is very cool that one of the standard options (in fact the cheapest) is to purchase it with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop installed. I am wondering whether it will be a standard SLED install or have a mobile UI similar to what Asus did with Xandros on their baby laptop. I will certainly be keen to see this running with SLED (though I am sure we can shoe-horn Ubuntu onto it). This option also comes sans hard disk (it will have 4GB flash instead) so I expect it will have better battery life than the standard Vista version with the spinning disk.
If I do get to have a play on one, I’ll let you know what I think.

I was just researching a route from my home to the Canberra Hospital in Woden. The route Google Maps provided was through the city centre. I tried to use the route drag feature to get it go via Majura Road, which seemed more sensible. However it always seemed to want to do a U-turn near the airport. After a bit of fiddling around, I have found that seems to be a discontinuity. This map shows the exact spot - the 100m obvious route becomes 25km when navigating with Google Maps! Does Lazyweb know how to report this to Google? I can’t find anything obvious.

The other interesting fact is that I believe the hospital is Woden, which is the town centre there. But Google Maps doesn’t seem to have heard of Woden, ACT. Is that because it is a town centre and not a suburb?

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post, is that if do want to see the International Space Station and the Shuttle all at once and you live near Sydney, tomorrow (Monday 17 March), is about the best chance you’ll get. At around 7:45pm gaze directly above, you will see both passing overhead, and will be about the brightest you could ever want. (Yes I know you have all seen satellites, but these are REALLY bright). It will be moving from South West towards North East.

Details are at Heavens Above

I was just googling for some photography stuff, and came across this photo.

Have a close look at the driver’s side window (the right hand side if you were sitting in the cockpit) ….

Still can’t see it? This picture might help…

Hmmm. Maybe the distinctive shape of the iPod just indicates how well Apple’s design elements have pervaded our consciousness.

The original image can be found at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-123/hires/iss016e032313.jpg

The post that pointed this out is at Yahoo

My son Jeremy was invited to perform at a curtain raiser for an ABC Classic FM Sunday Live concert down at Thirroul the other week. He performed wonderfully (as well as the 2 other “rising stars”). The producer spied me taking a few shots during his warm-up and asked me if I could take a few for promotion. With the kids and the main act, Kammer, I had over a 100 shots by the end (it’s great fun just pressing the button with a digital cam). Anyway I collected my best 30 or so, made a nice gallery using F-spot and sent it to the producer. He must have liked them because 1 of them is on the top-level http://abc.net.au/classic page with the other 5 (so far) are in the gallery. They haven’t been able to put up any of the kids photos yet because they need to get releases from their parents, but that may come. (The chiildren were all recorded as well so I guess they may even get played on air at sometime if they made the grade).

I took these without flash, at ISO200 with my Canon S2 IS. It has a (36 – 432mm f/2.7-f.3.5) lens and while not a DSLR, still allows enough light to do a good job indoors without flash under normal lighting conditions.

If you do enjoy good music I heartily recommend getting to one of the free Sunday Live concerts when they visit near you. They are in Mittagong over the 2 weeks, and then in Penrith.

If you are a news junkie like myself, you may have noticed that ABC News provides Google-like references to purportedly relevant news articles to the one being viewed, down the right side of the page. I have noticed however that their relevance engine clearly has some issues. The story this morning was titled “Sydney welcomes second cruising Queen” which was about the historic event tonight as two large ocean liners, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II will pass each other on Sydney Harbour. A had good chuckle when I read that the supposedly related articles were:-

• Council welcomes second airline - 21 Mar 2003 (Planes not ships - and hopefully not passing each other at 100m distance!)
• PM welcomes Swedish royals - 7 Nov 2005 (Some real royals)
• India cruising in Hobart - 14 Jan 2004 ( A royal game maybe, but the Indian cricket side is cruising along here)
• Australia cruising to huge total - 7 Oct 2005 (This time it is the Aussie cricketers going for spin)
• Melbourne welcomes Prince Edward - 12 Mar 2006 - (Another real royal)

Not a ship to be seen. Oh well Aunty ABC, maybe you should have a chat to Google!