Agileview

We celebrated Christmas a week early this year, as much of our family will be travelling interstate. So Sunday became the day of pressies, kids, rellies, photos, food, wine and of course the cricket (a day the Pakistans would like to forget, all out for 79 runs - what a shocker!). And yeah, I finally caved in to the marketing pressure and purchased a MP3 player - my Christmas present for 2004.

Yes, I took the plunge and bought an MP3 player. But not just any ordinary 128mb MP3 Player, following the motto of “if somethings worth doing, do it right first time”, I purchased the iRiver H340 with a capacity of 40 gigabytes, colour LCD, ability to host other USB devices (eg. copy photos from your digital camera without requiring a PC), act as a mobile hard disk and most importantly support for the Ogg Vorbis codec.

And what a truly geeky little device it is. Fits easily into the palm of my hand, weighs next to nothing and has more storage capacity than I have allocated for the Windows partition on my laptop! What also surprised me was the speed of USB2.0 vs USB1.1. Transferring 30mb using USB1.1 took 10 minutes or so, using USB2.0 this time is reduced to 1 minute. Frighteningly fast. Quiet as a mouse during operation, you can only feel a slight vibration as the internal hard disk seeks/reads during playback and I suspect it only does this to load a large portion of the file into its internal memory.

The entire package came with a heap of accessories: USB cables, head phones, cradle, external lapel microphone, charger, external battery pack and hip case. Pretty good value I thought. Unlike the iPods where these are “optional extras” ($ cha-ching $).

I also purchased this little companion gadget from Belkin - TuneCast II Mobile FM Transmitter. So now I can broadcast my own personal radio station (FM 90, Radio Freeman) into my car stereo, home stereo or into any nearby radio. You definitely can notice the difference between the commercial FM stations and the Tunecast. Sound is reasonable, but not as sharp or loud as from the player, I suspect that the little FM transmitter is somewhat under-powered and losing quality as a result. However, it’s a concession I’m happy to take just to listen to my own music.

I’m pretty happy with this purchase and once the pain of parting with $700 has subsided I expect the happiness will increase ten-fold. It will be very interesting to follow this market as it continues to evolve. Is it unreasonable to expect mobile Terabyte devices in 2 to 3 years time? Should be ready to upgrade by then

For more information on the iRiver and purchasing in Australia, check out these on-line shops:

• mStation
• mp3Direct
• enGear
• Minidisc Australia

Something to look forward to in 2005, yes The Goodies are coming to Canberra. Time to wind back the clock and do the funky gibbon!

Fran bought tickets today (without any begging at all) from Canberra Ticketing. We’re even going with some good friends so it should be a real blast. Half inclined to get the kids to come along as well, but @ $77 this is really premium entertainment.

And if you were not brought up with the 5 o’clock PM compulsory viewing comprised of: Dr. Who, Kenny Everett - Video Show, Monkey! and of course, The Goodies then here’s some links to quickly bring you up to speed… (a short history of the 70’s/80’s):

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/years/1970/goodies.shtml
• http://www.goodiesruleok.com/

Linux Conference Australia 2005 will be held at the Australian National University from Monday April 18 to Saturday April 23, 2005. For more information check out linux.conf.au.

I attended Linux Conference 2004 in Adelaide and had a fantastic time. Met many of the gurus of the open source world and generally felt very humble in the presence of such highly motivated and brilliant people. I can recommend this conference and expect it’ll be even bigger than 2004. So do yourself a favour and book it into your calendar. See you there!

Peter Bailey (Synop) and the presentation on the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Internet and Intranet Web Portals Project at Linux Conference 2004 (2 year project - multiple contributors).

Justin Freeman (Agileware) and Giri Fox (Apple) at Linux Conference 2004

Caught Linus Torvalds at Linux Conference 2004 in the wireless tent just hacking together a new kernel release

More photos from the Linux Conference 2004 are available here.

I believe 2005 is going to be the year of open source software and Linux is leading the wave. Here’s my prediction, 2005 will be the year where:

• More realworld business critical solutions are announced.
• Greater acceptance and uptake by Australian Government and Australian enterprises will occur - more large installations/conversions to Linux and other open source solutions. In fact this is already happening, with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) recently releasing a Request for Tender for Providers of Open Source desktop software (see below). Now that in addition to having already transitioned all of the “back office” infrastructure to Linux and Samba etc. throughout Australia. DVA is really leading the way.
• There will be more comprehensive support offerings from IT companies
• And of course, increased marketing drives (such as the one by Red Hat Below)

Roll-on 2005 and welcome to centre stage, open source software.

Red Hat Tour
Glad to see that Red Hat is leading the charge and promoting their product here in our small city.

Reproduced excerpt from the Canberra Times, Monday 13th of December, Page 13.

Open Source Desktop Software Tender by Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA)

The Information Management Unit within the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) is seeking Expressions of Interest (EOI) from providers of Open Source Software, specifically an open source office personal productivity suite with a view to replace its Microsoft Office Suite in the DVA desktop environment.

Closing date for lodgement of tenders is 17:00 PM (ACT Local Time) Friday 22 December 2004.

Open Source Desktop Software Tender or download it directly here Request_for_Expressions_of_Interest_open_source.doc (MS Word document)

More news about the DVA Tender here:

• Veterans Dept checks open-source options @ Financial Review
• Veterans’ Dept looks for Office alternatives @ SMH

2004 has absolutely flown past and I can’t believe we’re having our last meeting for the year tonight.

Should be a good event as Kathy Staples from IBM will be providing a hands-on demonstration of the new IBM Workplace Services Express. She’ll be doing the full installation, presentation and then a hands-on demo of it actually working. And all on her laptop. Which is a considerable effort since last time I checked the minimum recommended RAM requirements was 4gb RAM. That’s some laptop!

I’ll also be trying out something new… I’ll be both filming the event and recording the audio. The aim being to make these both available on the website so that interstate & overseas people can listen in on our do.

More details about the meeting can be found here:
http://walnut.agileware.net/?q=node/294

There’s also a good wrapup of the November meeting over here:
http://walnut.agileware.net/?q=node/293

Have you ever wondered how to get your return email address to be "Justin Freeman" <jfreeman@tryandspamthis.com.au> as opposed to the default <jfreeman@tryandspamthis.com.au>?

Well I set about last week to find out how as it’s been bugging me no end for a few years now. And the solution is quite simple, if not obtuse.

When you send an email the Domino router checks the “Internet Address” field in the Domino Directory for each sender. The value in this field is then stamped as the return email address on the outgoing email. However, for some wacky “Lotus only knows” reason you cannot put an email address of the format "Justin Freeman" <jfreeman@tryandspamthis.com.au> into this field. No idea why.

Now here’s the solution. The Domino router checks “Internet Address” field and if this field has NO VALUE then it checks the “Short Name/User ID” field. And this field accepts an email address of the format "Justin Freeman" <jfreeman@tryandspamthis.com.au>.

So if you update the Person documents in the Domino Directory so that the email address is removed from the “Internet Address” field and insert the email address into the “Short Name/User ID” field the router will start stamping outgoing emails correctly.

There is one last thing you need to be aware of, it appears that both the Domino router and the Notes client cache return address lookups. So you need to retart the Domino router (”tell router quit” and then “load router”) as well as restarting the Notes client.

Thought you might find this useful