Sunday Morning Rant

Okay, it's Sunday morning, I have a coffee in hand and I haven't had a chance to blog lately, so here we go:

This election has officially jumped the shark

That's it, this election is officially a joke. Neither party is offering significantly different policies, the media seems to be more concerned about the Days of Our Lives that is the Labor leadership squabble, and now we have channel 9 bringing Mark bloody Latham into the mix as a "guest journalist"

The only real spark of interest has been watching the twitter stream when people start to have a go at the journo's for being more concerned about Rudd and Gillard than the policies the parties are putting out. I've read many complaints about how much each party is controlling their various media packs, however it takes two to tango. The media is meant to be there to hold the parties up to the light, not help them keep mushrooming the populace.

Waving Away

I've already written about this on my wave blog, however I'll mention it here as well: If Google doesn't feel it can support the development of the Wave and associated technologies then it needs to hive them off into something similar to the Apache Foundation.

The Island of Doctor Nauru

Are we so seriously damaged as a country that we can actually think that prison camps on an island as far from anywhere as possible is an acceptable solution for such a small problem as boat borne asylum seekers? Did we learn nothing from the last time this was attempted? Yeesh.

Oh and Labor you're not getting out of this one scott free. East Timor?!? If you want to help out the East Timorese economy why not give a bit on the whole oil and gas fields thing. You know, something that might actually create jobs and build an economy?

LCA2011 Miniconf Submitted

Last night I submitted the following miniconf idea to linux.conf.au:

Where the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" was always a pipe dream, and indeed has become a by word for the triumph of hope over experience, the last three years has seen the rise of FOSS on your phone.

With Google, Nokia and HP now operating fully open development platforms (including Core OS development in the case of Google and Nokia) the time has never been better for FOSS development on what is already becoming THE ubiquitous computing platform.

This miniconf would explore the FOSS mobile development landscape, from the tools available, to the platforms themselves and future plans.

LGWN10

Coming up in just over a week is the best Local Government Web Conference in Australia. I'm helping out that irrepressible foodie Reem Abdelaty by doing the audio recordings and general dogs bodying. It's going to be a blast and I love the fact that we're getting people together who have a real interest in moving their local governments towards technologies that can assist both them and their constituents.

Determining Demand

Just one more for the morning. I'm wondering if the Coalition will use the same method for determining hospital and education demand in the future as they seem to be using for the NBN. Malcolm Turnbull said yesterday that there is currently not enough demand for 100Mb/s broadband in Australia to justify building the NBN. By that reckoning, we should only fund education and hospitals to support current levels, because the future holds absolutely no change.

Sigh.