I’m not sure who @fivewalls is, but he asked: “You’re not hanging out at hellfire again are you?” That’s the column on the right, people who mention me or direct their conversation towards me.

@hyper_mpesce, which is a robot that repeats things Mark Pesce says, rearranging and making everything hyper, said: “hyper-If hyper-you hyper-even hyper-if hyper-you hyper-read hyper-the hyper-Hellfire hyper-Club. hyper-” hyper-#DISCONNECT.” As one would. That’s the column on the left, which is everyone I follow.

I can think of no explanation for this coincidence.

Leslie Nassar had just tweeted that he’d had a dream where Channel Seven’s Sunrise program was “throwing One Direction celebretweens at super-fat versions of TV chefs carrying butterfly nets”.

I responded thusly (here with some minor improvements to the flow):

In the last dream I recall, the hipster wouldn’t shut up so I slowly sawed off both his hands at the wrist with a knife.

At first he thought I was joking, but as the blade worked through the tendons he realised in terror that I was serious. Blood everywhere.

I threw his hands onto the floor in front of where he was sitting against the wall and left him there, whimpering. His friend went quiet.

And then I woke up. Pulse racing. Sweating. Breath gasping. I couldn’t go to sleep after that, so I made coffee and read the news.

Why am I telling you this? Well, a week from today I’ll be flying to Perth to… to… [gulp] to speak at #DigitalMe. Yes. Speak. That’s it.

I would like to have a dream with butterfly nets. I think butterfly nets would be quite lovely fun.

I think I will make a coffee now. And read the news.

The title of this post comes from a subsequent tweet by the Snarky Platypus. “Are you going Wolf Creek on hipsters again?” He makes it sound like a bad thing…

Incidentally, if you do a Google Images search for the text “I don’t get nearly enough credit for managing to not be a violent psychopath” you will discover moist, sticky muffins and a dwarf-eating hippo. You’re welcome.

Or more precisely, that Benford’s Law is followed by the distribution of the number of Twitter followers that each of my Twitter followers has in turn.

“Benford’s Law of Anomalous Numbers states that for many datasets, the proportion of data points with leading digit n will be approximated by log₁₀(n+1) – log₁₀(n),” says Carmody with a straight face.

So, if you look at the chart, you’ll see that there’s more followers with a follower count starting with a “1″ (so 1, 11-19, 100-199, 1000-1999 etc) than with a “2″ (2, 20-29, 200-299, 2000-2999 etc) than with a “3″ (3, 30-39, 300-399, 3000-3999 etc) and so on.

He does note in another chart that there seems to be a spike of followers with just one follower each. I’m wondering whether that’s about spammers.

Even before Google controversially demolished the privacy walls between its various products, we were already living in the total surveillance society. With every keystroke we are voluntarily telling companies, governments and heaven knows who else an awful lot about ourselves. Should we be worried about the uses to which this information could be put? Technology writer Stilgherrian discusses the implications of what we share with social media consultant Thomas Tudehope.

I daresay I’ll be covering material like that in my Sydney Morning Herald story You are what you surf, buy or tweet, and the more recent ZDNet Australia story The Facebook experiment, but the conversation will be up to you, the audience.

The theme for SWF this year is “the line between the public and the private”. As artistic director Chip Rolley says in his welcome message:

The question of the limits of what is personal is one of the hottest subjects around.

“Privacy is for paedos,” ex-News of the World journalist Paul McMullan told the UK Leveson Inquiry into the media. Now, via Facebook and Twitter, we voluntarily tell the world things we previously might not have told even our loved ones. Investigative journalists thrive on leaks and finding out what others don’t want us to know. And the state knows few boundaries (personal or political) in its need to prevent another 9/11.

(If you want a high-powered discussion of these issues, Sydney Town Hall discussion on Friday 18 May with former High Court judge Michael Kirby, former director general of MI5-turned-thriller writer Stella Rimington, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle, media and news blogger Jeff Jarvis and investigative journalist Heather Brooke.)

iSpy is on Sunday 20 May 2012 at 2.30pm at the Bangarra Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay. It’s free, and you don’t need to book — but I’m told that it can sometimes get busy at SWF.

Before that I have speaking engagements on 27 April at DigitalMe in Perth and 11 May at the Saasu Cloud Conference 2012.

The cloud is the enabler, it’s the medium that automation grows in. We want to focus on the value of online accounting automation, why it’s often undervalued and how you can get some for your own business or practice.

Saasu makes the online accounting system that I’ve been using since July 2007, and I know the chief executive officer and founder Marc Lehmann and chief happiness officer Tony Hollingsworth.

Good leadership and a good attitude continues to deliver a good product. Well, I think so anyway. At least it works for me.

My keynote will be something about security and the cloud, obviously enough, but I’ll lock down the details before the end of this week.

Mind you, I wrote the ZDNet Australia feature Cloud security? Better get a lawyer, Son! in October 2010, and since then I’ve written Cloud could be ‘privacy enhancing’: Pilgrim and Hybrid clouds the eventual reality for risk management and Today’s cloud winners: the cybercriminals and Want government cloud? Rethink security! so I’ve got plenty of material to start with.

Saasu has kept the price down to a reasonable $99 for a full-day event. You can register online.

[Update 11 May 2012: I've just posted notes and background material for my presentation, Security and the Cloud: Hype versus Reality.]

On Monday I discovered by accident — well, by a 5am media release from the Prime Minister — that it was Commonwealth Day. Which used to be called Empire Day. Or even British Empire Day. I thought I’d celebrate by using a selection of avatars on Twitter. These are their stories.

From left to right, a slightly retro illustration of Britannia stolen from the Daily Mail; a model showing off the Fever Rule Britannia Sequin Dress, which you can hire from Bryony Theatrical; some random British military beefcake; Angus Stewart’s photo of Rule Britannia Pete; the DeviantArt profile picture of Britannia–Angel, a male of unstated age from the UK; and some random picture from Sodahead that you can trace back if you can be bothered.

As I mentioned in my follow-up comment, it turns out that the text wasn’t the work of Ursula K Le Guin as I’d originally thought. Oops. It’s actually a document related to the fantasy universe of Danny, the guy who developed the script. I hope to have more details about that soon.

dario says he’ll eventually post “an analysis of this fascinating script and a report of how I arrived at the solution”. Meanwhile, I’ll be organising a suitable prize for him. Stay tuned.

I’ll close comments on this post. Please feel free to continue the conversation over at the original post.

This is a start-of-year get-together for IT journalists and the vendors who wish to spruik to them. There is also drinking. Allegedly. I’ll be there along with the usual suspects from Sunday 26 February.

I’m exhausted. So it might be another day or two before I catch up with everything here. As usual, the best way to stay in touch with what I’m doing is my high-volume Twitter stream.

While in many ways it’s a standard conference coverage gig, it’ll be particularly interesting for a few reasons.

• I’ll get to interview some developers with unusual experiences such as Jacob Appelbaum, developer of The TOR Project, to name just one. Indeed, I’m hoping he’ll be a guest for the Patch Monday podcast.
• We’re toying with the idea of doing a daily podcast. That’d be a fun challenge, if exhausting.
• I’ll end up giving myself a crash updater course on Linux. While I’ve been a Linux systems administrator for years, and even did some less-common stuff such as custom installer CDs, I haven’t really done any hands-on work for two or three years. Geekery shall ensue.
• I haven’t been to Ballarat in ages, and it’s a lovely little town.

I’ll post further details of my plans for the trip and our plans for the coverage as we get closer to the date.

At this stage it looks like I’ll arrive in Ballarat on Monday 16 January and depart on Saturday 21 January. My intention is to bracket the event with other things in Melbourne. If you know of anything that you think I should know about, please tell me!

His entry was:

That’s not her arse you’re grabbing.

Now I never got around to organising a prize, and I’m not sure we really need one. However Fiona Patten has said she’s “happy to go thru the toy box and find a prize if the winner is interested”.

Benno, Ms Patten is executive officer of the Eros Association. Would you like her to rummage in her box for you?

The short version is that the weirdnesses I experienced were caused by:

• OS X Lion has known problems dealing with certain PDF files. It appears that the problematic PDF, produced by OpenOffice.org and then emailed via a Mailman mailing list, was one of them. Hence Apple Mail and sometimes Preview would crash when dealing with this PDF.
• Norton Internet Security for Mac version 4 is only for OS X up to Snow Leopard. OS X Lion requires Norton Internet Security for Mac version 5. It’s a shame neither NIS nor Lion knew this.
• Norton Internet Security probably hadn’t updated its virus definitions in the previous week because I was travelling a fair bit and was probably offline at the scheduled time.

I determined all this while I was running backups. It’s always sensible to make sure your backups are in order before doing any significant technical work.

I discovered that:

• Copying the 400GB of Time Machine backups of my old MacBook Pro from one external USB drive (pocket sized) to another (bulkier, for archiving) using the Finder took more than 7 hours.
• Creating the initial Time Machine backup of my new MacBook Pro on the pocket USB drive, some 220GB of data, took a little over three hours.
• Encrypting that 640GB USB drive took 14.5 hours.

In hindsight, I suppose I should have checked software compatibility when transferring everything from the dead Snow Leopard machine to Lion, but then it did flag other stuff as incompatible so I assumed… yeah, I know.

The brief version is that Apple Mail crashed when it tried to open a particular email message dated 4 November, one containing a PDF file. Consistently. So I thought I’d do a virus scan on it.

That’s when Norton Internet Security reported that LiveUpdate was missing pieces, and I saw that it hadn’t checked for updates since… 4 November. Eek.

Now all the action would have happened on my battered old MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. That computer finally died of motherboard failure on 11 November and I replaced it with a fresh OS X 10.7 Lion machine on 12 November.

However I did just transfer everything across using Apple’s migration tool, rather than freshly installing all the software and just copying the data, so… well… who knows what the hell is going on?

Deep in my heart I suspect that it was just bugginess and a dying computer, copied badly to a new computer. I hope.

If you want to follow or even help, the liveblog is over the jump.

[Update 11.20pm: Things may not be as bad as I thought. It turns out that Norton Internet Security for Mac version 4.x is only compatible for OS X up to version 10.6 Snow Leopard. There's NIS version 5.x for OS X 10.7 Lion. It looks like it's a straightforward software compatibility problem, and the lack of updates could be because I was travelling that week and the computer was offline when updates were scheduled. If this is all the case, I'm a bit disappointed that the software itself couldn't figure this out.]

The CoveritLive live blog tool should appear immediately below this paragraph — at least if you’re looking at this in a compatible web browser.

[This is where I'll post links to any follow-up posts.]

What is wrong with this picture? Here’s me, Sex Party and Eros Association representative Fiona Patten, and Fairfax technology journalist and editor Ben Grubb at the Internet Industry Association’s Harbour Nautical Policy Party last Thursday afternoon.

I reckon we should have a competition for the best caption. Entries in the comments below, please, and they closes 5pm this Friday 9 December 2011 Sydney time. We’ll choose the winner between us. Somehow. Stop asking me questions.

I suppose I should think of a prize.

If you need more details to inspire you, zoom in or look at the original uncropped image.

Maybe Ben can be the prize.

No, I think that’s illegal.

Does someone have a prize?

Here’s a brief sound snippet recorded a few minutes ago. I’ll post something longer in due course, because I think it’s worth recording the ambient sound.

Can anyone identify any of the creatures here?