The main cause of that was covering Linux.conf.au 2012 (LCA) conference. Indeed, some of the conference coverage wasn’t posted until well into the following week — which is this week as I’m posting this post, except it shouldn’t be because this post is about last week. Confused? You should’ve been there!

Now there’s so much stuff here that I’m posting the main body of text over the fold. If you’re only seeing the preview, do click through ‘cos there’s a very important question about the photo.

Podcasts

This week was Podcast Hell. Or Podcast Heaven, depending on how you look at it. Apart from the regular Patch Monday, I did a serious of four daily podcasts from the Linux.conf.au 2012 conference. Ermph.

• Patch Monday episode 122, “Cyber extortion: a victim’s story”, in which Suleiman Revell explains what it’s like when a distributed denial of service attack takes your business offline.
• TechRepublic at Linux.conf.au, episode 1, “Three threats and a balloon”. Also posted at ZDNet Australia as Linux should copy Apple on user rapport, which isn’t trolling at all. Includes open source luminary Bruce Perens’ comments on a certain attitude problem in some sections of the community, LWN.com’s Jonathan Corbet about the challenges facing Linux kernel development in 2012, and a brief introduction to Project Horus, which has used balloons to send Linux computers to the edge of space.
• TechRepublic at Linux.conf.au, episode 2, “FreedomBox’s privacy”. Also posted at ZDNet Australia. FreedomBox Foundation board member and developer Bdale Garbee provides a progress report on their privacy-enhancing personal servers, Red Hat’s experimental platform as a service (PaaS) product OpenShift is explained by its evangelist and open-source advocate Mark Atwood, and we report exactly what happened to that Linux-equipped balloon launched by Project Horus that we mentioned in episode 1.
• TechRepublic at Linux.conf.au, episode 3, “Cyborg lawyer demands source”. Also posted at ZDNet Australia as Cyborg lawyer demands software source. Lawyer Karen Sandler explains the links between her potentially fatal heart condition and software freedom, there’s part two of our look at FreedomBox, and a conversation with Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora about the Ada Initiative, a project to increase the participation of women in open technology and culture.
• TechRepublic at Linux.conf.au, episode 4, “Planes, sounds and freedom”. Also posted at ZDNet Australia as Linux.conf.au 2012: planes and freedom. Security researcher, software hacker and activist Jacob Appelbaum explains the problem with the surveillance state and what individuals can do about it, David Rowe explains the Codec 2 audio compression software that can transmit intelligible speech in as little as 1400 bits per second, and Andrew Tridgell, best-known for his role in developing the Samba networking technology, introduces us to his recent work with semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Articles

• Open source needed to save democracy, ZDNet Australia, 18 January 2012. Also published at TechRepublic.
• Aus becoming surveillance state: Ludlam, ZDNet Australia, 20 January 2012.
• No SOPA for Australia: AG (contributor only), ZDNet Australia, 20 January 2012.

Media Appearances

• On Wednesday morning I spoke about the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and the internet blackout protest with Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa.
• On Wednesday evening I spoke about the same thing on ABC Local Radio with Dom Knight, but I screwed up the recording.

Corporate Largesse

None. Again. All the Linux.conf.au social events were part of a conference I covered so that’s work, dammit. And the stingy bastards at The Greens and Electronic Frontiers Australia didn’t provide any refreshments at Saturday’s War on the Internet forum. No wonder I drink.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Trackside Australia, Victorian division. This snapshot was taken from the train somewhere between Melbourne and Ballarat. Can anyone identify the precise location? The location has been identified as the spot where the Bacchus Marsh – Balliang Road crosses the railway.]

The great thing about growing up on a farm is that there’s about eleventy hundred ways of killing yourself and you get to try them all.

In the photo, there’s a pine tree on the right behind me and my brother. Yes, a brother. He was born in 1963, so there’s a three year gap. I’ll get to the pine tree in a moment.

On the left is the cement-brick milking shed. Immediately to its right, off in the distance so you might want to look on the embiggened photo, is the pumphouse. And then the truck, well, that’s just a truck — although my father built it like Dr Frankenstein from bits of other, dead, trucks.

Just behind the truck’s engine compartment is dad’s shed, a crumpled heap of corrugated iron that’s no longer there. It was poorly lit and full of tools and wood scraps and junk and half a dozen unfinished projects. I didn’t like going in there, it was creepy. Strange creatures lived in the dark corners and would kill small children, I know that for sure.

Even if they were good children.

Mum and dad were pretty busy most of the time. My brother and I were left to our own devices. The huge open spaces of the farm, the sheds, the random bits of equipment all meant I could invent my own imaginary world.

Every trip out with the dogs — and the dogs went everywhere with us and took care of us, so we couldn’t possibly get into any trouble — became some sort of combat patrol.

But watch out for the snakes!

See the red line on the map? That’s the Snake Line. If you go any further north than this fence WATCH OUT THERE ARE SNAKES YOU’D BETTER BE CAREFUL WATCH OUT THERE ARE SNAKES! That’s my mother’s voice screeching. She was always getting agitated about the risk of snakes. I think we saw a sleepy lizard there once.

Also, I’m not quite sure why there were only WATCH OUT FOR THE SNAKES in that direction, as opposed to anywhere else we might have gone on the farm.

View Stilgherrian’s Life in a larger map

My mother was also worried about us drowning. If we went anywhere near water deeper than an inch, “LOOK OUT DON’T GO NEAR THE WATER YOU’LL FALL IN AND DROWN!” As a result, I too associated water with panic.

To this very day, my two biggest phobias are snakes and water. I can’t even look at a snake through glass without my pulse rate rising. Being in water deeper than my chest can trigger a panic attack. A spa is usually not a relaxing experience.

Actually there were snakes. Red-bellied black snakes and brown snakes. I was never, ever bitten by one.

Nor did I ever break a bone, which is pretty rare on a farm.

There were so many ways we could make our own fun…

There was an old sheet-metal box-on-wheels contraption that used to be the projection booth at a local outdoor cinema. Dad reckoned he’d turn it into… well, something one day. Meanwhile it sat behind some bushes at the back of the garden, and it was my space ship. A metal disc on the floor was the thing you stood on for the transporter beam to go buzz buzz BUZZ and then you’d be on another whole adventure.

Ice-cream came in metal cans in those days, with metal lids. A Frisbee was an expensive luxury — all “bought toys” were expensive luxuries — but the lid of an ice-cream can was just as good. What’s more, you could get a pair of tin-snips and cut the rim into a series of jagged metal blades and then use your brother as a target.

He annoyed me so much one time I hit him on the head with a cricket bat. The bloody little wuss complained to mum and she screeched at me and took away the cricket bat. I never really liked cricket anyway, I preferred going out walking with the dogs.

It wasn’t a proper cricket bat anyway, just a plank that dad had cut into the shape of a cricket bat. And a tennis ball.

Under the pine tree — yeah we’re finally getting to the pine tree — there’s always a rich carpet of brown pine needles, smelling 100% nothing like the “pine-scented air fresheners” in supermarkets but in fact 100% like actual pine trees and their sticky oily sap. If you rake all of the pine needles into a heap you can set fire to it, but it takes ages to get going and there’s heaps of smoke. Maybe you shouldn’t start the fire under the actual pine tree branches either but what the heck it’s going now. You want to get the flames going properly too ‘cos the smoke is annoying. But even though you want this, my professional recommendation is not to throw half a bucket of petrol onto the fire.

I know how to set rabbit traps. Do you?

One core issue affected everything while we were living on our farm at Mount Compass: we were poor.

I suspect my father’s enthusiasm to have his own patch of land blinded him to the economic realities of trying to run this property as a dairy farm. He presumably bought it cheap after the drought of 1961, but I’m told the bank manager was sceptical — even though he still approved the loan.

The facilities were basic. The milking shed was a simple cement brick rectangle with a corrugated iron roof. The dams and concrete water tank were only constructed later, and initially the sole water source was the bore and its unreliable pump.

One image that stays with me is my father in the middle distance, striding through the overgrown bracken over to the pumphouse, often in heavy rain or even a storm, to get that damn pump working again.

The house was basic too, but more about that another time. And I’ll talk about the effects of being poor later too.

Today, though, the three factors that caused the farm’s continual financial struggles, and an explanation of that photo.

The 1960s saw dramatic changes in the dairy industry.

Traditionally, once the milk had been sucked out of the cows, in milking sessions early in the morning and at dusk, it was stored in metal milk cans. These were collected daily — after the morning milking session, so milk wasn’t standing around in the heat of the day — on a flat-bed truck and taken to the factory where the milk was pasteurised and bottled, or turned into cream, cheese, ice cream or whatever.

In the 1960s, though, bulk handling systems were introduced. Each farm had to buy a refrigerated stainless steel vat, big enough to store three days’ worth of production. The milk factory’s tanker truck came only three times a week. The driver ran a bacteriological test to confirm your farm’s milk was OK to pump into the collection in his tank. Fail the test, and you’d have to discard everything in your vat. He’d also measure the milk’s fat content and other quality factors, since that helped determine what you were paid, not just the volume of milk.

Bulk handling, plus the simultaneous introduction of other milking shed equipment and even better wide-area irrigation systems, meant that larger-scale farms with paid employees could significantly increase production and reduce costs. The farm-gate price of milk dropped. Husband-and-wife farms like ours, with just 25 to 30 cows in milk, became uneconomical.

There was also another severe drought in 1965-1968. That meant buying in feed for the cows so they’d still produce milk. Profit margins were squeezed further. My father ended up taking on day jobs to make ends met — but I’m getting ahead of my story.

The third factor was particularly toxic. We were victims of a scam.

My parents could never understand why their milk production figures were only half that shown in the farm’s records. What were they doing wrong? It was years before they discovered the truth. After they’d bought the farm, a neighbour told them, but before they’d taken possession, the previous owner had brought in trucks and removed all the cows, replacing them with cheaper, less productive cows. Alas, by then the scammer was long gone, and in those days cattle often didn’t even have identifying ear-tags or tattoos, let alone the embedded microchips they have today. Too late.

Dairy farms are a 7-day operation, but somehow we managed to pay someone to run the place so we could take brief holidays.

Our usual destinations were the seaside towns in South Australia’s Copper Triangle, now branded the Copper Coast to include a few more tourist destinations. Wallaroo, where an uncle had a beach shack, or Port Hughes, which is where today’s photo was taken some time in the early 1960s.

I can remember the long, hot drive up through Port Wakefield and Kadina. We’d usually stop at both for a cool drink, and fellow South Australians over a certain age will know all about Woodies Lemonade. But the highlight was always arriving at Wallaroo and Price’s Bakery for their peppery Cornish pasties.

Price’s Wallaroo Bakery is still running today. I’ve marked it on the map. Maybe I should go and check out their pasties again.

Holidays were very simple. Splashing in the shallows of the ocean. Fishing off the jetty. Fresh fish and chips. Reading on the verandah. Walking in the sand dunes and pretending — no, wishing, really wishing! — I was somewhere far, far more exotic.

View Stilgherrian’s Life in a larger map

Sure, as I mentioned last time, in 1961 we lived on a farm near Kersbrook. But dad was just a labourer there, living in a worker’s cottage. His dream was to create a home for his wife and family. So to Mount Compass it was, and a 120-acre dairy farm on Lanacoona Road, Pages Flat, where we lived until 1971.

The boundary of the farm is still the same today. It’s even marked in Google Maps so, as usual, there’s a map over the jump.

The photo above was taken some time around 1962 or 1963. That’s Fern, one of the cows. I’ve marked the spot on the map where this photo was taken from.

Yes, the farm was so small that each cow was known by name. There were 25 to 30 cows “in milk” at any one time, plus perhaps four to six heifers, half a dozen calves and a bull. Plus two dogs and four cats.

Every cow gets pregnant every year — that’s how come they’re always lactating. But why aren’t there as many calves as cows? Well, some of the the female calves are kept, to grow into milking cows. Others are sold to other farmers. But you really only need one or two bulls to keep all the cows pregnant — yeah, dairy bulls have a pretty good life. So the other male calves are what we call “veal”.

The farmhouse is barely visible between the trees immediate above the cow’s head. I’ll post some more photos of that soon. Then from right to left we’ve got: a small shed where we kept the car; a high-roofed sideless shed where we kept the tractor and stored hay; the milking shed immediately above the cow’s tail; and finally a small run-down structure which was “dad’s shed”, full of tools and scraps of wood and a workbench where he was always at work on something that was probably never going to be finished.

I must say, I’m a little overwhelmed looking at the map and the photos and trying to decide what to write about.

Maybe I should tell you how my parents were ripped off by a con artist. What it was like growing up on that farm. The hard work by everyone. The fun of working with the dogs. The sense of open space and the freedom to have my own imaginary world. The fear of snakes. The dangerous stunts… ah so much!

But I’ve got a few years to cover in a few posts, so no hurry yet. Just seeing the farm again is enough for now.

However I will mention that I’ve posted a couple of photos here and here of me and dad in our Sunday Best for Mother’s Day, 13 May 1962. Enjoy.

View Stilgherrian’s Life in a larger map

The map shows a golf course. I’m pretty damn sure that wasn’t there in my day!

I’m fairly sure this photo was taken at the same home at 43 Adelaide Road, Gawler that I mentioned last time. There’s other photos from that time too, and I’ve just now posted them on Flickr.

However I’m told that in 1961 we moved to live on a farm near the village of Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills — although I have no memory of this at all. As shall now be usual, there’s a map over the jump.

I do have memories of the Gawler house, though. Fuzzy ones. Lying in a pram looking at the plaster mouldings in a white ceiling. The green leaves of the nasturtium plants in the back garden contrasting with the reddish brown of the corrugated iron fence. The yellow of the pumpkins.

My mother always had a fruit and vegetable garden. She grew up near Roseworthy, daughter of a farming family, and the women did gardens. That would have been even more important given that she was a child during the Depression and World War II. There was always fresh fruit and vegetables when they were in season, and jams and pickles and preserved fruit when they weren’t wasn’t. Nothing was wasted.

View Stilgherrian’s Life in a larger map

I’m not quite sure how this will unfold, except that each day I’ll find a photo or object or concept that relates to the year of my life in question — in this case that’s, erm, gulp, 1960 — and see what emerges.

Today’s photo was taken when I was just six weeks old.

That’s my father holding me. He was 35 years old. Yes, rather old for that era, but he’d been married before and had a daughter. The fact that he divorced and re-married was so scandalous in rural South Australia that the daughter was taken away to live with her grandparents and they cut off all contact with him. The first time I met anyone from my father’s side of the family was at his funeral a decade later.

And yes, dad is smoking around the baby. Different times, eh? Not the ever-present pipe I remember him for, but a black Bakelite cigarette holder.

The dog’s name was Toby.

The photo would have been taken by my mother using a Kodak Box Brownie camera in the back yard of our house at 43 Adelaide Road, Gawler. The house is still there, but with what looks like a really low-grade renovation.

I’ll also be posting photos at Flickr (there’s another 6-weeks-old image there already) and mapping locations at Google Maps (see over the jump).

As I say, I’m not sure how this will unfold. So let me know what you think, and what you’d like me to talk about.

View Stilgherrian’s Life in a larger map

• Boston Dynamics’ BigDog | YouTube: An amazing video showing of the capabilities of a 4-legged robot. Impressed.
• Liu Xiang Sent to Olympic Death by China’s £1 Billion Image-Building Exercise | China Digital Times: An example of how China’s Internet users avoid the censorship of the Great Firewall of China: using the words “Surrender Liu” (刘降 vs 翔) to avoid censorship of any negative comments about athlete Liu Xiang’s withdrawal from the Olympics. The words are pronounced the same, but different in writing.
• Stingray TV intro (1964) | YouTube: “Standby for action! We’re about to launch Stingray!” Another opening theme from another Gerry Anderson favourite.
• Putting A/B Testing in Its Place | Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: While the A/B testing of website design changes can be important, this article from 2005 points out its limitations as well as its strengths.
• The Avengers intro 1960s | YouTube: I’m on a bit of a 1960s bender at the moment. Here’s another superb opening sequence for a fine TV program starring Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg.
• Olympic Medal Count by Population and GDP | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Sean Carmody’s done another fine bit of data mining, this time seeing how Olympic nations rate when compared in the basis of their population of GDP.
• Marine Boy (1968) | YouTube: Opening theme for one of my favourite childhood TV programs, Marine Boy.
• Sticky Tuk Tuk | Out To Space: My partner Trinn ('Pong) Suwannapha’s video Sticky Tuk Tuk has been shortlisted for this year’s Marrickville Contemporary Art Prize.