Tag: crikey

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Weekly Wrap 121: Danger with Germaine

My week Monday 24 to Sunday 30 September 2012 brought to a close a stressful few weeks of work, what with all the travel and such, with my gig at the Sydney Opera House on Saturday afternoon.

There’s probably some explanation for why this phase shift from stressful to less-stressful seems to happen every year at this time. Spring. Long weekend. The end of the winter football season. Pollen. Nazi space labradors.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 156, “Apple Maps: You can’t get there from here!”. A conversation about the Apple Maps debacle with geospatial specialist Dr Michael Dobson, who now consults on geospatial matters with TeleMapics, but who’s previously been chief technologist and chief cartographer with Rand McNally & Company, and associate professor of geography at the State University of New York at Albany, and mobile app developer Leslie Nassar.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday I attended a media lunch held by Alcatel-Lucent at Coast Restaurant in Sydney. It was rather long, and there was wine.
  • On Saturday I spoke at “I Share Therefore I Am”, a panel discussion held as part of the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. The video will eventually be posted at the SOH’s Play site.

The Week Ahead

Monday is a public holiday in NSW but I’ll be working nonetheless, writing for Crikey, doing some systems administration for a client, and producing the Patch Monday podcast.

The rest of the week, along with the rest of the month, will be scheduled on Tuesday morning. Overall, the theme is less stress.

However I do know that on Friday the Prime Minister is hosting a Digital Economy Forum at the University of New South Wales and I might cover that. And on Friday evening I’m attending the launch of MooresLights, which is some SEKRIT project that Mark Pesce and Kate Carruthers have been working on.

I’ll be based in Sydney all week, with the return to Wentworth Falls currently planned for Sunday.

[Photo: Sydney Opera House from the south, photographed on Saturday 29 September 2012.]

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Weekly Wrap 119: Ducks, ducks, sheep and bull

The bulk of the business end of my week Monday 10 to Sunday 16 September 2012 was spent at Microsoft’s TechEd 2012 event on the Gold Coast, and the weekend at Parramatta.

Microsoft’s event, like all major vendor conferences, began with an intense burst of frustration thanks to the inevitable series of overly-long overly-staged buzzword-saturated propaganda events — “keynotes”, the industry has decided to call them — designed to hammer the new technology’s marketecture into your head while preventing the opportunity for critical thinking.

And, like nearly all others, it eventually settled down into something sensible once all the vice-presidents and managing directors and pointlessly-animated PowerPoint presentations and bass-heavy music had been stage-managed out of the room and actual engineers and designers and other geeks started talking through specific details.

I’ll have more to say about that in due course.

Parramatta, by comparison, delivered a delightful spring weekend full of ducklings and food and wine and almost no pretension whatsoever.

I’ll have more to say about that in due course also.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 154, “Good-guy hackers and other infosec anomalies”. A conversation with Michael Montecillo, a threat research and intelligence principal with IBM Security Services, covering good-guy hackers (well der!), click fraud, his views on the profile of hacktivism following the arrest of key Anonymous and LulzSec members, and more.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Tuesday I did a spot on ABC 105.7 Darwin, but it wasn’t recorded my end so I can’t bring it to you today. That’s a remarkable similar statement to last week, except that one was a pre-record with Richard Margetson and this one was live with Kate O’Toole. I’m annoyed that the recording didn’t happen, ‘cos I managed to give a coherent exposition of my thoughts about online bullying.
  • On Tuesday I did another regular Balls Radio spot with Phil Dobbie, talking about the High Court rejecting an appeal in the Optus TV Now case.
  • On Friday I spoke about the new iPhone 5 and the utility of smartphones for journalism on ABC Radio National’s Media Report.

Corporate Largesse

I attended Microsoft’s TechEd 2012 on the Gold Coast as their guest.

  • Microsoft covered my airfares from Sydney to the Gold Coast and return, airport transfers, three nights accommodation at Jupiter’s Hotel and Casino on Broadbeach Island, and all the food and drinks.
  • The conference backpack was a high-quality Targus job, containing marketing material from sponsors and other vendors. The former I’ve kept, because my The North Face backpack is starting to wear out. All the latter I’ve thrown into the recycling bin, unread.

Also:

  • On Monday evening I attended the SANS Sydney Community Event “Your Security Monitoring — An Attacker’s Perspective”, where the food and (soft)drinks were sponsored by Shearwater Solutions. An article about this will appear in due course.

The Week Ahead

It’s a busy week of (mostly) writing for me, with around five articles already committed to various mastheads, as well as my presentation at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I think my original plan to win the first annual Orkney Short Crime Fiction Prize will have to be dropped. I has disappoint.

I’ll be heading from Sydney to Wentworth Falls this afternoon (Monday) and will return to Sydney for the school holiday period on the coming weekend. I also plan to be in Sydney on Wednesday morning for Symantec’s announcement of their Australian expansion plans. How will that turn into an accommodation schedule? I’ll figure that out this evening.

[Photo: Ducks at Parramatta, a delightfully pastoral scene photographed on the banks of the Parramatta River on Saturday afternoon. I managed to get quite close to this family of ducks before they raised the alarm and took to the water.]

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Weekly Wrap 114: Screeching and grinding, mostly

Today I’m catching up on a fortnight of blog posts, so for now my summary of the week Monday 6 to Sunday 12 August 2012 will including nothing but the facts, ma’am.

Personal observations about the last fortnight or so will follow within the next 48 hours or so.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 149, “Does the internet really need new laws?” Why do governments keep wanting to make special new laws for the internet? Surely a crime is a crime, no matter where it’s committed? The answers come from high-profile geek Pia Waugh, with strong interests in free and open-source software and open government; IT lawyer Kay Lam-McLeod, from Brisbane-based practice Idealaw; and Kate Carruthers, founder of Social Innovation.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

[Photo: Ready in TARDIS 1, a photo taken in one of the TARDIS audio booths at ABC Radio’s Sydney headquarters in Ultimo.]

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Weekly Wrap 113: Slow clones and their delays

My week Monday 30 July to Sunday 5 August 2012 was dominated by the insanity involved in cloning hard drives and restoring my backup system to good working order.

Doing all of this over USB 2.0 interfaces was not helpful, but they were the only ports I had available on the loaner MacBook I’ve been using. Remember, I’m nomadic and quite often 100km from Sydney.

And then my backup drive failed…

Creating a new Time Machine backup of around 450GB of data takes 6 to 7 hours. Encrypting a 1TB drive takes nearly 23 hours. Even zeroing out a 750GB drive takes 5 hours.

And whenever you make a mistake, or a drive throws an error, you have to start that process again.

It’s been a wonderful lesson in patience. See, that’s the positive angle. Sigh.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 148, “The politics of data retention”. It’s in the news because it’s one of the ideas being floated as part of the inquiry into potential reforms of national security legislation being conducted by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security. The podcast includes Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, national manager of high tech crime operations for the Australian Federal Police; Bernard Keane, Canberra corresponded with Crikey; and network engineer Mark Newton.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Monday I did a spot on ABC 105.7 Darwin with a couple of other people about overly-busy lifestyles, but the internet stream from which I was recording it was dodgy so I haven’t posted the audio.
  • On Tuesday night I did another regular Balls Radio spot, but I didn’t record it. That’s probably for the best, it was rather disjointed.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I’m returning to Wentworth Falls on Monday, and have a day trip to Sydney on Thursday. In theory it’s a steady-paced week of writing. We shall see.

[Photo: Blue, being a photo of Wentworth Falls railway station on Thursday afternoon, one of the few bright spots in the week.]

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Weekly Wrap 108: June lull not lulz

Here’s a quick wrap of my week from Monday 25 June to Sunday 1 July 2012, mostly so the media output is documented. I won’t bother with a photo for now.

Podcasts

None. Long story, which I’ve started writing a post about. Stay tuned.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None. In the last week of the financial year everything goes very, very quiet.

The Week Ahead

With Bunjaree Cottages booked out for most of the school holidays, I’m lurking in a SEKRIT location in Sydney. Work plods along in the background. It’s nothing very exciting.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up) and via Instagram. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags. Yes, I should probably update this stock paragraph to match the current reality.

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Weekly Wrap 105: Trains, television and Singapore resolved

My week from Monday 4 to Sunday 10 June 2012 was a week of unexpected events.

I didn’t expect to be in Sydney quite as much as I was, and especially not for the purposes of committing television.

I didn’t expect it to be quite so goddam cold.

And I didn’t expect a few other, personal things that I’m not going to be telling you about.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 141, “Hosing down the Flame worm hype”, primarily a conversation with Trend Micro senior threat researcher Paul Ferguson.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

While Monday is a public holiday, I’ll be putting together the Patch Monday podcast for the Tuesday. Tuesday itself will be a planning day, in theory.

On Wednesday I’m covering a business briefing at the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia entitled The Internet — a Bigger Economic Boom Than Mining, Really for Technology Spectator and, I suspect, Business Spectator as well.

On Thursday I’m covering the lunch of IBM’s report “A Snapshot of Australia’s Digital Future to 2050” (not yet promoted on the internet) for ZDNet Australia.

And then on Friday I have a story due for CSO Online and then another Patch Monday podcast.

My week is arranged! So what are the odds of it actually going to plan?

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up) and via Instagram. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags. Yes, I should probably update this stock paragraph to match the current reality.

[Photo: Sydney CBD viewed from Harris St, Ultimo, on Friday evening. Yes, another Instagram shot taken with my battered phone camera. This situation will change soon.]