jeff waugh – Stilgherrian

17 December 201229 December 2012

Weekly Wrap 132: Schoolgirls and technological failures

I’d expected things to start winding down before Christmas, which is the traditional thing, but the week of Monday 10 to Sunday 16 December 2012 was actually pretty busy.

I visited North Sydney Girls High School twice. On Monday, to help assess the projects the Year 10 students had done on the smartphone. And on Friday, to record some material for the Patch Monday podcast and to provide some feedback to the students who are making a documentary on the whole thing.

More about all that coming soon — particularly the podcast to be posted on 24 December. [Update 29 December: Here’s that podcast.]

In between, the writing and… oh fuck it, just look at the list.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 167, “2012 in review: IT vendors prepare for cloudy big-data future”. The first of our year-end conversations is with broadcaster, columnist, and author Paul Wallbank; Kate Carruthers; strategy consultant and founder of Social Innovation; and Jeff Waugh, open-source developer, strategist, and advocate.

Articles

Is there really too much freedom of speech online?, Crikey, 10 December 2012. This was the second of two articles from the “Privacy in the 21st Century” sympopsium, the first being last Friday’s ‘Trial by Google’ the new threat to privacy, Leveson warns for Crikey.
Aust businesses are losing in the big data era, one ‘Like’ button at a time, ZDNet Australia, 14 December 2012.

Media Appearances

On Monday night I spoke about all manner of IT things with Dom Knight on ABC 702 Sydney and local radio around NSW. Alas my recording failed, so I can’t bring it to you.
On Wednesday afternoon I spoke on ABC 666 Canberra about the Anonymous hack of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) and the subsequent idea that defence personnel should be made to erase their digital footprint. Naturally I think it’s a silly idea that would destroy morale, despite Facebook killing the future of covert operations. But once again the recording failed. The week was jinxed.

Corporate Largesse

On Friday, Watterson Public Relations held their Christmas Lunch at the South Steyne Floating Restaurant, Darling Harbour. Just like last year.

The Week Ahead

So, I mentioned that things are refusing to quieten down before Christmas? Yeah well this is what the week is going to look like unless I force the chloroform-soaked handkerchief into its face…

Monday includes finishing this week’s episode of Patch Monday and recording material for the next.

The remainder of the week is as yet unplanned, because certain things need to be confirmed. But it includes writing two articles for CSO Online and two or three for Crikey, plus more of the client website work that’s been taking up much more time than expected recently. Stay tuned.

[Photo: Occluded House, a view of the Sydney Opera House from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, made all the more special thanks to the advertising laid over the bus window.]

24 December 201131 December 2011

Weekly Wrap 81: Twitter, chaos and Christmas cheer

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Part of me wants to make a profound comment there but, you know, Christmas.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 119, “2011: IT’s year of consolidation”. A panel discussion with broadcaster, columnist and author Paul Wallbank and open source developer and strategist Jeff Waugh. This was the final episode for 2011. The next one will appear on Monday 9 January 2012.

Articles

Hactivism goes mobile with Android.Arspam, CSO, 20 December 2011.
Still mid-game in the digital year that was, Crikey, 21 December 2011.
Permission-greedy apps not always rogue or lazy, CSO, 22 December 2011.
Facebook for banking? No thanks!, Technology Spectator, 23 December 2011.

Media Appearances

On Tuesday I was interviewed on ABC 774 Melbourne about Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal’s $300 million investment in Twitter.

Corporate Largesse

On Monday night I enjoyed food and drinks at the Hilton Hotel Sydney’s Executive Lounge thanks to Dave Hall, who has membership.
On Tuesday night I had a little pizza and a rather large number of gin and tonics thanks to infosec firm Black Swan Consulting.

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: The Western Distributor, Darling Harbour, photographed from the Parkroyal Darling Harbour.]

26 March 201113 June 2011

Weekly Wrap 42

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — which this week wasn’t much because I was mostly working on invisible things for clients.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 81, “Twitter turns five: will it rule?” Despite its immense media profile, the vast majority of internet users do not use Twitter. Is that because they just haven’t taken up the service yet? Or is Twitter simply not for everyone? My guests were Kate Carruthers, Jeff Waugh and James Purser.

Articles

None. Oh dear.

Corporate Largesse

None. It turns out that, no, I couldn’t be bothered coming down to Sydney yesterday just for a party.

Elsewhere

[Photo: The Blue Mountains Hotel, Lawson, photographed from the railway station platform on 24 March 2011. I had lunch there, and it was quite adequate.]

24 December 201007 July 2011

Weekly Wrap 29

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — which was another slow week again this week, since it’s the lead-up to Christmas.

Articles

It’s the NBN Corporate Plan, not a crystal ball, for ABC Unleashed. Ah, the National Broadband Network, political issue of the year! No sooner had the NBN Co Limited Corporate Plan 2010-2013 been released than the critics started whinging that it didn’t answer every single question.
It’s network neutrality, but it’s neutered, for Crikey, covering initial reaction to the US Federal Communication Commission’s new rules.
2010 on the internet: the empire strikes back, for Crikey. Yes, an end-of-year wrap-up.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 70, “2010: IT’s year of domination”. An extended panel discussion reviewing 2010 and making a few predictions for 2011. My guests are: Mick Liubinskas, co-founder of Australian start-up incubator Pollenizer and, back in the day, head of marketing and business development for infamous music sharing site Kazaa; columnist and author Paul Wallbank; and Jeff Waugh, open-source developer, strategist and advocate, and political tragic.

Media Appearances

On Wednesday I did another brief spot with Paul Turton on ABC Radio Statewide NSW. We spoke about Avatar being the most-pirated movie of 2010 and the UK allowing Twitter in the courtroom, more than a year after Australia did.

Corporate Largesse

None. It all seemed to wrap up last week. It’s going to be a bleak holiday season. Please send packages of food and drink.

Elsewhere

[Photo: My Christmas card from 2007, recycled because I didn’t get around to doing anything new this year. I made the tinsel antlers for my good friend the Snarky Platypus, who continues to use them to this day. Photograph by Trinn (’Pong) Suwannapha.]

01 October 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 17

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly.

It’s a bit thin this week. After doing 30+ hours and a couple of all-nighters last weekend for that server migration I mentioned last time, I’ve been taking it slowly during this week. And I’m getting this post done on Friday night because I’m heading to Newcastle first thing tomorrow.

Articles

How America could censor the internetâ€¦ or not, for Crikey. The US is currently considering the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which my Crikey colleague Harley Dennett also wrote about today in The internet filter coming to the US — with barely any dissent. It’s about cutting off internet domains that are alleged to be involved with copyright infringement.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 59, “Opening up the cloud”. My guest is open-source software developer and advocate Jeff Waugh. In a wide-ranging conversation they cover Linode and OpenStack; as well as DevOps, a new software development paradigm that involves operational staff in the entire development process; a DevOps tool called Cucumber, and its plug-in cucumber-nagios, written by Australian developer Lindsay Holmwood; and the social source code management system Github. And Richard Chirgwin debunks the myth that optical fibre only lasts 15 or 20 years.

Geekery

I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been doing next week.

Elsewhere

[Photo: Making TV at Aria: Lisa Creffield of Sky News Business interviews Peter Baxter from AVG at Aria Restaurant, Circular Quay, Sydney, following a lunchtime media briefing.]

13 June 200902 October 2009

Phonecasting in WordPress

While chatting with Jeff Waugh, we worked out a great way of blogging from remote Tanzania: podcasting by telephone! Here’s how.

Even if we’re not in one of the 70% of Tanzanian villages with mobile phone coverage, we’ll still have a satellite phone. We call into a voicemail service like mBox and just start talking. It then emails us the MP3 file of the recording.

WordPress already lets you blog by email, checking a standard POP3 mailbox and turning whatever it finds there into a blog post. Email subject becomes post title, email body becomes content. But it doesn’t support attachments. Yet.

Jeff reckons it’d be easy enough to see if the email contains an MP3 file and extract it. It could then be handed to, say, the PodPress plug-in, which in turn makes sure the MP3 file is properly connected to the blog post to work as a podcast. PodPress then automatically updates your podcast listing in iTunes and other directories.

As an added bonus, WordPress can automatically send a message to Twitter when a new episode goes online.

How do we avoid spam? Well, mBox uses Caller ID to make sure the email has a subject like:

mBox Voice message from NNNNNNNNNNN to MMMMMMMMMM

We can check the email headers to ensure they’re legitimately from mBox or whoever we use. And we can use the sender’s phone number to correctly assign the author, and the receiving phone number to, well, post into different categories or whatever.

So, to run through it again… I’m standing on the ferry to Zanzibar. I make a satellite phone call to describe the magnificent view. Five minutes later, that’s a podcast. And everybody gets notified via Twitter.

Of course there’s bound to be some potential for screwing this up, but whaddyareckon?