Tag: patch monday

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Weekly Wrap 126: Wattle, sniffle and SCADAgeddon

Monday 29 October to Sunday 4 November 2012 was a busy week, made slightly less busy by the need to recover from the throat infection identified last week and then, because I was run down, fatigue that was probably a mix of a cold and hay fever.

Hence the photograph of the wattle I’ve posted here. It is to blame.

Dear Plant Kingdom, if I spread my genetic material all over you the way you do over me, I’d be arrested! Please behave yourself.

[Update 1545 AEDT: I am reliably informed that the hay fever is unlikely to be caused by wattle pollen.]

Podcasts

Articles

Media Appearances

Also, the Sydney Opera House has posted the video of my Festival of Dangerous Ideas panel, I Share Therefore I Am. I’ll write more about that in due course.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Monday evening I had a few beers with Michael McKinnon from AVG Australia and New Zealand, which they paid for.
  • On Tuesday morning I attended the breakfast launch of Windows Phone 8 at the Blue Bar,level 36 of the Shangri-La Hotel, overlooking Sydney Harbour. Microsoft paid for that, obviously.

The Week Ahead

Next week is pretty much all about Singapore. On Monday I’ll head down to Sydney and get some writing out of the way. Then on Tuesday it’s Singapore Airlines flight SQ212 departing Sydney at 0905 AEDT and arriving in Singapore mid-afternoon local time.

Wednesday is Verizon Business’ APAC Media Day, a five-hour meeting followed by cocktails. On Thursday I’m visiting the hospitality tent at the Barclays Singapore Open golf tournament as Verizon’s guest. Friday through Sunday has yet to be finalised, but there’ll be at least two articles to write and a podcast to produce.

Oh, and a social life.

My flight back to Sydney SQ231 leaves Singapore at 45 minutes past midnight Sunday night — so technically that’s Monday morning.

[Photo: Wattle near Railway Parade, near Wentworth Falls, one of the causes of my hay fever this week.]

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Insulted, ASIO? That’s not really the problem, surely?

There aren’t many places in the world where you can openly accuse the nation’s top police and intelligence agencies of having an attitude problem, as I did on Monday, without being visited by the men in the van with the canvas sack. Which is a good thing.

In this week’s Patch Monday podcast, embedded immediately below for your convenience and CBS Interactive’s traffic logging, I departed from the usual format to present a personal opinion.

Data retention for law enforcement is one of the most important political issues relating to our use of the internet now and as far into the future as we care to imagine, I said, and it’s being mishandled.

The Australian government’s current one-page working definition (PDF) of what constitutes communications metadata (which can be requested by law enforcement agencies without a warrant) as opposed to communications content (which generally does require a warrant) is, to anyone with a technical understanding of how the internet actually works and is evolving, virtual gibberish.

“Dangerously immature” is how I described it.

I also raised three points where I think the version of reality being promoted by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is wrong.

  • This is a push for more power. We conduct so much more of our lives online than we ever did on the phone, and that means the balance of power is changing. We need to have a conversation about this.
  • The AFP says quite specifically that they’re not after our web browsing activity, but I don’t see how the working document supports that argument. And other agencies, including the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), are after that stuff.
  • ASIO and the AFP constantly talk about the powers being needed to catch the terrorists and pedophiles. But the law will probably be modelled on the current law for the phone, which provides access to communication metadata to many other agencies with far less stringent accountability rules for many other, far less serious, crimes.

Please have a listen and tell me what you think.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.5MB)

The podcast stands on its own, but I want to emphasise the thing that still disturbs me…

Continue reading “Insulted, ASIO? That’s not really the problem, surely?”

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Weekly Wrap 124: Dirty dog, dirty martini

My week Monday 15 to Sunday 21 October 2012 was marred by the black dog, who decided to visit in strength with his friend back pain. Productivity was very low.

It’s a shame. I have the workings of several quite good articles in various stages of assembly on the computer, and invitations to take part in a variety of interesting unpaid projects. At least half of them will progress no further.

Podcasts

Articles

None.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Monday I had lunch at a North Sydney cafe with Marc Brown, managing consultant of Trustwave SpiderLabs in Australia, along with members of their external PR team. They paid. I believe I had smoked salmon salad.

The Week Ahead

It’s a busy week of writing ahead, after the usual Monday scramble to complete the Patch Monday podcast. At this stage it looks like I’ll be in Sydney on Wednesday and overnight into Thursday. The weekend is currently unplanned, but that will be fixed later today.

[Photo: Manhattan at the Carrington, an essential part of yesterday’s return to normality. For some value of “normal”.]

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Weekly Wrap 123: Food, drink, virtualisation and snow

My week Monday 8 to Sunday 14 October 2012 was yet another exercise in chaos, but this time with added snow.

Virtually nothing in the schedule actually happened when it was originally planned. There was too much moving around, and then Friday’s snowfalls almost derailed the week’s close.

Still, it was my first-ever encounter with actual snow at close range, so there were a few childlike moment of joy. And then I decided to spend the weekend in a SEKRIT hideaway.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 158, “Partitioning porn from PowerPoint: VMware’s virtualisation vision”. VMware’s vision of a virtualised future extends far beyond their existing desktop and server virtualisation products, to include virtualised mobile devices, and even software-defined data centres (SDD).

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday I was a guest of NetSuite at Sydney’s Aria Restaurant, where of course they paid for the food and wine. We also received gift vouchers from some of NetSuite’s customers: Avago ($100); SkincareStore ($75); and WineMarket.com.au ($75).
  • On Wednesday I was a guest of Alcatel-Lucent at the Australian Internet Industry Association’s NSW branch forum Customer Centric Services, held at the Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney.
  • On Friday afternoon I was a guest at MooresCloud’s press event, held at the City Hotel, Sydney. There was food. And drink. And mysteriously flashing lights.

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’ll be producing the Patch Monday podcast and having lunch with someone from Trustwave SpiderLabs before returning to Wentworth Falls. I’ll spend the week up in the mountains catching up on many, many loose ends of both media work and general geekery.

[Photo: Waratah in the snow, not the same specimen of Telopea speciosissima as seen last week, but another one at Bunjaree Cottages.]

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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 120: Symantec, sunlight, servers and a ship

My week Monday 17 to Sunday 23 September 2012 was a bit odd. It wasn’t the steady week of writing I’d envisaged, but something a little less productive.

I think I was just exhausted after the previous few weeks so, with plenty of work ahead, I deliberately pulled back the pace. Mistress Insomnia agreed, alas.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 155, “Windows 8: Rectangles for all the things explained”. A chat about the interface formerly known as Metro with user experience designer Shane Morris from Automatic Studio and developer Nick Randolph from Built to Roam.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Wednesday morning I attended the launch of Symantec Managed Security Services’ Security Operations Centre in North Sydney. They provided coffee, but I arrived too late to avail myself of the snacks. They looked nice though.

The Week Ahead

The biggest thing on my mind right now is my session at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas on Saturday. It’s one thing to write stuff. It’s another to be a performer on stage at the nation’s best-known venue. Sure, it’s a panel discussion of a subject I’m quite familiar with. Nevertheless…

But apart from that, I’m producing a Patch Monday podcast for tomorrow as well as one for the following Monday because that’s a public holiday, a story each for ZDNet Australia and CSO Online, and in theory I’m working on a couple of stories for Technology Spectator that’ll run next month.

What else is in the schedule? I’m a panellist on this week’s episode of ABC Radio National’s Download This Show, which we’re recording Thursday morning, after which I’m heading to a lunch with some bloke from Alcatel-Lucent. And Friday night is the opening session of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, philosopher Sam Harris on The Delusion of Free Will. I guess I have to go to that one. See what I did there?

I’ll be based in Sydney all this week and next. Unless I change my mind.

[Photo: Stavanger Bliss in Sydney Harbour, a photo taken from Sydney Harbour Bridge as four tugs assist the Norwegian-flagged tanker to execute a turn off Neutral Bay. When I first saw the ship, it was putting out a bit of smoke and appeared to be listing slightly to port. But I soon realised that was all just its engines revving up and a reaction to the tugs’ thrust. Clearly this massive ship needs help maneuvering in such tight quarters.]