Arc Tangent

So I’m back from Europe. Harsh reality – work, no more partying, the beer isn’t as good, and I’ve got so much to sort out. That said I’m deeply refreshed and looking to get my life on a totally different track, so!

I have a huge series of blog posts to write about my adventures – with pictures – but today is the first day I’ve been properly conscious (thanks to jetlag and a nasty bug I picked up on the plane).

I have some stories to tell; please bear with me while I write them up. :)

Currently in a hostel in Aswan, the Keylaney. Highly recommended. Aswan far South, up the Nile toward Sudan. Surrounded by harsh, unforgiving desert, it´s a shocking blaze of green along one of the cleaner parts of the Nile river. No crocodiles though, thanks to Nasser´s dam.

Got here by overnight train. Didn´t manage to make it out to the tomb of Ramses II, which would´ve been cool, but requires one to book ahead a few days and get up at a ridiculous hour to avoid baking in the desert heat. Never mind, another time.

Floated up and down the Nile on a falluccia yesterday, seeing some of the islands here (this is site of ancient ivory trading station, many old tombs). People here very friendly, especially compared to Cairo folk. Got pulled into a shop run by a guy calling himself Antonio Banderas, just to talk. He didn´t even try to sell us anything. Smart, smart kid.

Many stories to tell, not enough time to tell them (yet). Off on falluccia cruise up the Nile to Kobumbo (sp?) in half an hour, will take 48 hours. Should be beautiful! Then 1-2 days to see Valley of the Kings before we have to return to Europe (life is so hard for me).

:)

(On this keyboard, that smiley face was a hell of an effort!)

Currently on a bus from Prague to Munich, where Brett and I will be catching a plane to Egypt. Insufficient sleep has been had – repeatedly. Almost over jet lag I think.

First night in Prague was crazy. Whirlwind tour of city and pubs, excessive beer. Partied hard. That’s on a Monday night. Whew!

Second night was opera (Dvorak’s Rusalka, told in very cool high-visual style) at Narodny Divadlo (the National Theatre). Amazing.

Can’t even begin to write about it all, and I’ve been here but three days. Feels very familiar here, like home. Czech people alike Australians in many ways (but different, too). Learning as much of the language as I can.

Czech women in particular much less shy than Australians. Got first phone number within 24 hours. :P

Will try to write more later!

I’m off to Europe for a month!

After a gruelling stint of contracting work, I’ve decided to take a bit of a holiday and go visit my best mate in Prague. While I’m there, we’ll also visit Egypt, Germany and the Netherlands. It’s going to be a non-stop trip of awesome and adventure!

I’m currently in Sydney, staying with some friends over the weekend. I fly out on Monday morning (depressingly early at that). I visited the Googleplex today – amazing building, very cleverly engineered and a very comfortable looking place to work if ever I saw one.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to blog some more now. :)

(Podcast will be up on iTunes, or you can grab it here)

We bring you episode four, where we welcome our third panellist, Teresa Watts who shall be joining us in the future! After discussing Teresa’s awesome hand-made IE voodoo doll we move onto a good chat about our business endeavours and employment experiences. We cover Andy’s business and his lessons learned since closing it end 2008 (focus, cash-flow and buffer savings, the pros and cons of outsourcing, dedicated working positions) before moving onto Teresa’s and Pascal’s experiences in in-house and freelance positions. Issues here include focus and structure but restrictive and limiting in manner, becoming bored by working on the same thing long-term, though however how it was a good experience — we both learned what we did and didn’t like doing.

Finally we all shed our wisdom on the lifestyle that is freelancing. Here we go over the ability to vet clients (yay!), communicating with clients, the importance of networking and being actively involved in your industry’s community (Twitter, LinkedIn, SIGs, conferences, speaking, …), pricing, separating work environment from the rest of your living space, and having an active web presence. Oh, and as usual Pascal makes a fool of himself, but nicely gets a stab back at Andy.

We’ve got interviews confirmed with Donna Benjamin on open education and Ian Cairns of Development Seed on Open Atrium — stay tuned. On that note actually, Pascal has set up Open Atrium on open.klepas.org and has a guest testing group set up. Email or @ him on Twitter to get an account and have a play.

Recorded post-show, this week’s ‘fuck you of the week’ goes to Apple for it’s failings in saving and syncing voice recordings via the Voice Memo app properly and ‘the tip of the cap’ goes to Teresa for her IE voodoo doll — srsly, check it out!

1. Teresa’s website
2. Teresa’s IE voodoo doll tutorial
3. Teresa’s blog
4. WSG announce mailing list, to stay up-to-date with web-related events
5. Nick Fink’s list of user experience events (world-wide)
6. Open Source Developers’ Conference — Brisbane 25–27 Nov.
7. UX Australia — Canberra, 26–28 August (registrations still open till the day!)
8. AusTender gov’t website
9. Australian Web Industry Association
10. Port 80 — informal meeting of web industry folk
11. Moo.com — custom business cards and stationery
12. bicubic.com — wholesale print service

The intro theme is the opening of track 26 of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts III. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons license and available from the NIN website and in full on various peer-to-peer networks (legally of course given its license). The show otherwise as usual is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia license—take, share and be merry.

That’s all this week — stay tuned!

(You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this podcast at http://arcwhite.org/feed/podcast, and download the file directly from here)

Ep. 3! From this week forth we give a quick shout-out of events nearby and around in the web-field that we consider interesting and potentially worth attending on top of the normal bag of news. Otherwise we have a quick chat about the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, the new Google Search (beta!) and a brief mention of this week’s über ‘wankism’: a website dedicated to chairs titled ‘chair whore’.

Pascal mentions a short update: his site is live — check it out at klepas.org — and notes he wants to write a howto/review/info article on using Jekyll from a designer’s perspective.

The main feature this week concerns the recent lively topic of online news media, particularly revolving around Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch’s decision to alter his media conglomerate’s business online model from ad-driven to a pay-subscription model. We discuss more in-depth the problems that print media and online media outlets are running into as of late, particular in monetising an online dissemination model somehow, and whether or not that will fly with today’s web-tuned audiences.

This week’s ‘fuck you’ goes to Sydney Morning Herald (who get no link from me! -Andy) for including advertisements that play music upon page load. Meanwhile, our ‘tip-of-the-cap’ to Mark Pesce, Pia Waugh and Senator Kate Lundy who we are planning an interview with to discuss the awesome work the two are doing in the open government arena.

Other links in order of mention:
* as always mail us feedback via arcwhite@arcwhite.org and klepas@klepas.org — we’d love to start a mailbag.
* Casual WSG Sydney meeting on 18:30, 13. August, Pumphouse, Darling Harbour, Sydney: http://webstandardsgroup.org/event/177.
* WSG Sydney meeting on 19. August http://webstandardsgroup.org/event/176 — 82 peeps already registered (free).
* Vision Au. are running two workshops on web accessibility 19–20., August, Melbourne: http://bit.ly/vision-au-a11y-1 & http://bit.ly/vision-au-a11y-2.
* Web Directions South ’09, Sydney: http://south09.webdirections.org/.
* Edge of the Web, Perth: http://www.edgeoftheweb.org.au/.
* Usability evaluation and training workshop in Canberra, 01–02., December : http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/evaluation-and-testing.html & http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/web-usability.html.
* For other web, design, and tech-related events in Australasian region subscribe to the WSG Announce mailing list: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/.
* Facebook acquires FriendFeed: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/.
* New Google Search: http://www2.sandbox.google.com.
* For your weekly dose of über wank: http://chairwhore.blogspot.com.
* Pascal’s new site: http://klepas.org. [You're such an attention whore! -Andy]
* Again, Jekyll: http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/.
* Jason Santa Maria’s beautiful website: http://jasonsantamaria.com.

This show is licensed as usual under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

OAO.

Episode 2! This show we cover some errata which turned into a mini-feature section with updates on webfonts, notably developments at TypeCon2009 and thoughts concerning EOT — if the proprietary compression technology was not used and URL/domain root binding wasn’t in effect then could it be the web font we could all use and pick up tomorrow? Also: mentioned: a negative Microsoft stigma, shitty Safari @font-face webfont handling during the download of the font file, and a note on where to find good, freely licensed fonts for @font-face font linking (see the links below).

The second feature focuses on security, with goodness for all. We cover briefly important points for sys admins before addressing security concerns for developers. Next up Pascal provides your weekly dose of wank with more security related [Sort of? --Andy] design and user experience musings and finally both Andy and Pascal finish the section with some advice for managers and the legal folk who deal with web content.

Andy closes the podcast with a big ‘fuck you’ to a certain popular company named after a fruit who are doing awfully stupid things by denying certain applications from being sold in their stupidly controlled application store (HINT: I’M TALKING ABOUT APPLE), and a joint ‘fuck you’ to buy.com (et al.).

We should note the Open Atrium review is coming — we’ve both been busy or between doors too much in the past week.

In order of appearance:

• Canberra Google Wave Hackathon – Sign up fast!
• TypeCon2009 Web Fonts Panel Recording
• ttf2eot converter utility
• HTTP Access Control Mozilla Developer Center article
• Listings of TTF/OTF freely embeddable, licensed fonts: http://www.fontsquirrel.com and http://tr.im/webfontslist
• SQL Injection Attacks (Wikipedia)
• Cross-site scripting attacks
• Security Now Episode 195 on SSL
• Bruce Schneier’s blog
• Insecure Passwords in use by security professionals (Dean Kaminsky gets hacked, article c/o Wired.com)
• The buy.com (and Orbitz, et al.) credit card third-party advertiser scandal

This show is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia

If at first you don’t succeed, try a bigger explosive. :)

@klepas and I put together a podcast. It’s going to be a bi-weekly sort of affair (or whenever we feel like it). I should note, first up, that the audio quality is pretty terrible. It was a first shot and not one of the three recording devices we used were really up to scratch – we’ll definitely have that fixed before next time!

In this episode, we discuss:

1. Recent events in the world of web fonts (proposals to bring more fonts to the web, and the advent of TypeKit)
2. The pronunciation of Opera (Oh-pear-uh? Op-er-rah?)
3. Static vs. Dynamic Website Content Generators
4. OpenAtrium, a new intranet package based on Drupal (which we’ll review next time around!)

Turns out ID3 metadata in MP3s is pretty limited – our show notes in the MP3 cut out about a third of the way through. So, here’s some useful links:

1. ‘Beautiful Web Typography’ talk slides
2. Typekit
3. Kernest
4. Jekyll
5. Development Seed
6. Drupal
7. Open Atrium
8. http://klepas.org/
9. http://klepas.org/beta

The intro music we used is the opening riff of ‘Fake It’ by Brad Sucks (http://www.bradsucks.net/albums/out_of_it/), licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Since we’re just getting this off the ground we’d love feedback. Feel free to email us – arcwhite@arcwhite.org and klepas@klepas.org.

This show is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/).

We hope you enjoy!

Over the weekend, Australia lost our last living World War 2 VC – at the ripe old age of 90. His name was Edward ‘Ted’ Kenna, and I met him a couple of times.

It would have been 1995, possibly 1996. I was 11, and we were living in Puckapunyal, the Army base smack-dab in the middle of Victoria. Primarily used as a training facility, Pucka is little more than a massive artillery range with an Army base and a married patch attached. It’s surrounded by electric fences – not for security, but to keep the ‘roos from jumping out of the range into nearby farmlands.

Dad was running 1st Recruit Training Battalion, Echo Company in Pucka. A big intake had meant that Kapooka didn’t have enough room, so E Company was detached to Puckapunyal. The first march-out called for a bit of pomp and ceremony, and it turned out that E Company was Ted Kenna’s unit way back when (or so I’m recalling – it’s been a while).

He came over to our place for dinner, with his wife. They were both genuinely lovely people – just nice, real nice. Ted was happy to talk to me and my brother, and he was even okay with telling the story of how he got his Victoria Cross – though he cautioned us not to call him a hero, because he was just a bloke who was under pressure and lost his cool when he’d had enough. In fact, I seem to recall he called his actions ‘reckless’ and ‘a little crazy’.

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I apologise in advance for the following post. I was feeling whimsical, having watched one of President Obama’s public addresses, and decided to loosely emulate the style for a blog post. Consider yourselves warned.

My fellow internet users,

Despite rumours to the contrary, I have not stopped updating this blog. True, my detractors would like me to be silent, if they existed. I say to them – you do not exist, therefore, I continue to blog!

Even if they did exist, I would continue. At this historic time, who could stand idly by, their voice still and silent? When so much is at stake, and so many give their all for the Good of the Internet, how could I sit by and not participate?

There are great things happening behind the scenes; great and terrible things. Just last week, I was accosted by some lawyers over a previous business situation. I thank you all for your concern, but urge you not to worry – for we are greater than this simple challenge, and together, we will triumph.

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