Software Freedom Day in Wellington

What is software freedom day?

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to be held this year on 20th September 2008. Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities.

What's on in Wellington?

This year Unlimited Potential, CWA New Media, New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS), SuperHappyDevHouse, WellyLUG, Cafenet, Catalyst IT and Sun Microsystems have combined forces to organise a local event to be held at the Wellington Convention Centre - Civic Suites 1 & 2 in Wellington from 12pm - 6pm. There are two main parts to the schedule - an opensource barcamp and a hackfest. Register here and come along and celebrate Software Freedom Day by taking part. There will be free wifi, coffee all day at the venue, and pizza and beer as things wrap up at 6pm. http://www.softwarefreedomday.org.nz/

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Pingdom has produced a nice article about the popularity of GNU/Linux around the world. They did that by using Google's search insight, and show maps for the popularity of Linux in general, as well as various distributions.

For example, here... (more in the full post)

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A couple of articles of note from The Press regarding Wigram in the last couple of days.

The petition which I blogged about a couple of weeks back is in:
  http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/thepress/4664487a6530.html

I spoke with Denis and about 3500 signatures were collected over just 10 days and with quite limited distribution, that has to tell you something, imagine the response we'd get over a longer period and with wider distribution.  Denis also mentioned he conducted a bit of a survey and the large majority of respondants were in favour of the airfield staying operational. 

He has delivered the petition and other information to the council to be heard at the AUgust 28th meeting and is trying to get an audience with a council member sometime before the meeting to further explain the situation.

I think it's quite clear that the people of Christchurch, when actually consulted, are quite against closing Wigram as an operational airfield.  Which is why the petition is asking for the Christchurch City Council to simply hold-fire on the plan change which would see a valuable city facility (past, present and future!) destroyed until it consults with the people who elected it.

The second item of interest is that the Air Force Museum has indicated that  it will prepare a grass runway on the remaining Air Force land so that the Red Checkers (and helicopters of course) team can perform at airshows, at least until the flight path becomes too crowded with housing.

  http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/thepress/4665771a6530.html

If we want to keep Wigram alive, we need to keep up the pressure, please feel free to write (civil) letters to your council members to let them know that you are against the plan change.

Aside: Still no reply from the council members, or Jim Anderton (sitting MP for Wigram) on the letters I wrote to them.  I find that to be somewhat unacceptable, especially from the council members.  If the Minister of Transport for the entire country can afford to take the time to write a personal reply, you'd think the councillor for an area of a single city could at least say "thanks for the letter".

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Microsoft Windows DirectX could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the system. Read More

Oh! The Australians will have the chance to see - and touch - the Microsoft Surface table according to the TechNet Australia blog.

Lucky folks...

... (more in the full post)

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I see New Zealand company Xero is engaging traditional PR for its UK launch.
 
They also try to appeal to the Apple fan base with this press release I found today:

Xero set to make Mac users passionate about online accounting software

Mac users are generally more likely to rave about their computers’ great graphical capability than the business software they can use, but a new online accounting package called Xero (http://www.xero.com/) is out to change all that.

Xero co-founder and UK MD Hamish Edwards says the business has committed Mac users on staff. So when it came to developing the software, making sure Xero worked on Safari was never going to be enough. Xero also had to deliver the intuitive, great looking experience Mac users are used to.

“We are big fans of the Mac experience so we realised there was huge scope to improve the experience small business owners were having inputting and analysing their financial information.”

Katie Lips, Mac-user and social media strategist and Director of Kisky Netmedia (http://www.xero.com/whosusingxero/kiskynetmedia.htm), says Xero has more than delivered.

“We’re always on the lookout for cool new web apps and I find it quite funny that I am so excited about one that does accounting – but I am!

“What I also like about Xero is that it looks good. Not something that you immediately think of as necessary when doing your accounts, but for me it’s so obvious the designers have thought about how people work and what they want to be able to look at. All the ‘headline’ data is there for me to see easily, which is quite often all I want to know.”

As well as presenting key financial data in dashboard format, Edwards says Xero is intuitive in other important ways. It’s as simple to use as a computer game, but also has enough sophistication to prepare a business’ end of year financials.

Says Lips “The best way I can think to describe how happy I am with Xero is I use it all the time. From not even looking at the accounts side of the business I am now using Xero all the time to run invoices, look at the bank statements and all sorts of accounting things I never wanted to know about before. And I am enjoying it.”

As well as running on Safari, Xero also runs on Internet Explorer and Firefox, making collaboration with people using PC-based systems hassle free.

Xero recently expanded its offerings to Apple users with the introduction of Xero for iPhone and iPod Touch. This enables customers to access their accounts information wherever and whenever they need to and it’s available free to all Xero users.

Xero provides small businesses and their advisers with one, up to date, easy to use, instantly accessible set of accounts and business information.

Learn more about how Xero can help you http://www.xero.com/overview/
Test drive Xero https://www.xero.com/signup/
Contact our media and marketing team ukpress@xero.com

While I haven't found this kind of press releases from Xero here in New Zealand, I understand the high profile of their executive team, plus the fact they are a New Zealand-based technology startup, and their proximity to the target user market made things easier - word of mouth spread quickly.

Starting something in another country is a different business though and the traditional PR machine still holds the keys to many doors.

But appealing to the Apple user base in its first reach? Is is a significant number of accountants and small companies using Apple products to run the business - in opposition to doing the business?

In any case, well done going there.

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I am sitting through Day 3 keynotes and now it's the Research and Development keynote session with Justin Rattner. Lots of pictures to load later, but I wanted to post this one because I think it's the big thing out here: wireless power transmission.

Unlike those "wireless power" gimmicks shown at CES, which require special connectors and devices actually touch the power source, this one transmits power over the air - we are talking about 60 watts power over two feet, at 75% power efficiency.

Based on principles proposed by MIT physicists, Intel researchers have been working on a Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL).

WREL promises to deliver wireless power safely and efficiently. The technology relies on strongly coupled resonators. Intel says that with this technology enabled in a laptop, for example, batteries could be recharged when the laptop gets within several feet of the transmit resonator. Many engineering challenges remain, but the company's researchers hope to find a way to cut the last cord in mobile devices and someday enable wireless power in Intel-based platforms.

Here are some pictures:

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This error comes when you are exporting the GridView control from Visual Studio. To solve this error you have to turn the eventValidation off.  You can do this in the web.config file but if you do, the eventValidation will be turned off for all the pages.

<pages enableEventValidation ="false" ></pages>

Alternatively, you can do this in the Page directive which will turn off the validation for a single page.

<%@ Page Language="C#" EnableEventValidation = "false" AutoEventWireup="true"

 CodeFile="ExportGridView.aspx.cs" Inherits="ExportGridView" %>

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I  thought I might do a post on my current media playback setup, but more than anything, highlight how far a modded XBOX1 can and can't go using one and XBOX Media Center (XBMC). Via modding the XBOX has turned into the ugly little console that can. I've had more fun on it in the years since it was discontinued than I ever did when I got it.

Despite what you may have thought, the XBOX can output HD. With the right bits you can have your setup looking beautiful in  HD and outputting true 5.1 sound. You can have you favourite movies/shows processed and upscaled to HD.
It can decode up to 960x540 videos, and upscale them. XBMC can also render the whole interface in HD and numerous skins have become HD specific - No more SD for you. Some of the awesome skins that are popping up check out AEON (below) or MediaStream.
And this is where I should mention the downsides - no true HD content. It has got enough CPU/GPU power unfortunately the 64mb of RAM the XBOX sports just isn't enough to store all the decompressed frames to keep fluid playback. Solutions are numerous but all pretty much involve throwing away the XBOX1 and running XBMC on a more powerful machine.

History
So how did this happen, you ask? In a slightly advanced move, Microsoft added the then new buzzword 'HD' support. Some games actually were released that support them. They enabled the ability to output resolutions of 576i, 576p, 720p & 1080i - keep in mind they only added this to the XBOX360 last year!
For a full list of games supporting HD resolutions theres a  good list here. Only a few games truely supported 1080I though but a solid handful featured 720 support - for me the best being Amped 2 which supported up to 720P with 5.1. The only downside is that once they had announced the XBOX360, there was no real need to develop the XBOX's support for HD in other Territories.
NTSC only folks. Pooo to you PAL regions.
Or not if you have a modded XBOX and can run a simple app (Enigmah-x v2) to switch your XBOX from PAL to NTSC, and thus enabling the HD resolutions in the original green dashboard. Once you've enabled them, you can also enable it in XBMC.



My Setup
I'm running a soft modded XBOX V1.1, with 80gb drive installed and a no name 3rd party component/optical breakout box ($NZ35 Delivered from USA). There are other no-names, but not all boxes are created equal. I've brought a couple of others from elsewhere and found them to have fuzzy images and slight colour sync issues.
The XBOX is running into my 37" Samsung Series 5 1080P 60hz LCD and a Pioneer VSX-915 Receiver. Media wise I have a D-Link DNS-323 NAS with 1tb storage, it's running via a 10/100 connection under the house to the lounge. I'm running XBOX and XBMC in 720P.
I've noticed some slowdown at 1080i in transitions.
My XBOX is softmodded with Auto Installer V4 for 007:AUF. I use a Mega-X Key 32mb USB key to copy hacked saves around. You can make your own controller port -> USB adaptor quite easily. With this system I can have a modded XBOX running XBMC in HD in about 20 minutes.


Problems
Obviously the biggest ones (for me at least) is the inabilty to play and HD content. But as I cover below, there are ports of XBMC popping up all over the show. Rule of thumb for downloads is look for the HR in releases eg - ***.HR.HDTV.AC3.5.1.XvID.avi. The HR stands for High Resolution (wiki) and is encoded at the max dimensions of 960x540 - which is the limit to the XBOX to decode easily.

I also don't really recommend upgrading the harddrive in your XBOX as it involves a PC with 2 IDE ports and a bunch of faffing around, and the chance you mess

up and the XBOX becomes a parts machine. If you must, maybe try this tutorial. It's a annoying as the default drive is usually only 8gb, although some shipped with 20gb drives inside. You can access the extra space but it requires formating the F drive in EVOX via RAW ftp commands (or a script).

Finally, the FAT-X Partition system only supports 8.3 DOS file names which is one of the reasons I don't really think the internal drive is really the way to store media. It's great for ROMs and other Apps but not large collections of media.

Also the depending on which XBOX revision you get, the DVD drive can change brands/models - some were really picky as far as playback of burnt media goes.


Next Step
PLEX - This my dream. Either a AppleTV or MacMini running OS-X and with Plex, the OS-X Port of XBMC. Unfortunately neither the ATV or Mini have the power to deal with HD - the ATV doesn't have the CPU/RAM for OS-X and the Mini is still stuck back in the world of Intels GMA-950 graphics chipset. Of course if Apple release an updated Mini on the X1300 chipset or better - we'd have the best XBMC machine around - and with support for the iTunes movie store.

Of course theres other options - specifically MythTV or Vista MC. I just don't need a PC in my lounge. I need a basic (yet complete) end playback unit.

Theres also the Playstation3 which I must say looks quite promising, add the forthcoming PlayTV Freeview tuner and that it can serve via uPnP to my NAS. Also support for HD file playback, albiet picky on formats. No MKV files, no FLV. I like the openness of XBMC. Oh and the Bluetooth remote - not good for anyone who tries to stick to a Universal remote.

And of course the XBOX360, which I already own, but as anyone who has one knows, it's horribly noisy. It also doesn't support the uPnP DLNA standard. Instead it has some 'not quite standard' implementation of uPnP. Good job Microsoft - its IE all over again. I also have no faith that Microsoft will ever improve beyond the basic support its added for formats now.

phew.... I'm tired. Time to go watch some media and not type about it.

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