Scott's blog

The UWA Student Guild and the National Union of Students are pretty strongly opposed to voluntary student unionism, or VSU: the result of amendments to the Higher Education Support Act 2003 which took effect in 2006.

Essentially, VSU means that Australian universities cannot require their students to be a member of a student guild or pay fees for non-academic services (like the Amenities and Services Fee we have at UWA, which provides funding for the Guild). In other words, students can choose whether or not they want to become Guild members (and whether or not they want to pay the A+S fee).

The Guild website has a page on VSU which appears to be rather outdated, but essentially suggests that VSU will prevent the Guild from offering services which it is still offering today, more than 2 years after VSU's introduction. Specifically, it claims:

A universal fee is the only way of funding important services on campus like representation, welfare, and campus life. Without the Guild, there will be no-one fighting against HECS fee increases, or representing students’ views to the uni, government and broader community. Students will have nowhere to turn if they are sexually harassed at uni, no-one to help them if they want to appeal a mark, nowhere to go for a textbook subsidy, no-one to fund their clubs to create an awesome social life on campus, no tavern, no O’Camp, no cultural events, no queer department, no financial counselling, no grants, no club rooms, no end of semester show, no social justice week, no women’s department, no market days, no Pelican… no STUDENT CONTROL.

And yet I didn't arrive at UWA until after VSU was implemented, and during the last two years I haven't noticed the loss of any of these services. Does anybody actually believe without VSU (or even without a Guild at all!), there would be "nowhere to turn if [you] are sexually harassed at uni"?!

My question is: why are the Guild and NUS still campaigning so aggressively against VSU, and why do they expect students to support them? There are always NUS posters up around campus encouraging students to "Say No To VSU!" and I've heard the president of the NUS speak at at least one meeting of student representatives, strongly encouraging people to come down to 'days of action' to, I guess, complain loudly about the injustice of not forcing students to pay the Guild ~$120/yr. (Which seems rather at odds with their other campaigns which encourage us to "help end student poverty".)

The last two and a half years have shown that VSU does not threaten the financial stability of the Guild (though it may reduce the Guild's income), so I fail to see why I should support taking away the right of other students to choose whether or not they want to support the Guild financially. Is there some other anti-VSU argument I'm missing? If anything, VSU seems to encourage the Guild to provide services that are actually useful to students by allowing us to choose whether or not we're going to support it.

(Note: I'm an A+S fee-paying Guild member, and I intend to stay that way for the foreseeable future, because I use services provided by the Guild - but I see no reason why those who don't use these services should have to pay the fee, too.)

I found this (very) short story and this article by Isaac Asimov rather interesting.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about the lack of imagination in movieland's monsters. Their only attributes are their bigness and destructiveness. They include big apes, big octopuses (or is the word "octopodes"?), big eagles, big spiders, big amoebae. In a way, that is all Hollywood needs, I suppose. This alone suffices to drag in huge crowds of vociferous human larvae, for to be big and destructive is the secret dream of every red-blooded little boy and girl in the world.

What, however, is mere size to the true aficionado? What we want is real variety. When the cautious astronomer speaks of life on other worlds with the qualification "life-as-we-know-it," we become impatient. What about life-not-as-we-know-it?

If anyone's interested in a free purple couch/sofa, there's currently one sitting in our garage that we're hoping to get rid of. I managed to get rid of the couch.

For anybody else who's been having problems shutting down their MacBook (or possibly other Macs) after installing Leopard, I managed to solve it (somehow).

The problem for me was that my laptop would just never shut down when choosing 'Shut Down' from the menu. It would do nothing, by the looks of things. I don't often shut down my laptop, but ever since the latest Software Updates came out, it's been bugging me to restart (this prevents Software Updates from installing) and everything seems to have been running more slowly.

Anyway, what I did is reboot, and when I was booting up, held down Ctrl, Option, P and R, which apparently "resets the PVRAM" according to some guy on the Apple support forums. Once I booted up, I ran Software Update and the updates all successfully installed. Then I rebooted again, cleared the free space on my FileVault volume, and everything seems to be going smoothly now.

Not sure if it's a result of the 10.5.1 update or not, but everything seems much snappier now, like it was before I installed Leopard.

Seriously, how can the Guild continue to make a profit off catering?

The food there is absolutely terrible. I can only remember buying one 'meal' from the Guild that was ever satisfying (the chicken focaccia from the Reid Cafe, and I don't even think they make that anymore).

Why would anybody go to the Guild instead of Broadway? The food there is so much better, and it's cheaper too.

I really think that everybody would be better off if they just charged third-party fast food retailers to open premises on-campus, but I'm sure people more motivated than me have tried to get this to happen and failed (after all, it seems to be a big issue when Guild elections come around).

Still, I don't see how (Guild catering profits) - (staffing and administrative costs) could come to much more than whatever you could extort out of Subway, Jesters, Hungry Jack's (although the health nuts might not be too keen on them) and co.. and students on the whole would be much happier, I think.

On a related note, I'd really like to see a Commonwealth ATM in the Guild. The nearest one is over on Broadway which is a bit of a trek when you just want to get a drink from the Ref. ATMs are profitable, aren't they? I'm sure there are more than enough students from banks other than Westpac, BankWest and CBA to cover the cost of running the CBA ATM, and I know I've considered opening a new account with Westpac or BankWest because of the lack of a CBA ATM in the Guild. Plus, it may just be bias, but it seems to me that there are more students with Commonwealth accounts than any other bank. I suppose there are lots of international students with Westpac accounts (by virtue of the on-campus Westpac branch) that I don't have much to do with though.

So, we're all back at uni again (well, perhaps not all of us, but many of us). The first week went pretty well, although I guess the fact that two of my units are small group class units (ie. no lectures, which means they don't start until week 2) was pretty helpful.

It's strange not having work every morning -- now the only person who notices when I don't turn up to whatever I have on at 9am is myself (I'm working from 12pm-5pm every day now). I think I'll try to go to all my lectures though, if only to get me ready for next semester. I'm going to do MATH1010, which could prove tough -- 8am lectures, and I haven't done any maths since high school. Hurray!

I haven't updated this in ages because to be honest, I've only really used it as something to do when I'm bored and feel like writing (which usually happens when I don't have anywhere to go, but I do have my laptop). My laptop has been pretty much sitting in a corner for the whole uni break.

Now I get to deal with trying to synchronize everything between my (Windows) PC and my (Mac) laptop again. Does anybody know a good way of sychronizing two iTunes libraries?

I've just discovered the excellent Mac OS X software thread over at Something Awful, and it's proved to have a large number of pretty-interesting looking things in it.

First thing I've discovered is SynergyKM - an OS X GUI for my beloved Synergy. Playing with the command-line version, plus manually writing configuration files, is a little tedious, and this is a really elegant solution that integrates into System Preferences. Apparently this project is merging with the main Synergy tree soon. Although I haven't actually tried it out yet, I imagine the functionality is the same as the command-line version (unfortunately, this means OS X still doesn't work with features like screensaver synchronization, and advanced clipboard functionality). For other operating system users, there's the cross-platform QuickSynergy, which is a little lacking in functionality, but works for me for setting up temporary connections on Linux systems (the APT package name is quicksynergy).

The second piece of software I've installed is Genius. Essentially, this is just a flashcard program one could use for study. However, it's very well-written - it's more than just a software implementation of handwritten flashcards. It's based on psychological studies of memory and basically seems like a very effective way of creating a mental map of list A to list B. I'm going to try using it in future German vocab tests.

And a question I have for any Mac experts: does anybody know the best way of creating something similar to a shortcut in Windows?

What I want to do is have an icon that can be dragged onto the Desktop, Dock, or launched from Quicksilver, that basically runs a command in the terminal, then closes the terminal. Windows allows you to this just by making a shortcut to the command. The closest I've been able to get is making a shell script and creating a symlink to it. :(

I'm just starting to get used to the 'new' setup of my OS X system.

My computer's fallen on hard times since I bought it, but hopefully this time it'll last a little longer before I have to repair it again.

The hard disk failed at one point so I had to reinstall the OS (but fortunately, I didn't lose any data). However, I naively chose to use a case-sensitive filesystem ("Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Case-sensitive)". This caused two pretty annoying problems: one, I couldn't install Adobe CS3. It just failed saying "unsupported filesystem, upgrade to HFS+", which was a pain in the ass. I also was unable to enable FileVault.

So in the end, I just reinstalled OS X, reformatting using the non-case-sensitive version of HFS+. I don't really understand why some apps just don't work with the case-sensitive version, but hey.

Also, I've recently started using Synergy, although apparently I'm very late to the party on this one (everyone else already seems to know what it does). The best way I can explain it is a software KVM, without the V. That is, you run a server on one PC, and a client on another, and the keyboard and mouse is shared between the two. It's quite neat. Also, it's cross-platform, which allows me to share my mouse and keyboard between my laptop (Mac) and desktop (Vista).

On the topic of keyboards, I've just ordered one of the keyboards that come with the new iMac - I was originally considering buying an iMac too, but decided that money would be better spent on buying a car that's better than what I'd be able to afford having bought a $2500 computer. So soon, I'll never have to use anything that isn't essentially a MacBook keyboard. I must be one of the only people who really like them - everyone else I've spoken to finds them really difficult to use for some reason.

What's the deal with people referring to it as "SPAM" constantly?

It's not an initialism, it's to do with a crappy Monty Python skit. There's no need to capitalize it.

This blog post pretty much echoes what I've been lamenting about the MacBook for a while now: there's no good docking station for it.

Sure, there are a variety of Mac docking stations provided by "BookEndz", but look at them! They're ugly. The problem is that there's no docking port on the MacBook, or the MacBook Pro. Instead, the docking station has to connect to every port on the side of the computer (well, fortunately, they're all on one side on the MacBook; not sure about the Pro). What a pain in the arse - I'd struggle to design something that looked good and was easy to use with those specifications, too.

I wonder, how hard would it be for Apple to add a docking port to the MacBook - the likes of which is available on almost every other notebook on the market today?

It seems to me that every day, Digg gets more and more retarded.

I remember when I first started reading it, there were some genuinely interesting and well-written articles on the front page almost every time I loaded it up. Of course, there was always a lot of shit in the comments field, but hey.

Now, if I open the front page, I get articles like these:
( Fuck democracy, yo. Bring down the machine! )

Likely even more retarded are the comments. Let's just take a few gems from the Streamy article above:
( how did this get here i am not good with web 2.0 technologies )

I hate you, digg userbase. You are why the internet can't have nice things.

via macosxhints.com: Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X sends your passwords in the clear over the network by default.

The link provides instructions on how to access a hidden setting that enables authentication over HTTPS. No idea why this isn't enabled by default - or why this setting isn't more clearly visible.

edit: According to some comments on that page, authentication is done using HTTPS, and this workaround simply enables HTTPS on all Notifier traffic. Still, better to be safe than sorry - and blog comments aren't exactly the most reliable of sources.

There are a number of different techniques you can use to redirect your mail at UWA.

Apparently it's poor "netiquette" to post a long entry in full on the planet/LiveJournal, since it clogs up others' friends pages, or something.
( Read on, McDuff.. )

Thanks to sweetjesus26 and shmookey for clarifying some of this.

I'm curious to know how other UCC members are currently using ssh-agent with screen.

I found this page by "peter", which has what seems like an ideal solution for running the agent even when screen is backgrounded.

Is this the standard solution? I'm told that unencrypted private keys are used more commonly than they perhaps should, but I'm sure there are lots of members running screen and an ssh-agent at the same time.

Regardless, I can now use this to log in "passwordlessly" to any UCC machine from my screen, so that's cool. Now to set up private keys on my home machine. Is it bad to use the same private/public keypair for multiple uses? I can't see any significant decrease in security if I were to, say, copy the private key from my secure homedir at UCC to my Windows machine and use that to login to machines at UCC. (Other than the fact that there's one more potential vector for an attacker to obtain my private key — my Windows machine. I don't think my shell account is a particularly huge target, however.)

Anyone who's ever experimented with Gmail's 'Send Mail As' feature has probably worked out that there is a problem with this feature when sending mail to Outlook (not Express) users.

Most email clients will display the From header as whatever Gmail says it is (ie. the address you're trying to "send mail as"). However, Outlook displays it as "you@gmail.com <you@gmail.com> On Behalf Of [chosen From header]". It's pretty annoying if you're using a personal Gmail address to send work email, which is probably the most common use of the Send Mail As feature -- lots of work email systems are impossible, difficult or inconvenient to log in to remotely (particularly when you have to use Outlook Web Access, which doesn't seem to support displaying the Send button on any browser but Internet Explorer).

I think there's a relatively simple partial solution to this problem, however. At present, Gmail passes the user's 'real' email address in the Sender header like so (I may be wrong here, taking this from memory):
Sender: you@gmail.com
Outlook displays this as you@gmail.com <you@gmail.com>.

If Gmail was to send the header like this instead:
Sender: Your Name <you@gmail.com>
then I'd imagine that Outlook would display Your Name on behalf of Your Name. Sure, this isn't a very good solution, but at least it doesn't make your real email address blatantly obvious to the receiver. Of course, we don't want to conceal the real email address completely - that would just open the system to abuse. But it would be nice if the real email address was only visible when the receiver was specifically looking for it. Headers can be forged anyway, so I don't think it's necessary to draw attention to the fact that the mail wasn't really sent from the email address in the From header.

Microsoft have a tutorial up on how to send mail on behalf of others. I think this should be implemented differently to Gmail's "Send Mail As".

Also, for those of you who use the British English version of Gmail (or any other Google service): I'd recommend against it. US English always gets the newest features first, and there's often a wait of a month or so before the "other languages" (which includes British English) support those features. I spent a long time lamenting the fact that I didn't have chat in my Gmail page before I worked this one out.

For those who missed it, yes, it's true that today Rowan sat on my MacBook, fatally wounding it. I took it to Winthrop today and it's going to cost $1100 (or so, still waiting on a real quote) to repair it. (I'm not paying, fortunately.)

I will refrain from disclosing the reason Rowan attacked me and my precious computer.

In related news, I now have to make do with just the hard disk of my Mac until I get it back. The Winthrop horror stories I heard from Sam don't leave me with much faith in their assertion that "the parts only take 2-3 business days to come in" and "we can have it done for you by Friday", but hey.

Rowan was unhappy with the $1100 estimated bill so we went to NextByte, where their response was "Well, I can't give you an exact quote, but if I were to estimate.. I'd say it will probably cost you around $1100." So it looks like he'll have to draw on the immense store of riches he acquired through various (possibly illegal) means (his parents). Rowan then asked them "So, if I were to acquire another MacBook, how much would you charge to swap the screens?" Subtle.

So yeah, I'm struggling to cope right now. I just got my new toy, too. :(

One (possibly) good thing did come out of it, however. When I took it into Winthrop, I asked if I could have the hard drive so I could keep my data. I mentioned that I had FileVault switched on and asked how the home directory was stored. Apparently it's an encrypted sparse disk image. The guy asked me what I was going to do with the hard drive, to which I responded "plug it into my PC, try to find a utility to mount HFS+ and then find a utility to decrypt and mount my home directory". He then recommended that I drop my CV into them later, as they're looking for a casual technician.

So, maybe soon, you'll have someone to yell at when your Winthrop repairs are weeks overdue!

I discovered an article on Slashdot that relates to my earlier post on packaging systems like APT.

A Windows-Based Packaging Mechnism
As part of my Google Summer of Code project, I'm working with WinLibre to develop a Debian-like software download system for free/open source software on the Windows platform. My reasoning is that open source software suffers from poor presentation. Most computer laymen, even those aware of open source software, often don't have any idea how to go about looking for it, but would use it if it were easier to access. What I have proposed is both a Debian-style packaging mechanism (capable of using Windows Installer MSIs or not, as the user wishes) and a software 'catalog' that takes the best aspects of Synaptic and Linspire's Click-N-Run system. Seamless, simple installation and removal of programs in as straightforward a way as apt-get (there will be a command-line tool as well). I'm posting to Slashdot to get the ideas of you lot who, while you may not be the target audience, can certainly provide insights that can be of value.

I was recently informed that my blog is "boring", so I'm planning to make this entry more interesting for those of you who are less technically-inclined (UniSFAns).

So maybe I'll go through some of the more 'interesting' things that happened to me over the past week.

Science Union: smarter than they look
So it turns out that my theory that it would be possible to duplicate a Science Union Pyjama Party ticket using Microsoft Word, some (almost the same shade of) blue card, and a printer, might have been correct.

For the record, I bought a ticket to the 'party' (which, also for the record, was shitty). However, a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, was not so fortunate, and so the plan to recreate the ticket was hatched.

Anyway, we made a ticket, which was remarkably close to the original. I wish I'd taken a photo comparing the two. However, we overlooked the fact that there was some sort of watermark on the back, and a signature by the person who sold the ticket (which also could have easily been duplicated). This led to said friend being kicked out of the Pyjama Party. Not only that, but when asked "where [he] got that ticket from", he gave my name, when I was standing right behind him in the line to get into the party!

Sorry in advance if this is less intelligible to the average reader than it is to me right now. IM POSTIN DRUNK LOL!!!!!1 I may post some more stories later, perhaps one explaining exactly how I came to be drunk enough to consider posting about my life on LJ on a weeknight.

I'm surprised that Mac OS X's Software Update application isn't as feature-filled as, say, Debian's APT. Of course, it's slightly better than Microsoft Update or the "integrated" Windows Update tool in Vista, but not by far. (What's up with using a website to automatically deliver and install system-critical updates, anyway? The web browser, no matter how trusted the site, shouldn't have the ability to make such changes.)

One thing that I love about APT is that updating all the software packages you've installed through APT is as simple as apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. This is easily presented to end-users through a GUI such as the Synaptic Package Manager provided with Ubuntu. (Of course, there is also software like yum which runs on other Linux distributions, but I'm not as familiar with it.) The real strength of such a package management system, however, is that new applications can be easily added and maintained to this system.

I recently discovered a program for OS X called AppFresh, which partially replicates the features of APT. Basically, it queries your system to determine which software is installed, and then uses iusethis.com to check if any updates are available. It also integrates a bunch of tools to add programs to iusethis, as well as add existing programs to your iusethis profile. Pretty cool.

However, I think that a better solution would be for system services such as Software Update to allow programs to register a feed of some sort which can be polled for program updates, thereby allowing all software to use a single service to notify the user of available updates, and/or install them automatically. Perhaps I'm not seeing the big picture, however, and this creates some sort of security issue.

The GNU mascot sucks. The best summary of it I've ever read was "some goat-type thing with a smug expression on its face, as if it's just finished "flaming some n00bs" on a newsgroup".

Honestly, who thought that a gnu would make a good mascot? It's a big, ugly, smelly and not particularly remarkable animal. Stuff like this is why I hate the open-source community.

Then again, I've never really had much patience for Richard Stallman and his "Free Software"-related pedantry. I respect that the tools created as part of the GNU project and licensed under the GPL are immensely useful, but the endless whining about "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux", and stuff like "digital rights management, more like digital restrictions management, amirite" makes me want to hit somebody.

How about the BadVista campaign? Some of the content (oh wait, RMS doesn't like that word!) on this site is laughable. DRM gives power to Microsoft and Big Media!

• They decide which features of your computer or software you can use at any given moment! Last time I checked, my Vista-running PC wasn't spontaneously disabling programs or hardware at Microsoft's whim.


• They force you to install new programs even when you don't want to (and, of course, pay for the privilege) I can only guess that this refers to WGA, where 'force' means "recommend installing/automatically install on configured computers" (not that I agree with this) and 'pay' means "if you use a pirated version, you're warned that it is pirated, and if you're one of the tiny minority that suffers the results of a false positive, you have to deal with a brief phonecall to Microsoft support". The language is misleading and suggests that Microsoft automatically installs (and bills you for) commercial software!


• They restrict your access to certain programs and even to your own data files! This seems to be alluding to the DRM present in media downloaded from MS's 'Urge' music store (or whatever the hell they're calling it these days). Yet slightly later on, the FSF explains how you only own a "license to use Vista and not the software itself". No shit! It's the same deal with DRM'd audio. Furthermore, this has always been the case. Buying an unprotected CD doesn't give you property rights to the music, merely the media. Downloading and using GNU free software doesn't give you copyright over the code, even if you can view it! This is the case with almost any consumer purchase of any good that is duplicated onto some sort of media. It has always been this way. I agree that sometimes advertising is misleading, but if you don't like the idea of licensing music or software from the copyright owner, then don't "buy the music" (or rather, a license to it).

Microsoft are not stupid. If the FSF really wants to be taken seriously, they should focus on what Microsoft has done to restrict our freedoms, and not what maybe could be possible using "digital restrictions management" through cooperation with "Big Media".