Oh, and the _real_ name did actually change. It’s not Zonked Quokka any more, that’s so yesterday. Today we’re Woozy Numbat! Get your order in!

Linux Australia has been threatened by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) telling them to take down the copyrighted movies Grind and Twisted from the Linux Australia website according to this report from Builder AU and another report at Ars Technica.

The only problem is, there are no films on the website, just some free software!

Twisted is a Python programming language framework for writing networked applications and Valgrind is a most excellent memory debugging tool.

It looks like the MPAA may have just been doing keyword searching and hit the site with a spam take down notice based simply on this, possibly further misled by the mention of the Linux.Conf.Au 2004 conference DVD of videos of presentations made freely available by Linux Australia.

Linux Australia’s president Pia Smith is quoted as saying

“This seems to be a huge misuse of resources, an infringement upon various global spam laws, an infringement upon our own Copyright Act under Section 102 and needless stress and cost upon small Australian organizations and companies” and have asked their legal counsel to contact the MPAA with regards to this matter.

Of course, now I’ve mentioned all this here I wonder if I’ll get similarly spammed ?

This is a really neat idea, a 40GB Lacie USB Hard disk with an installation of Mandrake Linux 10.0, ready to plug into a PC and go.

They even ship it with a mini-CD so that you can boot it on systems that won’t boot from USB, which is a neat idea.

This is taking the Knoppix bootable CD idea to its logical conclusion, now you can carry your entire PC with you without needing to carry a PC with you, if you see what I mean. 🙂 Now all we want is something that will detect the architecture and boot the relevant bootloader for the system, so you can run it on a Mac, etc, too.

Oops, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has pulled up Microsoft over an advert that tried to claim that Windows cost less to run than Linux.

Unfortunately the advertisers only managed to achieve this claim by including the cost of the hardware into their "study" and putting Linux on a massive IBM Z900 mainframe (which it runs on quite happily by the way) against Windows on a tiny dual Intel Xeon 900MHz PC.

The IBM Z900 costs upwards of US$500,000 whilst the dual Xeon PC would probably cost around US$1,000 to US$2,000 (if you could still buy one these days). With at least a possible 250:1 head start on the hardware costs, it’s no wonder Linux failed this not-very-independant little test..

Groklaw has a link to a rather amusing photo from HP World where someone put SCO and IBM in adjoining booths..

Says it all really.. 😉

Yay! After years of people repainting the “Windows” key on keyboards Linux users have their own Linux keyboard which will be available in Europe later in September by Cherry GmbH (no, it’s not on their website yet).

For some time now I’ve been playing around with a Hauppauge Nova-T Terrestrial Digital TV (DVB-T) card under Linux with lots of success, including the fact that I could bring a card from the UK to Australia and have it work.

What I’ve always wanted to do is to somehow create DVD’s of programs so I can watch them in our nice warm lounge rather than on the computer downstairs where it’s cold and not very comfortable. I’ve been playing around with importing them onto my Apple eMac to try and create a DVD with iMovie and iDVD with no success as the Apple QuickTime tools don’t support multiplexed video and audio streams in a single MPEG. 🙁

However, thanks to Doom9’s website I’ve found ProjectX, a java application for demuxing MPEG Program Streams (PS) and Transport Streams (TS).

It’s provided as source only (under the GPL) but easily compiled with the Sun Java SDK and appears to run fairly well, at least as far as detecting what’s multiplexed into a MPEG PS file, I’ve not yet tried to extract that information as I’ve got quite a few things to do around the house today..

Just got OpenWRT running on my Linksys WRT54GS access point / router. I can now ssh in, install extra packages.. I’ve got about 4MB of flash left to play with now (after installing tcpdump, strace and a web front end).

It’s all looking pretty cool.

root@OpenWrt:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type : Broadcom BCM947XX
processor : 0
cpu model : BCM3302 V0.7
BogoMIPS : 199.47
wait instruction : no
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 32
extra interrupt vector : no
hardware watchpoint : no
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available
dcache hits : 4294967292
dcache misses : 1543503199
icache hits : 4282384381
icache misses : 4227857535
instructions : 0

I’ve mentioned the Sveasoft firmware for the Linksys WRT54GS access point / wireless router, but now I’ve come across another alternative called OpenWRT which appeals to my UNIX sensitivities.

Rather than give you one big distribution it says:

OpenWrt provides only a minimal firmware with support for add-on packages. For users this means the ability to custom tune features, removing unwanted packages to make room for other packages and for developers this means being able to focus on packages without having to test and release an entire firmware“.

A refreshing application of the UNIX philosophy of joining small tools that do a single task well to firmware – Create a small but easily extendable base system and make many packages available for it. The OpenWRT website is well worth browsing, it’s all out in the open including a CVS repository and forums.

Update: I’m now playing around with a version of the Freifunk Firmware (also based on OpenWRT) that has been customised for Melbourne Wireless – I’ve got two Linksys WRT54GS’s up and linked with it as a test in my back garden.

Groklaw reports that they’ve won the Linux Journals Editors Choice award for "Nontechnical or Community Web Site". Congratulations PJ et al!

Also the GPL’d virus checker ClamAV won the "Security Tool" award. Congrats to the ClamAV team!