http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog Freedom is the right of all sentient beings Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:55:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We at OLPC Australia celebrated our first birthday with a massive bang — a black-tie gala event held at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney Harbour. It was a wonderful night of celebrating Australian Indigenous art, music, culture and food. Corporate sponsors generously donated to the cause. Of special note ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2010/05/29/olpc-support-from-the-prime-minister-of-australia/ I am writing this from Dhalinybuy School in remote Australia. What's even more impressive is that I am typing this on a production-model OLPC XO-1.5! For those who don't know yet, in March I started full-time as the Technical Co-ordinator at One Laptop per Child Australia. This basically means that I manage ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2010/05/20/olpc-in-east-arnhem-land/ Yes, this is quite belated. I'll explain why in a subsequent post. linux.conf.au this year was in Wellington, New Zealand. It just keeps getting better! It's always great meeting people you otherwise only know online. I was especially impressed by the OLPC NZ team. Immediately following linux.conf.au, I jumped on a plane ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2010/03/20/lew-zealand/ Carla Schroder from Linux Today repeats a question that I've heard asked many times: "Here we go with another round of Linux Today reader comments. Let's start off with an issue that has been on my mind: Vendors who boast of the their Linux-based devices, but they only support Windows and ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/10/24/linux-support/ I'm not usually one for blog memes, but what the hell :) A downside of vrms is that it can only look at packages installed via the OS packaging system. I know I have the Adobe Flash Plug-in installed (manually) as well. Nevertheless, the result isn't too bad, and I think ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/09/15/vrms-meme/ An intriguing offer came through to the SLUG-chat mailing list a few weeks ago: an Australian version of Beauty and the Geek is in the works, and they're looking for geeks. I'll be honest and admit that I'm a fan of the US version of the show. The 'geeks' feel like ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/08/30/bimbo-and-the-nerd/ I was having a discussion at work, and it occurred to us that a simple way of improving our data security is to turn machines off (or suspend, hibernate, etc.) when they aren't required. Now this isn't exactly rocket science, but what I found most interesting is how this ties ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/07/21/energy-conservation-for-security/ The OpenJDK plug-in that comes with modern distros is usually very good at handling Java in Web pages, but some applets are just stubborn. Thankfully, Sun have finally (after over six years!) released a plug-in for x86_64 Web browsers. I managed to get the JDK version working on Fedora 11 and ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/07/13/install-64-bit-java-plug-in/ Apologies for pimping my employer, but I became the subject of the inaugural 'Meet the Team' portion of the BizCubed newsletter. It's a good feeling knowing that you work for a company that actually cares about open source and open standards. For example, we sponsored the Government 2.0 event in Canberra ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/07/06/a-bit-of-corporate-indulgence/ I live in a country where even buildings less than 100 years old can be protected as 'heritage'. Yet in India they can demolish a 700-year-old mosque without even batting an eyelid! http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/06/28/heritage-is-relative/