Virtual Possum

Green my apple

  Green my apple 
  Originally uploaded by dhickie.

For all of you, Mac-tastics, Green your apples too.

Great picture from Dan and Wally ... the dog is trying to type a message on his blog but it's hard with small keys and an environmental unfriendly computer.

http://www.greenmyapple.org

If you believe changing the world is possible...

Then you should read Brian's latest post. He describes what a true passion looks like when it hits you. Brian history describes clearly the passion that drives all those people that fight on a daily basis to make this planet a better place. Not just from the environmental point of view but human rights, social justice, health, refugees, children rights, etc.

I've done door to door canvassing in my previous life and I completely shared your description of what it feels like. It takes, as you say, a lot of courage and you need to be convinced that you are doing the right thing.

I am immensely proud to have Brian as a friend!

Huey

Huey
Originally uploaded by brunom.

This cat has been the "master of the house" while the dogs have been on holidays. Tomorrow, his reign shall end as "they" are coming back! 6 weeks of total control over our lives will end! :-)

Inspiring CEO's

I have been very quiet lately. It's not due to a lack of interest or not being able to think, it's been a mix of feeling that I didn't have anything interesting to share with everyone and spending too much of my thinking time on work issues. 2007 is a different year, time has passed and maybe, what I thought wasn't interesting to others, might actually be interesting. We shall see.

Over the past few months, I have been reading the writings of a Fortune 500 CEO. Why is this relevant? Apart from the fact that you don't usually find many CEO's that blog, you will probably not find many that are young and understand that innovation doesn't happen in isolation, or through closed source developments. I believe that transparency and collaboration are fundamental, not just to use as key principles to run your life but as business principles as well. I don't have an MBA so I won't be able to translate this into nice business-buzzwords-and-fancy-charts but that is how we have been running our business, and it makes for a much saner and sustainable work environment.
 

Anyway, getting back to Jonathan Schwartz. Someone in charge of a very large corporation, finding time to write, share his views with honesty (it's not every day that you find public apologies over messes that were done within his corporation), deserves a credit. In addition, under his leadership, Sun Microsystems went on to Open Source Solaris, their multi-billion dollar operating system, Java and even Sparc. This shouldn't be overlooked.

Since I am an advocate of free and open source software (I deliberately want to avoid the Open Source vs Free Software debate here, freedom of choice!), this has had an impact on me! I am not sure how many companies started with a closed-source model and changed their license model on their flagship product (anyone care to tell me which other ones?).

BTW Solaris is an amazing operating system with great features (DTrace and ZFS being some of the most evident), being able to learn from years of R&D and production deployments is invaluable.

Rose

Rose
Originally uploaded by brunom.

During the last days of December, Danielle and I went to the house in the South Coast and after some much needed rains, I took a few pictures of flowers. There's more on the Flickr pages if you like this one :)

/B

Many dangers in Oz

Originally uploaded by brunom.

You have to watch out for everything around here :-)

Great Ocean Road

Originally uploaded by brunom.

I haven't been posting in a while as I have been working a lot and don't really have much to say. Only noticeable thing is that we drove from Adelaide to Sydney over one week in November. It was really nice.

More on IBC

So, a few days have past and I've walked through most of the exhibition, attended some presentations and met many people.

What to make of it? As I said, it's a very large conference with many (read: MANY) exhibitors but largely focussed on Broadcasters and HD-TV. Those are the centre of focus for this exhibition, which is fair enough. The interest for me was mostly around storage technologies (which also apply for broadcasters, now that everything is moving to digital) and software (Apple and Autodesk mostly). I manage to talk to most of the vendors I had contacted, which is good.

I also got to check the buzz from the Red Camera and had a look at their footage on a 4K projector. I have to say that it was impressive to see noise-less footage at that size and with that level of detail. The image was however a bit "flat" (the dynamic range didn't seem to be "off the charts" as the Red representative said) but this could be the projector or a myriad of other factors. What's really making waves is the price tag of this camera. If this takes off and the production releases of this camera produce film-quality footage, then I see that we will have to deal with 4K sooner rather than later :-) Which is going to be interesting from a technical point of view.

On the 4K size of things, I saw a 56" LCD display 4K2K (3840x2160) from a Japanese firm called Astrodesign and, even though this was a prototype (the rep said that they are aiming at having a production screen mid-2007), it was REALLY nice! The level of detail that you could see in the images was stunning! I was literally speechless while watching high res footage on that monitor. Very impressive!

And then there was iSilon, a firm that makes an interesting clustered storage solution based on FreeBSD. I've been in touch with them in the past but now that they have operations in Japan (for the Asia Pacific region) we might be able to test-drive some of their solutions! That's looking very promising.

And we also had the classics (Sony, IBM, HP). To be honest, I didn't see anything widely innovative from them (of course, I am talking about the stuff that specifically interests me like clustered storage or parallel file systems). Too bad companies like ClusterFS were not here, as that's the type of solutions that I consider interesting :)

An interesting presentation with David Stump ASC about the "whole digital movie", i.e. where you only use analog when you print for projection ... It was an interesting presentation and what I took from that is that there seem to be 2 areas which are fundamental, colour correction and archival. These seem to be the areas in which a lot of work is going and require a lot of attention.

Anyway, it's big and full of people in suits. Interestingly enough, I would say that 90% of the participants were male and over 25 or I would risk it and say 80% over 30. It would be interesting to see some stats from the organisers but it was a "men in suits" dominated conference ... which doesn't necessarily go that well with my look ;-)

IBC Bag and Badge

IBC Bag and Badge
Originally uploaded by brunom.

Amsterdam ... I am here

So, I've made it to Amsterdam. I am here for IBC 2006, a massive conference that focusses of digital media (to simplify it a bit).

The trip was exhausting and really long. I flew with Qantas and I have to admit that the pain from the trip was not due to the airline but just to the fact that both legs of the trip (Sydney - Singapore and Singapore - London) were full (not a spare seat). I don't want to complain but ... ARGH!

Anyway, I made it to Schiphol however my luggage didn't. So, the first day was spent going back and forth between the airport and the city and waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... until I finally got my backpack and could return to just relax.

I manage to catch up with some of my friends and former colleagues from Greenpeace, which was good and I have registered to IBC. This conference/show is HUGE! and from the exhibitors list, it's going to be FUN! :-) Can't wait!

Surealist impressions

Ibera_May2006_066.jpg
Originally uploaded by brunom.

I've uploaded a whole bunch of pictures I took during my trip in Argentina. I've just returned from around 3 weeks over there.

I spent some time in the Esteros del Iberá, in the northern province of Corrientes, some time in Buenos Aires and also spent a weekend with my family in our house in Villa Gesell. I had a great time. Very important and positive things are happening in Argentina and I will blog about that later on.

Forgive the title of the pictures with the file names, the description contains the information about the shot. It's all available in my flickr account.

Great quote

"Rule your mind or it will rule you". Horace

Water flowing

Water flowing
Originally uploaded by brunom.

I've just uploaded some pictures that I took while visiting Argentina back in April 2004.

I only have the proof prints because the lab that I used lost my negatives/slides ... yeah, it sucks but I finally got over it. At least I have these ones and the memories but I consider these pics some of the finest I've taken so ... you can imagine why it took 2 years to get over that fact. Did I ever get over it, really???

trumpet

trumpet
Originally uploaded by dhickie.

Danielle has taken on Lino Printing, which fills the house with friends and inks :)

Cool writings

For some reason (I don't really know how) I ended up on one of the posts that Brian wrote when we launched the new face of http://www.greenpeace.org/ back in 2002 (the version 1 of what you can now see at that same URL). Have a read, be active, do something for our environment (yeah, I know, I could be doing more ... I am trying, believe me).

AT&T built warrantless wiretap rooms for the NSA

Some clear information about something that probably has been going on for a very long while. Definitely time to start looking at stuff like Thor, Mixmaster and cgi-proxy.

AT&T built warrantless wiretap rooms for the NSA: "Cory Doctorow: AT&T has asked a court to suppress documents leaked by an ex-employee detailing how the company indiscriminately diverted domestic and international traffic to the National Security Agency for warrantless wiretapping

(Via Boing Boing.)

Inspiration also from a friend :)

The best amazon.com review ever?

Best Amazon.com review ever, of any product. Check for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00067L9A2/

(Via Philip Greenspun Weblog.)

Spider

Spider
Originally uploaded by brunom.

A macro shot I took back in March ...

Certified Scrum Master

On Thursday and Friday I went on to a Scrum Master training, held by Jens Østergaard.

The training was very good and I've learned a lot. We've been trying to use Scrum at work for a while and the training clearly showed me the little (large) problems that we had with our attempts and the stuff I need to do to solve them. It's going to be a very interesting couple of months from now on, when I change the way I was working and get this in place.

If you haven't heard of Scrum, and you are interested in new and more effective ways to tackle the complexity of your projects, I *highly* recommend that you take a look at it. It's a simple framework that works very well with Agile engineering practices (Test Driven Development, XP, etc). Check it out!

BTW, we were the first class of publicly certified Scrum Masters in Australia. Thoughtworks has already quite a few certified Scrum Masters too.

30 years ... a struggle that still continues today

30 years ago today, a coup d'état, one of, if not the bloodiest in Latin America, continued a process that was already in place, at an accelerated pace and destroyed, killed, tortured, abused many generations of Argentineans. One can barely imagine cruelty like the one that was shown. More than 30,000 people disappeared, countless had to escape in order to survive and tell the world what was going on. The Dirty War happened during that period.

This terrible history in Argentina has an amazing side to it though, people like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (The Grand-Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and many Human Rights and Social Movements organisations AND individuals that STILL keep on fighting for a just society and a better country. These are the same "crimes" that many people committed, they wanted a country were everyone would have the same chances, where there wouldn't be terrible inequalities.

There will be many events in Argentina. I am not there unfortunately, but my family is and so it's as if I was there, with them. We do what we can from where we are.

That's my past, my present and is my future. I REMEMBER and I WILL NEVER FORGET!