Sweden to set up embassy in Second Life
I reckon that’s very cool. I’d already heard about some people making their living “in there”.

Since so many HUMBUG members are interested in the OSDC-2007-in-Brisbane idea, there will be an initial gathering to discuss ideas and such at the HUMBUG meeting this Saturday, 27 January.

HUMBUG is run at Room S201, Hawken Engineering Building (no. 50) at the University of Queensland. The usual HUMBUG meetings start at 3pm, but the OSDC discussion will commence at 5pm. I did some venue scouting earlier this week, so I’ll be able to give some info on that.

See you there, if you can make it – otherwise if you are interested in helping and haven’t dropped me a line yet, please do so (at my-first-name @ my-last-name dot com dot au). I’m keeping a list and will make sure everybody is included for follow-up meetings and everything else. Thanks!

An excellent opportunity has come up to have the 2007 edition of the Open Source Developers Conference to Brisbane. Various people from Brisbane were independently interested, and we converged at LCA 2007 in Sydney last week. From discussions there, I understand that the OSDC committee is interested, but would of course like to make sure that it will once again be a well attended quality event, and a worthy successor to the previous editions in Melbourne – so we need to do some homework!

OSDC is generally held in December, the CfP would start in April. Various things would need to be in place before then. If you are able and willing to help with this, please email me at my-first-name @ my-last-name dot com dot au The current aim is for an initial meeting in Brisbane within the next couple of weeks, to go over things before submitting a full proposal to the OSDC committee.

Of particular interest are people with

• time & energy;
• connections to UQ and QUT (we want to get them involved, since it’s a peer-reviewed conference);
• specialist experience with some of the sub-tasks needed to put on a successful conference, such as:
  • connections and/or experience with local companies who could sponsor.
  • marketing and related experience.

So, please drop me a line ASAP if you want to be involved in making this happen. Thanks!

This happened a few days ago a few houses up our street: Man crashes car into swimming pool (in the Australian, other mentions on ABC and news.com.au).
(There’s a Dutch driving instruction joke: “kaboom = halt!, splash = water”. This nutball managed to do both at the same time.)
FYI: two kids had just come out that pool only minutes before. The parked car (with a baby seat) had noone in it at the time. Its smashing into a pole caused a powerline across the road to snap, cutting the power to two houses and putting a rather dangerous live wire on the road, near debris, sparks and water).

A few years ago something similar happened early one morning, a 4.0 litre Ford Ute wrapped wrapped itself around the Canadian maple tree at the front of our house, did a full spin, and ended up on our driveway. The driver then fell asleep, he and his companion were both very drunk (I understand that some blood was later detected in their alcohol).
A police officer told me that the extreme drunkenness probably saved their lives, because their bodies were so relaxed. And hey, they’d been going around the block a handful of times already, so they knew the road well. Here are some some illustrative photos.

All lucky (possibly undeserving) bastards, all alive and pretty much unscathed. Amazing, considering. Definitely not recommended to try anything similar: a stunt driver would have a difficult time recreating either event safely.
Anyway… it’s not a street with heavy traffic, we’re just at the bottom between two hills. People freewheel down, if they weren’t speeding already. Some bends, a few parked cars, optional alcohol, a touch of optimism and a common dash of plain stupidity, and thus we have another kaboom.
And some time the person won’t be so lucky. Or one of our kids…

So, particularly around these festive days, let’s be careful out there, eh?
And if you must, put alcohol in your petrol tank, but please don’t let it behind the steering wheel!

Jon Stokes writes about this on Arstechnica, looking at a forthcoming Virginia Law Review paper entitled “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design,” in which two law professors investigate how the fashion industry manages to thrive despite rampant copying of clothing designs.

While it’s not simply applicable to other areas (such as software), quite a few interesting observations are made – the most interesting (to me) is that making a generalistic presumption about needing very strong IP protection in order to drive innovation is just plain wrong, as the fashion industry proves. It may apply to other areas, but it’s clearly not a universal rule.

I actually think that fashion and software have a lot in common, particularly in terms of the trends that surface and evolve, and the speed at which the market moves. These aspects appear to be key factors, so perhaps there is a strong case for taking note of these observations for software… anyway, have a read and see what you think of it!