As regular readers would know, I make some effort to avoid using closed-source and proprietary software. This includes that popular operating system common on laptops and servers, MS-Windows. However there are a small number of reasons why this O.S. is required, including life-saving medical equipment hardware which, for some unfathomable reason, has been written to only interface with proprietary operating systems. Open source developers?

Free and open source software is based on key principles that are firmly grounded in instrumental advantages and ethical principles. It is heavily used in infrastructure and in new hardware forms; it is less used in user-end applications and traditional forms (laptops and desktops); however there is a good range of mature and feature-rich business applications available. The development of increasingly ubiquitous and more powerful computing is particularly well-suited for FOSS and workplaces that make use of such software will gain financial and positional advantages.

Presentation to Young Professionals CPA, October 8, 2014

Pre-Project and Start-Up (SU)

A project is defined as a temporary organisation created for the purpose of delivering business products with a degree of uniqueness according to an agreed Business Case.

A project mandate must come from those managers and those authorised to allocate duties and funds, subject to delegated authority ("corporate /programme management").

Authorised individuals must raise a Project Mandate. This should state the basic objectives, scope, quality, and constraints and identify the customer, user, and other interested parties.

Presentation to Software Freedom Day (Melbourne), September 2014

LUV annual general meetings are typically our smallest meetings of the year. It is a bold and few technically-inspired individuals who wish to sit through the necessary administrivia that keep the organisation alive in a formal sense, and the lack of an advertised speaker does suggest the possibility of ad-hoc pot-luck when it comes the short, technical lightning talks. However, I would like to make a special plea for LUV members to attend this agm. The reason being is that, after four years as president of LUV, I am going to step down from this position.

GNU zip is a compression utility free from patented algorithms. Software patents are stupid, and patented compression algorithms are especially stupid.

Presentation to the La Trobe Valley Linux Miniconference, Saturday July 19, 2014

Presentation to Linux Users of Victoria, 1st July, 2014

1. About Patents

A definition from the World Intellectual Property Organisation "A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. To get a patent, technical information about the invention must be disclosed to the public in a patent application." [1]

The final report of the ACIP (Australian government Advisory Panel on Intellectual Property) review of the Innovation Patent System came out today.

http://www.acip.gov.au/reviews/all-reviews/review-innovation-patent-system/

The good news is that ACIP have recommended that "no method, process or system shall be patentable".

THIS MEANS NO SOFTWARE PATENTS

Selections from the Report follow. I note that they referred to several of the examples were included in the LUV submission.

Presentation to ICCS 2014 International Conference on Computational Science, Cairns, June 10, 2014

Abstract

High performance computing is in increasing demand, especially with the need to conduct parallel processing on very large datasets, whether evaluated by volume, velocity and variety. Unfortunately the necessary skills - from familiarity with the command line interface, job submission, scripting, through to parallel programming - is not commonly taught at the level required for most researchers. As a result the uptake of HPC usage remains disproportionately low, with emphasis on system metrics taking priority, leading to a situation described as 'high performance computing considered harmful'. Changing this is not of a problem of computational science but rather a problem for computational science which can only be resolved from an multi-disciplinary approach. The following example addresses the main issues in such teaching and thus makes an appeal to some universality in application which may be useful for other institutions.

For the past several years the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) has conducted a range of training courses designed to bring the capabilities of postgraduate researchers to a level of competence useful for their research. These courses have developed in this time, in part through providing a significantly wider range of content for varying skillsets, but more importantly by introducing some of the key insights from the discipline of adult and tertiary education in the context of the increasing trend towards lifelong learning. This includes an andragagical orientation, providing integrated structural knowledge, encouraging learner autonomy, self-efficacy, and self-determination, utilising appropriate learning styles for the discipline, utilising modelling and scaffolding for example problems (as a contemporary version of proximal learning), and following up with a connectivist mentoring and outreach program in the context of a culturally diverse audience.

Keywords adult and tertiary education, high performance and scientific computing