The week is getting eaten up with trivial and non-trivial laptop tasks. (I'll finish uploading the Chix slides later, rather than skip talks to do it. By the way, for people doing slides from Flickr photos, the best search to use is Advanced and tick all the Creative Commons boxes. Yes including the commercial use one, please. The conference and most of the miniconfs are asking for BY-SA. That means you can't include NC — no commercial use — photos in your slides!)

Yesterday's keynote was Stormy Peters on Would you do it again for free?, addressing whether or not Free Software programmers who have ever had a job developing it would continue doing so after they leave the job. Her conclusion is 'yes' for various reasons, but that they'd probably switch projects. The major howler was that she speculated without checking that Eazel employees are probably mostly still in Free Software (in actual fact, a whole team almost immediately disappeared into Apple-land, never to reemerge). It's a shame she didn't follow that up before throwing it as a passing commend into the talk: it would have been interesting information informing her conclusions. (For anyone interested in following up, she has some sources at her blog: Do external rewards kill intrinsic motivations? and Two new points on “Would you do it again for free?”)

There was a warning during the keynote not to go to Rusty Russell's lguest tutorial without preparation, which I hadn't done: there was a BOF session the day before that I heard about from Rusty after the fact. I wish I'd found his blog post in time to go, but I didn't see it until after the tute.

lca has a long-standing problem with it being basically impossible to run any tutorials without starting from complete beginnings. Most of the audience will not have installed, studied or thought in advance, no matter how vigorously requested to do so. I'm beginning to wonder whether offering paid tutorials, as some other conferences do, would change the landscape a little.

I enjoyed Parrot: a VM for Dynamic Languages a lot. I believe Parrot has been around almost as long as Perl 6 has been talked about, or something like that, but fortunately I haven't been on board for that ride, so I can enjoy the fun without thinking about the pain. I'm even tempted to look at the code.

I more or less worked through several other talks: By Sound and By Touch: Using Linux with Speech and Braille Output Interfaces, Application performance profiling with Xorg and Breaking the Silence: Making Applications Talk with Telepathy. Andrew tells me Clustered Samba - not just a hack any more was amazing, audacious, awesome. Perhaps aspirational. Some words like that. I'm sorry I missed it. Tridge's talk last year was a step down, and silly me, I just assumed it was a predictor, not a total aberration.

As predicted, I didn't 'do' the Professional Delegates Networking Session. I instead went out to dinner with Twisted and Twisted-ish folk: Jonathon, Stephen, Elspeth, Andrew and Tim. And it was quiet and not a performance and exactly what I needed. Especially since the Google party is tonight.

I wasn't too engaged with Anthony Baxter's keynote Two Snake Enter, One Snake Leave? on Python 3.0 (the first ever backwards incompatible release). Partly because it's because I've been hearing about the thing for yonks and it generally turns into wailing and gnashing of teeth, hence my hindbrain goes into force override. Also, I was preparing my lightning talk slides. I kept working on them through Bringing kittens back to life - continuing story of open source graphics drivers, so I can't say much about that either. (I hear that Seeking is hard: Ogg design internals over in another theatre was good.)

After kittens, it was time for law: Stop in the Name of Law, Kimberlee Weatherall's wrap-up of the year in intellectual property. Some interesting conclusions from her talk:

• Weatherall says that you can tell her DRM is dead when digital movies and TV are DRM-free. Music has always had a more expensive DRM-free option: CDs. So the appearance of more DRM-free sales is not a revolution.
• The push to kill software patents entirely is dead. They're worth an awful lot of money to an awful lot of people, and aside from that research keeps digging up what are effectively software patents even before they were meant to be around in the US and even in the EU, where they still aren't. Draw a line, and software patents will spring up where the grass is greener.
• The big worrying new development we should watch for: the push to make ISPs responsible for copyright infringements. Particularly (watch out Australia) as riders on requirements to make them responsible for not letting kids see porn. THIS WILL PROTECT YOUR KIDS FROM PORN and also content owners from infringement BUT THINK OF THE PORN. (Dear, dear, dear readers: I am perfectly well aware that there are also legal, technical and ethical arguments against filtering porn too. Do not deluge me with them. Thank you.)
• If you're worried about the worldwide IP situation and you're scared and you're one little person and you don't know what to do, code. (Or create free content.) This content is becoming very useful to very many people, some of whom have a lot of money, and they are worrying about IP for you.

I wasn't a great fan of Create your own Open Source Dance Mat, because the content was short for the slot and letting a few people dance didn't really make up for the missing second half of the slot. Plus, the chaoticness of the dancing made several people in the audience decide that it would be a fine thing to have very loud conversations. I have no idea what they were about, as I have difficulty tuning in when a lot of conversations happen at once. But I suspect they weren't on-topic.

The final talk we went to was Jeff and Pia's The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census 2007 where they presented some raw results of the community part of their census. They didn't mention that they were working with psychometricians on it until nearly the end, so sent them an email with some semi-informed statistical rambling during the talk and spent about 48 hours worried that I'd been too snarky. But Jeff was enthusiastic in reply. Ah, performance anxiety.

There were lightning talks before the closing session. I compressed my Getting a talk into linux.conf.au post into a three minute lightning talk (Talks you should submit to linux.conf.au, PDF, 85KB) which was not unappreciated except when compared with Paul Fenwick's 32 or 38 slides, which result in the MySpace for unsocial fascist bastards Greasemonkey script.

After close (summary: linux.conf.au 2009 will be in Hobart, best logo ever, march south next year) was the Google party. I quite liked the vibe. Last year was a bit more intense, going well into the evening with oppressive humidity and a fair bit more alcohol. This year was more like a barbecue in someone's backyard. Someone's really big backyard. (It probably helps that Melbourne sunset is about half an hour later than Sydney's.) After the booze dried up (not that I was partaking but I could have done with another Coke) we headed to Polly's, which is another very Melbourne find. (Fancy red armchairs and cocktails...)

I didn't spend much time at Open Day. Unfortunately the venue was very uncomfortable: the floor was at the top of Union House and was unairconditioned. Our stand was also on the darker and hotter side. I womanned the LinuxChix stall with Akkana, Robyn and Kylie for about an hour. But I'd also printed the poster and had business cards done at my expense, so I feel I added in money what I couldn't add in time.

My project for February is to read Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (free, online).

I figure there has to be someone out there wondering what I did with my wireless A/V problems (namely, wireless A/V transmitters get interference from 802.11 wireless networks and are thus useless, especially in blocks of flats).

Well, first up for our purposes we decided to settle for wireless audio only. Neither of us have at all significant amounts of video sitting around on hard drives. We bought a Logitech Squeezebox. (The current Squeezebox is a re-badged Slim Devices Squeezebox version 3, Logitech aquired Slim Devices.) It connects to either wireless (WPA and WEP supported) or wired networks. It has several audio outputs, we're just using analog RCA.

The Squeezebox needs to be fed music from a storage device. You can install SlimServer (soon to have a 7.0 release, at which time it will be known as SqueezeCenter) on a machine which has your music on it (Windows, Mac, Linux or anything else that can run Perl including lots of Network Attached Storage devices). You can sign up for SqueezeNetwork, which streams Internet Radio to it. We don't use SqueezeNetwork: Australian broadband does not have the kind of download limits where it's a good idea to stream your music over the 'net all the time. Also it sounds like SqueezeNetwork, like pretty much every other Internet Radio service, has a lot of content which they have agreed not to distribute to non-US (or sometimes non-EU) users.

I considered one of these a year or so back but was put off by the Australian recommended retail of $500 (now $399.95 and in the US US$299). But on my most recent search Shopbot turned up a lot of excitingly named places — such as Don't Pay Retail — that stock it for well under RRP. So I did the annoying dance of trying to find somewhere that didn't charge exorbitant shipping (everywhere that has it seems to practice that annoying lock-in trick of only telling the customer the shipping cost after they've signed up and entered their name, email, phone, and full billing and shipping addresses) and we've had one since early December.

Reviews along the lines of this one are more or less correct about its strengths, in particular the menu design.

Some points not commonly discussed in the reviews:

• The menu design is really great. Actually this is mentioned in the reviews, but it's great.
• SlimServer is GPL. Some of the skins for the web interfaces and some plugins might be an exception to that (there's lots of IANAL discussion on the forums regarding people trying to avoid GPLing their plugins). There's a Logitech EULA on the download page, that is almost but entirely unlike the GPL, as in, they're both software licences, but this applies only to the firmware. I saw one of the developers somewhere saying that it's practically impossible to close development too, since they use a lot of third party modules.
• It supports a lot of formats (Ogg Vorbis, various Windows stuff I know nothing about) in the server software. Music is sent over the network as either MP3 (if the original file was MP3) or FLAC (if the original file was anything else). Hence, you can only skip through either MP3 or FLAC files. Other files can only be played at normal speed without skipping, or be paused.
• The web interface to the server is 'good enough' (better than MPD clients I've used) but not amazing. In particular, it needs more AJAX for the current playlist. Drag-and-drop rearrangement of the playlist is much nicer than click move-song-one-position, load, click move-song-one-position, load, click move-song-one-position, load...
• The network protocol is documented (and presumably there's a GPL implementation in Perl) but it's a custom protocol, not something any other software than Slim Devices software speaks.
• The Jive architecture, with which your applications talk to the new Duet remotes, isn't Free Software, although some of the stuff written for it is. I am entirely unclear on how core Jive will be to future Squeezeboxen. Fairly core.
• There is an active development and user community at their forums, most of which are mirrored to mailing lists.

I'm a bit worried by the recent appearance of the Squeezebox Duet, which is much more in the Sonos multi-room mold. I like my little box and its monochrome display. However, apparently the Squeezebox v3 remains in production, as does its very expensive brother the Transporter, and if the v3 is any indication, the Duet will be a great piece of work for people who want something more like the Sonos system. (People who live in a bigger place than us.) Further, the Duet remotes can control Squeezeboxen and Transporters, not just Duet Receivers.

Another device work looking at if you're in the market for a device to which you can stream music you have sitting on your hard drive — yeah I've heard of sound cards, but I only have one good set of speakers and they live over near the TV, not near the computer — is the Roku Soundbridge. It speaks DAAP and UPnP, which makes it much more generic in terms of the software that can communicate with it. Ross Burton reviews it favourably. Since it's hard to pick between them from reviews, we decided to buy the cheaper one, which in Australia in December seemed to be the Squeezebox.

I run several WordPress sites for other people (this isn't one of them). A couple of them are private: no password for the site, can't read the site. For years I've had an unwieldly situation in which the lockdown was implemented with HTTP Basic Auth configured in Apache, and the users separately log into the site in order to post.

I used HTTP Basic Auth for locking it down even after I discovered Authenticated WordPress (requires a login as a WordPress user before you can see anything) partly because it's accessible to RSS readers. Many RSS readers (and assorted web fetching tools) can speak HTTP Basic Auth. Few can log themselves into WordPress, although I wouldn't be surprised to find an exception or three. Eventually though different search terms led me to the HTTP Authentication plugin, and it turns out they play nicely together. If you install them both the site requires HTTP authentication in order to access any part of it, and any person who has successfully authenticated is logged into WordPress too.

A couple of niggles:

1. (The HTTP Authentication plugin requires that you have two matching lists of user names (well, actually one can be a proper subset of the other if you like, but users who aren't in both can't authenticate): the WordPress DB needs to have a registered user, and the external authentication source needs to have an entry for the same user.) Actually, I tell a lie. There is an option to automatically create a WordPress account for a user who shows up as successfully authenticated with an unknown user name.
2. The HTTP Authentication documentation is slightly wrong: you don't need the nickname to match the external user, you need the username to match the external user (which is the sensible way anyway).