CW: linux.conf.au organisers tweak focus as final keynoter announced

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

With less than a month before its kick-off, organisers of the world-renowned linux.conf.au will this week announce the final keynote speaker, who is also set to represent a shift in the traditional technical focus of the event.

The 'Seven Team', the group which is in charge of organizing the event, will formally introduce former game developer turned author, Kathy Sierra of Wickedly Smart. Sierra, whose motto is 'creating passionate users', is being introduced to promote a more user-centric perspective to what has traditionally been a highly technical community.

Sierra joins microkernel legend Dr Andrew Tanenbaum and Chris Blizzard, of One Laptop Per Child fame, on LCA's list of keynote speakers for 2007. Each of the three speakers has been chosen for their prominence in one of seven streams at the conference.

Tanenbaum will address the theme of Deep Kernel Hacking; Blizzard will discuss Free Culture; and Sierra will speak on the subject of User Experience. Other streams are: Programmer Tools and Methodology; Systems Administration; General Interest Kernel; and a category with the rather broad-ranging name of 'Cool Stuff'.

The streams have been hand-picked by members of the Seven Team, which consists of Linux Australia members Jeff Waugh, Pia Waugh, Sara Kaan, Jamie Wilkinson, Ben Leslie, Lindsay Holmwood and John Ferlito.

Each year, LCA is organized by a different volunteer team that has to bid against other teams for the privilege to run the event. After winning a bid against Melbourne, the Seven Team will be the first to bring the conference to Sydney since 2001.

The event will be held at the University of New South Wales from January 15-20, and owing to the big city location and the expected pleasant summer weather, organizers expect about 800 participants to attend.

"We're increasing the size of LCA by about 160 percent," said Pia Waugh. "Usually, LCAs are about 500 people, but considering it was in Sydney and we felt that we had the audience here, we thought we'd experiment with increasing the size of the conference. We're doing fairly well on that."

According to a post last week on Jeff Waugh's blog, registrations have already exceeded the 500 mark.

Another first in registrations for LCA 2007 is the introduction of the LinuxChix miniconf, which is a community organized stream that aims to highlight women's work in free software. The stream has encouraged a very high proportion of females to register, Pia Waugh said.

Waugh was also surprised to note that LCA 2007 will also be the first LCA event in which the Debian miniconf has not been the most popular amongst registered participants; instead, participants have registered most interest in the topic of Virtualisation.

Besides Australian participants, Open Source enthusiasts from countries including Serbia, Mongolia, the Philippines, U.K. and the U.S. have registered to attend the LCA. The conference has even inspired stunts by groups like Please Send Us to Linux.conf.au in a plea for sponsorship to the event.

"LCA has got a fantastic reputation globally as being the world's best technical open source conference," said Pia Waugh. "Every year we have people like Linus [Torvalds], Keith Packard, Bdale Garbee, Dave Miller, lots of really famous names who come to the conference and love the conference.

"It's very much a community event where great people come together to talk about great things, and the fact that your average young hacker who's only just started in the community can rub shoulders with the best in the world ... not only keeps the community close and exciting and interesting, but also [provides] a way to grow the future of the community to give new people the opportunity to participate and play," she said.

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ARN: SMS-based anti-truancy product expands to the US

As a journalist at Australian Reseller News:

A text-based school attendance product suite provided by Adelaide-based MGM Wireless is on its way to the US, following a successful five month trial in the US state of Arizona.

The January 1, 2007 US launch comes three years after its launch in Australia, where the product, messageyou, has been well received by schools and parents. Having been adopted by 270 schools nationwide, messageyou currently occupies a 92 percent share of the Australian market for student attendance communication systems, according to MGM Wireless executive chairman, Mark Fortunatow.

"It's a new product category," he said. "We really invented and pioneered this application in Australia; we launched our first school on October 1st 2003, and since then, it's grown from a non-existent product category to today, where we've got 14 percent of high schools across the country using the system."

The product aims to improve attendance at schools by simplifying roll marking and attendance analysis. When students are late or missing from school, messageyou sends an automatic SMS text message to parents and guardians - a strategy that has proven successful in reducing truancy.

Australian schools view attendance as a key performance indicator for institutions and staff members, Fortunatow explained. As student attendance also affects how school districts are funded in the US, he expects US schools to have even greater incentives to boost attendance rates.

"On any one day, if you've got a number of kids away, our system locates those kids and provides that information back to the school -- that's an immediate financial benefit to the school, on top of welfare and economic benefits," he said.

Currently, most of messageyou's sales and marketing occur direct through MGM Wireless, Fortunatow said, as the product is tightly coupled to the attendance and communication processes at a school, and the application requires a high level of professional services to implement.

"We find that in order to sell the systems in schools, we need highly experienced salespeople that really understand the issues in a school in a lot of depth, and that doesn't lend itself to a reseller network," Fortunatow said.

However, MGM Wireless does have partnerships with telcos, including Telstra, Optus and Vodafone, as well as about 30 integrators and other vendors of student management systems.

The company is currently in discussions with potential channel partners in the U.S., but Fortunatow was unable to discuss the specifics of any U.S. deals at this stage, saying only that "We've been approached by a number of partners, and channel partners in particular, and that will certainly be a key component to our roll-out strategy".

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CW: From cutting code to managing projects

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

In her 21 years of experience in the IT industry, Adelaide-based EDS client delivery executive Linda Zeelie has come a long way from her roots as a junior programmer. Amongst other industry accolades, Zeelie was recently named one of the world's "25 influential project managers" by international project management magazine, PM Network.

Liz Tay speaks with Zeelie about her love for IT and her experiences as a woman in the male-dominated industry.

How did you first get started in the IT industry, and how did you end up at EDS?

I started my IT career in South Africa, and I migrated to Australia about nine years ago. My first job in IT was straight out of school, in the [South African Department of] Defence IT section. [I] didn't go to University first; I did a three month training course then went straight into my first job as a programmer.

I stayed there for probably about 13 years, and worked my way up; so junior programmer, programmer, senior programmer, then I went up through the systems analysis and design route -- so I became an architect of business applications, and then I went into project management.

So I worked my way up through IT, but to be honest, I haven't coded a program in close to a decade for sure.

What first sparked your interest in the industry?

My great aunt was an industrial psychologist, and she did a lot of psychometric testing when I was a kid. She always said, 'You'd be good for this new computer thing', and that's always just stuck in my head.

So going up through high school, I always just thought 'I'd be good at this computer thing', so that's the direction I chose and nothing else really sparked my interest more than the computer thing, and that's the way I went.

What aspects of technology interest you most?

That's a difficult question, because there are a lot of roles in IT, and I think that's half the problem - people think IT equals computers, technology, you know, geeky stuff. But things I like best would be the systems analysis and design for applications and project management. Those are the things that really excite me and that I really enjoy.

Why do you think there is a shortage of women in the Australian IT industry?

I think IT is perceived as a technology industry. It's perceived as something that needs you to be interested in network diagrams and you know, all the technology-type stuff. And I think a lot of our training courses and university courses encourage that as well, whereas to be honest, IT to me is a whole industry on its own, where it's got soft skills, you can do HR [Human Resources], you can do finances, analysis, design, testing, configuration management, project management, there's just a whole myriad of roles in IT where you don't have to code a program at all.

But people don't see it that way. They [think] you must be sitting in front of a computer programming all day [to be in the IT industry].

I've worked in a couple of places around the world, and I was actually shocked at how low the percentage of females in the Australian industry is. I always saw myself as a person in the IT industry; I never thought of myself as a 'woman', until I moved to Australia, because here there are so few. You kind of stick out a little.

I've actually been involved in a number of programs through the Australian Computer Society and Uni SA [the University of South Australia] to encourage girls in the industry, and as part of that, I've actually stopped to think of what's different about Australia that girls aren't interested in IT, and I think it's just a perception that IT is technical.

My daughter is in high school and I said to her, 'Do you want to go into IT?', and she said 'Oh no, I don't like computers'. But she wants to be a project manager, and I'm like 'Well, you could be a project manager in IT', and she goes 'Oh, can I?' And she's got a mother working in the industry, so obviously the perception is really strong.

What has being a woman in IT been like for you?

As I said before, I never really thought of myself as a 'woman' in IT - I was just a 'person' in IT. There are a number of instances where I'm very often the only woman in the room, so it is becoming a little bit more obvious to me about being a woman in IT.

The more successful you are and the higher up you go, the tougher it does get, because it is a man's world. I haven't really seen that as a barrier before, it's just something you need to learn to live with and get on with.

But the disadvantages are there, and the advantages for women aren't quite there, so the benefit ratio doesn't quite add up, and so I understand why a lot of women do not want to go into the industry.

What's the hardest part of being a woman in IT?

The networks. A successful senior business person has very good networks, and as I've said, the networks [in IT] are all very male-oriented, and so networking is very hard and knowing the right people is difficult.

Probably [the next hardest part] after that would be the work-life balance, because as a woman, I've got two kids, and so those are challenges that often my male colleagues don't have to deal with as directly as I do.

Trying not to let my job take over my life is a challenge, because it easily could.

How do you keep your job, side projects and life in check?

I like to be involved in industry associations, [such as] the computer society, management institute, organisation for quality -- a whole list, because I like to give back. I like to be part of my community, and I believe that we've been given a lot of opportunities and its our responsibility to give back to the community.

This year I've done some project management training in Vanuatu for some of the local church leaders there because they run large projects without any formal education let alone training, and I found that very rewarding, because to me, if you just worked and gave nothing back, that's not living.

Everyone gets the same 24 hours, so the challenge is what you do with the 24 hours. There's a lot you can fit in if you choose to do it. Unfortunately there's a lot of things that I've had to sacrifice as a result of that. It doesn't all fit into the 24 hours and that's the downside. So you've just got to understand what it is you're choosing not to do.

Have you got any professional role models?

Professionally, no. It's very hard to say that, but no. I've got a lot of role models in the male environment that I really respect, but I can't model my life on them because they have different challenges than I've got - I'm trying to juggle children and husband and life.

Certainly in Australia, where our major capital cities are fairly isolated, in Adelaide, to have a woman role model would be hard to find.

I do [think that it is important to have a role model]. In my personal life, I model my life on a number of people, and it's important, I think, to think 'Hang on, that's the kind of life I'd like to live, that's the kind of values I'd like to emulate'. So without role models it's more hit and miss.

There are a couple of ladies groups in IT that have a number of mentorship programs running, and I take my hat off to these ladies for putting the amount of time they do into trying to line up mentors for women coming into the IT industry. I think they do a great job. But as you get more senior, it's funny, I've got to a level where now I don't think I have one [a role model]. It's very sad.

Does EDS have any programs in place that are particularly targeted at supporting female employees?

We're faced with the same problems that other companies are faced with. When we go out to hire people, the girls aren't coming in from high school into the graduate programs, they're not coming out as [IT] graduates, therefore they're not available to be hired, which just makes the problem worse.

There are a number of benefits that the organisation has, and being a large organisation has benefits as well. It varies from things like daycare in some of our offices, through to being able to work from home, through to other benefits that most organisations would give women.

How do you think companies or education providers could make IT more palatable to women?

I've actually talked to a lot of them [education providers], and they are trying their best to encourage women into IT; I've been involved in a number of programs to try and raise women's awareness of the industry as a whole.

To be honest, education providers possibly could be looking at putting programs in place that are less technically oriented, perhaps focussing on some of the non-technical IT roles that are out there.

But in reality, they are really just responding to what businesses are asking for, so to me, the real change has to come from the organisations. I don't think the IT industry perceives its low percentage of women as a problem, and until they do, and actually actively address it as an industry, I don't believe that education providers or schools or industry associations are going to have a huge impact on changing the perception of IT with women.

First of all, the IT industry and management, which at the moment is predominantly male, need to recognise that it's a problem. They're losing out on a fair percentage on talent and skills out there in not having women apply for work in their industry. I believe women bring different skills and balance to a workplace, and so if there's less of us, we bring less of those skills and balance.

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PCW: Internode increases support for high speed ADSL plans

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

Internode has announced a new international link that is expected to boost its network capacity to the US by 40 per cent. The link will be provided by Australia-Japan Cable (AJC), and will run in conjunction with Internode's current fibre-optic link on Southern Cross Cable.

Internode's five-year agreement with AJC will provide an additional 1.2Gbps of bandwidth on top of the 3Gbps the network currently gets from Southern Cross Cable. As the AJC link can be easily upgraded up to 4.8Gbps, it also acts as a rapid expansion path that Internode expects it will need to support high-speed ADSL services planned for launch next month.

New ADSL1 plans running as fast as 8Mbps will be launched alongside the AJC link on January 10 next year. Although the high speed services have been available via Telstra since early November, the ISP is delaying the release of any new plans until it is sure of having enough capacity to take on new customers.

"Our growth rate is just massive at the moment," said Internode's managing director Simon Hackett. "We're not out of capacity at the moment, but if we accelerate our sign-up rate even more with those new plans, we may actually run out of what we have. We're just being prudent about it, just making sure we deliver the performance our customers bought."

Besides increasing the capacity of the network, the additional redundancy provided by the AJC link will also act as an alternative route which will allow the network to run uninterrupted in case of any failures in the Southern Cross Cable system.

"Most ISPs almost exclusively use the Southern Cross Cable network, and it's a great network, but there can be certain sorts of failures that can take the entire system out," Hackett said. "So now we're going to use two cable systems. It's like running mirrored hard drives; we're making sure we treat our customers' network as they would want us to - [with] extremely high reliability.

As it will be routed through Japan, Hackett said the AJC link could potentially also provide Internode with a path into Asia directly. The company is currently looking at doing a direct break out in the link from Japan into Asia, to improve network performance for customers accessing Asian resources.

"We have a significant amount of Asian influence and Asian population in Australia, and a lot of those people want to interact back with resources in Asia," Hackett said. "We're starting to see it [demand for a link to Asia]; it's not enormous yet, but this gives us the ability to grow."

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PCW: Instant messaging goes intelligent

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

"Is it possible to train machines to understand the way humans write and speak naturally, and to be able to then visualise people's ideas?" asks Sydney start-up Morf Interactive Communications when designing its artificial intelligence technology.

The company answers its own question with the MOJI Intelligent Messenger (MOJI IM), a three dimensional instant messaging application with intelligent virtual pets to enhance users' communication online.

Built from artificial intelligence technology initially developed by researchers at the University of New South Wales, MOJI IM uses an interactive heuristic engine to extract meaning, emotional nuances and syntax from what users type or say.

"We felt that to have a good commercial product as a start up, we probably need to have a low-cost, high-volume model; that's where we started getting interested in the instant messaging space," said Robert Fong, CEO of Morf Interactive Communications.

"Here was a platform where there was hundreds of thousands of conversations floating across the Internet each day, and no one was actually listening in, and harnessing meaning in that dialog for greater interactivity, and to create that unique experience in an instant messenger."

Understanding human speech allows a pet to learn about its owner and react to what is said during conversation, by generating images of what a user describes, or changing its appearance to suit a user's mood.

The intelligent messenger also acts as a cyber watchdog, by flagging threatening topics of conversation such as bullying, racism, sexism, and drugs, and notifying parents of any dangers via e-mail.

Aimed at the child and teenage market, MOJI IM will be delivered via a free download or CD. In the virtual world, called MOJIKAN, users can interact with their pets and with one another, blog, share information, photos and videos, play games, and shop for items using MOJI's own virtual currency.

While anyone can create a pet for free, pets begin requiring "food" after a three month trial period. Pet food and games are purchased in-game with virtual currency, which users younger than 14 years old can buy at a fixed rate using real world dollars.

For over 14s, MOJIKAN has a stock exchange system where the exchange rate between virtual and real world dollars varies according to supply and demand. The system works in a similar fashion to that of Linden Labs' virtual economy, Second Life, which has already proved successful, with real world spending of more than US$600,000 per day.

Fong expects the upkeep of each pet to cost users no more than $3 per month. While this does not seem like much money for the business, he expects that the amount will encourage a large volume of users to maintain their pets.

"The reason why we kept it this low is because we spin off the Korean model where it's really [about] micro payments, but lots of it," he said. "The main intention for the business model to succeed is that the user needs to have some sort of emotional attachment to the pet that then compels them to spend x amount of dollars to save that pet at the end of the free period."

MOJI IM is expected to be made available in to users in Australia and the South East Asia in May 2007.

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Image: Holiday Wi-Fi threat as obvious as Santa's beard

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

CW: Nortel-supported Master of Mobile Computing course launched

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Edith Cowan University (ECU) is launching Australia's first ever postgraduate degree in mobile computing with global networking company Nortel.

From January 2007, the West Australian university will offer a Master of Mobile Computing in addition to its current bachelors, postgraduate certificate and diploma offerings.

The two-year Masters program is expected to appeal to new graduates as well as IT professionals, offering theoretical knowledge, practical experience, and social networking opportunities with prominent members of the mobile industry.

Course material will be based on training material from Nortel, who will also provide carrier-grade equipment for laboratory work. Nortel's relationship with Edith Cowan University dates back to 2005, when the company deployed a wireless mesh network across the university's four campuses.

"Nortel is an ideal partner on that end because, off the top of my head, I can't think of another company which has such a significant influence and participation in both carrier space and enterprise space," said ECU senior lecturer and course coordinator Alfred Tan. "I think this recent announcement is just another high point in the cumulative work, on both ends, of our curriculum."

Unlike the mobile computing courses at other institutions that focus on specific areas of mobility, subjects in ECU's curriculum encompass the whole spectrum of mobility, Tan said.

To produce the multi-skilled "wireless warriors" that Tan envisions, the course covers technologies from Personal Area Networks like RFID and Bluetooth, to Local Area Networks like WiFi and wireless mesh technologies, to Wide Area Networks and mobile application development.

"In today's world, we are seeing a push towards a seamless operating environment where the device will adapt to what backbone you have without any effort from the user - for example, phones with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 3G," Tan said. "Students need to learn to develop smart tools that can seamlessly use these protocols at the backend, so as far as the user is concerned, they have an uninterrupted experience."

In addition to its partnership with Nortel, ECU also has agreements with Cisco, IBM, Lenovo, a South Australian industry-government consortium, and local mobile application developers in Western Australia.

The course will be delivered at ECU's campus in Mount Lawley, with some subjects also offered online. Students are required either to already possess a relevant undergraduate degree, or to be able to demonstrate equivalent prior learning, including at least five years of industrial experience.

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PCW: WiFi on The Rocks

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

An 802.11g network has been launched at the Sydney Rocks area to provide free high-speed wireless Internet access to the public. Initiated and funded by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA), The Rocks' Wi-Fi hotspot is expected to bring the city technologically in line with major tourist destinations around the world.

The service is accessible indoors and outdoors within the region between the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Circular Quay. Users log on to the network from any Wi-Fi enabled device simply by selecting the network on the device, and registering their details via a Web browser.

Users are limited to 30 minutes of usage on the network at a time, and access to a network which has a capacity of speeds of up to 54Mbps. The service, offered through iBurst mobile broadband provider, Chili Internet Solutions, employs a distributed architecture with five mobile access points, with bandwidth shared equally among all users.

During the three month period from the launch of The Rocks Hotspot on 27 July to 31 October, the SHFA and Chili have registered 860 hours of usage by about 1,000 users. While Chili's Business Development Manager, Matthew Blayney, admits that this is a relatively small number of users, he notes that it has been increasing steadily.

"On an average day," he said, "you may see between 10 and 20 users on the network.

"The number of people that are using it is on the smaller scale at the moment, but it is ramping up, obviously, as people are becoming aware that it's available. The main thing is really to tell people that it is available because a majority of the time, people aren't accustomed to having free WiFi available."

The network is currently able to support a maximum of 500 users at any one time, Blayney said, but as it has been designed to be scalable, it can be updated easily to accommodate more users when necessary.

But rolling out the network wasn't a walk in the park. Because it employs the popular 802.11 spectrum, it competes with many other wireless networks operating in the same space. To avoid excessively interference, "a lot of fine tuning" was undertaken by Chili to ensure that the channel that The Rocks' Hotspot operated on was least contended as possible.

Blayney said that the network does not have any major restrictions with downloading files, although Chili is able to block access to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) programs and Web sites from the core network if necessary. Also, as users on the network are only enabled to see the Internet, and not other users, Blayney said that he does not foresee many problems on the security front.

"Being a public hotspot, there isn't really a security perspective," he said. "It is a fairly open network; we don't enforce any sort of hard and fast security measures for people downloading certain things."

"Under our normal ISP policies and guidelines, we limit access to malware, pornographic and other similar sites, wherever possible."

According to Dominique La Bouchardiere, Comporate Affairs Coordinator of SHFA, Chili was selected to provide The Rocks' Hotspot service for its quality of service and competitive pricing.

The service is expected to appeal to travellers, students, business people and the local community as it will allow them to surf the Web, e-mail, play games, and check up on activities in the area amongst one of Sydney's most historic areas.

"Internet access is an integral part of many people's daily lives and free Wi-Fi is in high demand among all of these groups," La Bouchardiere said. "It [The Rocks' Hotspot] will help attract more visitors to The Rocks and encourage business growth, as people will have yet another reason to visit and stay in this unique destination."

The SHFA is currently considering providing a similar service in Darling Harbour.

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CW: Report questions telcos' role in furthering broadband

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

New, stricter regulations are required for the advance of Australian broadband, while the government should withdraw its support for nationwide infrastructure run by incumbent carriers, claims a report released Thursday by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA).

The report, titled "The Local Broadband Imperative", suggests that the telecommunications industry has been misguided in its approach to future broadband technologies, and is depending too heavily on a "big national solution" that can only be achieved through existing carriers.

Rather than being a nationwide problem, as is currently believed by the industry, broadband issues tend to vary by area, and can thus be more effectively addressed by small, local networks that could be managed by local councils, the report states.

"When it comes down to it, broadband and Internet access has a lot in common for an area as would local public goods such as garbage services and parks," said report author Joshua Gans, Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School. "If people think it's valuable, people are going to be very happy if it's in their area; it's going to bid up house prices in that area and it's going to earn more rates for local councils."

With current pricing of Telstra-owned infrastructure, however, entering the broadband market can be difficult for start-ups. And besides the issue of connecting local networks to Telstra exchanges, start-ups also face the issue of getting space in conduit to lay local networking cables or fibre.

"We don't have a market that would allow people to be entrepreneurial about exploiting whatever value they think might be there," Gans said. "It seems to me that what we need is to [allow] the competitors to be free of Telstra, and allow them to do the investment.

While Gans recommends that the government should encourage competition through stricter regulations on Telstra's wholesale pricing, the company argues that allowing other carriers to piggyback on its infrastructure is not only destructive to Telstra business, but also does not provide enough incentive for other carriers to invest in their own networks.

"There will be no solution to the broadband impasse in Australia while the current regulations remain in place," said Telstra spokesman Rod Bruem. "If Telstra could get an adequate return on the infrastructure, you'd see other competitors investing in infrastructure of their own, [but] there is no way competitors will be interested in building new infrastructure while regulations are so destructive."

Meanwhile, Gans argues that incumbent telecommunications carriers, including Telstra and Optus, may not be sufficiently motivated to make big broadband investments due to conflicting interests between their current phone service offerings and the possibility of low-cost alternatives, such as VoIP, that high-speed broadband will provide.

"I would just say that [from] a casual observation of their incentives, [it] looks like they [telecommunications carriers] have no real reason to speed it up," he said. "They're in a competing business - the last thing these guys are going to want is to allow a service to come in that is essentially almost zero price, because it's going to be competing with their existing lines of business."

"To hand responsibility for investment in broadband to people who have direct conflicts of interest doesn't seem like the way to go," he said.

Australia's broadband impasse has left the country lagging behind the rest of the world, with more than half of all broadband users still capped at download speeds of 512 kbps or less. While being a laggard comes with the advantages of lower costs and less risk, hanging on to old technology could be costing the country business and educational opportunities, the report warns.

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PCW: Nuance enhances mobile speech recognition

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

Nuance Communications has launched a system that will improve the text-to-speech and speech recognition abilities of mobile devices.

The product, Nuance Mobile Speech Platform, is expected to provide end-users with a simple, intuitive user interface, and allow mobile application developers to enhance their offerings.

Nuance is the same company that produces Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

The Nuance Mobile Speech Platform is built on a client-server architecture, which enables advanced speech recognition functions and any other queries to be sent from the mobile device to a remote server. As a server typically has much more processing power than a mobile device would, the platform is able to handle a much larger speech recognition vocabulary along with performing other tasks.

"Speech recognition is not limited to the device - it is sent over a packet to the server," explained Peter Chidiac, regional director of Nuance Asia Pacific and Japan's speech division,. "That then enables the server to be connected to the Internet, to corporate email, to SMS servers and so on, to enable mobile dictation with virtually unconstrained recognition."

Through the platform, end users will be able to perform searches, dictate emails and SMS messages, and have any incoming emails and messages read out to them, which, Chidiac expects, will improve the usability and efficiency of mobile devices.

To enable 'natural language processing', Nuance's speech recognition technology analyses a collection of utterances from local call centre data in Australia, the US, and the UK. Using statistical and semantic language modeling, the system compares the data against what is said, to decide on the most probable function the user is trying to perform.

"It's semi-artificial intelligence," Chidiac said. "You can say exactly what you want, and the system will route you to the right area, or the right person and so on. You don't have to go through the various prompts."

Using the platform, he said, a location search that would normally need around 47 clicks on a standard keypad could be performed with only two clicks and some verbal commands.

"What it enables is for you to get to what you want and access content, information, and do your communications in a more natural and faster way," Chidiac said.

Nuance is currently in discussions with enterprises and telecommunications carriers to bring the mobile platform to end-users. While Chidiac hopes the technology will reach the market by 2007, he said its commercial launch will be largely dependent on the company that deploys it.

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CW: Victoria's ability to host high-tech jobs questioned

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Victoria's current economy may be unable to sustain the production of hi-tech jobs and a global competitive edge in the future, according to a study by Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

In a report titled "Melbourne's Second-Speed Economy", researchers Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Paul Smith questioned the newly re-elected Bracks government's 'hi-tech master-plan' for Victoria, which the researchers claim to be too heavily focused on funding scientific research facilities, and too neglectful of existing opportunities, to produce jobs of the future.

By analysing data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics during the periods 2000-2001 and 2005-2006, the researchers have revealed what they call a 'misconception' in perceptions of the growth and subsequent rapid decline in the job market over the past five years.

Data suggests an overall growth in property and business services industries, which include high-end servicing jobs, legal and accounting services, computing services, and technical scientific services. While this growth has previously been seen as evidence of globalization and economic success, the Monash study suggests that the growth has been largely domestically driven and does not, in fact, reflect on global competitiveness.

"It appears that in both Sydney and Melbourne over the past half decade or so, much of the employment growth in the property and business services industries has been very closely related to the property boom in both of these cities," said Healy, a sociologist and Research Fellow.

"Our interpretation of the data at this point suggests that a lot of the jobs growth in the property and business services sector may have really not been so much to do with engagement of the global economy, but simply responding to domestic demand derived from population growth and the domestic property market," he said.

As a result of the widespread misconception, researchers speculate that governments are relying too heavily on population growth, property investment and property construction for continuing economic growth - elements that Healy said may create an "illusion of prosperity and economic viability", but will not make Australia more viable in the global marketplace in the long run.

Instead of actively investing in existing companies for the generation of future hi-tech jobs, the Bracks government, for instance, is placing too much emphasis on "new hi-tech firms" that are expected to emerge and take the place of the existing manufacturing sector, he said.

"They [the Victorian government] think that new firms are going to appear out of thin air to provide all these new, good, hi-tech jobs," Healy said. "We're saying that with the right sort of financial and other support, many existing manufacturing firms can improve and refine what they are already doing, and generate not only new and better products for marketing globally, but can generate high level jobs in that process as well."

By consulting with prominent industry members such as Ericsson and Ford Australia, researchers found that while corporations worldwide have placed high value on Australian engineers, the country has not been producing enough tertiary graduates to capitalise on this advantage.

"In absolute terms, the sheer number of tertiary graduates that are being produced out of Australian universities as a whole since 1996 have not increased very much," Healy said. "The economy has kept growing, but the volume of tertiary graduates has not kept pace with the economy."

"We probably have a culture in Australia of not sufficiently valuing engineering relative to other areas," he suggested. "We may have a national cultural problem in engineering and engineers are not really something that we've placed a very high status upon in the past."

Researchers are now recommending that the Bracks government fund a larger number of university places for the training of engineers in Victoria.

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CW: New Horizons ramps up summer training offerings

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Summer has arrived in Australia, and with the advent of the holiday season comes the sun, the surf and training opportunities to occupy IT staff during the traditional lull of business activity during the warmer months.

To meet the demand for training during December and January, New Horizons Computer Learning Centres has ramped up its offerings with more than forty classes running across the country each month, most of which will be run everyday via a 'Walk-in' program.

"Training is popular with IT staff at this time of year because demands on their time are usually lower when information workers are on leave," said Paul Hughes, Senior Account Manager at New Horizons. "So it is easier to schedule staff to attend training programmes."

Course offerings are primarily focussed on IT technical training, desktop applications training, and on business skills training, and range in price from $580 for a one-day Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database administrator course to $3,500 for a five-day ethical hacking certification course.

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CW: Sydney loses national share of IT jobs

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Besides having experienced a dramatic decline in IT jobs during the past five years, Sydney is also fast losing ground as Australia's IT hub, according to a study conducted by Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Researchers Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Paul Smith analyzed data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and found a decline of nearly 16,000 computer servicing jobs in Sydney since the turn of the millennium, compared to a decline of about 2,700 jobs in Melbourne.

And while Melbourne has maintained its national share of about 27 percent of all IT jobs in Australia, Sydney's national share has dropped from nearly 41 percent in 2000-2001 to 34 percent this year.

Healy attributed the nationwide decline in IT jobs to a number of factors, including millennium bug fears and the Sydney Olympics in 2000, which could have led to a boom, and subsequent collapse, in the employment of IT staff.

The July 2000 introduction of the Goods and Services Tax in Australia could also have contributed to the boom, as most companies had to either install new accounting programs, or modify their existing business software to be able to conduct business under the new GST regime.

In addition to GST and the millennium bug, which are expected to have affected all Australian cities similarly, Sydney has also experienced a decline in population growth and a move towards the outsourcing of IT services, which Healy said could be contributing factors to its loss of national share of Australian IT jobs.

"I suppose in the first place, there does tend to be a higher concentration of high-end servicing jobs in Sydney relative to the rest of the country," he said.

"[But] Sydney is no longer accounting for as big a part of the total number of computer services people that it used to; part of that absolute decline might be due to ... Y2K, GST and offshoring. But the decline in national share may be simply to do the fact that the population is growing rapidly in other parts of Australia, whereas the population growth in Sydney has slowed right down."

Rapid population growth in Queensland with the development of the Brisbane Hinterland region, and a resources boom in Western Australia are expected to have lead to the two areas now accounting for a much larger proportion of computer services personnel than in the past, Healy said.

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GGG: Samsung YP-F2

As a reviewer at Good Gear Guide:

Samsung's YP-F2, dubbed "the Pendant", has the look of a miniature clamshell phone. Too pretty to be a techie gadget, and too obviously wired to be a fashion accessory, the YP-F2 seems to be caught uncomfortably between two worlds.

The thumb-sized, 20.5 gram player boasts 1GB of storage and a 12-hour battery life. On the 28.1mm x 52.5mm front panel is a tiny three-line monochrome LCD, on which white text is displayed against a black background. While this proves to be effective in maximizing battery life, the size and brightness of the screen can be a strain on the eyes. Navigational buttons, volume control and connectors are kept to the edges of the unit, so there is nothing to distract from the screen and the silver Samsung logo printed proudly above it. There are four buttons on the right face of the unit: menu, play/pause, forward and back. The left face features a hold switch and volume controls.

Headphones plug into a 3.5mm audio out jack at the top of the unit. Supplied headphones are integrated into a necklace-like cord, with the player dangling off like a bizarre piece of technological jewellery. While the pendant design is a convenient way of carrying the device, the look may not be pleasing to all users. Samsung has included a clear plastic cradle that attaches firmly to the device and acts as a belt loop. In rebelling against the pendant design, however, you'll have to either supply your own headphones, or get used to carrying the player in a shirt pocket, since the necklace is not long enough to reach anything below chest-height.

Sound quality is good, and the player's five-band equalizer can be either tweaked manually, or tuned to one of seven preset settings: normal, rock, classical, jazz, house ballad, R&B and dance.

Disappointingly, navigation is clumsy at best. Holding down the top right "menu" button gives access to all the major functions, including the playback screen, file/folder navigation, playlists, FM tuner and settings options using the volume controls. All these are scrolled through using the volume control buttons, with both forward and menu buttons acting as select tools. The play/pause button takes you back to the playback screen. It was difficult to figure out the buttons initially, especially since the 10-page manual is no big help, and while you do get used to them, the experience could still use improvement.

The YP-F2 does not support sorting by artist, title, album or genre, and displays songs by filename only. Like its sibling the YP-U2, it does offer the very useful ability of organizing files into multi-tiered folders and navigating that way.

The FM radio feature was unable to produce a satisfactory sound from any of the radio stations tested. While the sound was clear, the constant interference quickly got annoying and gave the impression of holding a seashell to the ear. The unit stores six preset radio channels, and switches between them with the press of a button. Scanning for radio channels can be difficult however, as the device had a habit of skipping over prominent stations from time to time.

A proprietary USB 2.0 cable is used for data transfer, and doubles as a charging mechanism. It takes only two hours for the battery to fully charge.

The device is drag and drop, although Samsung Media Studio is also included, and can be used as an alternative. The software allows music to be sorted by artist or genre, and a search function allows the user to call up files by title, artist or album name. The software is basic and unpolished, and as an added annoyance, some menus appear in the Korean language, making the program quite difficult to navigate.

The device is drag and drop, although Samsung Media Studio is also included, and can be used as an alternative. The software allows music to be sorted by artist or genre, and a search function allows the user to call up files by title, artist or album name. The software is basic and unpolished - some queries appear in a foreign language.

All in all, the YP-F2 is a decent unit that does what any basic portable music player should do - load music, and play it.

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CW: Real-world programmer turns real estate agent in Second Life

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Ever thought of throwing in the towel with the tired 9 to 5 work regime of the real world? West Australian IT student Adam Frisby found his escape in the virtual economy of Second Life.

The virtual world was originally created by Linden Labs as a social experiment, and now hosts more than 1.5 million residents who, in total, spend about US$650,000 per day. Second Life's entire economy is currently worth over 1 billion Linden dollars (L$), which converts to roughly AUD$54 million via the game's own stock exchange.

Much like how real-world commerce operates, Linden dollars are used in-game for the buying and selling of land, goods and services. Second Life allows its residents to build literally anything they can imagine, using its developing tools and a C/Java-style language called the Linden Script Language.

For a skilled programmer, creating items in Second Life can be a job that offers variable hours, room for creativity, and huge potential for profit. Frisby, who is known in-world by his moniker 'Adam Zaius', is a Second Life entrepreneur whose business is expected to reap revenues in excess of AUD$1 million during the next 12 months.

Liz Tay speaks with Frisby about his Second Life as real estate developer.

How does your job work?

I run an Australian business called DeepThink with a Canadian business partner. We provide real estate (regions) inside Second Life which people can lease from us. Our biggest project is the Azure Islands which has over 100 regions, simulating an area larger than several small nations.

How much time do you spend working in-game?

It depends on the day - a lot of the work I do is spontaneous - on busy days I can spend up to 18 hours logged in, on quiet days as little as one or two. We now have four people on contracts with us to help out with the volume of work, but even still there's a lot that needs to be done.

What is your average day like?

I usually wake up at around 3AM so I can catch the end of the US business day. At the start of the day, I answer any messages that have been sent to me overnight while sleeping - from then on, it's designing new regions. I usually get through one or two new regions each day. There's a bit of everything required - programming and scripting for interactivity, texture design using Adobe Photoshop, modeling and terraforming using the client's own tools. There's certainly a market which would let us outsource these things, but we prefer to keep them 'in house'.

How much money is there to be made in Second Life?

The amount of money you can make is directly tied to real world skills - texturing skills, programming, etc. An established clothing designer I know makes around US$80,000 a year on a catalogue with more than 1,000 items. There's very little in the way of hourly contract jobs outside of a few small groups - but there's plenty of room for entrepreneurial activity if you can stand the hours.

How does your Second Life job compare with a standard 9-5 job?

It's not your average desk job - that's for certain, the great side is you get to work with a lot of interesting people from all over the globe; and there really is nothing else like the Second Life platform - you get to work on the cutting edge of Internet applications in a creative way. The downside is it's risky; at any moment everything could explode; Linden Labs could go bankrupt, and you would be out with nothing.

The best part of the job is we get to be really creative: we get to build entire worlds from scratch, and we have people going crazy over them. Pretty much everything we build gets a really great positive reaction from people. We have people lined up waiting for us to finish projects and let them in.

I don't think we've had any particularly bad incidents ... the worst I can think of is the odd bit of harassment to our residents we have to clean up after.

What first attracted you to the job?

I started using Second Life as a recreational activity - [drawn by] the lure of being able to program and see your results in a 3D environment 'live' - I had come over from a similar but older environment in January 2004. Back then, there weren't any moneymaking opportunities as the in-world currency was worthless.

Around early 2005, the currency picked up real tangible value. It took us awhile to realise it; but we started several projects mid-way through the year, including the Azure Islands; which has grown at an exponential rate ever since. My business partner, Alex, has been in since 2002 as an alpha tester.

Do you know of many other people who make money from Second Life?

There's around 200 people in Second Life who make more than US$1,000 a month, of that I would estimate around 20 of them make enough for a full time living, and of that around five who make more than US$200,000/year in revenue. There are a lot of creative people who are being noticed and hired by big businesses to build them a presence inside of Second Life; there's been a fantastic amount of growth this year. Second Life is on track for 2 million accounts by Christmas.

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Images: Optus trial brings traffic intelligence to road users

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

PCW: Hack to win a PS3

As a journalist at PC World:

Keen to get your hand on the eagerly anticipated PlayStation 3? Japanese Web host Shimpinomori is promising to give away a modified version of the powerful console to the first person who is able to hack it.

The challenge was launched less than two days ago by Shimpinomori founder, Augustin Vidovic, to test the security of the PlayStation 3 Open Platform and the viability of using it as a heavy-duty server platform.

"The PS3 is a brand-new kind of system, with the flabbergasting Cell processor, which the very architecture protects from most of the buffer overflow causes," Vidovic said. "It should be much harder to crack [than standard servers]."

Hackers have been invited to attack a Shimpinomori Web site, featuring an image of the PS3 box in the hands of a toddler. The first to replace the image will win the PS3 that the site is currently hosted on.

Mere hours after the challenge was launched, Vidovic's Web site was already attracting the attention of the blogging and hacker communities. To date, the site has received in excess of 1500 diggs on social bookmarking site Digg, and so far, said Vidovic, it's looking good.

"The Digg Effect [is] in full force, [and] the PS3 is at 95.5 per cent idle most of the time," he said. "Imagine that: the PS3 may be a pricey game console, but if it proves to be a first class server, it is really cheap!"

Vidovic has given hackers until mid-January to win the PS3, after which the offer will expire. So far, he said, there have been many people attempting dictionary attacks, brute force attacks against the SSH server daemon, and attacks via standard Nessus, kitco and other portscanners.

The PS3 has already been launched in the US and Japan, but with limited availability. It debuts in Australia in March 2007.

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PCW: Optus trial brings Traffic Intelligence to road users

As a journalist at PC World:

Optus has partnered with Sydney-based traffic information service provider, Traffic Intelligence, to trial a technology that is expected to provide high quality traffic information to road users.

The service is based on Cellular Floating Vehicle Data technology (CFVD) developed by Traffic Intelligence's U.K. partner, Itis Holdings, whereby data generated within a cellular phone network is aggregated and analysed to generate real time traffic and travel time data.

Cellular data is collected from what is called "handover events", which occur when individual mobile phone users are transferred from one cellular station to another as they move across geographical distances. Through monitoring and analysing patterns in these events, CFVD technology is able to identify movement down a road and calculate traffic time.

The service is expected to be the first of its kind in Australia, according to David Quayle, managing director of Traffic Intelligence. Pending the successful completion of the trials, Quayle expects the service to be available by the third quarter of 2007.

"What we're hoping to achieve [with the trial] is to prove that the combination of the Nokia technology, which is the platform technology, and the Itis analysis and aggregation technology, works," he said. "When you combine the two, it gives you the level of quality of data that Itis Holdings already gets overseas."

Itis Holdings has already deployed at least six similar projects overseas, Quayle said, but the Australian service will have to employ a slightly different method of accessing data anonymously over Optus' mobile phone network. While the overseas services used mobile phone network probes to generate data, Traffic Intelligence and Optus are trialling a Nokia cellular mediation product that will provide the same data at a lower cost.

"To put a probe into a mobile phone network is a fairly expensive exercise if the probes are not already there," Quayle explained. "On the Optus network, as with many other networks around the world, the Nokia product can replicate the data that we expect to get from the probes, so really what we're trying to do is utilise the existing infrastructure without incurring too high a cost."

Quayle called cellular traffic data the "gold standard" of traffic information for its accuracy. "It's an extremely good method of generating traffic information in a country like Australia," he said, "where you've got a fairly small population and a large geography, and not much physical infrastructure on the roads to counter vehicles."

If and when the service becomes available, it will be up to Optus and Traffic Intelligence to decide whether information will be distributed via SMS, Web-based applications, IVR (automated call centres), navigation devices, road authorities, or a combination of media.

As Traffic Information's sole mobile network partner, Optus will also be deciding if they would allow the service to be provided to other mobile networks, Quayle said.

"We chose to go with Optus because Optus was the most amenable of the three mobile networks in Australia that we've been talking to, [and] we really see no reason to [expand our partner base]," he said. "Because when we roll out we will be using multiple data sources - cellular, GPS and some road authority data when we can get hold of it - we won't need a second mobile phone network."

Optus was unavailable for comment.

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PCW: Burden of free hosting proves too much for Jumba

As a journalist at PC World:

In a move that has sparked a commotion amongst its users, Web hosting service provider, Jumba, has announced that it will withdraw its free Web hosting service as of December 8. All existing free customers, with the exception of a select group of 70 non-profit or charity Web sites, now face an ultimatum: upgrade to a paid service, or have your site taken offline.

Repercussions were swift for the Melbourne-based company, as dissatisfied customers turned to Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, to vent their frustrations.

Just eight months ago Jumba's new business development and customer service manager, Adam Ferguson, assured Whirlpool users that the company had every intention of keeping its Web hosting service free.

"If we turned around and stopped offering our free hosting and told people to upgrade to a paid account," he wrote prophetically, "any 'reputation' we had on Whirlpool would be all but gone."

But the abolition of its free Web hosting service is only one of several complaints that Jumba has accumulated on Whirlpool. The company has been labeled problematic, disappointing, "incompetent" and "a joke". And while there have been a faithful few customers supporting Jumba, they have been unable to counter the recent onslaught of censure.

Meanwhile, Jumba has been busying itself with improving its level of customer support, and its ability to deal with a fast-growing paying customer base, according to company director, Michael Banks.

"It's now been over 12 months since we originally started offering that particular [free hosting] service. We now have to shift our focus to our paying customers," he said. "A lot of our paying customers were either not referring clients to us because we still had free customers or didn't feel that we were at the level of professionalism of other companies, because we still had what they called a 'burden' of free customers."

Banks explained that the past year has seen Jumba's customer base grow from 400 customers to nearly 10,000, only around 1,600 of which are free accounts. Managing the growth was a challenge, he said, as the company was simply not prepared to take on the sudden load of new customers.

"When you weigh up the fact that customers aren't referring people to us because we have this free hosting burden, you have to look at it from both sides," he said. "We looked at it long and hard, and we can support these customers better and the rest of our clients better by not having this burden on us anymore."

Besides discontinuing its free hosting service, Jumba has also increased its staff count from 10 to 12 people during the past six weeks. It has also appointed dedicated, full-time system administrators, and will introduce a custom built customer service system, JACSS (Jumba Advanced Customer Service System), early next month.

JACSS will allow customers to use one central system to view invoices, pay bills, update credit card information, store and manage cPanel sessions, as well as manage domain names. Customers will also be able to submit forms and request information via the service, and view where they are in a queue of support requests.

"If customers can self-serve with things like viewing invoices, paying accounts, requesting basic information, that is 90 percent of our workload at the moment," Banks said.

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Image: Microsoft beefs up mobile platform

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

ARN: Sybase adds OSC to its list of OEM partners

As a journalist at Australian Reseller News:

Sydney-based software developer, Open Systems Consulting (OSC), has announced an OEM partnership with mobility software house, Sybase.

At the core of OSC's product range is Tplus Mobile; a PDA application for use in the courier industry and other services where data must be sent and received in real-time. OSC managing director, Steven Green, said it had built its application using Sybase' development tool, PocketBuilder.

The partnership was expected to benefit both parties, he said. At its simplest level, the contract guarantees Sybase a license income, and enabled OSC to purchase Sybase's database at a lower fee.

But both Green and Sybase A/NZ director of channels and alliances, Steve Dolan, agreed the license fee and savings were only secondary benefits.

Green said partnering with Sybase would also add credibility to OSC's products, which he predicted would help when marketing to large companies.

"Sybase has a lot of exposure in the mobile workforce market," he said. "It's a win-win type of relationship where they can leverage off our skills and we can leverage off their products and exposure in the market."

Dolan said the agreement added to Sybase's development of mobility solutions partners. It also provided the company with opportunities to utilise its alliance relationships with a variety of mobile device vendors.

According to Sybase figures, application partners generate over half of total partner-based revenue.

"I think in the mobile world, customers are more interested in buying a pre-built solution from a vendor like OSC than buying the database from us and trying to build their own," Dolan said. "Our feeling is that OEM and application partners are going to be very important to our success."

Sybase currently has about 40 OEM partners and application resellers in A/NZ, and another 20 in various stages of partner development. Dolan expressed an interest in continuing to grow its partner base.

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Image: Emirates to offer in-flight mobile phone service

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

CW: Google's recruitment process revealed

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Want a job at one of the hottest IT workplaces of the century? Well, Google is still employing. Even after declaring a massive worldwide growth in employees during the past financial year, the company is advertising vacancies in its engineering, sales, and operations teams.

In fact, according to Lars Rasmussen, Head Engineer of Google Australia, the company has been finding it difficult to find enough people for the positions it is trying to fill.

"I think Google worldwide would like to grow faster than we are - it's [manpower] probably our scarcest resource," he said. "Even though we're growing at quite a phenomenal pace, we're always short of engineers and we always want to find more."

But it's not simply another case of the nationwide skills shortage that has recently come to the attention of employers and institutions in Australia. Google maintains a high hiring bar, Rasmussen said, and there is generally a shortage of people with experience, academic background, and enough intelligence to reach the required standard.

Rather than search for one particular skill set, Rasmussen explained, all Google asks of potential employees is that they be "smart".

"We don't look for people with particular skills; we don't look for people with C++ experience or Java experience," he said. "We look for people that have excelled. And just by the nature of that, there is a shortage of people like that."

Notorious for its time and intellectual demands, Google's recruitment process is based largely on a series of interviews with a series of different interviewers. Through a range of interview topics from programming questions to general logic puzzles to personality checks, Rasmussen expects to be able to size up how skilled and intelligent a person is.

"The interview process is... 'intense' is a word I often here from people that get interviewed," he said.

Rasmussen said that while interviewers try to avoid "trick questions", they do aim to ask "unusual" questions that are not geared towards any particular skills or experiences in an effort to measure how well a candidate does on something they haven't worked on before.

It may take anything from four to a dozen interviews before Google hopefuls get a shot at working at the search engine monolith, but for those [[ArtId:958830083|after a challenge]], even the recruitment process can be an experience to remember.

Adam Schuck was recruited by Google Australia soon after graduating from the University of New South Wales with honours and a University medal in Computer Science in 2006.

"The recruitment process was like nothing I had ever done before," he said. "For my first round, I was interviewed by Operating Systems legend Rob Pike, and two of the Google Maps inventors, Lars Rasmussen and Stephen Ma. They asked me stimulating technical questions, and I can't remember having ever walked out of an interview so excited."

Schuck is now a software engineer at the Sydney Googleplex, working on Google Maps, which is estimated to have about 55 million users around the world.

"Google Maps is a really exciting product, and there are a lot of interesting problems which need solving in order to figure out what users want and how to give that to them in a fraction of a second," he said. "It is very satisfying to have written code which is being used by millions of people around the world every day."

Besides having worked amongst the colour and the cheer of the Sydney Googleplex, Schuck has also worked, played and enjoyed catered lunches at Google's offices in New York and Sillicon Valley.

"It is great to be part of a community of like-minded people all around the world," he said. "I am constantly impressed by the intelligence and enthusiasm of my colleagues. Everyone at the company seems to really enjoy what they do, and people sincerely believe that they can make a difference. It is extremely motivating to show up each day to the office knowing that your work will be seen by millions of people."

It may seem like the Wonderland of workplaces, but gaining admission to Google is far from child's play. According to Rasmussen, there is no way of grooming oneself into a position at Google, so the only way to get a job is to submit a resume and hope for the best.

"People often ask us how to prepare for an interview," Rasmussen said, "and apart from obviously encouraging people to look at Google's products and try and understand why Google has been so successful, really the thing is to not prepare at all; just be yourself and come in here, and we'll try and ask you questions you're not prepared for."

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PCW: Wireless energy to power nano-robots

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

Imagine coming home after a long day of work; too tired to consider anything besides your favourite sitcom and sleep, you set down your laptop bag by the door, carelessly empty your pockets onto the coffee table, tuck a wirelessly powered LCD TV under your arm and pour yourself into bed, knowing that a wireless power system would have fully recharged your mobile phone, PDA, laptop and MP3 player by morning.

It was a dark, fretful night when wireless energy transfer first presented itself as a research topic for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Marin Soljacic. Soljacic had forgotten to recharge his mobile phone and it was complaining in a loud, unpleasant tone as it reached the final moments of its battery life.

"Needless to say, this always happens in the middle of the night," he said. "So, one night, at 3 a.m., it occurred to me: Wouldn't it be great if this thing charged itself?"

Along with colleagues Aristeidis Karalis and John Joannopoulos, Soljacic developed a method of wireless energy transfer that is expected to one day render the need to plug in and power up a thing of the past. The team's research was presented at the 2006 American Institute of Physics Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Physicists have grappled with the notion of the energy transmission equivalent of wireless data networks for some time, Karalis said, but had no way of overcoming efficiency and range limitations. So instead of using a radiative field as in wireless LANs, TVs and radios, the team has proposed a technique that relies on resonance to transfer energy from one object to another.

In this scheme, energy is radiated from a source at a certain frequency. Just like how a musical tone may shatter one wine glass and not another, the particular frequency of emitted energy is detected only by another object that is resonant at the same level.

A non-radiative wireless power system has many benefits, such as its minimal effect on environmental objects and its efficiency over a theoretical radiative scheme. Once wireless power is commercially developed, Karalis expects such systems to power not only home appliances, but also make possible a range of future technologies.

"The proposed mechanism is promising for many modern applications," the researchers write in a scientific report. "For example, placing a source (connected to the wired electricity network) on the ceiling of a factory room, while devices (robots, vehicles, computers, or similar) are roaming freely within the room. Other possible applications include electric-engine buses, RFIDs, and perhaps even nano-robots."

But it may be years before the team's research comes into fruition. Besides energy inefficiencies to do with the nature of wireless systems, Karalis said, the wireless energy transfer scheme could pose health hazards through the magnetic field it induces around the resonant objects.

"However," he noted, "human beings and most random objects around us are non-magnetic and therefore interfere very little with magnetic field. Considering that the proposed energy transfer scheme generates a much smaller magnetic field than the one produced from Magnetic Resonance Imaging, gives us strong belief that the hazard could be minimised."

"In any case, let's not forget that there are numerous applications that do not entail the presence of humans, [such as] robots in a factory," he said.

The technology is currently undergoing experimental investigation to do with safety and inefficiency issues. Karalis said that it is still too early in the developmental stages for any business plans to be disclosed.

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ARN: SurfControl unveils new channel program

As a journalist at Australian Reseller News:

In one of its biggest channel overhauls in two years, SurfControl has revamped its partner program to help resellers to better support end-users.

The security vendor's vice-president of worldwide channel sales, Dave Harris, said its existing program had been adequate but lacked localised content.
"It didn't have online testing, and for partners, the challenge was keeping it up to date," he said.

SurfControl has introduced an online portal, 24/7 technical support, and new marketing resources for resellers. The vendor has also made available online its compulsory Star sales training and technical certification program.

Harris said the new-look partner portal now featured single sign-on technology and localised content. Partners could also control access permissions for their employees via the website.

The new program was launched at SurfControl's first Asia-Pacific regional partner forum in Sydney. CEO, Pat Sueltz, who was meeting local partners for the first time, said the event was its largest to date, with 50 resellers from Australia, India, Singapore, China and Japan in attendance.

"We started out 10 years ago being 100 per cent direct. Today, we're 100 per cent channel," she said. "We recognise that with more than 15 million users across some 23,000 enterprises, the way forward is to work closely with our partners."

SurfControl had experienced 15 per cent year-on-year revenue growth from Q1, 2006 to the first quarter of the current financial year, Sueltz said. This included double digit grown in Australia and New Zealand. The vendor now has about 100 resellers in the Asia-Pacific region.

"I don't think it's about our numbers, but about the quality. We want to make our certified resellers successful," she said.

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CW: An interview with Linux Australia's cover girl

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

It can be tough being a woman in an industry where almost four in five people are men. But that's just another challenge that Pia Waugh enjoys, alongside juggling her own consultancy, a research position at Macquarie University, running Linux Australia and Software Freedom International, and being otherwise heavily involved in the industry.

Liz Tay speaks with Waugh about her experiences, passion for technology and open source, and advice on how to take on the skills shortage in Australia.

What, and when, was your first job in IT?

I believe that I was 18 [or] 19, working as a technician and sales person for a small IT company in Revesby in Sydney. It was part-time, while I was at Uni, and it was quite enjoyable getting to pull things apart and play with things. That was my first paid IT job. It was mainly hardware, but also a bit of software; people coming in with screwed up computers and we had to fix them. It was fun.

What first sparked your interest in IT?

My mum was a techie so I've been using computers since I was four. Going through school I changed my mind many times, as we all did - you know, wanting to be a vet, or a Chinese medicine person, or in IT, or whatever. But I ended up falling back into IT because it's just a natural fit for me and I love technical work, and then I got into Linux and that propelled me more into IT.

Did school influence your decision to go into IT at all?

No, not at all. In fact, every IT teacher I've had has been completely useless. I went to a small country school up until Year 10, and there were only two of us interested in computers: one girl and one boy. And we used to fight like mad, because I was a PC girl and he was a Mac boy. And in Year 11 and 12, when I went to an all-girls' school which was a bit bigger, there were only probably half a dozen of us who were into computers. So I've never really had that many of my peers into it.

Did you ever find it difficult as a woman in IT?

It was never hard being a woman in IT. It's interesting, actually, because I think there are cultural expectations in countries like Australia and the US that you need to be masculine to be in a male-dominated industry. Whereas you go to countries like Malaysia, or Finland, or even Iran, and there's a lot more women in IT because there's not a gender association with IT, and thus they don't expect you to be masculine to go into IT. It's been interesting to look around the world and to understand that that is a cultural expectation and thus it is something that we can actually overcome.

I mean, I've had people assume that I've had to be a big, butch lesbian to be working with computers. But that's such a rarity. It's not even a butch thing for males to get into! [Laughs] So it's quite bizarre.
---PB---
What's one good experience that you've had, and one bad experience?

One good experience was being invited to go and use my technical skills to help solve social problems - helping set up a community center with loads of computers in Nhulunbuy, which is a tiny little remote community in the middle of Arnhem Land [in the Northern Territory]. So I guess the best experience for me is being able to use my skills to make the world better, rather than just as a career.

One bad experience was probably having a server crash and then having to do a 21 hour day to try and get it to install in exactly the right way so it didn't crash. That was Microsoft, and it was one of the last projects I worked on Windows. [Laughs]

Where are you currently working?

Currently, I've got a couple of gigs. First of all, I've got my own consulting practice that I run with my husband called Waugh Partners, where we do vendor-neutral Open Source consulting, industry development, strategic consulting, that kind of stuff.

I also work part-time at Macquarie University in a research position, looking at the use of open source in the research and higher education sector. So I'm sort of in both a research position and a technical position and an advisory position, so it's really awesome at the moment.

You're also quite active in the Linux and Open Source community, aren't you?

I was the first female president, and am currently vice-president, of Linux Australia. I've been involved with them for five years or so. I'm also president of Software Freedom International, which is an international non-profit group who run Software Freedom Day, looking at transparency and sustainability in technology.

I've been involved and I've spoken at loads of girls-in-IT events around Australia, and there's an event called TechGirls that I help run in the Central Coast [NSW]. TechGirls is again focused mainly on talking to school girls about IT and how it can be really fun and really exciting and completely different from the stereotypes.

I'm also involved in a project in Sydney where we're going to be going into schools and talking to girls and boys about IT generally because we think it's important that young males get to meet rocking female role models, and rocking male role models in IT. Our event is going to be kicking off probably mid-next year.
---PB---
What aspects of open source technology interest you most?

There are two aspects that interest me most about open source. The first is the community aspect - the fact that I can go anywhere in the world and sit down and have a coffee or a beer with someone who has the same underpinning values as me: the values of freedom, anyone getting involved in technology, anyone being able to make it from zero to hero. There's such a great support base.

I found, in the proprietary world, there's far less of a support base for technical people; finding information is hard, and often enough, because people don't have access to the source code, it takes a bit of guesswork to fix things. Whereas in the open source world, it really is so easy to get things fixed. It's technically such a brilliant set of solutions.

The second aspect about open source that I love is that you can innovate so much because you have access to what's going on. What you do create, you can trust because you can see the source code, and what you do create is sustainable because anyone can build on it in the future rather than having to start from scratch.

So I guess the sustainability and transparency of systems is something I care about deeply, because our lives are so based on technology. Why should my generation and future generations not be able to access our history, read our love letters and all this stuff that we've developed, just because our lives are recorded digitally?

Open source, for me, is a way of making sure that we can trust and rely upon technology that we use everyday to not limit our personal rights.

Have you any professional role models?

Bdale Garbee [Linux CTO of HP]. I listened to a talk of his about four years ago, because he was the project leader of the Debian project at the time. I'd just been nominated for president of Linux Australia, and had no idea about how to lead an organization. So I went and had a chat to him, and he is the one that talked to me about how to establish common values in the community in order to establish common goals, and he's just been such a great role model for me since then, both technically, in terms of the work that he does, and also professionally, in terms of how to build my own career, how to lead a community, and how to take this whole open source thing forward.

And - this is going to sound really w-nky, and I don't care - my husband, Jeff Waugh. He has done a lot in open source, he's just a great open source professional, and it's been really good working with him because we both have different skill-sets and so we're able to make those work together in our own company.

And can I have one more role model? My dad. He is a refrigeration mechanic and the savviest business-person I know. My mum and dad always have run multiple businesses and it's their business-savvy that has made me feel comfortable and confident with setting up our own business.
---PB---
What sorts of character traits do you think would recommend a woman to the industry?

Here's the thing. The reason that we called the event 'TechGirls' is that it's about technology. I go in to these talks and the first question I ask the students is 'How many of you have a mobile? How many of you use MSN? How many of you use the Internet?' All of the hands go up. The kids of today are more technologically gifted than any of the generations above them. They are already very comfortable using technology to solve problems, to do what they want to do, to communicate, to do assignments, whatever.

If you love playing with gadgets, if you love actually playing with technology, then I think you're quite suited to working in IT. If you like solving problems, if you like having challenges, learning, and being surrounded by smart people, I find IT has a lot of really great people that are a lot of fun, are very smart and challenging, and it's a great community to get involved in.

Because there's such a diverse amount of jobs out there, you don't need specific maths, science, programming, or even creative skills. There's a job for pretty much everyone in IT and so it's just a matter of jumping in feet first and having a bit of fun finding out what takes your fancy.

The industry you're describing sounds very inviting, but the fact is there is a very low ratio of IT women to men. Statistics compiled in 2005 by the Australia Bureau of Statistics show that women comprise only 20.5 per cent of the IT workforce. Why do you think this is so?

In Australia, apparently numbers are going down. This isn't the case in every country. I personally think that Australia is becoming more conservative, and thus the place of women is becoming more strictly defined - and I think that's really silly. I also feel that there is a lack of understanding about IT jobs in schools. Schools are about six years behind the industry and six years ago, we had a bust. So schools are actually telling their kids not to go into IT. Girls tend to be focused on careers at an earlier age than boys, so if a teacher tells them to not go into IT, they're probably going to listen more, and I think that contributes to it.

And there's this horrible stereotype of a nerd, that doesn't have much of a social life, or hygiene, and unfortunately that has gotten out there. So every time I get in front of these girls, I talk about how I'm very proud to be a geek, because a geek is a person who uses technology to do cool things.

How do you think companies or education providers can go about making the IT industry more appealing to girls?

The first thing we need to do is to assist teachers and careers advisors in schools to get a handle on the diversity of jobs available in IT, because at the moment, a lot of them just don't have the information and thus can't help encourage childrens interest when they do express an interest in computers. I've seen kids be told "no, don't go into IT, be a social worker" - not because the teacher is trying to turn them off IT, but because the teacher just doesn't know anything about IT. So the first thing that we need to do is to go to the younger education institutions and rectify the situation.

I think companies can make clearer what they're looking for. There are so many IT companies that don't care if you have a degree, for instance, because what they're looking for is experience. But if they better defined what they're looking for, perhaps we can build that into degrees and into TAFE courses and even into schools, so that the kids who don't have the experience are more likely to actually have the skills they're after. We have a massive gap between what's being taught is useful in IT and what actually is useful in IT.

So you think that the IT industry is difficult for people to get into because they just don't know where to start?

Absolutely. I had an example where a girl contacted me just basically saying that she's doing a sysadmin course at TAFE, she has no idea where to go, no idea about what experience to get. I told her about the Sydney Linux user group. She hadn't used a lot of Linux before, but she was pretty keen - she drove four hours to come to Sydney for this Linux user group meeting, and three weeks later I'd helped her get a placement as a junior in a Sydney ISP.

She just couldn't get that [on her own] because there's just no pathway to doing that. Most companies are looking for three or four years on the job, and how do kids get that? My first IT job was difficult to get, but from there on it was really simple.

So I think we need to try and look after that a little bit better, and help students get work experience. Work experience is being [removed] from schools, so how are they supposed to be able to go into a job?

One of the things I talk to them [young people] a lot about is volunteerism. If you go to a Web development company and you can say 'here are six websites I've already put together - one for my parents, one for my school...' then you're building up a portfolio that will help you.

I think that the biggest thing that young people can do today is to heavily get into volunteerism and involved in communities because it's those contacts and the portfolio that will help them get a good career.

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Image: NTP files patent infringement suit against Palm

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

CW: The Observatory Hotel makes spam an unwelcome visitor

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

With only a small IT staff, yet a significant amount of its business being conducted electronically, cyber security is an issue high on the priority list of Grant Raubenheimer, Hotel Manager of the Observatory Hotel in Sydney.

The 100-room hotel employs 145 staff to perform tasks that include managing reservations and servicing rooms, but relies on a barebones IT department to manage its computing resources.

It is the lack of specialized IT staff that makes SMBs like the Observatory Hotel a soft target for spam.

"For a small business, it's the unknown - not knowing what to do for your business to operate," Raubenheimer said. "With a bigger operation, you're able to put more resources into IT security."

But resources or no, the hotel relies on its network of about 10 servers and 60 computers for property management, communication and back office functions, so the possibility of a security breech is too grave an issue to be ignored.

"We utilize the computers all the time to manage the business," Raubenheimer said. "There are things we have to deliver, and if these [systems] crash, then we have a problem."

More than 20 percent of the hotel's business is conducted via email, Raubenheimer said. But while the hotel receives over 30,000 emails a month, more than 55 percent of these are estimated to contain viruses or to be spam.

Besides costing the hotel bandwidth, leaving staff to deal with potentially malicious email is a drain on time, could lead to viruses being installed, and runs the risk of having sensitive information revealed to phishers.

To avoid such complications, the Observatory Hotel turned to a combination of anti-virus and anti-spam software and services.

"I suppose it's the philosophy, 'To be sure, to be sure'," Raubenheimer said. "If we can stop it [a malicious email] before it gets into the hotel, it's great for us; we don't have to worry about it, and we don't get the staff going, 'is this a legit email? Do I double click on the link? Do I open the executable file?'"

The hotel originally purchased Trend Micro's anti-virus product to provide a layer of security on its Linux servers. However, as the product focuses primarily on viruses, it did not stop a large amount of spam from getting through to the hotel.

So when the hotel migrated from Linux to Microsoft Exchange to enable remote email access, it took on an additional layer of security through MessageLabs' Protect service. The service filters out spam and viruses at Internet level, which saves bandwidth and employee time for the hotel.

"I do find that there are products out there that pick up on a virus quicker than others," he said. "In the time that we've been running the programs, we've never had an issue."

Acceptable use

Following the new implementation, the next step for the hotel is to make sure that its employees are aware of cyber-security issues and how they can be avoided. All employees are required to agree to the hotel's Acceptable Use Policy before using the Internet each day.

"It [the policy] educates the employees as to why there are things that you can and you cannot do," Raubenheimer said, "so that we know that everybody in the organization knows exactly what is required and why we do it, and what we as an organization should be doing in order to make ourselves more secure."

In addition to the policy, the hotel has systems in place to block known pornographic or otherwise time-wasting URLs, and disable executable files from being run.

"Whatever we put into the system, we're very cautious about the security aspect," Raubenheimer said. "We will put the measures in place so that we are not compromised."

While these electronic roadblocks could potentially mean that legitimate emails are filtered out and reservations are lost, Raubenheimer has not yet been faced with any such problems. Besides, as he says, "it's better to be safe".

Raubenheimer's penchant for safety costs the hotel around two thousand dollars per year, but he says that is "not a huge investment" for security.

"You weigh up the cost benefit of downtime and having to recover data, and of being safe, and if it costs you three, four thousand dollars, then it's a small price to pay," he said. "It's our insurance policy."

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