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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ARN: Access Providers gets Activ

As a journalist at Australian Reseller News:

Access Providers (AP) has cemented a share acquisition and subscription agreement to acquire Sydney-based telco and IT services provider, Activ. The move follows the Melbourne-based wireless carrier's decision to accept a $2.85 million takeover bid from WIN Corporation for its shares in SelecTV.

Negotiations with Activ began in January this year, AP CEO, Keith Ondarchie, said, but were slowed by processes relating to AP's acquisition of Saise Telecom in September last year.

Activ is ASX-listed AP's third acquisition to date. Prior to purchasing Saise, the company also acquired ISP, Online 2000, in July 2005.

Activ would provide a platform for growth in the Sydney market, Ondarchie said, with AP providing networking expertise and Activ providing data, voice and mobile services.

"At a much larger scale, [we will be able to] offer to our customer base more complex solutions," Ondarchie said. "Activ brings a much higher level of customer and channel partnerships."

Ondarchie expressed an interest in growing the company's nationwide reseller base, but said it was currently too early to confirm how it would achieve this. Its first step would be to enhance Activ's channel model and adopt it nationally.

"They [Activ] have a different type of reseller model, where their resellers of complex engineering solutions refer to Activ to design and deliver them," he said.

AP reported a 170 per cent increase in revenue to $10.8 million in the 2006 financial year. With Activ under its wing, the company forecast in excess of $22 million in full-year 2007 sales.

The acquisition of Activ and its 19 staff brings AP's headcount to 70. While the company currently has zero debt, Ondarchie said it was looking to reorganise its finances for a more flexible balance of debt and cash.

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