(Blogging this in absolute surprise that the clip wasn’t already available on YouTube! Had to find and upload it myself. Lazyweb, where are you?)

… but this may just be the first step towards a more open process here in Australia. It’s a good sign that things are changing for the better, at the very least. Rock on!

The Federal government and patent agency IP Australia have launched a new open, online database featuring almost 20 years’ worth of the country’s patent application records, in a bid to make it easier for inventors to check if someone else has already had their light bulb moment.

The AusPat database, launched this week as part of a joint initiative between the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) and IP Australia, will allow researchers and the innovation industry to crosscheck patent applications with records dating back as far as 1979.

 — New patent database exposes inventors’ old ideas, by Marcus Browne, ZDNet

While the packages were downloading, I noticed a few coming from universe, but fewer than I had expected. I try not to use universe stuff on my mission-critical server, but some things are just too good to live without. Perhaps they’re candidates for main inclusion?

So, here’s some of the universe stuff I can’t live without on my server, excluding supporting libraries:

• collectd: Totally awesome “just works” system information collection and graphing tool. No more dicking around with nightmare configuration of Cacti and friends — collectd comes with a bunch of useful and sensible plugins that are ready-to-go for common graphing tasks. collectd has a vote of confidence from the Red Hat Emerging Technology folks, so you know it’s good.

• libapache2-redirtoservname: Convenience module for making sure you’re always redirecting to the primary domain name for your websites — with only one line in your VirtualHost configuration. Here’s how easy it is to use:

  ServerName bethesignal.org
  ServerAlias www.bethesignal.org perkypants.org www.perkypants.org
  RedirectToServerName On

• rtorrent: Simply the best terminal-based torrent client.

• php5-xcache: Opcode caching for PHP. Handy when running lots of PHP gash.

• mailgraph: Lets me know how much spam I’m killing, and email I’m suffering. See mailgraph on gnome.org for a great example of mailgraph in action.

Surely udev could read and do something useful with /etc/iftab, even if it only provides a fraction of the functionality? Ubuntu successfully migrates the configuration, which is plenty good, but… ew.

I’d kick myself for becoming a “this is progress?! in my day…” curmudgeon, but this is a matter of protecting simplicity rather than pointless defense of “the old ways”.

Here’s /etc/iftab:

# This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces.
# See iftab(5) for syntax.

eth0 mac 00:15:c5:4a:71:98 arp 1
eth1 mac 00:18:de:03:3e:0d arp 1

While this is /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules:

# This file maintains persistent names for network interfaces.
# See udev(7) for syntax.
#
# Entries are automatically added by the 75-persistent-net-generator.rules
# file; however you are also free to add your own entries.

# PCI device 0x14e4:0x1600 (tg3)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:15:c5:4a:71:98", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x8086:0x4222 (ipw3945)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:18:de:03:3e:0d", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="eth1"

stanley: ~
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
201 host
46 bzr
43 ls
40 cd
32 sudo
22 vi
19 scp
12 clear
11 ./push-live
9 wget

Amusing aberration at the top there.

At end June 2007, there were 45 businesses in Australia involved in the provision of digital game development services. These businesses employed over 1,400 people and generated a total income of $136.9m which represented an average of $3m per business.

Total expenses incurred for the same period were $128.5m. Almost two-thirds of this amount was attributable to labour costs ($83.8m).

During 2006-07 digital game development services businesses recorded an operating profit before tax of $8.5m, and an operating profit margin of 6.2%.

Compare and contrast.

But it wasn’t just that. I also wondered how much we kicked Perl’s arse. Or, put more diplomatically… I wondered what the difference might be between two large, mature FLOSS projects.

Of course, GNOME and Perl have very different structures, requirements and constituents, and there’s simply no point making comparisons with Apache’s… consortium of projects.

More seriously, I really liked the visualisation, interface and rich querying capabilities. The attention to detail to these issues makes MarkMail the #1 mail archive site I’ve seen.

Thanks to Jason Hunter at Mark Logic, we now have a full import of the GNOME mailing list archives to play with in MarkMail. Enjoy!

Update: Jason has announced the loading of 750,000 GNOME mailing list archive emails. Rock on!