Hi everyone! Just a quick note to say I’ll be delivering the Tasmanian branch of the ACS’s (Australian Computer Society) IT in the Club talk for March. I’ll be speaking on my recently completed Honours and newly-started PhD work on “pilers” and “filers” in Personal Information Management (PIM). It’s a free event for students and ACS members (and possibly the general public) and there’s typically free food and drink. I’d love to see some of you there!

• API Centre, 69 Liverpool Street Hobart
• Wednesday, 11 March 2009
• 5.30 - 7.30 PM

I should note that I was recently added to ACS Tasmania’s Executive Board, a role which I hope will allow TUCS and ACS Tasmania to have a mutually beneficial relationship! A good year ahead!

Hi everyone! I’ve been hard at work on Project “F” since LCA2009 finished.  Just what is Project “F”? Well, you’ll find out in a few short weeks! You’re all going to love it, I guarantee it. Secret Lab is also working on getting Button Squid out the door for Windows, Mac and iPhone. That should appear very, very soon.

I’m heading back to Uni today to start my PhD in Computing. My supervisors are Professor Christopher Lueg (who was my Honours supervisor) and Professor Peter Marshall (from the Information Systems dicipline); I haven’t quite fixed on a topic let, I’ll no doubt post about it in detail when I do! Needless to say, I’m looking forward to getting back into Uni. The tax-exempt scholarship certainly helps too…

In other interesting matters, I encourage you all to read the extremely surreal comic Awakeman by my multi-talented friend Josh Deprez. It really is very strange.

Andrew, from Secret Lab, has a post up singing the virtues of Adobe CS4’s smart layers and shows off some cool Button Squid promo art!

Also, my friends the Jess^2 have revamped their website at TheJessSquared.com. You should go take a look!

That’s it for now, don’t forget to follow @thesecretlab on Twitter!

linux.conf.au 2009 finished yesterday in Hobart. It was run at my home university, UTAS. A great time was had by all. The three keynotes were all pretty interesting and there was a great spread of talks over all of the miniconfs and during LCA itself.  My favourite talks were, in no particular order:

• Did Hell Freeze Over? by Lawrence Crumpton (from Microsoft)

• Beyond Open Source by Arthur Sale (Professor of Computing at UTAS)

• FOSS games and the law by Nic Suzor (EFA Australia and Law Academic)

• PHP Architecture, Scalability, and Security by Rasmus Lerdorf (Creator of PHP)

• The Art of Klingon programming and What’s New in Perl 5.10? (double feature) by Paul Fenwick (Perl Training Australia)

• Awesome things you’ve missed in Perl by Paul Fenwick (Perl Training Australia)

• Geek My Ride by Jonathan Oxer and Jared Herbohn (Car Nerds)

• Open Source for Model Rocket Design by Bdale Garbee (Beardless)
  

Finally got around to registering for LCA 2009. You can stop annoying me now.

Hi all! Just got back from a whirlwind tour of Melbourne, then Sydney - Jon and I have been running three-day REALbasic workshops for the AUC. Both went extremely well, a clever and engaging bunch of students all around! The material will be available online shortly, I’ll update this post when it’s up.

I was also pleased to find out I achieved a grade of First Class Honours for my Honours work this semester. I’ll be heading into a PhD next year - wish me luck!

Secret Lab is doing well at the moment, we’ve made some great contacts in recent weeks and are embarking on some exciting projects! More to come soon, it’s all very secret still!

Please make sure that anyone who cares at all about the future of Australian freedom of internet access and censorship in general does what they can to stop Senator Stephen Conroy (Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) from enacting his ridiculous plan for a technically and democratically unworkable internet filter.
Make sure you write a letter to the senator, full details can be found at the No Clean Feed website. Senator Conroy’s contact details are as follows:

• (03) 9650 1188
• minister (at) dbcde.gov.au
• Level 4, 4 Treasury Place, Melbourne Vic 3002

A sample letter, for the lazy, can be found at the No Clean Feed campaign website.

Just got back from AUCs fantastic /dev/world/2008 conference. It was a tremendous success, some great sessions were run. Jon Manning, Andrew Bennett and myself attended as presented and had some great feedback from our sessions on AppleScript, OpenGL and Polishing Applications, respectively. I met some great people and learnt a few new things.

Also, the trivia night was absolutely awesome; kudos to the University of Tasmania/AUC’s Tony Gray for running that (with a little help from the Secret Lab team.)

If you want the slides, then head over to the Secret Lab site and grab them! The slides from my brief presentation on Circuit can be found here. Enjoy!

Anyone who wants further info on anything, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Hard at work on my Honours thesis. I have almost completed my introductory chapter. Hopefully it actually makes sense, I’m planning on giving it to my supervisor to read sometime next week.

I’ll be giving a presentation at AUC’s /dev/world 2008 conference in Melbourne entitled “Polishing Your Cocoa Application” - should be good! Jon Manning and I will also be running two workshops on REALBasic in Melbourne and Sydney in late November/early December - if you’re at a eligible AUC University and are interested - then please go and apply!

This previous Sunday Secret Lab was fortunate enough to appear in the Sunday Tasmanian! After being e-mailed by one of the editorial staff on Friday afternoon, I did a quick phone interview with them and we were rushed off to The Mercury building for a photo shoot.

Jon Manning, Andrew Bennett and myself appeared alongside Josh Deprez in a rather complimentary article entitled “Cyber students hunt big game”. Good press all around! Read our 5 minutes of fame here!

In other news, I was saddened to be present as Starbucks in Hobart closed its doors for the last time tonight. Secret Lab (and myself personally!) have effectively used it as an office since it opened in late 2006. No other coffee shop in Hobart provided a decent working space and didn’t mind us sitting there for hours upon hours (nor the strange noises we sometimes made!)