• Official Public Sphere event details on Senator Kate Lundy’s site.

• The Twitter feed from the morning.

• Craig Thomler’s liveblog from the event.

• Tom Worthington’s blog (Including links to the slides of the morning’s presentations)

More posts to follow, just need to let the dust settle!

Akismet  for WordPress: Anti-spam. If you’re running WP you’re probably already running Akismet. It’s a fantastic anti spam plugin that fights against the scourge of comment spam. If you aren’t running Kismet you’ve probably got a lot of jibberish comments from Russia. If you’re not running it, you must set it up immediately! You’ll need an API key for this, but getting one is a simple process. Akismet = ftw.

NextGEN gallery: Photo Gallery. This is a fully featured but simple to use gallery plugin for WordPress. It uses the nice Lightbox transition effects to display your photos and there’s an option to turn those photos into a flash slideshow. It’s got good thumbnailing, tagging and watermarking options. I’ve tried a few gallery plugins and this is definately my most favourite to date!

Cystats: Cystats is a great web-stats plugin with a good layout and a comprehensive set of views. It lets you see who visists, when and where. I use Cystats for “blog-only” traffic data which for some people is going to be their focus. Free, well supported – a must have!

So there you have three essential plugins for a multimedia website. Check back later for additions to this list!

In a shock decision this morning, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced that none of five bidders including Optus and Melbourne group Acacia for a national network were up to scratch.Under the new plans, the funding for the network offering speeds of up to 100 megabits per second will be provided by a national broadband network corporation in which the Government will be the majority shareholder.

$15b national broadband network (NBN) on way

“night safari is awesome as well. its a completely different zoo right next to the normal one. only open between 6 and 11 pm, but full of nocturnal animals and really well laid out. plus they have this crazy ‘fish spa’. you pretty much sit with your feet in an aquarium full of cleaner fish and they nibble away at your dead skin. the little ones just feel like bubbles. the bigger ones, yeah. they feel like a fish biting you. but in a good way. the water was also cool and moist (sorry. inside joke) a lot of people flipped out about it all, but after a day trekking around in mid 30s with insane humidity and monsoonal showers it felt pretty good.”

Monkey magic – Brigg’s blogspot.

Koala drinks from waterbottle (news.com.au)

“The lovely folks at Radio Proglas have been foolish enough to give me 45 minutes of air time. I think they think that because the majority of the audiance doesn’t speak English, I can’t do any harm.Radio Proglas is a Christian Radio Staion, but from 7.15 to 8pm Feb 12, I promise there will be no mention of god…possibly of alcohol and sex, but no god.Feb 12 @ 7.15pm in Czech / EuropeFeb 13 @ 5.15am in Australia” (Radio Proglas)

For a preview, it’s worth checking his MySpace and if you like what you hear do yourself a favour and join his Facebook group.

The day was well balanced and very valuable. The audience of around sixty comprised of people who had never used Joomla before, to seasoned gurus, and everyone in between. For the uninitiated, the first hour was used to show how quickly and easily Joomla can be set up in a variety of environments. A very thoughtful suggestion from Raoul Callaghan for people who don’t have their own web hosting account was to use JumpBox, a virtualisation package that allows for a nearly instant install of Joomla for you to play with! Being told about JoomlaPack, a Joomla backup and migration tool, probably made my day! CASE is always looking for handy tools to make things easier, and JoomlaPack looks to be one of them.

The day moved onto discussions about templating, general design and then security. A tip from Nick Sibbing has three big ticks and a star next to it in my notepad, and that is putting ?tp=i after a URL to reveal location and name of each Joomla module – no more hunting! Potentially the most shocking number of the day was that despite millions of downloads of Joomla, only a few tens of thousands of people have subscribed to the Secuity Alert email service. If you run Joomla but aren’t subscribed, do it now!

During the day there were two other  pieces of software shown off, all Joomla friendly of course. OpenFreeway, an Open Source e-Commerce solution, I think, shows great potential. I would be very nervous using a FOSS e-commerce solution (especially if credit cards are envolved) but a note the FreeWay people made was that, unlike any other in it’s class, will be PA-DSS certified (that is, appoved by the credit card companies). So, FreeWay holds potential for small business and not for profits that previously couldn’t afford to take their commerce online! Then, in a global launch, the guys from Zac Ware revealed Jentla, the world’s first Joomla Enterprise Layer. This could be an exciting development for CASE, because it allows you to administer up to a thousand different Joomla sites from one point. This means security updates, rolling out new extensions network wide and things of that nature may have just become a lot, lot easier.

This is just a taste of what took place during the day and I can highly reccomend that anybody interested in Joomla to attend the next one, well worth the trip!

Before outlining how you can get an XO, it is important to understand that these computers are not like normal laptops, they really are specialist collaboration devices meant for children aged 5-12 to be used in the classroom as part of their normal education process. They won’t necessarily make great gifts in isolation, because most of the value comes in collaborating and sharing with others, particularly in an educational setting.

Check out the post over at OLPCFriends and get involved!

Visit the official [CSU] Website.

As I trudged out of the Chandigarh train station into another foggy North Indian night, I was struck by an array of bizarre sculptures erected outside. Long, stick-like limbs and understated faces, they were obviously the creation of Nek Chand, the man responsible for Chandigarh’s most famous attraction, the Rock Garden. Clutching an address, I started doing the rounds of the autorickshaws, trying to find one who seemed to offer a reasonable chance of getting me where I wanted to be.

Images of Nirvana

Dark Taj - photo by James Barker

You can follow along with all CASE’s projects at the official CASE Blog.

Editorial: Sony Didn’t Intend PS3 To Succeed As A Console

Read it!