Sadly, you can’t make this stuff up.

In the recent Senate hearing for the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the 20th November, Senator Conroy launched into some scathing details of how Malcolm Turnbull has hired his mates to oversee the NBN Co implementation.

Lets put some context in here… Justin Milne was the CEO of Ozemail - of which, Malcolm Turnbull was a part owner. Malcolm bought in to Ozemail in 1994 for $500,000 and sold his share to Worldcom in 1999 for $57m.

Now, Malcolm Turnbull is the Minister for Communications, and Justin Milne ends up on the NBN Co board of directors. That isn’t the whole story however - it gets even more incestuous.

CICOMILNE PTY LTD was awarded a contract for $14,000 for advice in 2013 between September and December for “Provision of advice in NBN transition issues”. The consultant and 100% owner of CICOMILNE PTY LTD is Justin Milne. This contract was awarded one week after the Liberals were elected. What the advice was is still missing - as at the moment, nobody is sure what services were actually provided.

Senator Conroy rightly inquires “So out of nowhere, the Ministers absolute best mate gets a $14,000 contract a week after being appointed, is that correct? … Who gave Mr Milne’s name to Mr Clarke or Mr Robinson given that Mr Clarke had never met him?”

This is even more interesting when Justin Milne was appointed onto the NBN Co board in November 2013.

So, how many other contracts are awarded to Malcolm Turnbull’s mates to get his way with NBN Co?

Recently, I purchased a new Dell Inspiron 15 (3537) - however one of the worst things about this laptop was the fact it only had a 2.4GHz wireless card. While my first change to this system was to replace the 750Gb hard drive with a 256Gb SSD - to get a massive performance boost, the slow wireless was a killer. To make matters worse, the wireless card was also tied into the bluetooth adapter.

After a bit of hunting around, I found that the Intel AC-7260 was a PCIe Half Mini Card with bluetooth onboard. This would make it a drop in replacement for the card that Dell shipped with the laptop. It would also allow me to connect at the full 300Mbit speeds of my WD MyNet N750.

I ordered the card and it arrived quickly, but I soon started to find issues with this card. The main one being that randomly fails to work properly when the laptop resumes from sleep.

When I did some searching about this problem, I was very surprised to find that this and many other problems seem to plague this range of card from Intel. There are threads on whirlpool, and multiple threads on the Intel Communities support site.

This seems to be either a hardware problem that Intel refuse to admit (as they’d have to replace all these cards with OEMs), or a driver problem - either way, it seems to have been ongoing for over a year.

I specifically bought an Intel wifi card thinking that a big name like Intel would make a decent wireless card - but it seems that I was mistaken :(

I’m going to make this brief.

Rest in peace you wonderful man.

For a while now, I’ve been slowly migrating my private data away from Google to a few self-hosted options. For file sync, I’ve used ownCloud - which comes with built in contact (CardDAV) and calendar (CalDAV) support.

On Android, I used DavDroid to sync my contacts to ownCloud. One thing that I missed the most moving from Google Contacts was that I could no longer create contact groups. It seems that the Almighty Goog in its ‘wisdom’ restricted the creation of groups ONLY to Google Accounts. This is one feature that I used heavily, and seems hotly requested for support in DavDroid. The problem was, Groups was a Google only thing. DavDroid recently supported groups, but you would get thwarted by Android.

I was discussing this with pulser on the #omnirom irc channel on FreeNode, and pointed this issue out - and that the DavDroid author thought it should be a simple fix within Android to make groups work on all account types. Less than an hour later, the patch was born AND tested. Less than 12 hours later, the patch was included in all currently shipping OmniROM nightlies.

Now, groups sync correctly - and can be edited from any source - the ownCloud web interface, Thunderbird or OmniROM - and sync perfectly between devices. All without giving your data to Google.

THAT is the power of open source software.

I’ve been looking at the latest release of RedHat Enterprise 7 and its ‘clone’ CentOS 7 recently.

Sum it up in a single word? DAFUQ? (is that technically one word?).

If you currently run EL6, for $diety’s sake, stay on it. There are so many problems at the moment that you are much better to stay well clear until the dust settles.

List of current issues:

1. rsyslog - no longer works. Everything is now in a 'journal'
2. logwatch - no longer works. Does not support journal logs
3. gnome3 - If you use a desktop, you're pretty much forced to use Gnome 3
4. systemd - requires all kinds of hacks and workarounds to get anything more than basic functionality
5. systemd - Service files missing from a lot of tasks (eg: BZ 1060347)
6. up to 50% speed reduction in virtual machines - BZ1104748
7. No thunderbird packages available as yet.
8. No Xen Dom0 support in EL7 - despite the upstream kernel version supporting it
9. Wholesale shipping of packages out to EPEL to avoid support requirements

This is just scratching the surface at the moment… There are many more gotchas just waiting to bite.