The reality of forming government in the newly elected House of Representatives depends on those eight elected members, but the AEC’s total of 2-party preferred vote currently excludes all votes cast in these eight electorates, the eight electorates whose elected members will determine who forms government.

Based upon the published information currently available, the ALP trail the coalition by less than 2,000 votes nationwide, including four seats where the coalition obtained considerably less than 25% of the primary vote.  It’s disappointing that the AEC has published such misleading data, but it’s utterly shameful that the nation’s news outlets are pouncing on this.  In this situation, a two-party preferred vote is meaningless, and misleading two-party preferred vote even more so.

And now back to your regularly-scheduled programming.

This year, I’ll be presenting Awesome Things You’ve Missed in Python, a fast-paced, code-heavy recap of interesting features to hit the Python Programming language in the past few years.  My talk is not specific to Apple development, but will have a strong focus on techniques which are applicable to development with the PyObjC library.

If you’re on staff or are a student of an AUC member university (most Australian Universities are, as are a few Kiwi ones), registration is cheap ($100 for students), and all flights and accommodation are subsidised (to a generous limit).  If a fun two days of meeting interesting people and learning about development techniques with the latest technology available on Apple devices interests you, get in contact with your local AUCDF coordinator to register!

• That I have no right to tell you who to vote for.
• That I have no reason to tell you who to vote for.
• That my opinion is just that: an opinion.

• That everyone’s vote counts.
• That voting informally puts your decision in the hands of others.
• That voting informedly makes your decision count for more.

• That who you vote for is not the same as who you believe should form government.
• That all policy deserves the scrutiny of many viewpoints.
• That our parliament works best with a diverse senate.

• That there is no party who supports all of the ideals of any individual, even those who are members of the party.
• That no party knows how to best allocate your vote.
• That no party knows who their best candidate is.

• That you should question your ideals before you select your candidate.
• That you should select your candidate before you select your party.
• That your second and third preferences matter just as much as your first.
• That you should vote below the line.

• That my enemy’s enemy is not always my friend: to be my friend, I need a reason to support you.
• That blanket negative policies do not deserve the right to be enshrined in appropriation bills.
• That the previous government was deposed for a reason.

• That a long-term view is not rewarded by our short-term electoral cycle.
• That three-year electoral terms favour fiscal conservatism and that Australia is worse-off for it.
• That there is often merit to policies which do not result in an immediate return.

• That no party considers my electorate important enough to campaign broadly in.
• That at this election, no major party deserves my vote.
• That no party deserves my continued support.

• That there is a time for conservatism.
• That with significantly reformed personnel and policy, the Liberal Party will one day be deserving of government again.
• That that time is not now.

• That the current government has, for the most part, implemented fundamentally good policy.
• That the next government deserves wide-ranging, informed, non-partisan scrutiny.
• That this election should be all about the senate.

Well, the walk is on again this coming Saturday, operating in just about every major city in Australia (and in other countries as well). I seriously recommend getting along to your local walk: it’s a good opportunity to have fun with a camera and the experience is seriously rewarding.

If you’re interested, you can search and sign up for your local walk at the WWPW web site. The event is run by a Photoshop training company, I do recommend opting out of the marketing announcements they offer, as it’s quite high-volume across the year.

Unfortunately, recently I’ve experienced a mini-deluge of Russian comment spam which, under PyBlosxom requires far too much effort to clean up (even with the excellent Akismet spam plugin by Benjamin “Mako” Hill). I’ve used this deluge as an excuse to migrate my site to WordPress, which I’ve been considering making the move to for quite some time.

The resulting site is now up and running at my new domain name (chris.neugebauer.id.au), which is running on my new UK-based Linode 512 VPS. Hopefully this is an excellent excuse to keep it properly up-to-date, especially considering the amount of effort I’ve had to go through to get it to this stage!

So, if you’re seeing 10-month-old posts from my blog, sorry about that, I’ll try not to do it again!

More news at 11!

I landed in Wellington on Friday — as a miniconf organiser, I was fortunate enough to get picked up at the airport, and get the sights of the area shown to me. This includes Wellington’s idea of an aircraft control tower (slotted between two houses on a residential block — no photo, going too fast ), a wind meter, which kindly blocks the road in sufficiently-strong winds, and most importantly the conference centre in which LCA will be held. I checked in to UStay (the budget accommodation booked by the conference), and got a room on the 11th floor. This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue to me, save for the fact that the elevator goes up to 10 only: the remaining floor is scaled by way of a fire escape that isn’t terribly well-marked. The room is pretty comfortable (really good for NZ$21 per night), and the common room is big, with plenty of couches, allowing delegates to socialise.

This is my first time staying at conference accommodation (I’ve been to two LCA’s before), which has revealed an entirely new side of the conference: all the delegates staying here share a single common room, and there are plenty of new friends to be made just by popping over to another of the many groups that form there.

The common room, luckily, provides more than enough entertainment here, since the weather’s been pretty awful since I got here — strong wind and plenty of rain have accompanied 15-degree weather (which I am hoping will lift tomorrow). Flights for some have had to be diverted to Auckland, so it’s dubious as to whether some people will even make the start of the conference. This is apparently unusual for Wellington (despite its reputation as the windy city).

Well, it’s probably time I considered popping downstairs, and getting ready to go: I’ve got a miniconf to run today — wish me luck!

That’s all for now. More substantial updates once things actually happen!

Honours, Semester 1 (during semester 2)

Uni study’s been going quite swimmingly of late: both my units of study went pretty well (insofar as I got HDs in them); thesis on the other hand, has only really just started to take off. My research is into the computer vision task fo object detection (for example, finding faces in images), in particular, I’m working on improving the scheme built into the Intel OpenCV Library (Haar Classifier Cascades, if you’re at all interested) by having them consider colour.

One of the deficiencies I’ve discovered during my research is lack of sufficient real-world colour face datasets to perform detection upon: whilst I need in the order of 2000 faces (1000 to train upon, 1000 to test upon), the largest useful academic set is an order of magnitude smaller. For this reason I’m developing my own set. My current intention is to assemble the data set entirely from Creative Commons-licensed data (e.g. from Flickr and Wikipedia) and to release the resultant set under CC licenses too. I expect I’ll give a lightning talk at LCA on this, I’ll also dump a blog post here somewhere about what sort of data I’d like donated.

Summer of Google

One thing that’s looking like it will derail my Honours work slightly happened not too long ago. I applied for a Software Engineering Internship at Google Sydney back in July, and didn’t hear much about it. In late October, however, I very suddenly got contacted about it, and interviewed for the position, and quite happily, I was offered a job. This, amongst other things, involved dropping (almost*) everything for the summer, and moving to Sydney within two weeks, which I guess I’ve done somewhat successfully.

So I’m now working at Google until sometime during the first two weeks of semester (!). My current project involves working on [redacted], to make [redacted] do [redacted]; in related news, the new Sydney offices are pretty damn cool, the food is excellent, and the work is fun. I’m really looking forward to the rest of my time here.

*I guess the most important thing to mention here is that I’m still spending my week-and-a-bit in Wellington for Linux.conf.au 2010, and that I’ll still be running the Open Programming Languages Miniconf there. I can hardly wait!