SAGE-AU 2005: So you want to start a business?

Paul Fenwick has always had an entrepreneurial bent. At the age of six he went into retail, setting up a street-side stall to sell four-leaf clovers from a mutant plant in the family garden. Two years later Paul's attempts to market mutant funnel-webs failed disastrously, and after returning from hospital he discovered that his all his Spiderman comics had been burnt. This was Paul's first lesson that the world of small business is not always an easy one.

That's my biography for my Small Business Talk to be held at SAGE-AU 2005 which runs from the 5th—9th September in Perth this year.

I've got oodles of other interesting news (interesting to me, anyway) which has to go through all the appropriate channels before I can write about it publicly. That's why I'm writing blatent advertisements for SAGE-AU 2005 instead.

End of financial year
It's the end of financial year, and everyone and everything is just a little more hectic because of it. I have a ton of deadlines: negotiations with our bank, taxation matters, a stupidly big pile of paperwork, and a number of conference and magazine-article related matters.

However my real task for the day is clearing my desk, and making sure that there isn't anything that we really want to take advantage of in the 2004-05 financial year. Any spare time will be spent catching up on accounting and tax matters.

The good news is that despite the busy time was year, I was still able to go out to dinner last night with about a dozen very good friends, and I was still able to sleep until the gloriously late time of 10am. One of the distinct advantages of running one's own business is flexibility of hours.

On the matter of running a business, I'll be presenting a short yet amusing talk on starting a business at the Open Source Developers Club on the 13th July, 2005. This will be a sneak-preview of my paper and presentation for the Australian System Administrators Conference in Perth later this year.

Nigel McFarlane, RIP
I was shocked to read this article. Nigel McFarlane was an active and vibrant member of the Australian open source community. Our first real encounter with Nigel was when he called wanting to interview Jacinta for a newspaper feature-article on Melbourne's successful open source businesses. The interview resulted in a discussion of Perl Training Australia in one of Australia's most widely-read newspapers. After that it seemed that I was bumping into Nigel everywhere — industry functions, user groups, conferences, and an almost endless number of mailing lists.

Nigel was an author of numerous books, a strong supporter and active member of the Mozilla/Firefox project, a regular speaker at conferences, and even drew crowds for 2600 meetings.

Nigel's insight, talent, and enthusiasm will be sorely missed.

Thursday: Teach Database Programming with Perl, and prepare for Perl Security.

Friday: Teach Perl Security and prepare for ToEE. Fly back to Melbourne.

Saturday: DM a ToEE session. Continue writing paper for the Australian System Administrators Conference.

Sunday: Continue writing paper. Revise my article for SAGE Advice.

Monday: Review and submit paper, article, contracts, and advertising material. Perform handover with staff member returning from South America.

Tuesday—Thursday: If lucky, perform end of financial year accounting and adjustments, and prepare on-line resources to go with SAGE Advice article. If unlucky, catch-up on conference and article submissions. If deeply unlikely, deal with all of the above plus client issues.

Sometime in October: Rest!

World of Warcraft EULA
I don't try to hide the fact that I'm a gamer. I love games. Card games, board games, computer games, strategy games, role-playing games, on-line games. I love them all. I helped start an AD&D club in grade 4 in primary school. I wrote a printer-driver as an English assignment in high-school to print Tolkien's Dwarven runes on a Commodore-64 printer. I'm a gamer, through-and-through.

The gamers of the world are blessed through modern games technology. Present-day computers are capable of producing mouth-wateringly good graphics and sound, and with the rise of the Internet, huge and detailed multi-player games have become available. The early forms of these were the MUDs — Multi User Dungeons/Domains/Dimensions, and were text-based. The newer games games are often referred to as MMORPGs — Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, and are immersive experiences.

I've played a number of MMORPGs in my time. There's currently a "second generation" of MMORPGs, including Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, and World of Warcraft, that build significantly upon what was learnt from older, "first generation" MMORPGs like EverQuest. The second generations MMORPGs are undergoing plenty of growth, and with good reason.

I have a number of friends who play World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the second-generation MMORPGs made by Blizzard Entertainmentww. WoW have had the foresight to include a free "guest pass" with boxed copies of the game. This allows an owner of the game to give their friend a 10-day free trial. I recently had one of these handed to me.

I had a hard time getting through the registration process. In order to participate in the "free trial" one needs to provide name, address, telephone number, and credit card details. It looks like Blizzard isn't interested in anyone participating unless they can provide significant proof they have the capability to go and purchase a boxed-set of the game, and then pay an ongoing subscription fee.

After a day or two I finally agreed to provide Blizzard with what I thought was an excessive amount of registration information. I'm eager to play with new toys, and I have plenty of friends telling me how much they enjoy the game. Having completed the registration, the game starts, and immediately starts to download a patch. I was expecting this, MMORPGs are regularly patched to add new features.

Finally, the patch installs, and an End User License Agreement (EULA) is displayed; and then a second one. Included in the patch is an updated EULA, and it makes a standard MMORPG license look like a walk in the park. In particular, it includes the following: