Considering how shallow a lot of modern Australian policy and culture is and how thought provoking many of his books are, this is not a surprise. From what he wrote the only country he's visited other than Australia is Iran, which he chose based upon his interactions with "illegal" refugees from that country, a cause that he is passionate about. Also, I believe that he has consciously decided to be a bit of a recluse. Check out http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/images/GregEgan.htm . I laughed when I read this as at the same time I was mentally scolding my sister for putting too much information about herself on Facebook.

Even for someone trained in maths and physics his books can be a struggle to read. But they are full of concepts that really make you think. I recommend Permutation City as one of his easier, but still very interesting reads. Short stories are good too.

You have to be able to cope with his Canadian inferiority complex though One look at his website and you won't think he's underappreciated. I wish people would stop giving me his books.

Terry Dowling's science fiction could be said to verge on the mystical (and I'm a hard sf person myself), but full of amazing ideas and imagery is so intense that you can see his distant future lands. You *know* they exist, that great sandships ply the deserts of an Australia transformed by a resurgent Aboriginal culture, where Nationals are restricted to the coasts, and where artificial and non-human intelligence struggles to survive. I cannot recommend his books highly enough, though as he uses small publishers they can be hard to find. He also writes horror, and again though I'm not generally a fan of the genre, his writing transcends this.

http://www.terrydowling.com/

It was quite impressive, though the heat generated by the demo PC's caused a few problems in a neighbouring server room. I also submitted the story yesterday (once the press release was made public) and it was rejected.

Sorry for the bad connectivity - the Web Server has actually worked through the /. effect at low load without any problems. However, it's sitting behind several firewalls, which probably interpreted the massive number of connection requests as a denial-of-service attack and throttled the pipe. Also, we are in Australia, so it all happened in the middle of the night.

As for the discussion about the choice of encapsulation format - it probably just burns down to having to make a decision at some point and our decision was strongly influenced by open source considerations at the time. We haven't actually seriously tried putting CMML into QuickTime or MPEG-4, though their hierarchical format and the necessity to pre-process files before they could be streamed via rtp/rtsp indicated potential issues with serialisation and dynamic composition on the server side. When I mention streaming, I mean live streaming over rtp/rtsp and live inserting clip tags into the stream.

silvia