dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

About 30-40 people turned up to Bar Camp Gold Coast on a rainy Saturday at Griffith Uni (perfect weather for staying inside and talking tech). I was really encouraged by the quality of the people that attended... I always knew these people existed on the Gold Coast and I will now double my efforts to get more stuff like this happening on the coast.

Anyway - I'll blog about this in more detail later, but here are some of the things that we did.

• Mobile Coffee Guy - very popular. Thankyou Kerry - I will definitely use you again. I'll find your website and post here.
• Pizza - Eagle Boys were ok. But were pretty late and pizza was a little cold....
• Hardware giveaway.... got rid of a lot of my stuff. Hands shot up pretty quickly - so obviously people obviously wanted this stuff! Lots of other people brought stuff to give too.
• Apress Book/Tshirt giveaway - didn't know how to give these away in the end (best presentation was too hard to judge) so we did a door prize instead.
• Internet - Griffith Uni installed an AP especially for us, and we had use of the uni internet. Seemed pretty fast - although annoying to keep getting the login page after a time away
• Group photo - thanks DJ for getting this together.. good idea
• Linux area - we kept a little area with some Linux magazines, distros and flyers on and the GCLUG people seemed to gather around there and talk to people about Linux, seemed to work well.
• Tshirts - good number of shirts (I think we printed 38) - they nearly all went, and it was nice to see Linux on everyone's backs too (including some MS people :)). Thanks to Custom Tees for those.
• After drinks... we got about 10 people there.... Parkwood Tavern was pretty ok, had a good outdoor area - with heaters!

Ok - I've fallen off the Wagon on blogging again... been busy with work, and also been doing a lot of Gold Coast stuff. Sorry - I will try harder.

One of the things I have been involved with is Bar Camp Gold Coast - which is on TOMORROW! It's not to late to signup if you are still interested. We have lots of stuff happening, some giveaways and actually have some decent Internet for once! 38 people and counting signed up so far - if it's anything like Brisbane I'm sure we'll get quite a few extras. We ordered Pizza for 50 - so hope it's not too much more!

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I've been in Brisbane the last couple of days doing a Certified Scrummaster course. The course was run by Jens Østergaard in association with the Scrum Alliance.

Arrived on Wednesday morning and was surprised to find we had 2 trainers - Jens had bought along his colleague Arne Åhlander to co-train. I really like having 2 trainers. Not only does it give the trainers a little bit of a rest so they are always "fresh", but we get twice the perspective on things, twice as many people to ask questions of and it's just nice to hear a different voice sometimes.

The course was extremely practical - lots of exercises and examples, and there were great people on the course. I was surprised to find I was not the only Gold Coast person - GCCC had 4 or 5 people that they sent along (what a refreshing thought to think our governments are thinking about Agile/Scrum - maybe we'll finally get value for our taxes). As usual, no matter how hard I tried, I ended up asking way too many questions and commenting.... I just couldn't help myself. My apologies to any of my fellow attendees who I might have annoyed, that's just me being me - I don't think I can change this... and maybe I shouldn't.

At the end of the course I told Jens a little bit about OSDC, Linux Australia, Barcamps and all the other things I have been involved in - he was really interested - and I think there would be a lot of Agilists in the open source community that would benefit from engaging more with the Scrum community. Jens is happy to talk or find someone from Scrum Alliance to talk at our various events - so if anyone from OSDC/LCA/Barcamps is reading this, please get in touch with him - he is a great contact.

I took part in a protest in front of the council chambers on the Gold Coast today. We were protesting about the fact that a few weeks ago the GCCC banned peaceful protests on council land that did not have the permission of the Gold Coast CEO. The legislation was introduced by the (unelected) CEO in response to some complaints about rescued battery hens at a Vegan Society protest. The protest was a great success and the new rules were effectively overturned today in council, but one of the things that I found interesting were Cnr Dawn Critchlow's remarks to us outside the chambers.

(I'm the one on the right)

She started by saying she supported our protest, but when asked why she had voted for the new regulations (the vote was unanimous) she said there had been a lot of things on the agenda for that day (the new regs were bundled in with all sorts of other non related things) and that she hadn't read it and there had been no discussion in council about this particular part. Hang on a minute, how the hell can they vote for something when they haven't read it? I shudder to think what other laws are being passed in out governments by politicians that haven't had time to read things, if they haven't read something they should at least abstain.

Fair play to Dawn though, she fessed up, admitted it and apologized. She has to be one of the few honest politicians I've come across. Mayor Ron Clarke on the other hand rushed out to talk to us after Dawn (maybe someone had dobbed her in) and got himself into all sorts of trouble back-peddling and contradicting himself - he did look rather foolish and I think the Local nine news captured a bit of this. I recorded the segment and will upload to youtube when I get a moment.

While I was standing there - I noticed the old council chambers are still vacant - maybe this will be the site for the Gold Coast Ministry of Truth?

I've seen this problem so many times I just have to quickly blog it.

If you make a copy of a Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) vmware guest and you can't get any network (your eth0 suddenly becomes eth1 or eth2) - make sure you remove the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and then reboot. This will fix your problem, in previous Ubuntus it was the /etc/iftab file (which is a well documented fix) but it's all different in Hardy.

Well Barcamp Brisbane #2 was a resounding success. We counted 60 people at the peak - and I managed to find a few new Gold Coast people which is always good. I didn't do any unorganising of this one really but ended up doing lots of wrangling on the day, although it was more like herding cats at times.

My presentation on wxRuby was ok - although I think a little too technical judging by the lack of questions.

I did prepare it all at 4am this morning, but I told a bit of a fib in the presentation. I actually know NOTHING about wxRuby, wxWidgets (come on - I am a web developer!) and not a lot of ruby - I just wanted to do it as a bit of an experiment to see if I could get away with it without anyone realising. Sorry for the deception, but it was fun, and gave me some presentation practice. The content of the presentation and demo was correct though - so if you want to use wxRuby - go ahead, it is very cool.

Next challenge - Bar Camp Gold Coast. Pencil in 5th July in your calenders if you are nearby - I promise to do a presentation on something I'm good at this time.

ps. I also succumbed to pressure and joined twitter. http://twitter.com/spidie

Off to Barcamp Brisbane today. I "unorganised" the last one, but I'm just an attendee this time (although I probably won't be able to help myself bossing people around). Jaron woke at 4am briefly and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I ended up preparing something to present (shock horror). I'm not a great public speaker - so this is quite unusual for me, so please go easy on me if you are there.

If you're reading this early and still want to come along, all the details are at http://barcamp.org/BarCampBrisbane. It's at the East Brisbane Bowls club and this year - WE HAVE INTERNET, so a few of us will probably be twittering and all that stuff. I'm taking the camera so I'll post pictures, I am also taking a few boxes of my assorted computer junk to giveaway, swap or sell - so if you have stuff like this gathering dust in your place please bring it along.

For those trying to install Hardy on the new Dell 530S (or similar Dells), I'll save you a lot of hassle - this is the thread to read:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/153702

I wasted a lot of time trying all sorts of things to disable the sata drivers to get around all the "revalidaton failed" errors etc, but in the end found this thread (much lower down the search results). Dell ship with the SATA controller in IDE mode in the BIOS for easy windows installs without SATA drivers, Ubuntu of course comes with all the drivers and works perfectly in SATA mode.

Once the SATA issue was resolved this also fixed my problem with my ATI Radeon HD2400 graphics card - some sort of IRQ conflict.