May 2012
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Happy Geek Pride Day!
Happy Geek Pride Day everyone! Today is a perfect day to:
Tell people all about Gold Coast Tech Space…. spread the word, point them at http://gctechspace.org or better still get them to join our meetup group http://meetup.com/gctechspace
Join Gold Coast TechSpace - all the info you need is at http://gctechspace.org/membership/ - membership is just $40/month or $20/month for...
January 2012
1 post
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Podcasting at Conferences
For podcast hosts out there that attend conferences, especially those that only do Face-to-Face interviews like us, I’d so recommend making the most of these moments.
You get to speak to people you wouldn’t normally come in contact with, plus you get to ride on the coat-tails of the buzz that the conference creates.
Craig and I have experienced this recently attending Open Source...
September 2011
2 posts
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gr8confau call for presentations now open
We are pleased to announce that the CFP for gr8confau is now open. Gr8 Conference Australia will be held on 15th November 2011 at ANU (Australian National University), Canberra
As this is our first time running the conference in Australia, it will be run as a mini-conf of Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) 2011 which runs for the entire week from 14th -18th November. To attend the gr8...
July 2011
1 post
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The Lean Lego Game at Exite
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the E.X.I.T.E camp for girls at Bond University. Exite is a programme organised by IBM and has the aim of encouraging girls to pursue careers in engineering and technology. Our local event is organised by Carol Woodhouse at the Gold Coast IBM Lab.
I was going to do a programming exercise, but in the end I chose something more hands on a did “The...
April 2011
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Single parenting - it ain't easy!
This week I completely take my hat off to single parents, especially those with more than one kid. It certainly isn’t easy juggling parenting, work and general day to day stuff when there is only one of you.
My wife’s been away for the last 3 days and I’ve discovered this first hand - it’s certainly doable, but you end up with no…zero….zilch time to yourself...
February 2011
6 posts
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First CodingByNumbers meetup on #golang →
@aspinall and I have finally got around to arranging our own meetup. It’s based around a lot of the things we talk about on the podcast, but we are trying to focus on all the topics that none of the other meetups cover (we’ll leave the Java stuff to http://www.meetup.com/qldjvm).
We are holding the meetings at Brisbane Square (Suncorp, L28) on the 2nd Monday of each month and the...
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Coding By Numbers PHP Interview from #lca2011 →
As promised here is the PHP interview that I did with Adam and Jethro at #lca2011. Hope you enjoy it and can keep up with with us!
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Coding By Numbers lca.conf.au wrap-up episode →
I didn’t get a chance to do any blogging at linux.conf.au this year - not even a wrap-up, but perhaps this is better. We did a codingbynumbers wrap-up episode where we summarized our time at the conf.
In case you were wondering where the PHP episode is that I recorded at LCA - that’s the next episode, thought we’d get this one out quickly first.
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Got Root? Rooting your Nexus One.
During linux.conf.au I tried to do a talk involving an Android phone and a live demo onto a projector. I didn’t have time to root the phone again to install vncserver - so I took the simple option and installed http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast. It worked when I first tried it but then failed miserably during the talk.
Anyway - I decided to root my phone again so that I could use a...
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Google Go Interview with Andrew Gerrand →
For those that attended the Google Go Tutorial at linux.conf.au here is the link to the podcast interview that I did the week before the conference. Hope you find it useful. For those interest in Go that live in Brisbane we are hoping to do a session on GO very soon - watch this space.
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Fossil
I’m playing around with a new DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) called “Fossil” at the moment. So far I really like it.
If you are familiar with git and mercurial then you’ll find the source control part pretty similar to what you are used to. What makes fossil rather special is that it is also a bug tracker and wiki too, and these are also distributed. Clever eh!
...
January 2011
7 posts
“We make a living by what we do, but we make a life by what we give.”
– Winston Churchill
WatchLightning talk from Open Programming Miniconf at Linux Conference Australia - I did a short lightning talk about podcasting and http://codingbynumbers.com. I was talk number 7. I must apologize on behalf of my laptop for completely screwing up Pete Leong’s talk at number 6!
You can find the full list of talks here: http://conf.linux.org.au/wiki/OPMLightningTalks
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WatchMy Java talk in the Open Programming miniconf at Linux Conf Australia 2011. My first attempt at a talk at a conference, hopefully I will get better with more practice.
You can find the slide for the talk here on slideshare.
“Happiness is a continuous creative activity”
– read on a calendar
“Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Don’t walk behind me,...”
– Albert Camus
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December 2010
13 posts
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Mercurial and Subversion, good playmates
We’ve had a couple of Subversion outages recently. As usual, development ground to a halt. People couldn’t update their projects, couldn’t get the history - we shelved some changes in Intellij for checkin later in the day… in short a pain we could live without. Such is life with centralised version control.
Since the advent of bitbucket I’ve been using Mercurial a...
“This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron,...”
– Riddle by J. R. R. Tolkien, in “The Hobbit”
(Another) big break. My plan for Jan!
Tomorrow is the last day of the year, and also my last day of work for a month. It’s a long story as to why I am off for another month, but I’m planning on using the time wisely - well that is the plan anyway!
So here’s my plan - I’m writing it down here so that I might actually stand a chance of sticking to it:
Week 1 - Spending some quality time with the kids before...
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Take a (Big) Break
First day back after the holiday today and my first task of the day… a toastmasters talk. What was I thinking of doing my final talk (Exercise 10 - The Inspirational Talk) the day after a holiday?
I’d planned to prepare the talk while I was away but just didn’t get any time…. so as usual I winged it.
Put about 35 slides together of my holiday for a 10 minute talk…....
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November 2010
18 posts
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The fifth day
Ever since about 2005 I’ve only worked 4 days (or less) a week. It’s only in the last year I’ve had to go back to 5.
When I worked 4 - I LOVED my 5th day off… it’s great being able to get all those odd jobs done. You know - those things that either spoil your weekend (waiting in queues) or you end up trying to squeeze them in during your lunch hour or the working day as...
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