dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

Just a quick post to say that Barcamp Gold Coast #2 is all pretty much ready to go for 29th November at Griffith Uni! All the info you need is at

http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast

We are doing pretty much the same as last time, pizza is sponsored by MindWorx this time, hardware giveaway and also a book swap if anyone is interested in offloading some unwanted trees (idea copied from Sydney). Coffee guy will be there too and we have the wireless internet like last time.

Not much more to say apart from please register at http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast2 - oh and tell everyone you know.

See you there

I've just started reading a rather cool book - I got it on a tip from Obie Fernandez in his now famous Do The Hustle talk at Ruby Fringe. It's called Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely - it basically explores why we make the decisions we make - the journey is fabulously interesting and often (as the author puts it) delicious!

Anyway, ironically, just this morning there was an example of this in my street.

I live in a small dead-end/cul-de-sac street of about 12 houses - we have 2 bins - a regular bin (green lid) and a recycling bin (yellow) lid. The green bin is collected every week and the yellow one every 2 weeks. Anyway - this week is NOT a recycling week, but we often get one person in the street accidentally putting their bins out. However, this week 2 people put their yellow bins out. By the time I went to put my bins out late last night everyone in the street had the yellow bins out! At this point I even put my yellow bin out as I thought maybe the others knew something!

As I rode out of the street on my bike this morning into the next street I of course saw of course that no-one else in the neighbourhood had the yellows out... herd mentality at it's best!

I use X11 forwarding a fair bit with ssh - it's so nice to just do "ssh -X user@host" and be able to run the odd command that needs X.

Anyway - came across a little problem this morning with a Ubuntu server that I was trying to do this on. For those that have never used Ubuntu server - it is like the full Ubuntu desktop but basically with all the X stuff stripped out. I like to run this - as I really don't need X on a headless server and it saves me on some CPU/memory and makes apt-get upgrade nice and fast.

Anyway - back to X11 forwarding - with Ubuntu server when I tried to launch an X application - I got the message

Error: no display specified

Had a look through the environment variables - and the DISPLAY variable had not been set like ssh -X automatically does. Tried to set it manually, but nothing.

I then discovered with the help of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSHHowto that xauth is not installed by default with Ubuntu server. A quick.

apt-get install xauth

Fixed everything up nicely. Happy happy joy joy.

Just reposting this email I sent to the bar camp gold coast mailing list in case anyone else is interested:

Thanks for coming on Saturday and judging by all the blogs and twitter posts I have a sneaking suspicion that you all enjoyed yourself and got a lot from it!

Where to from here.... well there will definitely be another barcamp sometime in next 6 months. I would say 3 months, but that clashes with
birth of my 2nd child, so if one happens then - I won't be doing it. Have a look at http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast and see if you can
see anything you can do.

Thankyou to Steven T & Morgan for helping me organise, Graham for some wrangling on the day and of course DJ for all the awesome photos (lots
of love for DJ going out on twitter this week!). Also thankyou to the Sponsors Linux Australia, Griffith Uni, Apress books and Inqbator and
to Craig Rippon at Custom Tees for doing the shirts.

The photos from the day are all now at http://flickr.com/groups/778799@N23 - please submit any more photos you have to this group and make sure you tag anything barcampgoldcoast.

You can also follow us on twitter - http://twitter.com/barcampgc and there is also facebook and all the other stuff on the wiki page.

And for the Brisbane people - Bar Camp Brisbane is calling you!!!! I hope what we have done so far with the QLD camps has inspired some of you to take the initiative and MAKE THINGS HAPPEN!. There was also talk of doing something halfway at Logan or somewhere.... good idea too.... DO IT

I was recently asked by someone to investigate an MP3 player solution for someone that is partially sighted. Up until now they had been using a CD player with a big screen on, but when this broke there was no suitable replacement, and anything else that they tried jumped due the vibrations from the drumming that was going along with the music. I'm blogging this more for the benefit of my brother-in-law who will be setting it up - but it might be useful to somebody else.

Anyway an old laptop was provided - and as this system had to be fool proof and crash proof, a Linux install was an obvious choice. The system had to boot straight into the MP3 player, and the user would just hit the power button when finished and power saving would ensure a clean shutdown. The player had to be full screen (nothing around it to confuse) and the only other requirements were that it had to play a single playlist and have some nice big buttons.

I tried a lot of different things, icewm, fluxbox, various different players with various skins, but I just stumbled (thankyou Patrick O'Hearn) on an almost perfect setup - Banshee.

Banshee and Rhythmbox box have "party modes" where you can put it into full screen, but unfortunately Rhythmbox does not remember the state and always starts in windowed mode... so Banshee won there.

1. The base system is Ubuntu Hardy with Gnome - to install banshee from command line:

sudo apt-get install banshee

or use the Add/Remove gui - I think it's in there.

2. Get the playlist setup right, then hit F11 to put it into full screen. Then quit the app (it will remember status).

3. Next I wanted to do away with the window manager completely - I was going to use fluxbox - but I think raw X11, does just fine.

Create a file in your home directory called .xinitrc and put the follow in the file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
dbus-launch banshee


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!

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.