dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

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.

Ok - I've been reading about all these hackers running OSX on non apple hardware, and seeing as I just got delivery of a new uber-specced el-cheapo Dell 530S from the Dell Outlet and my 2 year old son went to sleep on time tonight, I thought I would try something different. Before doing my usual Ubuntu install (it gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction not even booting the vista virus) - I threw in the Kalyway OSX disk (obtained from dubious sources I know - but I do own OSX licences).

It all seemed to install ok - I got stuck in the keyboard loop problem that a lot of people get - but that was fixed by booting in single user mode and skipping the intro. If you have to do this don't forget to change the root password while you are in there - or you wont be able to login.

I had to throw in a different network card - but luckily I had an old Realtek clone card in the cupboard that worked straight off. Wasn't expecting to do any hardware hacking tonight but I did have to chop off half of the back plate to get it to fit in the slimline case so won't be a permanent fixture (damn those slimlines - I didn't notice the "S" on the model number when I ordered it).

My stumbling block was graphics - I have a ATI Radeon 2400 XT and despite following all the howtos - I am still a bit stuck with this one. I am either stuck in 1024x768 or I get the lovely block pattern and have to go back into single user and undo.

I'm going to give it one last chance tomorrow with the Leo4All build (someone with my card reported sucess with this)- then I'll give up and put what I originally indended on it. While it's fun - I don't think it's really worth all the hassle, especially since who knows what Apple will do in future updates to break people's installs. It's funny - Linux used to be like this 10 years ago - but oh look how it's changed... I've put Ubuntu on a lot of dells recently and it's generally a breeze.

After recently reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris I decided to start my own little outsourcing experiment. I didn't have anything in mind at first, but then I thought about the logo for my own consulting company Dalton Technology - it was looking a little tired and I could do with something new. I would normally get my wife to do this as she is actually a graphic designer, but her being pregnant, tired and completely off this sort of work at the moment - I thought I would try one of Tim's recommendations - the site elance.com

Took me all of 2 minutes to post my project - entitled "logo for my consulting company" - very little additional information (I was feeling lazy and also wanted to test out how people responded to zero upfront information). Anyway - you can put these things out for open tender, but I didn't want to deal with all the emails so I just picked about 7 or 8 suppliers that I liked the portfolios styles of and let them bid it out. Bids ranged from about $50 - $300 for the job. The one I liked the most bid at about $180 and so I whittled it down to 3 that I liked and managed to price match them down to $150.

The winning bidders for my project were The Netmen - and once selected in elance, they sent me a short questionaire for me to fill in for my company. This was relatively painless and probably took me around 15 mins to fill in. It consisted of questions about my company, my business, the kinds of customers I have, corporate styles, colours, fonts and most importantly - which logos in the current portfolio I liked and which I disliked (and why).

Just got back from meetup #2 of the OSDGC. We met at the Mylkbar on Upton St - a good central venue I think and I was pleased to see on entering that they have a happy hour until 6pm so beer was pretty damn cheap.

Some new faces, old faces and new faces that were really old faces - and we had some good stimulating conversation about Open Source and the state of the IT Industry on the Gold Coast in particular. I tried really really hard to not talk too much, ask questions and listen more (it's an effort - I think it is in my genes to waffle when I think there might be a silence coming).

Anyway - a big thanks to everyone that came (and thanks Ralph for buying us food - we should have really chipped in for that). We are hoping to do a lot more of this community building and I am hoping to get a Bar Camp Gold Coast going sometime in June/July, please join the OSDGC mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/osdgc to keep up to date.

Got home and caught up on lifehacker feed - which led me to this post which led me to Geek Dad. I think I have found my new favourite blog.....

ps. speaking of geek, I just saw the ultimate Star Wars geek toy today - R2D2 DVD Projector

Busy Busy Busy... but I must find time for the odd blog post.

Lot's on at work, but I've been trying to move the whole Gold Coast IT Community stuff on a little bit....

Bar Camp Brisbane is on 24th May, and we are hoping to follow up in June with the first Bar Camp Gold Coast. OSDGC meets again this week on Thursday and the http://itgoldcoast.org site is now updated along with the Planet for Gold Coast bloggers - please pass on if you know any Gold Coast people. Our entries on the linux.org.au User Groups section are now back again and I have finally managed to join up for OSIA.

Oh - yes I also created a Gold Coast IT Professionals linkedin group but still pending at the moment - will post with the link once it's up there.

Now that made a little bit of a dent in my todo list.

I'm not normally a Today Tonight fan (far from it) but was pleasantly surprised to see a segment on Linda Cockburn (and family) and their latest project in Tasmania. If you haven't heard of Linda, she is the author of Living the Good Life: How One Family Changed Their World from Their Own Backyard - a great book that was partially responsible for inspiring me to get back into gardening.

Linda, Trev and Caleb have now left Gympie and joined the "march south" to Tasmania to embark on a bigger project that involves building a straw bale house amongst other things. You can read all about it on their website - I don't believe there are plans for a book on this on.

For those that missed the segment - I pulled it off my Tivo and youtubed it here (come and get me Today Tonight!):

I've been an Eclipse user for a good while now, and also have used the RadRails plugins on and off too. We recently noticed that the people that do RadRails now also do a PHP plugin and bundle the whole thing in a suite called Aptana Studio. All looks pretty good and about the best drop-in open replacement for Dreamweaver I have seen so far. The whole thing can be run as a plugin for Eclipse or standalone packaged product.

I opted to trial the packaged product as apart from me and one other, most of our developers don't use Java. There's a few plugins we rely quite heavily on - Subclipse (subversion access) and Mylyn (for integration with TRAC) - so I was keen to see if these work in Aptana. Subclipse was easy - as the update site was already configured ready to go. Mylyn was a little more difficult (not the same as vanilla Eclipse), so I'll just quickly cover my findings in case anyone else had the same problem.

1. Install Aptana studio
2. In Software Updates menu, select "Find & Install" and then "Search for New Features"
3. Add a new remote site with this url: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update-archive/2.0.0/e3.2 - you have to use Mylyn verson 2.0 as the current Aptana is based on Eclipse 3.2
4. This is where things don't work quite right, if you select all Mylyn features you'll get an unresolved dependency (org.eclipse.jdt), if you select just TRAC Connector (hoping dependency checking will work it out) you get another unresolved dependency (org.eclipse.mylyn.context_feature). So, select everything, then deselect "Mylyn Bridge: Java Development" and "Mylyn Bridge: Eclipse SDK". Voila - it should now install.

Something up with the Mylyn dependencies here, it's fixed in the new version, but until Aptana updates to the latest Eclipse we are stuck with this workaround.

Ok I've failed to blog much lately. I have a pad next to my desk where I write all my blog ideas down, it is fairly full but they are never transformed into real blog posts (my poor excuse is that I am very time poor). Anyway - here are the titles anyway - perhaps I will come back to them.

• My cycling nightmare: 4 blow-outs and a tyre change
• Is that a big log across the path....Ahhhhh, no it's a snake
• Nagios.....yum
• Docbook - my love hate relationship
• .asia domains frenzy
• Glass on the cycleways
• Hey - I didn't sign up for Windows support
• Green lights and tailwinds
• Amazon EC2
• Pumpkin is such a satisfying veggie
• The never-ending carport
• Bye bye Myspace

Right - now I've got those off my chest, I'll turn over another new leaf