dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

My 2 year old has been driving us crazy all week with (amongst other things) this song "5 Caramels in a bakers shop....something something something....with a sugar on top.....something else undeciferable...".

Anyway - isn't the internet wonderful. May I present 5 currant buns:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080229073236AACwLy6
My pain is eased - I know what it is and I can now at least get him to sing it properly.

He has also taken quite a liking to the White Stripes whilst watching Rage today - quite funny watching him rush between his toy drum kit, guitar and keyboard trying to copy what people are doing in the music videos.

Ok, I've been cycling the 12km to work every day for the last 3 months now and I thought I would share some of the things I have learnt over the time.

1. Get a decent bike and look after it. If you're doing any sort of decent distance, a road bike is best, but if you have to use a mountain bike, I can't recommend slick tyres enough. They won't cost you much and it will make life a lot easier for you. With your tyres - make sure you pump them up to the maximum recommended pressure and keep them that way (the rubber leaches air over time). The pressures may seem a bit high (120psi on mine), and you might need to get yourself a good foot or floor pump to achieve this - but don't worry they will easily take it. Doing this will give you a better ride, your tyres will last longer and you'll avoid pinch flats. I've had 2 punctures so far - and both have been from when I hadn't pumped the tyres up enough.

2. Buy a rack and panyer bags. Rucksacks make your back sweaty and disrupt your balance if you have a lot of stuff in them. Riding without carrying anything on you is a much more pleasant experience. If you can't afford the full panyer bags - I just got a bag for the top of the rack which has little flap down parts for the sides if I need to put more stuff in. This is quite adequate for going to work every day.

3. Get clip-less pedals or at the very least toe clips. I thought this was a little too much when I first got my new bike, but once you've tried the clipless pedals and proper shoes there is no turning back. You'll get at least 2 times more efficiency from your pedaling as you are able to apply pressure through the full 360 degrees - it cut my journey time by 5 minutes and I am a lot less tired. Another good tip is to use a lower gear and increase your cadence - it may not seem like it, but you get better efficiency.

I was reading a post on facebook this morning and someone apologised for his poor grammar and use of abbreviations saying "Myspace did this to me". One of the follow-ups made the point that you shouldn't feel like you have to write like this - it's quite ok to use full sentences and proper punctuation if you want to.

Anyway, it got me thinking. I am a pretty fast typer - I use all these acronyms and poor grammar not to save time but more to fit in with the rest of you lot (it's actually sometime slower for me as I have to rack my brains to think of the acronym). In IRC especially you are often seen as a n00b if you write fully, so that's where I started writing in shorthand to fit in with the crowd.

Back in the early days of BBS, 1200 baud modems (yes I used to dialup at this speed) - I could half see the point, but maybe these days I should make an effort to write fully and set an example. Would be interested to hear people's thoughts on this.

Anyway - I'm going to spend the next month writing everything fully in chat, emails & IRC and see what happens. I can't give up the smilies though - I can't see myself writing "I am feeling very sad about that" or "I am winking at you now"!

(note to self: need to stop using the word "Anyway" at the start of sentences.... getting very boring).

A couple of people asked me why had put "is sorry" on my facebook status and IM accounts - "but you're a pom" they said. Well...

1. I may not sound like it but I have actually been an Australian citizen for a few years now!
2. Being of British birth I think I actually have all the more reason to be sorry for what happened to the Stolen Generation and the Aboriginal people of Australia. The early government of Australia was heavily influenced by the British and certainly took it's lead from what the British were well practiced at doing in all of it's "colonies" around the world. So - I'm apologising for them too.

Yes - I'm sure you've heard it all before. Pick a war-torn or poverty-stricken part of the world and it's hard not to put 2 and 2 together and attribute some (or in some cases most) of the blame to British (or French, Portugese, Spanish etc etc) Imperialism in the past. We certainly plundered these countries and left little behind but poverty and corruption in it's place.

That is why I'm so happy to see someone like Kevin Rudd* actually doing something positive in this area for a change - and for once I am really optimistic that together we may be able to right some of the wrongs that have been done in the past.

In a similar way I am also really excited about projects like OLPC. Not that we should do these things out of guilt, but it's really empowering to see enthusiastic people in the western world actually putting something back into developing countries rather than taking, and Education is a fantastic place to start. I hope that the launch of this project in Australia may contribute to the healng between our own internal 1st and 3rd worlds.

* I didn't vote for him, but our lovely preferential voting system in Australia at least allowed me to put them no. 2 after The Greens :)

We had our first OSDGC meeting last night. Thanks to everyone that came - I thought it was a good start (about 10 or 12 people). It was good to just talk without all the usual installfests and hardware hacking that you get at LUG meetings. I have to admit I also rather enjoyed my first go on a Wii (I lead such a sheltered life these days - no time for computer games). Thanks to Dave and the guys at inqling for letting us use their place.

A few of us were lamenting about the lack of community on the Gold Coast and the failure of the IT Gold Coast Forum to really speak to people like us, so I setup this very very simple site:

http://www.itgoldcoast.org

I was going to make it goldcoastit to differentiate from http://itgoldcoast.com but then realised the obvious problem in putting the name around that way - so I just shamelessly copied theirs. If you know of any other groups that should be listed on there - please let me know

Anyway - the site has no real agenda other than promoting better a better IT community on the Gold Coast. It's all hosted on google at the moment, so easy to put a calendar and a news feed on there. There seemed to be some interest in planets last night, so I thought we could maybe do a gold coast planet for all the bloggers. So if you are on the Gold Coast please send me your blogs URLs - I was thinking we should make the planet an open one (like http://planet.linux.org.au) - not limited by specific tags or anything (I think some people call it a universe).

First day back at work today. We had a lot of rain over the weekend, so decided to not cycle and get the (much slower, but dryer) bus. I've felt a lot sleepier all day without my morning exercise, although maybe staying up pretty late trying to get all my keys signed from LCA might have more to do with it.

I finally got everything in the right format for the caff tool, but it was then prompting me for the password each time (I have 3 keys to sign with) so I now have gpg-agent all setup and will finish them off tonight with a bit more efficiency hopefully.

During "nap-time" had a bit of a play with my new Nokia n810. Awesome bit of kit. One word of advice to everyone who gets one - upgrade the firmware before you start, there are some funny package conflicts with the shipped version of OS2008. The mac flasher also doesn't work on the Intel macs so I just used my ubuntu box for flashing... worked a treat.

I was a little annoyed to find that the Amazon memory bundle that I bought (which was an advertised special) is not actually the right flash for the n810. Someone screwed up with the combo there, as it is a microSDHC with a SD adapters- it should be a miniSDHC for the n810. My fault too for not really checking. Not sure if I'll bother returning it as it's not worth the postage, but will at least complain to Amazon.

Will try and get the Java and Ruby stuff working on it this week - then I'll be ready to start doing some major work with it.

Final Day of LCA... What a week. Missed the keynote today, but I'll probably catch the video next week. Lots of people all day talking about Python. I've had a play with it, but I really can't see much of a difference between the dynamic languages... it's all a matter of style. I personally use Ruby at the moment (which seems to have a really bad rep at LCA) purely because it gives me ActiveRecord and Rails.... which are very rapid and have excellent community support. It's a pragmatic decision more than anything - gets me stuff done fast and it's not .net :)

Planned on going to Farsight first, but ended up skipping to Kimberlee's Law talk as I couldn't be bothered to walk to Old Arts (I was kinda interested too). Great talk - she made some bold predictions, and a lot of people are obviously worried about all this stuff. Her core message was pretty sound though, as developers we should not stress about it too much and keep on writing cool stuff.

Ok.... I failed miserably in my attempt to blog every day through LCA. Friday morning was a late start (due to 3am bedtime) and that just messed me up for the week. In reference to my last post - I now have photographic evidence of me sticking the stickers on the laptop, I vaguely remember this now. I am now in the predicament that my macbook has a "Gnu/Linux" inside sticker on it - and it doesn't, unless you count all my various vmware images that run on there. I don't think the sticker will come off nicely so I may have to go back to running native Ubuntu on there (I had a lot of trouble with Feisty, but maybe Gutsy is better) - just to justify the sticker :)

Ok. Back to LCA. Thursday was an awesome day, started with an interesting and thought provoking keynote by Stormy Peters about paying open source developers. I then went along to Malcolm Tredinnick's tutorial on fast & efficient website... I knew some of this already, but there was a lot of real useful stuff in there - so will be watching that one again.... having the AV for almost all the talks is going to be really handy.

Ok - I think I had a lot to drink last night. I awoke way later than normal and my laptop is now covered in FSF stickers. Is this the LCA equivelent of the groom-to-be waking up naked in the middle of the countryside tied to tree? :) [it was those damn slab-drinkers!]

Will post a proper blog later when I get my act together... day 4 was a very good day and deserves to be written about.