dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

First things first, what's with the low shower pressure in St Mary's? If this is an attempt to save work I'm afraid it's not working as you end up taking 2-3 times longer with your shower :)

Day 3 - LCA Opens. Bruce Schneier keynote was very good, not what I was expecting and could easily be digested by anyone not in IT, so I will be sharing the video for this one with a lot of people I know (The Greens will find it interesting I think). I seem to actually be one of the few people that seem to have not read Bruce's stuff before, but I'll be reading his blog from now on.

The talk of the day was the big XO giveaway - I'm not going to go on about it too much, but suffice to say I couldn't help feeling jealous I didn't get one. I did have an idea for software for preschoolers, but I tried to mention it to Jim after the keynote but he didn't seem to be that interested (it's not their target) so maybe I'm just clutching at straws here at a reason to get one.

Day 2.... I'm getting into this now.

I spent most of the day in the Mysql Miniconf but had a little departure to the packed sysadmin one for the session on puppet (sorry Mysqlers I was probably the one that instigated the switch of rooms as I did tell someone in sysadmin how much space you had!).

Puppet is awesome - I've already started some work on this, but I am still a little daunted by all the different ways of doing things. Anyway - there were some good tips from the Kennards...ahem I mean $client talk and I am pleased to hear that there is a good book that just came out. Looking forward to Luke's talk on Friday.

Anyway back to Mysql. Lots of talk about replication and proxy, which is of main interest to me. Proxy is awesome but I think I might have to put hold my plans to use it in production for a while (differing opinions on it's stability) which is a real shame as it solves a lot of problems for me. Very few seemless options of doing M/S selection in PHP so there will be some coding, at least a move to RoR there are a few options like Masochism.

Well, here we are, me attempting to blog again - let's see how this goes!

After my 4:00am start from the Gold Coast - I am finally in Melbourne (a cool 15oC as I stepped off the plane in my Gold Coast attire...brrr) at my first ever LCA!

After crawling my memory for Melbourne geography and how the trams work, by some miracle I made it to Melbourne Uni. Nice campus, the eclectic mix of beautiful heritage buildings and hideous 60's architectural mistakes reminded me a lot of my own campus - gave me more thoughts about becoming a student again, but this came crashing down again as I thought of lack of $$$!

Ok, so I've got off my fat ass and released this idea into the wild - here is the email that I just spammed to as many QLD IT people & groups I could find... hopefully it will propagate it's way around by itself now...!

Hello Fellow Queenslanders!

I'm writing to you because I think you might be interested in the
concept of BarCamp: an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people
to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with
discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

Aha - the start of my blog... for real this time. I've been procrastinating on this for a while now - I read a lot of blogs, but never got around to writing my own. Anyway - I've just got back from Sydney and was really lucky to be around at the same time that Bar Camp Sydney was on. If you don't know what a Bar Camp is - head over to http://barcamp.org and you'll find out, I won't repeat it here. Anyway - a lot of people who attended were bloggers and I guess they shamed me into starting!