coffee.geek.nz

2010-03-31 11.09.06, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

So, last week was Ben's last week at Catalyst for a while. He's off to our fellow pacific island of Hawaii to do a photography course with a difference. The end result will be Ben sent somewhere in the world to use his camera skillz for humanity. He'll be going place where evils such as child traffic occur, to record this and hopefully use the photos to get the rest of the world to care more than they do now.

Ben will be posting his photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/serenecloud/

So, last week we all had cake to celebrate commiserate Ben's absence.

thanks to the ninjas who migrated geekspeakr.com from Drupal5 to Drupal 6, and to a happier server during LCA2010

quote from Liz Henry, who really enjoyed the hackfest:

It was like Christmas – I hung out with kick ass open source people all day long, heard great talks, gave a talk and asked for more coding and development with other women, and then got to do that very thing with people I greatly admire!

and thanks to Catalyst for the use of their boardroom and intarwebs.

it's in Wellington New Zealand - 18th Jan to 23rd Jan.

There's still time to submit a speaking proposal to a miniconf:
http://www.lca2010.org.nz/programme/miniconfs

There are 3 funding programmes, if you're an open source contributor and need $$$ to get to Wellington for the conference.
http://www.lca2010.org.nz/media/news/89

The Programme is out - checkout the speakers and topics:
http://www.lca2010.org.nz/programme/schedule

There's is a partner's programme -- details coming soon.

Accomodation - there's student-style accomodation (which I reccomend) - also 4 star, 5 star, and apartments for groups/families.
This year there are couple and family accomodations available.
http://www.lca2010.org.nz/register/accommodation

The primary sponsors, who you should all be thinking good thoughts about now, are: Internet NZ and Google....

other sponsors: Catalyst, Canonical, Egressive, 3months, amberDMS, Dreamhost, Ingres, iwantmyname.com.

On friday we had the first of the Catalyst Drupal+Postgresql Codesprints. About eight drupal devs gathered with laptops, hidden in a meeting room where nobody could find us, and went through the issue list for drupal on postgres.

The issues i want through
http://drupal.org/node/514330 - update to the installation instuctions - wasn't actually needed as the old instructions still work in 8.1 and 8.3.
http://drupal.org/node/400296 - back port of a postgres fix for the simple test module into drupal 6 - the patch needed work. Luckily the patch writer was in the room with me, so he was nudged to fix it. He's done so, now i gotta find time this weekend to look again.

http://drupal.org/node/396388 - thanks @nzkoz for translating this from french :) After much testing on D6 and D7 I just couldn't find how to make this occur. It's obviously happening to many folks who then take the error message and search and find that issue - so I left it with a plea to please add instructions on how to make the error occur.

What's it's like to work at catalyst?

Sysadmins bring us beer regularly

We watch YouTube

eat cake

draw important things on whiteboards

Listen to great music

Wear awesome hats

Attend Pizza Thursday

Order lots of bacon in foreign countries

get creative on friday nights

wonder if the boss is nearby

When you get sleepy, the desks are really comfy for naps

My friend, Reed, has created a brand new python users' group in Wellington

The first meeting is this coming thursday, 8th of January 2009, at Catalyst IT.

More details: http://nzpug.org/MeetingsWellington

My catalyst colleagues have been up to awesome things recently

Sam Vilain has completed a conversion of the perl source code to git and the project has move to use this git repo
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/04/1610256

Josh Waihi is now an official Postgresl maintainer for Drupal.

Vik Olliver's 3D printer that can replicate itself.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10...

i'm at day 9 of 16 days of NO WORK.

That's right, i haven't been to work for 9 days, and i've got another 7 to go.

So far, i've
* had lunch with my sister numerous times
* bought a couch (same as the one in the malthouse)
* bought an xbox and played much Assassin's Creed.
* numerous discussions with numerous artistic friends about http://creativefreedom.org.nz
* christmas shopping at mini craft fairs in the middle of a weekday.
* OLPC testing brunch
* beer oclock at catalyst
* tried to decorate our falling down student flat so it feels less falling down
* practise guitar, cello, flute but no piano.
* caught up with issues on a bunch of drupal contrib modules
* finished the whole API on a Net::Twitter::Search on cpan
* had strange dreams about making a clan tartan generator perl module :-S
* been to many a christmas do
* Tabitha's birthday party
* did a "cafe crawl" through wellington for 3 days straight.
* found a couple potential flatmates for next year

24/11/2008, originally uploaded by reedwade

yay!! :-)

November Mini Happy Dev House | wellington.geek.nzSource: wellington.geek.nzThe first Sunday of November is going to be another Mini Happy Dev House. No topic for this one, unless someone has something they want to present - please contact Nigel (nigel@catalyst.net.nz) if you have an idea.

tHERE'S STILL A FEW BUG LEFT IN LENNY BEFORE IT CAN BE RELEASED AS THE NEXT dEBIAN sTABLE.

iF YOU'RE NOT REALLY INTO TESTING SOFTWARE, OR FILING PATCHES, THEN CONSIDER INSTEAD BAKING COOKIES.

tHERE ARE GOOD FOLKS AT cATALYST it WHO HAVE BEEN HARD AT WORK FIXING GIT AND KERNEL ISSUES -- SO SEND THE COOKIES TO aNDREW rUTHVEN ON lEVEL tWO.

P.S. TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPSLOCK AWARENESS DAY.

SaveTheDevelopers.org :: Making The Web A Better Place, One Campaign At A Time...Source: www.savethedeveloper...Web development community driven campaigns designed to act as a catalyst for change on the web.

and w0lfie wins an eeepc, originally uploaded by Br3nda

for bestest winning-ness in the tokemon contest

Wellington really is the place to be for Open Source.. Andy thinks so, and so do I.. OhLoh shows twice as many opensource hackers in Wellington than in Auckland.

when i bump into another palm user (there's a few on level 2 at catalyst), we do a quick catchup of what new apps we're using - then a few stylus taps and some bluetooth packets later we've shared all the software we discussed to each other.

i'm just sayin'

after doing the budgets again, i realised we were several hundred dollars short of the target for girl geek dinners. I really wanted to make the tickets less than $30, and for 70 people.

So, i put out the distress call.

Four very very awesome Wellington companies responded and joined our sponsors.

The new sponsors are:

HackOff 2008 is a fun evening for teams of hackers to compete at solving
programming problems for fun.

Remember when coding was fun?  Before you got bogged down with UML
diagrams, architecture planning meetings, spec documents, units tests
and user documentation?  For one evening, we'll take you back to how
coding was meant to be - see a problem, solve it, move on.  The first
team to solve all the problems will be declared the winners and will
receive the adulation of their peers.

The evening will be hosted by Wellington Perl Mongers and Catalyst IT.

 
6pm @ Catalyst, level 4

Speaker + topics =

Brenda Wallace  Heap-Only Tuples
Jonathan Harker         Full Text Search
Mark Kirkwood   Optimising the Planner
Sam Vilain      Implementing Transactions and Nested
Tim Goddard     Top-n Sorting

Level four, 150 Willis street, Wellington

there's a rule, for our little cul-de-sac on level seven at catalyst - we only use technologies that begin with P.

So, Tim therefore must be working on pRuby, not ruby.

It's with some amusement i discover a project named Pruby

there's a rule, for our little cul-de-sac on level seven at catalyst - we only use technologies that begin with P.So, Tim therefore must be working on pRuby, not ruby.It's with some amusement i discover a project named PrubypRuby is the ultimate glue code between PHP and Ruby which lets you use Ruby as a HTML-embedded, server-side scripting language. With pRuby, you can intermix PHP and Ruby to create dynamic web content. It features better startup speed than CGI and PHP, better execution speed than PHP, more powerful and less messier to program than PHP, cross-language function calls, and cross-language error handling.

Pizza thursday is something we do at catalyst. We're a giant flock of geeks hacking opensource at work all day, so we stop to rant to each other on thursdays.

Check out the topics for the next pizza thursday:
* ccache: gcc's best friend
* "thing's wot I lernt about technical writin"
* a rant about licensing

Vik, Tim and I will be lurking at the victoria varsity career day, representing catalyst on the 9th of May.

We'll have chocolate coated coffee beans to give away, and Vik will be brining down his RepRap Machine (a 3d printer than can print copies of itself)

If your a student there who loves the warm fuzzy and/or glory of opensource, stop by for a chat.

Andy Chilton's blog post on google lockins described more succintly than i could my own "i've got a bad feeling about this".

I don't agree that lockin is what's happening quite yet, but it could happen so easily. Andy's making the point that Google Application engine is the first of very serious, very genuine vendor lockins.. elsewhere folks are turning to google because they provide a service that no-one else does, or they provide it in a better way than anyone else did.

However, they scare me. They can be alot more open than they are. Consider that Catalyst employs nearly ten times more fulltime opensource developers than google.... but hey, we don't fund Summer of Code.

Open ID is a good measure of openness, and so is import/export of data (real time APIs being even better). On the privacy side i want the ability to remove my data from the bowels of google - Their privacy statement never quite says enough for me.

The idea that google is not "doing evil" comes from google's corporate philosphy and i encourage you to read it. It refers to the idea that adverts can be non-intrusive. That's all. It doesn't make any broader statement on evil than advert placements.

However, back to lockins: Consider if today you decided to ditch every google service. Could you? How many of their services are you locked into?

For myself, today i'd:

Interesting Blog post from my colleague Matt Holloway on how ISO business model means there is no final edition of the OOXML spec available for review

I wonder how anyone can vote yes to fast track on something they don't even have an official copy of.

p.s. Welcome to catalyst, Matthew.