i'm kinda pleased alot of you did notice :-) -- yes, i've deleted my facebook account a week ago.

I'll do a good summary of why soon - but for now, it can be summed up as "WTF FACEBOOK, PRIVACY FAIL!". Facebook have taken what was shared/uploaded to their service, under some pretty good privacy conditions, and then a few years later facebook have changed their mind and made everything public. I don't want to trust them with data (and i had used them to share baby photos with family). I don't want to encourage my friends, family, or anyone else to use facebook. Hence i'm not using them either anymore.

Here's a pretty good visualisation of facebook privacy over the last five years:
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

So, if you want to keep up with me, try the following services, which so far haven't decided to suddenly expose all private data held on their services (exception for google reader).

My Blog: http://coffee.geek.nz
RSS feed: http://coffee.geek.nz/rss.xml
Statusnet: http://shiny.status.net
Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/taniwha
Twitter: http://twitter.com/br3nda
Google Reader: http://www.google.com/profiles/brenda.wallace

There are lotsa quotes of stuff i said in this Computer World story by Stephen Bell :
"Wellington's Brenda Wallace cruises to victory in predictions contest"
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/technology/android-boosted-ipad-dism...

Well-known Wellington geek Brenda Wallace cruised to victory for the second year running, in developer group Unlimited Potential’s contest for the best predictions for ICT in the year ahead.

A growing number of organisations, especially government agencies, will choose open-source software during 2010, for the wrong reasons, Wallace predicts. Referring to the Public Sector Remix open-source desktop trial, she says, “I suspect they’re doing it because Microsoft wouldn’t give them the price they wanted. I hope they’ll stay open-source, because it gives them freedom and control and breaks a monopoly.”

Libraries will begin renting e-books, she says. More tablet computers will enter the market, running “quasi-operating systems” such as Google’s Android rather than full-blown Linux, Apple or Windows; “but users won’t know or care about the OS; they’ll just use [the devices].”

The move to open government “will get creepy”, Wallace says, observers will “stalk” politicians, reporting their movements through Twitter and other real-time forums. “I’d like to see them do it to the lobbyists,” she says; “I’d like to know who they’re having lunch with.”

Tonight i defend my claim to a sparkly pink tiara at Bloggers Predict 2010
Thursday 28 January 2010
5:30pm - 8:00pm
Where: Wellington Regional Chamber of Commerce, level 28, The Majestic Centre, 100 Willis Street

The 2010 lineup
Brenda Wallace (@br3nda) Current tiara-holder, Brenda was UP Visionary of the year for 2009, can she defend her title in 2010? The Capital City’s geek girl extraordinaire and queen bee of the software community, Brenda is to mobile technology and open source what honey is to brown bread, she makes it taste better! Brenda blogs on Coffee.geek.nz about coffee, gadgets, opensource, wellington, new zealand, music, and above all things: freedom.
Philip Fierlinger (@skyrize) From Silicon Valley to Silicon Welly, Philip’s web design expertise and has been eagerly sought after by online businesses and conference-goers alike. Currently design chief at Xero, blogger at Turntable Media Philip’s passion for web usability also led him to establish his own consultancy.
Mauricio Freitas (@freitasm) Geekzone head honcho and microblogging enthusiast. If there’s a new gadget being launched you can be sure Mauricio has an opinion about it. Been renovating his kitchen for last 6 months and has forgotten how to cook, however is on first name basis with all the (good) cafe owners in town. Possibly Wellington’s most avid “Tweeter”.

News items from Renegade Economists | 3CR Community Radio 855 AMSource: www.3cr.org.auBlack Screens: Brenda Wallace from the Wellington activist community discusses kiwi government tactics to reduce internet freedoms. Karl is back form NZ and whips thru the growing media storm we are building with co-host Alice Bleby. Dont forget Speed Renting next Tues 17th.

I had some projects stored in git, that i work on while on a plane -- and i didn't have my git env set up so it ended up with "brenda" as the author. To clean this up, here's the command"

git filter-branch --commit-filter '
        if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME" = "brenda" ];
        then
                GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Brenda Wallace";
                GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Brenda Wallace";
                GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="shiny@cpan.org";
                GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="shiny@cpan.org";
                git commit-tree "$@";
        else
                git commit-tree "$@";
        fi' HEAD

Some of the geeks from Webstock mini.

Matt, who has something to do with Internet Explorer.

Nigel, geek, and Aucklander (but i don't hold that against him)

Mike, "Social Networker" who blogs about Enterprise (but i don't hold that against him)

Sammy!

Kris, font geek. Gave his talk with beer in hand. heh. I must emulate.

Some shameless self promotion by me:
http://www.up.org.nz/gadgets-games-geeks-08

Free software advocate Richard Stallman is in New Zealand for a limited time to speak about copyright and share his experiences establishing the world’s first free user operating system.

A pioneer in ICT circles, US-based Stallman controversially started a movement based around sharing source code back in the 1970s when programming was still in its infancy and launched the development of the GNU operating system (www.gnu.org) in 1984.

 
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

Collected "Press"

Google Open Source Blog - Wellington Girl Geek Dinners

By Brenda Wallace, Catalyst IT and Geek Girl at Large

Memcache

Overview

I place an order, and 2 days later i get this emailYour Lenovo order: Order # CA###### has been receivedFrom: lenovopc@au.lenovo.comTo: 1hooewl@my.lenovo.com, 1sahar@my.lenovo.com, empsale@au.lenovo.com, lenovopc@au.lenovo.com, brenda@catalyst.net.nzDate: 15/03/07 17:06  Dear Brenda Wallace,Order informationThank you for visiting Lenovo. Your order has been received and transferred to a Lenovo Customer Representative. This e-mail confirms receipt of your order to Lenovo.......

Last night, the eve of valentines day, the occured the annual lightning talks installment of Wellington Perl Mongers
Grant McLean spoke on "Why XML::Simple Sucks" - and advised fellow mongers to never put the word "simple" in a cpan module. He gave the following example of emails he gets for support:

Dear Mr McLean
I have downloaded your module and am having a little
trouble making it work.
I'm pretty new to XML and I've never used Perl before.
Could you please tell me, what's a hashref?

Here's a copy of my 7 days of fame on stuff.co.nz

Linux conference blog

Friday, 19 January 2007

This week Sydney is hosting the largest free and open source software
conference in the Southern Hemisphere. Linux.conf.au (LCA07) is an
influential gathering of over 800 interested users and software
developers.

Perl Mongers (http://www.pm.org/) is a "Loose Association of Perl User
Groups".  The Wellington chapter (http://wellington.pm.org/) meets on the second Tuesday of each month (ie: today) at 6:00pm for:

• interesting talks
• the opportunity to ridicule other people's code
• networking with other Perl users
• and of course beer

The venue, the web hosting and the beer are kindly provided by Catalyst

Tonight's three speakers are