planet.linuxchix.org.nz

in honour of them truckies.

national-truck-parade-day--the-anthem.mp3

»» Submitted by Shiny at 04 July 2008 03:28

To be found here: http://twitter.com/br3nda/statuses/849087654

»» Submitted by Shiny at 04 July 2008 00:46

Sarah Wiig, Wellington music geek and all round awesome person, will demo her amazing musical glove she built.

Then, the Sarah Wiig band will play into the evening. Style is acoustic folk.

see Sarah Wiig's MySpace profile to listen to to her music.

»» Submitted by Shiny at 03 July 2008 04:30

I'm super looking forward to getting the Samsung Q45, but everytime I close my macbook, I feel a little tiny bit of panic. Actually it's slightly more than tiny. I'm terrified that these are the last few days I have without filesystem corruption.

Longer term readers of this blog will remember that I've been pretty burnt in the past... my last year's LCA slides getting eaten by a fucked up suspend/fullboot/shutdown/resume sequence that turned /etc into a python file and the slides into a gnome xml config file. (I now have an irrational hatred of both python and gnome).

Yeah, that was a year and a half ago and I'm sure things are better by now. Even so. The one remaining thing that fills me with warm fuzzy joy about the macbook is that macosx suspend and resume just works. Actually that's not true. iCal and iSync also fill me with warm fuzzy joy.

Stay tuned for my adventures getting it working.

02 July 2008 14:30

There are none.

I have become used to picking up a takeaway double espresso in the morning at my tube station (Queen's Park), and holding on to the empty cup during my journey to transfer at Baker St, right through until quite a bit after I exit the tube at Euston Square. It pisses me off, but I've become used to it.

Yesterday morning, I got off at Paddington with an uneaten banana and my empty coffee cup, and had to juggle them with carrying my laptop case, and getting out my wallet to buy tickets to Exmouth. I eventually walked up to a coffee stand and asked the woman behind the counter where the rubbish bins were (I figured since she was selling coffee in takeaway cups she would know where to dispose of them).. but rather than answer my question she just sighed and held out her hand to take my cup.

After I had eaten my banana, I wandered around a bit trying to find a bin again, and failing, ended up chasing a cleaner as she was exiting into a "staff only" area with a rubbish bag (which I presume she had filled up by picking up litter rather than emptying a rubbish bin, since there are none).

I have had it drilled into me since childhood to be a tidy kiwi and throw away my trash correctly, but when it becomes this difficult I am seriously considering just not bothering. It would have been much easier for me to put the banana skin into my empty coffee cup and just put it on the floor and walk away.

I am forced to conclude this is because "they" think that terrorists are going to leave bombs in the rubbish bins at railway stations, which is rage inducing.

I wasn't in London during the tube (and bus) bombing in 2005 (although I was 3 days earlier) and I've never lived in a country that has a fear of terrorism (I absolutely refuse to even justify the arrests of people recently in New Zealand by referring to it as "terrorism", even though that was what it was labelled - bare foot peace, māori and anti-bypass activists do not terrorists make), and I don't know how Londoners feel about this. Maybe I am suffering from privileged New Zealand person syndrome, but it seems to me that the complete removal of rubbish bins from train stations is neither a particularly strong deterrant, nor a worthy one.

02 July 2008 08:00

General Tickets have sold out, in only 2 days..

BUT! there are still 6 student tickets available for only $5 each!
http://wellington.girlgeekdinners.co.nz/

»» Submitted by Shiny at 02 July 2008 03:21

Turning twitter off has immediately increased my desire to blog. This is not surprising, but it's far more pronounced than I would have expected.

This possibly means that the quality of what I blog about will decrease, to meet the lower-quality twitter standards somewhere halfway.

Anyway. Here are some things.

- I cannot figure out whether I like Goldenhorse anymore or not. I'm leaning towards Not. Funnily enough, I used to love Kirsten Morelle's accent, and now I find it rather irritating.

- Using git again (albeit with the eventual target of cvs) is beautiful.

- I've completely given up on using Mac OS X and will buy a Samsung X45-A00D this week. There's just no point keeping mac hardware if I'm not going to run Mac OS X on it, and besides, I have someone who wants to buy the Macbook from me.

- IKEA is terrifying. People are terrifying. This was not helped by Sara's desire to "stand in the model kitchens and think about what our future lives would be like had we those kitchens". 99p cooked breakfasts are terrifying.

- I am going to Exeter tomorrow to talk about Mahara at an ePortfolio conference. From what I hear, the train ride from London is worth looking out the window. Not sure I'll be able to pull focus from my laptop, but I will try.

- I managed to figure out how to register myself as an overseas voter, which means that elections will allow me to stay in the Wellington Central electorate instead of forcing me to vote in Kaikoura which is where my parents live (and what I told NZ Post to forward mail to). This makes me happy, I have voted in the Wellington Central electorate since 1999.

- I've been thinking again a lot about the amount of personal information I put on this blog. I know I've written about this in the past but I'm thinking about it again. I think the amount of personal information I put on here has vastly decreased over the last 2 years, and I partially wonder if my audience has subtly changed in that time... but also I think the increase of the other tools I have been using (twitter!) have led to this. Twitter was much more personal than this blog was, partially due, I think, to the fact that I knew who was following me on twitter, and I really have no idea who reads this blog. I find myself wanting to write more personal things here and stopping myself, which hasn't happened for a long time. Maybe this is also a reaction to moving to another country and having a lot of things going on in my life right now.

30 June 2008 15:00

Tickets are on sale now
http://wellington.girlgeekdinners.co.nz/

and... 30% of the tickets are sold after only 3 hours -- be quick!!!

»» Submitted by Shiny at 30 June 2008 13:44

I just witnessed first hand the sort of computer use experience that I hear people talking about all the time but, thankfully, am mostly sheltered from.

It was a recent looking chassis running some recent looking variant of Windows. I laugh to find that I cannot actually recognise Windows releases anymore, but this one had a big green "Start" button, so I presume this means XP or Vista.

The person was struggling to complete a task that really should not have been that hard, but Windows was slow and unresponsive (this of course could have been down to either the machine itself or network latency), and he responded to this by repeating the requests he was making of the operating system, on some occasions at least 3 additional times, rather than waiting for the first request to complete, while randomly hitting keys (that I couldn't see had any actual instructive use, but rather was just a way to express anger), and yelling at it, while waving his arms about.

I sat in silence, knowing that any comment I could possibly have would be misunderstood or at any rate, not helpful. At one point, he actually asked me, "why is it so slow?" to which I mumbled sympathetically.

It really amazes me that this is the quality of some people's interactions with their computers. It is so far from my own experiences with computers, where 99% of the time when something isn't working I know why, how to work around it, or how to fix it. In general my approach to breakages with computers resemble a challenge for me to solve, sometimes a frustrating one, but no more so than a complicated problem I'm interested in solving. Certainly the computer is not a black box that I am forced to use and loathe doing so.

I am at least mostly convinced that this person's problem was because he was using Windows, although of course there are some people who just don't have an aptitude with computers, no matter what.

30 June 2008 10:30

I'm pretty much carbon bonded to my Palm TX - an aging palm pilot that has wifi and bluetooth and that's about it.

I keep all my calendar, todos, and such in Agendus. It's nifty too becuase i can attach jpegs to just about anythjing, and link meetings and tasks to each other.

I then use Agendus Mail - it pulls down my imap emails, and I can then turn an email into a Todo or a meeting or a memo.

I then keep projects in an app called BrainForest - which shows a rough tree outline with progress meters.

And then - keyring, a gtk app that's on fresh meat, keeps all my passwords (and yegads there are many).

Quick news pulls down Rss.

There's TCMP, an opensource video player for palm that plays divx etc.

And there's Palm books, a free (maybe opensource, i dunno) book reader for -- umm... reading books in txt, html, rtf format.

and a nifty trick - the free PDF reader named Palm PDF does presentation mode over bluetooth - so if i can find a bluetooth projector i don't need my laptop.

Diddle bug, and opensource palm app, is handy for drawing quick notes, which can then be send by email or bluetooth + mms as a PNG.

and finally hBlogger is a blog api client for these rants you see here.

»» Submitted by Shiny at 30 June 2008 05:02

The sound on my laptop has been uber quiet everysince in compiled in a kernel module to make my apple airport express work (the one Geoff gave me, so i'll blame him).

Ubuntu forums people have been very helpful, suggesting a multitude of ways to adjust volume from aumixer to alsamixer to kmix and back again, but they all have it set to maximum already.

So -- very very quiet sound, i seem to be stuck like this.

»» Submitted by Shiny at 29 June 2008 10:25

I have a new keyboard. I took it with me at lunch on Thursday, and a group of people gathered around our restaraunt table to stare, in silence, with their mouths open.

It’s a bluetooth + laser virtual keyboard. It projects the keyboard onto the table in full red laser glory, and then watches for changes in the image to detect key presses. It really works.

Continue reading at Gaming Generation

»» Submitted by Shiny at 29 June 2008 06:18

»» Submitted by Shiny at 29 June 2008 04:07

just discovered WomensPhoneBook . co . nz - cos, you know, women can't use a regular phonebook, they need a special pink one.

Tried search for my favourite things:
computer games, linux, bluetooth, lasers, hackin, opensource, gpl - no results :-(

search for "beer" found me a homestay in "Beerescourt" Hamilton. 1 result for Whisky

alas no results for "hired killers", though there is an advert for "timesavers for new mums".

»» Submitted by Shiny at 28 June 2008 11:11

What's this? the javascript flickr "badge" on brenda's blog? the author of flickrrippr isn't using flickrrippr?

Well now - i just haven't got the whole of flickrrippr working in Drupal 6 yet. the basics are there (and in drupal CVS) but not ready for production yet.

despite the "badge", i still prefer to live with javascript off.

»» Submitted by Shiny at 28 June 2008 10:11

I made a little drupal module, which provides a UI for converting varchar(limit) columns into text columns on postgresql - not sure it's worth putting in drupal contrib - might add to the mini modules section.

It converts, but doesn't bring constaints and indexes with it.

On postgresql there's not real advantage in using varchar. I hear that on mysql it gets indexed better and is much faster -- but then the drupal code doesn't enforce the limit that's stored in the schema so you see sql error when inserting long comments etc...

Hence I prefer to make them text fields

you can get a copy of this module here:
git clone http://git.shiny.geek.nz/drupal/modules/varcharfix/

»» Submitted by Shiny at 28 June 2008 04:38

I used to be fine with pretty much everything the internet threw at me. Sure, I would close websites immediately that I wasn't interested in, but I was never really scared of any internet trends. I never got into livejournal and I was scathing about it, but it didn't freak me out.

I had my own website/journal/blog since 1999. I completely embraced twitter. I reluctantly joined facebook (because Jonathan Baudanza somehow got to me when I was drunk enough to pinky promise), I use flickr because it's incredibly convenient (this after years of maintaining my own gallery), I use last.fm... I don't know why anymore, actually.

But recently I've been using these things less and less. Yesterday I had a total freakout about quality vs quantity (I could write a whole post about the propensity of people to vomit content in the general direction of the internet and hope that some sticks on a wall somewhere where someone might actually see it and pay attention to them! but I won't...) and turned off IM notifications in twitter (I cannot quite yet bring myself to delete my account), and unsubscribed from a whole bunch of rss feeds (no, not modblog yet).

And then today I had another look at github, and had another freakout. Is git suddenly cool? Well yes, it is and it's not sudden. But it's cool because it's an incredibly good tool. It's not cool in that web 2.0 way that twitter and pownce and dopplr and all those sorts of things are, at least I thought...

I thought I was living in this dual world. On one side I had those trendy web 2.0 things that I was a bit wary of but signed up with, used to keep in touch with people (not necessarily geeks), and on the other side I had this world where I use git and vim and ion3 and debian unstable and make scathing comments about graphical interfaces and pointy clicky ... and I could not imagine that those two would ever cross together into this sort of hybrid trendy geeky web2.0 nerdy monster.

Are nerds cool? Someone said to me recently that nerdy was the new black.. and I thought at the time, I was never cool in highschool. I wasn't a nerd, I was more uncool in that rebellious smoke behind the bike sheds and wear 20 up doc boots kind of way, but I wasn't cool and I had a pretty miserable time. Now I live in a world where I'm pretty far gone in terms of geekiness and I never expected that to be cool.

Github seems to me the ultimate expression of this. Take something incredibly geeky (people being passionate about their vcs), add web 2.0, stir, and you end up with cool nerds. It's no surprise to me that github seems to be so rails-focused (written in, as well as hosted project proportion). Rails people have to be the epitome of cool nerds, with their special lingo and their whiskey drinking.

26 June 2008 20:00

SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa is a monthly hackathon, combining serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere.

The whole thing is about rapid development, ad-hoc collaboration and cross pollination. Hardcore coders, l33t hax0r, passionate designers, and other types that enjoy software and technology development are welcome. If this sounds like fun to you, then you're one of us.

So, join us! Order some a brunch and coffee, dhcp into wifi and tag your commits with SHDH. Meet fellow geeks, scheme and come up with world changing creations, while consuming beer, milkshakes, cookies.

New Super Happy Dev House: 10th July, 2008 - 1pm until we get bored

The format of our talks is possibly unusual to some. Instead of slides, we all join the same ircchannel and watch there. The speaker can then post links to webpages, pastebin code snippets and etc while we all follow along.
Topic
Web Frameworks
Speakers
Rob: Django
Brenda: Drupal
SamV: Catalyst perl mvc
Nik: Ruby on Rails
??: Cake
??: Symfony
??: Silverstripe

We're not too strict -- if someone wants to talk on building websites with wordpress or some kinda wiki that's okay too.
Location
the Cross, Abel smith street

More info: http://shdh.org.nz/

»» Submitted by Shiny at 26 June 2008 10:34

http://theden.net.nz

What is the Den?

The Den will be a coworking space in the heart of Wellington’s CBD.

Coworking is the chance for independent contractors, work-at-home professionals or people who travel frequently to Wellington to work together in an office like environment alongside whose in a similar situation. The ability to host client meetings in a private office is a major driver for many freelancers in Wellington.

Right now we're on the hunt for a space that will not only meet the needs of all those talented independent people, but also the room to host user groups and even barcamps!

At launch we're intending to provide
Wireless Internet
A board & meeting room(s)
Kitchen
Mail collection

If you've got ideas, or would like to see us provide other services let us know.

The only thing stopping the launch is finding the right space that can suit all our needs and not cost the moon. At this stage we plan to email weekly updates to those that express interest (and also add more to the website :-)

»» Submitted by Shiny at 26 June 2008 10:31

I signed up for a new VPS, after my old host lost mine during a disk failure, with no recovery available.. It was getting slow anyways - Serving my blog on tektonic was like hammering in a nail with a banana

Anyhoo. the new host is slicehost. The new server is fast. They have community based support via a channel at freenode, and a website full of opensource tips and howtos. I like them.

»» Submitted by Shiny at 26 June 2008 10:15

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:

They join our other sponsors:

And our national sponsors, who help all Girl Geek Dinners in New Zealand:

(FX rocks! they are sponsoring Auckland too!)

»» Submitted by Shiny at 26 June 2008 09:32

The very day the EeePC 701 was available in stores in New Zealand, swept up in the internet hype, I bought one.

The hype was well deserved. The original Eee has been credited with turning the notebook market on it’s head. While the concept of the netbook has been tried before, this time, we were ready for it.

I had a lot of fun putting my EeePC through its paces for Linux Journal. I regularly tested its limitations, carrying it around for internet access and writing while out at cafes and travelling. It’s spent quite a few hours perched on racks in server rooms displaying build documentation or providing me internet access over HSDPA modem. I loved my EeePC, but I did find myself wishing Asus would market a premium model. I was willing to pay a little more to get a little more.

When the EeePC 900 was announced it felt like they were reading my mind.

The Linux version of the Eee900 has a 9” screen at 1024×600, a 1.3MP webcam and 1GB of memory as standard. It has two flash disks, one 4GB and a second 16GB. The second SSD is noticeably slower than the first, making it unsuitable for OS install but at least providing a lot more storage for your data. The touchpad has been tweaked, adding multitouch support and a larger surface area. The notebook itself is also slightly larger, the thickness and width remaining the same but the depth being increased by an inch or so.

Of course, the price tag has gone up, from $600 NZD for the 701 to $750 NZD for the 900. While some couldn’t justify the increased cost, to me it’s well worth it for a computer I can use more seriously. The display is certainly not overgenerous but has at least improved from downright frustrating to reasonable for many tasks. The aesthetics of the notebook are also vastly improved without the large black speakers either side of the panel.

It’s not all roses, however. The battery life is still a miserly 2 – 3 hours, and I find both models of Eee to get uncomfortably warm. I’m also less than pleased at Asus choosing to use a much slower SSD for the larger disk. The announced Eee901 should remedy all of the remaining issues stopping the Eee from being quite the most perfect computer I could envision, with 5 hours battery life, an Intel Atom CPU and the addition of bluetooth.

I’m very excited about where Asus is going with the EeePC line. I see the Eee900 and 901 not as competing for your upgrade dollars against the 701, but threatening $4000 ultraportables from the like of Sony and Fujitsu. They’re cute, they’re fun, they’re portable and the featureset is creeping closer and closer. All for a quarter of the price.

I’m unashamed about being on the netbook bandwagon. The 900 is the first thing I pick up in the morning and the last thing I put down at night. The EeePC has cemented itself a solid place in my heart by being easy to learn, work, and play – and even easier to love.

»» Submitted by jhall at 26 June 2008 02:15

I hate Sainsbury's.

The tube inspires violence. Seriously. I want to bite people all the time. And not in my typical dysfunctional way of showing affection, but more in a, I want to tear chunks out of your arm kind of way.

My snot is now black. I take this to mean I now officially live in london.

Hampstead heath is pretty and there's a nice pub with a courtyard nearby.

Where are the asian supermarkets?

I doubt I will ever get used to "fashion". Especially when it's sitting next to me on the tube and I can't do anything else except stare at it in morbid fascination.

On the upside, I get to do a sudoku twice a day on the commute to work (fashion aside).

The University of London Computer Centre have kindly given me an office to use while I'm here. ♥! It has a coffee place just around the corner with good coffee (their menu used the word ristretto! joy!) and free wifi. I take my laptop there for lunch. It's sort of like a date, except I don't buy it things and it doesn't put out (see previous entry about laptop rage).

My flatmate's favourite wine is Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc.

25 June 2008 15:30

Have been broken for awhile, since I moved servers and upgraded s9y. For some reason the upgrade to 1.3.1 managed to forget to add a couple database columns. Eh, I guess that's what I get when I move servers, upgrade s9y, and postgres all at once (while chewing gum too, of course).

Anyway it's fixed now, thanks to rapid s9y.org developer help.

24 June 2008 14:15

Dear Lazyweb,

For a long time I have been using a combination of Linux and Mac OS X, I have Linux on my desktop machine at work and Mac OS X on my laptop (a macbook, previously a powerbook). I've tried in various times and various ways to run Linux on my mac laptops as well, with varying amounts of fail.

These two usages are generally quite happily split. Anything involving writing code has been done in Linux, and if I needed to do anything from my laptop I have a small far less ideal setup, or just ssh to my work machine and work there. My macs have happily supported: syncing with my phone (calendars and contacts), and itunes, and skype.

Now that I'm in London and back to full time work, I don't have the support of my Linux machine 17 minutes walk away from home, and I'm exclusively using my laptop, and it's driving me crazy. For the first time ever I'm starting to feel hatred for my mac. So I'm thinking about buying another laptop, probably a Samsung Q45 or Q70. I'm leaning towards the Q45.

Anyway, back to switching over.

I am not too worried about my ability to get skype going, that should be fairly trivial. The Q45s I have seen have an integrated webcam similar to the macbooks, although I can't see that at the specification on the above link, not sure about the Q70. Video calling is not compulsory, although I do use it to talk to people I left behind in Wellington.

I'm not too worried about itunes either, I currently have a very old ipod and an ipod shuffle, but I do have all the music that was on there backed up on a usb drive. If anyone has any recommendations for good ways to deal with ipods under Linux, that would be helpful.

The thing that I am worried about is syncing with my phone. In Linux I don't currently use calendars (I've been using the Mac OS Calendar for a long time happily), and I use abook for addresses, which I loathe but rarely have to touch. I have a Nokia e65.

So I need: a good way to manage music with ipod-ish things (I'm guessing the answer to this is going to be amarok), a good calendar, some way to sync contacts and calendars to my phone.

Help me lazweb-kenobi, you're my only hope.


Edit: and any recommendations on where to buy in London (or online), preferably with the option to get a US keyboard

23 June 2008 07:45