Older blog entries for mtearle (starting at number 19)

Obligatory post linux.conf.au diary - doesn't everyone have one?

arrival - Arrived in Sydney safely, and caught a taxi with other compatriots to UNSW. I disagree with rmt's view of Sydney taxi drivers, the majority bar one were very pleasant and helpful, much moreso than the taxi drivers here in Perth, Australia.

tutorial day - Went to the "Threaded Programming" tutorial, it really opened my eyes and explained things quite cleanly to me about how threads work. Registered, got recognised by jdub. Encountered mbp and raph. This was quickly followed by the GNOME talk by mjs and vicious. Held a calendaring BOF, Skud arrived just in the nick of time as I was flailing madly at attempting to explain things to the rest of the people participating. On reflection, it went well and it was nice to meet people face to face. Went to Oxford Street for dinner with all the other West Australian expats, a lovely that restuarant called Thai Panic. I kinda agree with Skud, if Oxford street is the queer central of Sydney then it's really quite dull - thoroughly prententious and no sign of real personality. Cripes The Court in Perth can do better.

wednesday - Attended the Alan Cox keynote. I'd attend the talk that Linus had given in Australia (the penguin incident trip) several years before, it was quite a thrill to see how far the kernel had moved since then. Met telsa at some point that day. Attended the OpenH323 talk, must investigate if it can talk to work's 5300. Attended ajv's talk on large scale OSS, it was a pity there were few cluey software engineers in the audience it could have triggered some interesting discussion. Went to the Qt/Embedded talk, sexy to say the least. Watched the eye canday at Rasterman's talk. I feel kinda sorry for taj talk that happened at the same time, i would have liked to go to both of them. Went to Newtown for dinner, lovely BSE-free steak :)

thursday - Saw Dave Miller's keynote, went to the GNOME talk, followed closely by Wichert Ackerman's Debian Talk. Met Zebee, Clare @ work's daughter. Went to the init script talk and finished the afternoon with Rusty's kernel come generic linux hacking talk. Skud's comments about the gender cliqueiness of the free software community ring especially true, at UCC we suffer the same problem, the CS/hacking community doesn't seem to attract many females - where's the glass ceiling? Went to the dinner, lovely food, too much wine, and was certainly guilty of revisiting my earlier student drinking days. I'd agree that it was not what I had hoped for, not enough mingling, most of the crowd disappeared early, too much Australian ockerism and not enough of a direction to the whole evening. Watched gbowland laugh at taj - something about GNOME/KDE? Went to the pub afterwards, drank more, met hypatia, went back to International House and went to sleep.

saturday - missed most of Saturday morning (see above), heard that the Perl 6 talk was fixing some of my pet peeves about OO perl. Went to the conference review, truly astounded about the percentage of developers at the conference versus plebs. Then wandered around Sydney with about 50 other linux hackers, lots of fun! hypatia reminding me that I really need to buy some platform shoes :) Caught up with another old friend of k's, the M lady.

sunday - went down to Nowra to visit relations, Sydney trains are great, pity there are so unclean. Lost an hour of my life that I'll never get back in Dapto, oh well.

monday/tuesday - back to Perth, catching up on sleep and catching up with work. Must deal with some of the calendaring stuff. Oh well, I think I've mentioned enough other hackers in this diary tonight to make up for yakk's blatent name dropping all last year :)

linux.conf.au - Welcome to Advogato - the linux.conf.au noticeboard Fly out of Perth in about 17 hours, it should be fun, although I'm experiencing my usual pre flight jitters. (Bad experience on the way to the airport for my first jet flight & related events in my life at that time, to quote Angel "I need a hug")

iCalendar - got enthused seeing sked and started working on python wrapper to libical. I've run out of time to work on it this past week due to going to the above and other work committments but I've put something up here

mailman - for the first time in eons, I actually got around to hacking some code - submitted a patch to automatically approve subscriptions for certains domains (of course, it could just as easily be faked with procmail but that's no fun! :) ) Next challenge is to forward port a local mailman hack.

new years - managed to survive it intact, that's about it. Fled to a strange party to escape my geeky/painful/depressing/irritating friends and acquaintances only to be surrounded by geeks from one of the other Unis in Perth. It was quite pleasant however, spa good. My life is cursed! D&D, B&T However spoke to a good friend in Melbourne today, he should be coming out West late Jan which is good (TM)

mojos - Mojos is the local "local" music venue, went and saw three great bands there tonight - Carus, Ruby's Grace and Mixleplix for the small sum of AU$ 5 (that's an increasingly small amount in US$)

disappearance - yakk has gone and it is strangely quite around here, hope the Eazel boys don't scar him too much

linux.conf.au - plane tickets booked, conference fees paid

ObHacking - was working on a mailman patch then Christmas happened, will try to look at it this weekend maybe

diary piracy -

If someone can recommend a good source of time-in-a-can I would be most grateful.

Eeeeeek!

Uni - I loathe studying at this University (however working here is not bad), got my exam results back today, not pleasant, failed the uni I thought I was going too and life just sucks. Oh well, off to talk to people tommorow

DTP - Having to put together a newsletter tonight, the lack of a good open source page layout tool is depressing, oh well, I'll just have to use MS Word *shudder* yakk pointed me at Glayout, but that still ooks at the planning stage, any other suggestions?

reefknot - watching the mailing lists and enjoying the lively discussion/flames. Too busy at work to do anything else.

aaaaarrrrggghhhh - Exam terror strikes again. Have a really evil exam on logic this Thursday, only understand about 35% of the course, but need to get 58% in the exam. Looks like I'm looking down the barrel of a supplementary exam - and I was really looking forward to doing the whole graduation thing in March. It's partly my fault, lecturer has bad attitude (no questions in lectures), I get bad attitude toward lecturer ... it all goes down hill from there.

bjork - just watched a special from 1997 on ABC (the .au one) about the album she was producing. Very funky music, and the pictures of Iceland were so beautiful. I'm still insanely jealous of my friend who go to Finland in 1998 and probably saw many things just like that. I'm must listen more closely to her music next time it comes on the radio.

books - I agree there needs to be a free bibliography solution, however, like advogato their needs to be a certification model to stop crap biblios filtering in. This is one of the reasons that sticks out as to why companies still charge lots of money for this plus the fact that there are an insane number of books published each year and it there is a linear relation to this in terms of cataloging. Some of the effort here should be pushed back to publishers and authors which in turn probably requires a distributed solution. Hmm, I better stop writing before this gets complex.

gnome-doc-list - the debate about the mouse buttons continues. On a related topic of gnome lists, which ones are worth joining?

swiprolog - prolog is cool, although mind warping. must have a look at it's list operations

25th - yep, it's coming soon. yakk and gbowland think I should just get over it

magicpoint - used it today for a presentation, my lecturer was curious at what the program was. He's one of the old school, he understands tar and Makefiles and has probably used 9-track mag tape in his heydays.

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two months later - I haven't really been keeping up with this diary posting thing very much. I've been kinda of drifting around and not really contributing much, both work and study have been giving me enough stress and distracting me from hacking away. Not feeling particularly well doesn't help either.

gbowland - Grahame's youthful enthusiasm makes me very jealous, I wish I had more.

study - two units - one easy, one hard - I'm meant to be working on the hard one at the moment, instead I'm writing a diary; on other hand prolog is funky and I should really make an effort to learn it. I gave a lecture for the easy one recently on the topic of Internet Standards - there is certainly a marked difference between the ethos of the IETF and the W3C. The W3C puts me off, it feels like an old boys club.

choral - just performed Mozart's Ave Verum and Mozart's Wedding mass. Much better than a requiem anyday.

wow - long time no diary, must have been those exam thingies and general slackness

gnue - have been tracking the GNUE mailing list. It looks as though it could be really exciting if put together correctly. I have already written one billing application for the University and if GNUE would help me avoid the pain I'd be very glad. Although I can appreciate Derek's diary entries in relation to some of the traffic on the list.

music - peformed Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky with PUCS in late June ... sounded beautiful

rrdtool - played with rrdtool recently for a project at work, it's quite good and mind boggingly simple to use. My only wish (or itch) is that there are no nice front ends out there for my particular application, which is a SCADA style monitoring application. It looks like we may have to go with a commerical application instead, not that this is neccessarily a bad thing - it just doesn't give the warm fuzzy feeling that open source does.

evolution - downloaded the .debs of 0.3.1 it's progessing wonderfully, although the only thing I think I can offer to the project at the moment is my input on the mailing list. P75's are really painful to do any development nowadays.

it's a small world after all - saw a posting to the Australian choral mailing lists about a web site that skud wrote, is the Australian online community really that small? :)

gnome 1.2 and helixcode - set up a workstation at with the helixcode .debs. Things just worked, it's a nice feeling. It was like working on the Mac again. It's nice when you tell someone has cared about the code that they have written.

university - passed exams, although I feel that one of my units this semester is going to be painful

code_rush - watched it on TV tonight. yakk named dropped :) Good documentary, it's amazing how organisations can change in just over a year