Older blog entries for mtearle (starting at number 25)

University - So long and thanks for all the fish ... finished my last exam today, hopefully forever, but I'm not counting my chickens just yet. Hopefully this means I'll be more useful in the global scheme of things but ...

Home, Sweet, Home - Still needs to be cleaned as we have only just moved in, crap still everywhere. We've already re-arranged the computers three times though....

ObHacking - the debian kpkg stuff is really nice...

.au is really too small - whilst reading jaq's diary - the number of people that I've met in it was disturbingly high, maybe I should just move to Sydney?

hacking - not much accomplished this month, although have had a look at creating some widgets for Term::Stool

study - currently hacking matlab, it reminds me disturbingly of python in syntax

audio - just found audacity and dbmix on Sourceforge, definitely be useful for one of my evil projects in July....

Life Imitating Art Imitating Life - Doesn't the speech from Microsoft's Craig Mundie have overtones of Anti-Trust in it?

Anti-Trust - went and saw it at the cinema tonight with a large proportion of UCC. We were about 60% of the people in the cinema. This wouldn't be so depressing if there were more than ten of us. The movie desperately needed a real exposition but it was fine once it got going. I definitely need to watch it again to catch all the in jokes. Had an entertaining and illuminating discussion with gbowland and Avril on the way home about Linux, GNOME politics and how all the pieces are fitting together or not as the case may be.

reefknot - Reefknot seems to be progessing well. I think reefknot-devel crowd have the highest velocity of the calendaring efforts out there at the moment.

gbowland - Congratulations on deciding to kick the coffee habit ...

gbowland has broken the world

advogato - Advogato, it's been almost a month since my last confession ....

iCalendar - have been reporting bugs in Net::ICal, raising questions about libical, and feeling awfully guilty about some email that I've been ignoring in my Calsched inbox.

Accomodation - moved house, too much junk, too many stairs, although it's a strange feeling to live alone for a change.

LCA 2002 - the mad Perth people are trying to put a bid together for linux.conf.au 2002, there's lots of enthusiasm, now we need some organisation. If your interested in coming to Perth, Australia for it email me and I'll pass the message onto our organisers mailing list

absent friends - Bumped into a girl I hadn't seen for about five years today that I had known from first year Uni, it's curious to see how people change over time. I gave her my details, it will be interesting if she calls.

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