Planet Catalyst

Don Christie: A very nasty invasion of privacy

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:43:16 +0000

I have written in the past about how new Copyright legislation essentially turns global corporates into criminal investigators with very wide ranging powers of snoopage. Here is a very nasty example of what can happen. Viacom, representing...

Read more @ http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/passthesource

Brenda Wallace: Convoy!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:28:48 +0000

in honour of them truckies.

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

Brenda Wallace: Job Advert

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:46:25 +0000

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

Reed Wade: Cheese Puff

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:42:04 +0000

Oh man oh man, I can't stay away from these things. (I'm not the only one.)

I can feel the digits slipping off the expiration date on my birth certificate every time I eat one of these but I can't help myself.

Brenda Wallace: Girl Geek Dinners -- WE HAVE A BAND!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:30:13 +0000

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.

Penny Leach: I am terrified of suspend/resume

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:13:53 +0000

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.

Andrew Chilton: Cil v0.4.0 released

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:47:10 +0000

This release has a number of new things and functionality.

Here's the short version of the changes, though there are quite a few since Saturday's release:

now reads a ~/.cilrc config file, so set your UserName and UserEmail in there
you can now filter on --is-mine which takes your email from your ~/.cilrc
you can now use shortened hash names for issues/comments/attachments, so long as they are unambiguous
a new command called 'am' has been added so you can process email messages into either new issues or comments on existing issues (ToDo: processing of multiple messages in actual Mailboxes)
allows dependencies between issues so you can state which DependsOn or Precedes another

Documentation has been made a little nicer too.

There are still lots more ideas to get through but I'm sure it'll slow down at some point. As always, thanks to those who provide me with inspiration and ideas, you know who you are.

Have fun, let me know how it goes and happy hacking.

Update: fix to packaging, patched to v0.4.1, see the main cil page for tarball details.

Andrew Chilton: Why I'm Passionate about Perl

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:33:43 +0000

I saw this meme on Grant's journal (huh, who keeps a journal these days, I knew he was old fashioned). Not sure where he got it from but I thought I'd do it anyway.

The person who introduced me to Perl showed me that...

Erm, nothing. I was the same as Grant. I introduced myself to Perl and I'm glad I did. At the time, I was living in Germany, had a crappy old laptop, no webbernets and lots of time. I had to do something and somehow, Perl won.

I first starting using Perl to...

...do my own photo gallery website. And yes, I wrote my own templating language. I love the fact that I did it and I think by doing so, my passage towards being a true Perl programmer was complete. TMTOWTDI! It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

I kept using Perl because...

...after only a few days, I was connecting to The Gimp and writing Perl-Fu modules to generate the graphics, the thumbnails and all the buttons on the site (duly swapped with onMouseOver and onMouseOut). The fact that this language was reading in XML, writing out HTML, reading in jpgs, writing out lots of other images and all these other things made me think that this language was special. At the time, I just didn't know that it wasn't a language at all, and instead was an addictive kind of glue, dressed up and disguised as a language.

I can't stop thinking about Perl...

...because it just encompasses everything I believe in. It has power, expressiveness, individuality, schizophrenia and duct tape (lots of it). It's also free and it has a great community, which are both hugely important factors.

I'm still using Perl because...

...I haven't yet found anything better than it. I'm afraid it's that simple. Other scripting languages don't seem worthwhile enough (or different enough) to spend time on and it's only completely new paradigms like Erlang, which I would consider learning. Whilst a lot of Perl people are saying "Ruby until Perl 6", I'm saying "Perl until Perl 6".

I get other people to use Perl by...

N/A. I don't say to other people that they should do anything. Then again, there's no harm trying to convince someone to use something by showing them it's better. I mean, show them a thousand line Java file or a 10 line Perl program. Also show them ACME::EyeDrops and say "There, you do that". If they reply with "Why would I want to?", you've just won the "Which is more fun?" argument.

I also program in ... and ..., but I like Perl better since...

...as stated before, I've not found a better language, though in the past I have written stuff in C, C++, Ruby, Java, Ada 83 (Ravenscar Profile) and a few other bits and pieces. To be honest, waiting for stuff to compile just bores me to tears. It used to take me a thousand hours to get an Ada program to compile and once it compiled, there was no point running it since I knew it would work! Perl is a refreshing change :-)

Brenda Wallace: soldout!

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:21:19 +0000

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/

Reed Wade: Zither

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:15:56 +0000

You want zither? Here's some now--

Andrew Chilton: SoCNoC 2 a Success

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:46:59 +0000

Despite my own failure at doing SoCNoC this year, a number of other people have and it is they I'd like to thank for making SoCNoC what it is.

Throughout the year, a few of us behind the scenes in KiwiWriters do lots of work to make sure we're ready for SoCNoC during June. Sometimes it feels like a lot of work but when it starts, it's all worthwhile.

And this year we have managed to break a number of records. Here's a quick run-down of some of the more memorable figures:

143 participants (2.4x last year)
32 winners (2x last year)
2,635,755 cumulative words written (2.6x last year)
58,000 page impressions (2x last year)
cost - free (same as last year)!

and lots and lots of fun in to the bargain too.

Well done to everyone who completed it. Special congrats. to our organisers who not only did all the work but managed to write a novel too: Kerryn, Travis, Cassie, Pam - and hello to Jane too!

Here's looking forward to a record breaking 3rd SoCNoC next year!

Brenda Wallace: Girl Geek Dinner tickets are on Sale

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:44:54 +0000

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

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

Penny Leach: the way people use their computers baffles me

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:05:40 +0000

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.

Stuart Yeates: I'm confused about hardy heron and default applications

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Yeates) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:13:00 +0000

Back in the day you told your linux system which applications you wanted to use with environmental variables things like:

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/emacs

Then along came the wonderful debianness of the apt-family and the alternatives system.

update-alternatives --config vi

Now this system too is being undermined by various systems, leaving me uncertain where to set things. What I'm trying to do is:

have Sound Juicer and not Music Player (RhythmBox) launched when a CD is inserted. There is an entry for "Multimedia" under the "Preferred Applications" menu option, but this seems to be about opening files, not responding to newly-mounted media and Sound Juicer is not listed as an option. There doesn't seem to be anything about CDs under the "Removable Drives and Media Preferences" (although this is where the setting are that automatically load F-Spot when I attach my camera, which seems like the same kind of thing).
configure which applications I can launch on the .cr2/TIFF/Canon RAW files produced by my digital camera I want the same applications to appear in both the file browser and F-Spot (which look like they're presenting the same interface but apparently aren't). ufraw seems to be the tool of choice here (either standalone or as a gimp plugin), but I'd like to pass it some command line args. I can find no entry or this under the "Preferred Applications" menu option.

There are lots of menus with a "Help" as an option, but very few of them seem to be.

Brenda Wallace: keeping my brain from stack overflow

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:02:34 +0000

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.

Stuart Yeates: Mike O'Connor at Friday drinks

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Yeates) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:34:00 +0000

Mike O'Connor
Originally uploaded by Stuart Yeates

I took some photos at Friday drinks, trying to do the whole wide-aperture-to-isolate-visual-elements thing. I wasn't really aware of just how much it is dependent on the relative position of the photographer, subject and background.

Some of them turned out better than others.

Brenda Wallace: Sound - i want it back

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:25:43 +0000

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.

Brenda Wallace: Yes I am from the future, and the future has lasers

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:18:09 +0000

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

Brenda Wallace: cows!

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:07:19 +0000

Ponoko - Mooooooo by SuperVery

a farm inspired bracelet made using beech. how can you not love cows. with this you get 8 small cows on your bracelet. Standard length is 7.5 inches, however i can easily adjust the length to suit

View >>

Stuart Yeates: What should the ohloh homepage look like?

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Yeates) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:01:00 +0000

In a previous post I criticised ohloh homepage for being completely useless for current users of the site. This was somewhat unfair, since I provided no concrete constructive suggestions as to what should be on the page. This blog post, hopefully, fixes that.

To my mind there are two classes of information that should be on the homepage: (a) things that lots of users are confused about and (b) things that are 'new' (think customised rss feeds) (c) combinations of both.

Finding out what people are confused about is easy, just look in the forums, where people are most confused about:

changes in their kudos
why their enlistment hasn't been updated
why version control system of choice isn't supported

The list of 'new' things is:

new / updated projects
new / updated users
new / updated enlistments
new forum posts
new RSS items in projects RSS feeds

These (1), (3) and (5) can be filtered by the users connection to the project (contributor/user/none).

So the trick now is to find combinations which help users understand what's going on and encourage users to engage with ohloh and the projects.

Idea X: A feed of updated enlistments a user is a contributor or user of:

Project A's enlistment at http://example.com/git updated 24st June 2008 at 24:50 GMT. A, B and C are the biggest commiters to this project, which is in Java and XML. Last updated 1st Feb 1970.
Project B's enlistment at http://example.com/git updated 24st June 2008 at 24:50 GMT. D, E and F are the biggest commiters to this project, which is in C and shell script. Last updated 1st Feb 1970.
Project C's enlistment at http://example.com/git failed at or about revision 12345. Click here for instrustions on what to do about this. Last updated 1st Feb 1970.
...

This not only tells user the status of their projects, but that enlistments are being processed, the expected time between each processing of enlistments, that some processing fails and that there's a link to find out more information. Such a feed also focuses attention on the processing of enlistments---which is the heart of ohloh and the key differentiating factor that seperates ohloh from 15 billion other open source sites.

Idea Y: A mixed feed of upstream bugs that effect ohloh performance and functionality:

Ticket "support for .xcu file format" updated in ohcount by user "batman"
Post "jabber message length" updated in Help! forum by user "someone else"
Ticket "svn branch support" updated in ohloh by user "robin"
Ticket "bzr support in ohloh" created in ohloh by user "joker"
Post "jabber message length" created in Help! forum by user "someone"

This lets people keep up with the status of ohloh progress on issues such as the implementation branch support for svn and support for hg.

Andrew Chilton: New Cil release v0.3.0

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:05:56 +0000

Here's another release of cil for your perusal. Staying true to the "Release early, release often" mantra, I hope you have fun playing with it.

I'll quickly go through all the features in this release:

Filters when Listing Issues

For example:

 $ cil list --label=Type-Critical
 $ cil list --status=New
 $ cil list --assigned-to=andychilton-at-gmail-dot-com

(Note: --label and --status were in v0.2.1.) These can be combined too. For example, this is the command line I used to make sure there were no outstanding issues for this release of cil:

 $ cil list --is-open --label=Milestone-v0.3

and opposite to that, for the changelog I could figure out what had changed since the last release by doing this:

 $ cil list --is-closed --label=Milestone-v0.3

If I was on a big project, I'd probably cron something like this to send me an email each morning:

 $ cil list --is-open --assigned-to=andychilton-at-gmail-dot-com --label=Priority-Critical

That's a pretty nice filter :-)

Added a '.cil' Config File

To be able to do some of the filters above (e.g. --is-open and --is-closed) cil now reads a config file and can determine which statuses and labels are valid. There are also lists to say which statuses are considered open or closed. Of course, if you want neither of features you can just turn them off (which is the default behaviour).

Added a 'fsck' Command

Cil saves it's issues, comments and attachments in the filesystem which isn't usually a good way for (slightly) relational data. The new 'fsck' command can help you figure out missing entities though. For example, if an issue is missing its comments or attachments and whether comments or attachments have been orphaned. It also runs some validation against each issue. Validation at the moment consists of checking statuses and labels in their respective allowed list.

Here is some example output you might see from this command (usually if you or someone else has not been tracking the right things):

 ===============================================================================
 --- Issue c4fa2e27  -----------------------------------------------------------
 * StatusStrict is turned on but this issue has an invalid status 'InProg'
 * LabelStrict is turned on but this issue has an invalid label 'Something'
 --- Issue 1f67bc27  -----------------------------------------------------------
 * comment '8dfe256c' listed in issue '1f67bc27' does not exist
 * comment '99b20701' is listed under issue '1f67bc27' but does not reciprocate
 * attachment '29afc3ef' listed in issue '1f67bc27' does not exist
 ===============================================================================
 --- Comment 99b20701  ---------------------------------------------------------
 * comment '99b20701' refers to issue '893f7ea6' but issue does not exist
 ===============================================================================
 --- Attachment 37873839  ------------------------------------------------------
 * attachment '37873839' refers to issue '8af89d74' but issue does not exist
 ===============================================================================

More validation checks will be in v0.4.

Bash Completion of Commands, Options and Entities

(Where 'entities' are issues, commands or attachments.)

As stated in a previous post, there is now bash completion for cil.

Working Practices

As I said earlier, I use a few command lines to let me figure out when I can release a version. For example, the next release is going to be v0.4.0 (barring any bug fixes to v0.3.0) so I tag all of the issues I want done for that release with Milestone-v0.4. This makes it easy to see what needs doing and what is already done:

 $ cil list --is-open --label=Milestone-v0.4
 $ cil list --is-closed --label=Milestone-v0.4

For example, an issue might have been added at some stage in the past, complete with labels:

 $ cil add
 ... added issue 'cafebabe' ...

I usually commit the new issue to my VCS immediately. When I start working on it, I'll mark it InProgress, even if it is just locally. Sometimes I check this in too if it's going to be longer than a few hours:

 $ cil status cafebabe InProgress

Once I've finished hacking on the issue and I'm happy with it, I set it to Finished and add a comment to say what I've done:

 $ cil status cafebabe Finished
 $ cil comment cafebabe
 ... added comment 'decaf7ea' ...

I use Git for my VCS so prior to check in I stage all the working file changes but also make sure Git is tracking the issue properly too. It already knew about the issue file but I need to add the comment file that goes with it:

 $ git add issues/c_decaf7ea.cil

Finally when I commit, I commit the code, the issue and the comment all together. In the message I usually put the text '(closes #cafebabe)'. This keeps everything together.

What's Next

The next release of cil will be Milestone-v0.4 so I'll add that label to a few items I want in it. If there is something I want for the future but haven't roadmapped them yet (into v0.5, v0.6 etc) then I just put a Milestone-Future label on them so I know I want to do them but just don't know when.

Happy hacking and look out for v0.4 sometime in the next week or so.

Brenda Wallace: phone book wtf

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:11:38 +0000

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".

Brenda Wallace: flickrippr coming soon!! promise~!!

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:11:20 +0000

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.

Brenda Wallace: Convert varchars to text

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:38:03 +0000

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/

Brenda Wallace: Super Happy Dev House for July

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:34:52 +0000

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/

Brenda Wallace: Co-working space in Wellington.

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:31:17 +0000

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 :-)

Brenda Wallace: New blog server is very very shiny.

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:15:09 +0000

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.

Penny Leach: why am I suddenly scared of the internet? aka, cool nerds.

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:48:54 +0000

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.

Brenda Wallace: Girl geek dinner update

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:32:33 +0000

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!)

Penny Leach: london so far

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:19:29 +0000

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.

Brenda Wallace: OWASP Wellington Event

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:49:14 +0000

OWASP Wellington Event
Date / Time Wed, 25-Jun-08 18:00
Location SA Office, 3rd Floor Lumley House, Hunter Street.

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/New_Zealand#Upcoming_Event

Brenda Wallace: 2008 Privacy Awareness Week Forum

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:41:14 +0000

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner will be hosting a day-long
privacy forum, to be held at the Intercontinental Hotel, Wellington on
Wednesday, 27 August 2008. The draft programme and registration details
are now available on www.privacy.org.nz/forum-and-registration/

The
final programme will be available nearer Privacy Awareness Week as more
speakers are confirmed. Topics include, among others, health screening
programmes, the DNA database, technology, employment and privacy, and
criminal investigations and challenges.

Andrew Ruthven: Old Schoold Unix: finger

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:18:20 +0000

Back in the days when the Unix world was more trusting, we had a command called finger. This command was used to find out information about a user. The output would look something like this:



Login: andrew         			Name: Andrew Ruthven

Directory: /home/andrew             	Shell: /bin/bash

On since Wed Jun 25 09:18 (NZST) on pts/0 from chimaera.etc.gen.nz

   1 second idle

Plan:

This is my .plan!  Surprise, surpise, surpise!

And if you ran finger against a host it would return a list of the users logged in. But the finger daemon that was queried had a few issues. Early versions had gaping security holes, and as more bad guys started appearing it became a useful way to find out what accounts existed on a host. This was useful to know who to target.

Because of these reasons the use of finger has declined, quite drastically.

One thing of interest though is the "Plan" section, this displays whatever is in the .plan file in the users home directory. This used to be used to indicate what someone was up to, or their plan.

Last year some of the folks at Catalyst started creating themselves Wiki pages called .plan or ToDo in their own namespace. In a moment of insanity I decided to create a finger daemon that would return those wiki pages. I also hooked it up to our internal staff directory. So it would return something like:



Name : Andrew Ruthven                         Extn: 7231

Email: andrew.ruthven@catalyst.net.nz         DDI : +64 4 xxx yyyyy

Nick : puck                                   Cell: +64 27 xxx yyyyy



Plan:

                              Andrew Ruthven/.plan



                                   Priorities



Do more work.

This was easy to do with our original wiki software - MoinMoin - because it had an output mode for plain text. But we've changed to MediaWiki, and Mediawiki doesn't have support for spitting out pages in plain text.

Yesterday I decided enough was enough and wrote a filter to support this. It grabs the Printable version of the page and strips out the toolboxes and headers and footers, then passes it to the text based web browser links before printing out the plain text version.

Perfect.

If you are interested in this filter, you can grab it from its git repo or you can just grab the script from here.

Penny Leach: per category rss feeds

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:02:44 +0000

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.

Andrew Chilton: Cil now has Bash Completion

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:44:33 +0000

Another day, another feature added to cil. It's rocketing along.

I've never written anything for bash completion before (someone else has always done it for me) but I had a go at it tonight. After an hour and 15 I had it working quite well.

I was suitably impressed with the whole thing since even though I knew doing it for commands and/or options would be easy enough, I managed to do it for a few other things too (more later).

For example:

 $ cil a<tab><tab>
 add attach
 
 $ cil s<tab><tab>
 show status summary
 
 $ cil --<tab><tab>
 --filename --help --label --path --status --version

That's all happy and nice but the following feature is the killer and will make working with issues a breeze. It also completes the actual issue/comment/attachment name, giving you the choice of the correct type where necessary.

Let's say your issues/ dir contains three issues, two comments and one attachment:

 $ ls -1 issues/*.cil
 issues/a_85eceee9.cil
 issues/c_d8dd779f.cil
 issues/c_feb65ae7.cil
 issues/i_02ee35bd.cil
 issues/i_5c88cb30.cil
 issues/i_98203ce8.cil

When doing the following, it completes to one of the three issue names:

 $ cil show <tab><tab>
 02ee35bd 5c88cb30 98203ce8

as it also does for the other commands that act on issues (status, edit, comment and attach).

Another example would be for extracting attachments:

 $ cil extract <tab><tab>

completes to:

 $ cil extract 85eceee9

This is pretty good stuff already but I can already see that it can be used a lot more in the future...

Let's say you allow the following statusus in your issues: New, InProgress, Finished and WontFix. Then, setting the status of an issue would work like:

 $ cil status 02ee35bd <tab><tab>
 InProgress Finished New WontFix

Really straightforward and really fast, which are basically two of the things I wanted cil to be from the start - I just didn't realise it would be so easy :-)

Seeing as I try and credit people where I can, thanks to Francois for the suggestion of adding bash completion. It's given me a chance to learn something new to me but very powerful.

Note: this feature is in Git and will be in the v0.3.0 release.

Andrew Chilton: If It's us or Google, then it is us!

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:20:09 +0000

OpenGeoData has a post today which talks about Google's new MapMaker. It seems the Ad Broker wants to own what you do but gives nothing back.

Needless to say I'm completely disappointed in Google yet again but that's coming as no surprise these days. Head over to OpenGeoData and read the entry for yourself - Google Want to be TeleAtlas

Recently, I've been looking at OpenStreetMap a lot and have tried (and tried) to get something going so that I can map both Seatoun and Mt Vic. I refuse to install Flash to use their web editor but also the version which runs on Java isn't working for me either!

A short while ago, I thought that I'd like to make a nice, small and simple Gtk version but I just had a better idea. What about making a JavaScript version? That would be pretty cool.

Currently I have no time but this might be one of those ideas that simmers for a while and then one day, I try it and see what happens. I fear it will be a big project but wouldn't that be just awesome!

As for helping Google map the world and taking your data, thxb'nothx.