Blog Without An Important Name

The opportunity has come up for me to escape Dunedin, and go a long way away for an indefinite time. So, I’m jumping on the idea, and planning on moving to the Netherlands, Deventer specifically, to work for Topicus.

I’ll have a 6-month contract with them to start with, that is evaluated after 3 months to determine if it will be continued. This is because they’re a little uncertain about how a non-Dutch-speaker will work out. So, to help that along, I’ve started learning to read it so I have at least some foundation when I’m there.

As of now, I’m waiting on a work permit (tewerkstellingsvergunning). Well, really, I’m waiting on the university to open again so I can get a transcript that will then form part of the application for the permit that Topicus will be sending in for me. Once this has been done, then it’s pretty much just a matter of buying some plane tickets and getting myself over there.

If everything goes as well as we hope, I’ll be winging my way back there in the European spring-time, so April or May.

I realised that I’d forgotten to mention this here, so now I’ll amend that.In July/August, I’ll be spending five weeks in Europe. I leave NZ on the 13th of July, and get back on the 22nd of August.It’s just for a holiday, so should be a fairly cruisy time. And I miss out on some winter, too.I’ll be going to the UK, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands (in that order). I have a few events to go to along the way, which is good for working out where to go when. In between times I’ll be visiting friends.The things I’m going to are:

• LugRadio Live in Wolverhampton (UK) (computery stuff conference)
• Gothic Festival in Waregem (Belgium) (music)
• Summer Darkness in Utrecht (Netherlands) (more music)
• Lowlands in Biddinghuizen (Netherlands) (still more music, and a rollercoaster park!)

If you’re really keen, you can view my itinerary (OpenOffice.org spreadsheet) which goes into more detail, although is still in a state of flux to a small extent.If anyone is going to be near where I’m going, give me a yell. Time permitting, I might be able to come visit. I’ll be taking my new toy (the small one) with me, so will be reachable by the usual methods.

Yesterday I got back from a bit of a holiday in Auckland. The purpose of the trip was to go to Kiwi Foo Camp (a.k.a. Baa Camp). It is a gathering of 150 people with creative interests in various, generally technology related, things. It’s aim is to be a way for all these people to get together in a way the breaks down normal barriers of hierarchy so that they can share ideas, plots, and schemes without these getting in the way.

I met a bunch of people that I’ve heard about or only ever talked to via email, such as Don Christie and Peter Gutmann, along with a host of people I probably would have never heard of if they weren’t there but who are also doing interesting work in a variety of fields. A nice effect, which is by design, of the 150 people cap is that you have the ability to meet nearly everyone there. It also means they can put on free beer and wine for the entire event.

Almost everyone was sleeping on the school grounds where it was hosted, or nearby, which meant that things like game playing (Werewolf is a favourite) carried on to 4am, and people were happily getting up at 8am for breakfast in the morning. I was supposed to be sleeping in the Wharenui at the school, however due to getting to bed a little late and an apparent overbooking of it meant that I ended up sleeping outside on the deck of it the first evening. From what I could tell, I got the better deal. It wasn’t hot and stuffy, and the one person out there with me didn’t snore too much. The following night was inside one of the school rooms, which was helpful because it kept the mosquitoes somewhere where I wasn’t, although I think by then they’d decided I was bled dry anyway.

As is common with conferences, and even moreso with this one being an ‘unconference’, much of the value isn’t so much from the sessions, but from chatting to people you happen to sit beside because there’s a spare seat, whether they do programming, community projects, are politicians (I talked with Judith Tizard extremely briefly), or whatever. They all seem to be doing good stuff. I did, however, do a session of my own. I was planning on doing one on neural networks and genetic algorithms, and another on Amazon web services but due to time constraints (some uncharitable folk may call it laziness) beforehand, I only had time to prepare the GA stuff. That worked out OK, as it managed to take up the whole hour anyway. I didn’t get a big turnout, but I didn’t expect one – this was a fair bit more on the computer science side than most of the things there.

The photos I took are here, many more can be found on flickr.

The rest of the time in Auckland was catching up with friends there, and spending way too much money at JB Hi-Fi on music and a little bit of anime.

I’m in need of a bit of a holiday, so I’ve booked myself to head up north for a bit over a week.

I fly in to Auckland on Friday the 24th of August, on the 25th I’m going to see Psyche, and then on the 28th spend the day bussing down to Wellington. This will be a good chance to visit all the people in those cities I haven’t seen for ages, and raid the music and bookshops there. I’ll be there until the 3rd, whereupon I head back to Dunedin.

If anyone in these places wants to get together, let me know!

Today was apparently the hottest day Sydney has seen so far this summer. As someone who finds 25 degrees uncomfortably warm, the 35-40 degrees we had today was a bit much. It didn’t help that most of what I was doing involved walking from Pyrmont (where I am right now) to The Rocks, and back in the middle of the day.

However, it was good. I was meeting a couple of people from the conference for a final lunch thing at The Australian, where they have regional beers, and a range of pizza. As toppings, we had emu, crocodile, and kangaroo. Crocodile and kangaroo are really quite good it turns out. Emu is not very remarkable.

Later that evening I went for a BBQ, and had kangaroo meat then, too. It’s extremely good like that, and apparently cheaper than regular steak.

It just makes me wonder what kind of reaction you’d get if you were cooking kiwi on the BBQ. Quite different I’d expect

My NZ SIM card has failed, and due to some weirdness of Vodafone, I can’t access voicemail by calling the international number. So should you need to reach me, I can be found at +61415951810 until the end of January (when I return to New Zealand). Email should be pretty reliable too, if you don’t mind waiting a bit.

I’ll also try to update this with more descriptions of talks from the conference. Although, planning to do that didn’t really pan out for last year, so I’ll make no promises.

(Jono Bacon)

Jokosher is aimed at being an audio production tool for Gnome, to replace things like Cubase. Jono is of Lugradio fame, and spent some time complaining about the lack of good audio mixing and editing tools on Linux, so the community got Jokosher started.

It’s looking quite good, and hopefully a near final release is coming out around March. I liked the approach they took to developing the GUI, basically questioning everything, and so it results in a nice simple and sensible-looking application.

The talk consisted of Jono providing background to the project, covering the design decisions, such as why they use things like gstreamer, python, and so on, followed by a demo of it working (mostly, it was from head).

A good effect of this project is that it’s stress-testing the gstreamer framework, and apparently has resulted in a large number of bugs being removed and features added/polished. So this will mean that a lot of audio-related stuff will work better.

(John Stowers)

John’s showing off a program called Conduit. It’s a really interesting looking application that is used to move data from one application to another (or visa-versa). The kinds of things that a looks like it can do at this stage is synchronising a folder of pictures, and flickr, or Tomboy synchronising notes onto an iPod. I think I’d use it mostly to keep a backup of phonenumbers on my cellphone. It does things like conflict resolution, too. Oh, and moving things between machines (e.g. keeping tomboy notes in sync)

Apparently it mostly works with D-bus, which is nice because it’ll encourage apps to use that.

I’m going to have to check this out when it comes out in Ubuntu, apparently a stable release is aimed to go with GNOME 2.20. Don’t know when that is supposed to be, but current Ubuntu is 2.16, so I guess a year or so.

I’m currently sitting listening to Keith Packard talk. He’s good at it. He’s discussing all the new developments in X.org. As always, it’s looking quite good. Finally, things like dual-head and plugging extra monitors into laptops will just work automatically. Apparently, it’ll no longer be actually possible to do it from xorg.conf, instead it’ll all be done by commands to the extension that controls it. So, GUI configuration and so on. That’ll be great for using things like Linux laptops for presentations.

The other half of his talk is about stuff that’s happening to Intel drivers. Well, actually, starting with some interesting history on video cards and how they were developed. He also says that they have the goal of of ensuring that drivers are available in X.org as soon as a chip is released. That’s good. Otherwise, it’s just covering how Intel interacts with the community. That is to say, well. Everything open source, public and well supported.

It was a fairly mid-to-high level talk, but interesting to see what’s going to be happening on that front.

A few days back I posted this, where I mentioned the lack of wireless access at Christchurch airport. Today, I got a reply saying that they’ll be doing something about that. I’m pleasantly surprised that a company like that (I always think of airports as kinda staid and conservative, that may not actually be the truth) actually monitors ‘blogs, and that they’d take the time to reply.

On the note of wireless, wireless at the conference seems to be a bit intermittent, but I’m not sure if it’s the actual network itself, or my card. I’m suspecting my card more and more. Periodically it seems to just drop out, and to get the drivers to activate it again requires a reboot. It’s a Belkin 54g card, but with a Broadcom chipset and using the bcm43xx drivers. If it’s a real issue, I can try ndiswrapper, but I’d like to not do that if I can get away with it (there is some hope here that someone reading this at the conference will be willing to find me and help me fix it

Now I’m in Melbourne, I arrived yesterday. It’s a cool day here, only about 24 or so I managed to get sunburnt, which is something that hasn’t happened in Dunedin for a while.

I’ve just been doing stuff with family. There’s a thing on tonight I wouldn’t mind going out to (this), but I’m still quite tired and don’t think I’ll have the time before I fall asleep, so I might have to pass. Will have to see if there’s anything of that type happening in Sydney.

Anyway, nobody here knows the password for the WEP encryption on the wireless, so I’ve got to get this laptop back to breaking it, so I don’t have to plug it in in the office.

On Sunday at about 11, I fly up to Sydney to validate the excuse for my Aussie holiday with a conference. Yay!