Kind Acts of Randomness

Happy Geek Pride Day everyone! Today is a perfect day to: Tell people all about Gold Coast Tech Space.... spread the word, point them at http://gctechspace.org or better still get them to join our meetup group http://meetup.com/gctechspace Join Gold Coast TechSpace - all the info you need is at http://gctechspace.org/membership/ - membership is just $40/month or $20/month for Students/Concessions Support our crowdsourced shelving project at http://ipledg.com/projects/gc-techspace-storage1/347, we are now half way through our funding application and every little bit helps. [Read More]

For podcast hosts out there that attend conferences, especially those that only do Face-to-Face interviews like us, I'd so recommend making the most of these moments. You get to speak to people you wouldn't normally come in contact with, plus you get to ride on the coat-tails of the buzz that the conference creates.  Craig and I have experienced this recently attending Open Source Developers Conference and YOW, recording for our podcast Coding By Numbers. [Read More]

We are pleased to announce that the CFP for gr8confau is now open. Gr8 Conference Australia will be held on 15th November 2011 at ANU (Australian National University), Canberra As this is our first time running the conference in Australia, it will be run as a mini-conf of Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) 2011 which runs for the entire week from 14th -18th November. To attend the gr8 conference you will need to have a ticket for OSDC (which is very reasonably priced) or pay a small fee (expected to be around $50) for a miniconf ticket. [Read More]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the E.X.I.T.E camp for girls at Bond University. Exite is a programme organised by IBM and has the aim of encouraging girls to pursue careers in engineering and technology. Our local event is organised by Carol Woodhouse at the Gold Coast IBM Lab. I was going to do a programming exercise, but in the end I chose something more hands on a did " [Read More]

This week I completely take my hat off to single parents, especially those with more than one kid. It certainly isn't easy juggling parenting, work and general day to day stuff when there is only one of you. My wife's been away for the last 3 days and I've discovered this first hand - it's certainly doable, but you end up with no...zero....zilch time to yourself and this can't be good for your state of mind. [Read More]

@aspinall and I have finally got around to arranging our own meetup. It’s based around a lot of the things we talk about on the podcast, but we are trying to focus on all the topics that none of the other meetups cover (we’ll leave the Java stuff to QLDJVM). We are holding the meetings at Brisbane Square (Suncorp, L28) on the 2nd Monday of each month and the first meetup (March 14th) is on #golang. [Read More]

As promised here is the PHP interview that I did with Adam and Jethro at #lca2011. Hope you enjoy it and can keep up with with us!

I didn’t get a chance to do any blogging at linux.conf.au this year - not even a wrap-up, but perhaps this is better. We did a codingbynumbers wrap-up episode where we summarized our time at the conf.

In case you were wondering where the PHP episode is that I recorded at LCA - that’s the next episode, thought we’d get this one out quickly first.

During linux.conf.au I tried to do a talk involving an Android phone and a live demo onto a projector. I didn't have time to root the phone again to install vncserver - so I took the simple option and installed http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast. It worked when I first tried it but then failed miserably during the talk. Anyway - I decided to root my phone again so that I could use a proper vncserver - but the internet is really not very helpful when it comes to rooting Android phone. [Read More]

I'm playing around with a new DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) called "Fossil" at the moment. So far I really like it. If you are familiar with git and mercurial then you'll find the source control part pretty similar to what you are used to. What makes fossil rather special is that it is also a bug tracker and wiki too, and these are also distributed. Clever eh! [Read More]