#Linux

I’ve been using Linux since slackware 0.9 and I’m quite used to compiling software and kernels from source, but in recent years it’s very rare that I have to do this anymore. I run Lubuntu on my desktop as I just like things things to be clean, simple and just work - I often sacrifice the latest and greatest for stability. One of the tools I just can’t do without is pianobar which is a command line tool for listening to music on Pandora, which incidentally is now available in Australia without the use of proxies! [Read More]

One of my big projects over the last year outside of my day job has been helping to setup the Gold Coast TechSpace. It’s been a really rocky ride; things like this are really difficult to setup in a place like the Gold Coast and it’s been a huge learning experience for myself and the founding committee. However, it does feel like we are over the hump now with people starting to get what we are trying to achieve and a handful of loyal members paying a membership fee of $40/month ($20 for students) to help cover our rent. [Read More]

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the presentation of 4 Griffith University Gold Coast Students Yukito Tsunoda, Harold Haigh, Ben Cowley & Maryam Nemati. They have been working on an OLPC Activity “NoteBoard” as part of their Industry project. The students developed the activity based on specs supplied by Sridhar at OLPC Australia. This approach differs from some of the other OLPC Activities in that it was based on a real customer need rather than the meandering evolution that we sometimes see with some of these projects. [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.

For those that attended the Google Go Tutorial at linux.conf.au here is the link to the podcast interview that I did the week before the conference. Hope you find it useful. For those interest in Go that live in Brisbane we are hoping to do a session on GO very soon - watch this space.

http://www.codingbynumbers.com/2011/01/coding-by-numbers-episode-20-interview.html

We've had a couple of Subversion outages recently. As usual, development ground to a halt. People couldn't update their projects, couldn't get the history - we shelved some changes in Intellij for checkin later in the day... in short a pain we could live without. Such is life with centralised version control. Since the advent of bitbucket I've been using Mercurial a lot for my own projects, so thought why not try it at work as a fallback for when subversion is down. [Read More]

Leave em to it! I was recently inspired to pull out the XOs again - they had been sitting on my shelf doing nothing and I thought I should make use of them. Anyway - I've given one to @aspinall for his daughter and one to my son Jaron (5).  I've pretty much just left him to it, and he's steadily working it out. Anyway, tonight I find him in his room playing around with the speech application. [Read More]