Retail Therapy
29 Sep
Almost two weeks. Some of that has been because I've been working hard on KnowledgeTree. But most of it has been because Johann finally convinced me to get a Nintendo GameCube. Between Soul Calibur II and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, my PC would be lonely if Jeremy weren't playing Sims II on it. And, lately, our puppy has arrived.
LinuxWorld coming to SA?
16 Sep
It's being reported at Tectonic (Africa's first and best Open Source publication) that LinuxWorld is planned for South Africa next year, in mid-May. Wonder when the call for papers will be - if we crack the nod for a conference at all...
The business of Open Source
15 Sep
I'm only three weeks into a year-long contract working on an Open Source project (KnowledgeTree), and part of this is figuring out how the company (Jam Warehouse) will make money providing the impetus for the project, and also how we'll work towards getting contributions from other service providers and community users of the project. I need to figure out just how much I can talk about in public, but I imagine this is something I'm going to talk about quite a bit in the next few months. So far, we've had pretty good response on development-for-hire (and fed back to the community) and on documentation, but are these renewable sources?
Slow poke...
15 Sep
It's my third week at Jam working on KnowledgeTree, and I'm still full-speed, hence the lack of posting. Most of my time at the moment is being spent working on creating translation hooks, as someone approached Jam to fund a translation to French. Otherwise, I've got remote installations starting tomorrow, so it's not like I'm going to be less busy. But I'm really enjoying the culture and the people - must be one of the bigger concentrations of people worth employing around.
Fooz's Tour of Eden
08 Sep
One power of blogs has to do with vicarious experience. Pieter's blog has always interested me, because, not despite, the fact it mostly revolves around his bike fetish. Recently, he rode an extravagant distance in the Tour of Eden in the Garden Route area. The immense punishment he put up with and his success at overcoming the obvious questioning of what he's doing putting himself through the whole thing makes his series well worth reading: Stage 1a, Stage 1b, Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4a, Stage 4b, Stage 5, and final thoughts. For pictures of Pieter in skin-tight lycra (or whatever they use for the biking gear), there's also a gallery.
ISOC ZA AGM
08 Sep
My first two days in the "not working for Jam" portion of my monthly calendar were spent working on preparing for the ISOC ZA AGM last night. This involved setting up an icecast server and darkice client (about two hours) and trying different microphones (another two hours), fighting dodgy network cabling (30 minutes) and trying to get a Bluetooth headset to work (10 hours, unsuccessful).
Back in the saddle
03 Sep
Well, not like I got out of the saddle for very long, but I started at Jam Warehouse on Wednesday, and got stuck in. Except for some minor hardware difficulties, I managed to get a reasonably productive day in, building a picture of where the KnowledgeTree project and community is, where Jam wants to take it, and what work needs to be done. Incidentally, the Evolution Exchange connector works like a charm. Install package, point at Exchange server, and we're done...
Mini-holiday
03 Sep
It's quite amazing what one day of just low-intensity work and one day of no work can do - which is nice, since I'll be able to do them for the next year. Monday I spent at the Barn helping with post-move problems. Tuesday I bought a new game and played all day until I went to the CLUG meeting where I gave my Scalable Web Applications presentation for the second time. This time I got a few questions at least...