I recently decided, despite using nothing but Linux on my laptop, that I had become a suite using purely graphical Office tools (Evolution for calendar, email etc, OpenOffice to write documents and presentations and so on). I was becoming a very rusty geek!
Time for Plan A. Migrate email, task management etc to emacs, start using Docbook for presentations and document creation (in Emacs of course) with git to protect my precious work.
However so far it all feels a bit hard… There is no consensus on the best way to configure Emacs for laptop email using IMAP services (mix and match any of Dovecot, fetchmail, Gnus, RM, procmail, etc etc); and getting a decent fop processor working is harder than it should be (I got going instead with dblatex in the end) — now writing Docbook documents seems hard as well — all that XML *sigh*. I’m not even feeling at home with git yet .
Update 29/Aug/08: Sacha Chua has some great advice to share on using Gnus for email
I am glad to report that voga.com.au has not been blocked by the great Firewall of China. Anyone in China who needs assistance with their software process can safely get hold of services and help from your truly. I’m sure the doom mongers are feeling a bit foolish now?
If you are asked to chose numbers for a lottery here is a rather inelegant hack to create some entries. Assume you need x numbers from a range of a to b inclusive then run this program as
A long with a lot of other sad people, I have been throwing my random thoughts onto the intertubes in the belief that they are of interest to people. In order to maximise the spread of mental drivel and minimise the effort involved I have spent far more time than I should investigating and setting up (playing with) various services and feeds to spread my ‘goddness’ far and wide. Here is how it works
Friendfeed allows me to see information from many more people than Jaiku
ping.fm allows me to post to Jaiku, Twitter and facebook
ping.fm also posts pownce, tumblre, plurk, Identi.ca and myspace but that’s probably a waste of time although I do have a limited number of followers there
I do not post to LinkedIn as sometimes my comments are not that professional
Both Jaiku and Friendfeed also receive feeds from my WordPress blog, my Flikr photos, del.ico.us book marks and my dugg stories
So I monitor friendfeed for the ‘big picture’, post to ping.fm and watch jaiku for interesting conversations.
I think I can unite the Agile and Waterfall communities united around a common software engineering approach.
I give you “Big Design As Late As Possible” (BDALAP).
BDALAP recognises that certain design decisions are a) complex and b) have far reaching implications. They therefore require careful consideration and the use of such techniques as modeling and documentation. However we really would like to understand more about the problem and issues we are trying to solve first before we commit ourselves to a significant decision
A good example of this is the design of a database table schema which has implications all over a system and impacts how the system may be extended in the future. Other examples including communication of cooperating processes.
So in the first instance we can dummy them using such things as program data structures (it’s easier to modify the code than a RDBMs database schema). Later on an effective data schema can be created based on a more complete understanding of the system under discussion
I realise there is a bit of hand waving going on here and it’s not exactly original, but that does not need to be a problem or stop me becoming the BDALAP pundit.
I believe the usual way to implement this type of thing:
The BDALAP website and blog
A few journal articles on BDALAP success stories (must show that BDALAP was the sole reason for success and how it overcame ALL obstacles)
A BDALAP conference (I’d like somewhere pleasant — Nice in France?)
A BDALAP consultancy that can charge the same rates as an Actuary
The BDALAP patterns book
The BDALAP anti-patterns book
That should get me on the gravy train — anyone else want to come for the ride?
There’s some contention over where exactly Gen Y starts and stops – some say those born 1983-1997, others think 1982-1997. In this week’s Entertainment Weekly, Gen Y is defined as “current 13 to 31 year-olds” and BusinessWeek says they can be as young as five. Regardless, we know who they are – they’re the young kids of today, the most digitally active generation yet, having been born plugged in.
When I have a working laptop at home I drive my wife mad as I surf facebook and post on Jaiku whilst watching TV. I always want to put information on Wikis (with open slather for everyone to update it) when my colleagues don’t understand the benefit and I’m posting here when I should be working on something else. I’m a man 25 years before my time!
Or perhaps I can just tell people I’m 22 years old?
Slashdot identified our very own Jonathan Oxer as Australia’s Geekiest Man, a well deserved honour and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Now we need to know who Australia’s Geekiest Woman is. Possibly Kirrily, although she recently moved to San Francisco so I don’t know if she still qualifies.
Updated: In early March Jon made it onto Australian national TV
This is so cool! I found someone has been using the Google Arabic translation service to view my blog. I asked my wife how good the translation is, but her Arabic has become very rusty, although apparently my name is correct.
I’m guessing if you don’t have the correct fonts installed then the above quote will not appear correctly – sorry.
(Updated: I’ve also discovered I’m linked from a Spanish language site at http://www.taquiones.net/perl/blogs.html, along with a bunch of other people who can actually program in Perl and have written books to prove it)
I was trawling through the flickr photos for last year’s OSDC and discovered that I had been caught red handed writing my material at the last minute.
I was a late fill in and had spend all my time writing a flashy demo, the slides then had to be written at the last minute so I missed a lot of the papers.
What was really frustrating was that laptop dual head mode did not work when I got to the presentation room and I had only my slides to present using a borrowed Mac, so no flashy demo.
I don’t intend for any of that to happen this year!
In my current quest to understand more about the world of Web 2.0 I have scored a Spock account and I have three invites to give away. If you want one please leave a comment
The Open Source Developers Conference 2007 call for papers has gone out and I have just submitted my paper proposal. Now all I need to do it write the paper and set up the demo’s… (if I get accepted)