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Entries for archive: 2007

Found 133 entries.

Zaapt is One Year Old

A few days ago, Zaapt became one year old. But the best is yet to come.

It's been a great week for Zaapt this week. Not only has it passed it's first birthday (born on first check-in) it's also had a lot of development done on it. The models were improved in Sep/Oct and this month it's been the controller side of things. The views didn't need much change but maybe a minor tweak here or there.

I mentioned the other week that I am now using the issue list on my Google Code Project Homepage. At this very moment I can tell you that there are six issues I have to do before I release v0.1 - which will be an amazing achievement. It will also signify the first release which I will be happy for other people to start using - before now it was still in a little flux.

As 2007 finishes up, I look back on the number of hours I've put into Zaapt and see that it's all been worthwhile. I have spent a hell of a lot of hours on it but to now have a CMS written in Perl and using PostgeSQL as it's main store is just great. It was always an ambition of mine to have that combination and Release v0.1 will realise that (note if you Google for cms, perl and postgres, Zaapt is in the top 10 hits and has been since March).

As Nigel a friend of mine said to me recently, "We just shake you and a site falls out" - which just proves how easy it is to create a Zaapt site.

So 2008 will be a belter of a year for Zaapt. I'm aiming to get it into Debian with the help of Francois Marier so after the v0.1 release, I'll sit down with him and figure out what I should do before we put it in - he doesn't know this yet :-)

Finally, just to give you a glimpse of how interesting Zaapt will be next year, here's a quote from one of my current open issues:

This issue also implements an idea I've had for a while in which models can also be mash-ups of other models. In this case, one model is referencing another. In another case, who's to say that a model might not just link together a blog.entry, a gallery.picture and a map.location.

Wouldn't that be oarsum - "CMS mash-ups".

Labels: perl, zaapt, cms, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, postgres

Inserted: 2007-12-24 17:32 (4 years, 1 month ago)

Ideas for Things to Give

Here is a few ideas of things to give for presents if you so insist on it.

In my last post, I complained that \l{giving presents at Christmas was a waste of time and money|the-christmas-circus-and-the-commercial-merry-go-round.html} so go and read that post if you have the time. Alternatively, this is a much happier and less cynical post :-)

So this is the list of ideas of gifts that I would like if you insist on giving me something.

Basically, I feel that there are many more worthy causes for your money than I so here are my suggestions on what I would consider a good present.

The first is easy:

• give some money to a charity of your choosing and tell me about it

I don't really even care who to or how much since whoever you give it to will be a charity that you consider to be a good cause and that will be good enough for me. Of course, you can tell me who and how much but I will only be interested in the former.

The second thing you could do is 'gift' me one of the following, or something of the like:

• an adopted Hector's dolphin
• give a Gift of Hope
• donate to Forest and Bird
• another NZ-based green charity

or alternatively, if you want to give me something physical, try this (and yes, it is slightly commercial):

• give me a tree please (native only)

So there you go, anything on that list would make me happy though still, you should go from the top down.

Labels: presents, charity

Inserted: 2007-12-15 23:39 (4 years, 2 months ago)

The Christmas Circus and the Commercial Merry-Go-Round

So as time goes on, I like Christmas less and less. I enjoy meeting up with people, having some nice food and a good laugh but the rest of it kills me.

Today I went to the shops just to pick up a few things. Unfortunately for me, I went in the middle of a Saturday afternoon when it was chock-a-block. I don't like it at the best of times and now that it is two Saturdays before Christmas it's just a bit silly for me.

On the way out of the car park (after I'd picked up non-Christmas related stuffs) this dude decides to beep his horn at me and shout expletives in my general direction. I just stared at him as I went past as though "WTF is that for?" Such a nice guy, about 60 and in front of his wife too.

The next car park I was in - the supermarket - a girl in the car in front of me was being impatient of the one in front of her. She accelerated and swerved suddenly and then nearly caused an accident because the one in front wasn't expecting it.

All this because everyone is so wound up and tense in the argy-bargy that is Christmas shopping, in what is supposedly the season of goodwill. Yes, I'm very sceptical of the whole thing and am glad that today has been my only dealing with shops this whole silly season.

So Christmas, let's see! There are three things that are associated with Christmas:

• religion
• family/friends
• presents

1) I'm atheist so Christmas doesn't mean anything to me in the spiritual sense. Some people have religious beliefs which they are entitled to and I fully respect, so I'm not going to comment on this point. It's just not for me and I shall say no more on the subject.

2) This is the one that means the most to me at Christmas time. It's nice to be able to meet up with everyone, share some food, a drink or two, some games and lots of laughter. This is what Christmas is all about, the sharing of each other's company.

3) The giving of presents is the one that annoys me most and is the subject of this post. Basically, I think is a waste of time - at least where adults are concerned. Most presents between adults are either gimicky (therefore they end up in the bin) or unloved (therefore they end up on auction sites). You know what these presents are because they are given with the following lines: "But it's so funny", "Oh, it's just a laugh" or "it's only a little something". Many times, friends of mine have said that a present someone gave them was just so wrong and they have never used it. The same can be said for me too.

The only time giving a present works is if you've already decided with the person what you're going to get them - and them with you - so therefore, you might as well both scrap it, not bother and just buy your own. Get something you actually want and need. I personally think it's all just fuelled by the shops and it leads us further and further down the road to a consumer nation in constant debt because the pressure of giving and putting on a big Christmas is just too great.

As an example, some of my family insist on sending presents from the UK to NZ. That's a phenomenal half way around the world. In all cases bar none, the cost of the postage was at least as much as the present itself. And half the time I could have bought it cheaper here! This makes no sense at all. In one case, the present sent never even arrived. Also, the cost of transferring money from there to here is prohibitively high for such amounts and in reality, that's just a silly present to give (oh, in return for your monetary present, I'll give you some money too - Q: Who wins? A: The bank).

In a lot of cases, if I want something, I'll go out and buy it and most of the people I know are capable of doing the same. Therefore, pretty much anything I get as a surprise present is probably something I don't actually want! This is the same for birthdays too, I just want people to stop wasting money buying me presents. If they want to give me something then they should give something to a good cause or charity and tell me about it (this is the subject of my next blog post).

This year, in return, I shall be making a generous donation to a charity of my choosing and I hope that everyone who I am 'expected' to buy presents for will understand that there are more worthy causes in the world. I shall not say who I'm going to give to nor how much, since that is a personal matter and I always keep my donations to myself.

Finally, just remember that everything I said above is related to giving presents between adults and that I haven't mentioned kids yet! I do believe that Christmas is for kids and I think it's nice to buy them a little something. But it's still too easy to go over the top.

Labels: presents, charity, christmas

Inserted: 2007-12-15 23:16 (4 years, 2 months ago)

Tonight's Happenings

Gathering interest for next April and June.

It's amazing how many people are already expressing an interest for Script Frenzy next April (for which I hope to be ML) and for SoCNoC next June.

Tonight was Catalyst's Christmas function at Wellington Zoo and I had a number of people come up to me and express an interest in both of the above events. It's awesome to see that some of my enthusiasm for writing is rubbing off on other people. Not that it needed much rubbing off since most of them had thought about writing many years ago - it just so happens that this just gives them a little kick to give it another go.

And as a final note, many thanks to all the organisers of this year's Zoo Doo, it was the best of my four so far. Thanks Pauline, Vicky, the directors and everyone at Catalyst who made it happen. It was awesome.

Labels: socnoc, planet-catalyst, zoo-doo, script-frenzy

Inserted: 2007-12-13 01:15 (4 years, 2 months ago)

Zaapt has Issues

For ages I have ignored the issues tab for Zaapt inside the Google Code site but I decided that I had so many plans and ideas rolling around in my head, that it made sense to get them down.

So tonight I have just entered 18 issues which I need to work through over the next few months.

Currently there are two bugs, two tasks and the rest are enhancements.

So you can see that I think Zaapt works pretty well but there are still plenty more things to do.

Google Code Project Hosting and its issue list is also helping more than just listing the issues. It is also helping me figure out which issues I'm going to fix before I release v0.1 of Zaapt and which ones I can leave until v0.2 (milestone ordered list).

This also means that once those ones are done, I know it's time to release. A bit like TDD whereby you know your development is done when all your tests pass (we hope).

P.S. I just found a bug in the issue search so I'll report it to Google once I gether evidence.

P.P.S. The grid view is awesome. On that page I'm categorising the 'y' axis as Which version of the software the issue relates to and the 'x' axis as The release in which it will be fixed. That's pretty cool.

Labels: zaapt, planet-geek, google-code, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2007-12-07 00:30 (4 years, 2 months ago)

Delegating Control to Others

For wellington.geek.nz, we now have other people administering certain calendars.

Well okay, we have one person administering their own calendar (read about it on the new blog) but it's a start and here's why.

Before now, I have usually given out blanket permissions to do something on a site (e.g. on KiwiWriters) but now it's much more refined. I'm creating specific permissions, with specific roles and correct assignment of such and therefore being much more detailed about who can do what.

This is all possible because I recently added RBAC to Zaapt and this is proof it works and works really well.

There are still lots of things to do on Zaapt but as each day passes, it gets more complete.

Labels: zaapt, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, wellington-geek-nz

Inserted: 2007-12-05 00:26 (4 years, 2 months ago)

NaNiWriMo Winner

So I'm late posting this - about winning - but better late than never.

November and NaNoWriMo turned out to be awesomly hard this year. I think this was because I was working a lot at the start of the month so it consumed more time than I wanted it to. But I clawed the words back towards the end of the month.

You can see from my progress that I did quite a few days of over 4,000 words and even managed 5.6k on the last day (though I remember doing a 6k day last year). Then again, I didn't write on 10 days, which meant my average was over 2.5k a day.

Anyway, winners certificate:

The current status of the novel is that there are about 3 scenes to go so probably just a few thousand words. I told this to the others during the TGIO party on Sunday but no-one believe me that I'll finish it off - hehe, like my previous two novels. This year, I'm determined to prove them wrong (naming no names but Kerryn and Travis are the main two non-believers). Just you wait and see!

P.S. That image was uploaded using the new(ish) file upload feature of Zaapt which I just fixed to work properly with Apache2 :-)

Labels: zaapt, nanowrimo

Inserted: 2007-12-04 00:23 (4 years, 2 months ago)

A Quote about Open Source

The roots of Open Source lie in Academia and Scientific Papers and Peer review.

Simon Willison pulled this quote about Open Source from an article by Dave Shields.

I love it, though my favourite quote from it is:

As a programmer, it [Open Source Software] is the best arena in which to work.

P.S. my blog entries are not usually this short so I now need a Tumblelog for such things. Time permitting, I shall be implementing a (initially small) Tumblelog model for Zaapt in December.

Labels: open-source, zaapt, tumblelog, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2007-12-02 00:26 (4 years, 2 months ago)

Blogger in Draft now Accepting Comments with OpenID

Exciting news for people who comment on Blogger blogs. They're now accepting OpenID on BloggerInDraft so soon enough it'll be phased into the rest of Blogger.

So on their post announcing that Blogger will accept comments using OpenID I decided to leave a comment there using my own identity.

And it worked - beautifully. It even asked my OpenID Provider some other details such as my name. I allowed them to do this and sure enough, my name appeared with the link to my site. So that's pretty cool too (I only typed my site url).

Anyway, I got number nine in the comment list.

So now, that means both LiveJournal and Blogger both accept OpenID for comments. I reckon that must mean that a large majority of blogs on this planet now accept OpenID - so let's now get Wordpress and Typepad to do it too.

Labels: livejournal, blogger, planet-geek, wordpress, planet-catalyst, open-id, typepad

Inserted: 2007-12-01 00:15 (4 years, 2 months ago)

What Am I Doing After NaNoWriMo

Just thought I would add a copy of a post I put on the NaNoWriMo forums in response to the question "What are you doing after NaNoWriMo?" Lots of things to do it seems.

I have a number of things I'm going to do after NaNoWriMo, some short term, others a bit longer term.

Short term, I am going to be adding 'Member Excerpts' to KiwiWriters with the help of the others in the KW committee (Kerryn, Travis and Cassie). We also have many other writing challenges planned throughout the year so check it out when you can (especially if you don't want the excitement of writing to die down once NaNo is over.

There are a few other more personal projects - mainly websites - which are in need of my attention. And I shall certainly be posting more blog entries over the coming weeks. I might even do x365 this year like I said I would last year :-)

Longer term, I have found out that ScriptFrenzy will be April next year instead of June which is awesome. That means I can do that in April and still do SoCNoC in June, as well as all the short story weekends planned over the coming year. At the moment, it looks like I'll also be ML (Municipal Liason) for Wellington for ScriptFrenzy too which will be pretty cool.

Oh, and I have lots of housework to do. Yay, what fun (NOT). Phew!

Labels: nanowrimo, kiwiwriters, planet-catalyst, x365

Inserted: 2007-11-29 22:06 (4 years, 2 months ago)

Good News About the EeePC

It looks like Asus are going to adhere to the GPL and fix the violations they've been accused of.

Thanks to Cliff Biffle who wrote ASUS eeePC: First impressions and GPL violations and probably many more like him, Asus are fixing up what I think was probably just an oversight. It may have been on purpose but I suspect (and hope) not.

Anyway, they're remedying their lack of providing the source code for their Xandros based OS on their EeePC. Beforehand, they had provided some source code but apparently it was incomplete.

Hopefully this means that all the Open Source people out there can hack on something that already works rather than have to do something from scratch. Of course, people will do their own things too which is the way of the world in Open Source but now they can also use the newly released Asus code as a starting point.

Oh, and the release of an SDK for developers also looks like a good thing.

It's already looking up in the EeePC world. It was good enough before but now it's even better.

Labels: planet-geek, planet-catalyst, eeepc, asus

Inserted: 2007-11-29 14:24 (4 years, 2 months ago)

Macy Lights Slowly Catching Up

It's 2/3rds of the way through November but I have only just passed the halfway mark.

With only 10 days left and 20 days gone, I still have half the novel to write. It's been a crazy month so far, lots of things happening and work taking far too much time, but I'm determined to finish the novel and get my 50,000 words within November.

Even though my average word count required for the rest of the month is 2,500 words per day, I still reckon I can do it.

I realised that there was only one more weekend left in November but hopefully that won't be too busy (unlike all the other weekends so far).

Still, that didn't stop me from creating an extra artificial one. I'm going to take next Thursday and Friday off work because:

• I deserve a break, and
• I have to finish NaNoWriMo

...it just wouldn't be the same if I didn't win.

The Story

As I've said before, I'm just loving Macy Lights and the Battle for Ashton's Gate so that's added incentive to finish as if I needed any more.

Interestingly, I decided yesterday that the novel itself could be split into three parts. I have written Part I in the first 25k and have hinted at what happens in Part II. Part III will be written for my second 25k.

This means I shall be delaying writing Part II until after November, which will also be about 25k.

This turn completely took me by surprise since my plan had always been to write Part II right there inside the novel (not that I knew it was separate part back then). The only shame is that I had to write a short synopsis right in the middle of the novel instead of writing the whole lot. Ah well, sometimes that's just got to be done during NaNo.

Finally, wish me luck for what will be a mad rush for the rest of November.

Labels: nanowrimo, macy-lights

Inserted: 2007-11-21 00:11 (4 years, 3 months ago)

wellington.geek.nz is Now LIve

Brenda and I have been working on a new site for all the Wellington Geeks out there. And it's now live.

After trying to do about a thousand things this month, one of them is mostly ready. Brenda and I have been working on http://wellington.geek.nz/ recently and it looks like people have found it before we were fully ready to release.

As it turns out, that's okay, Release Early, Release Often is the Open Source mantra so that just means we get more eyeballs at it earlier rather than later.

One good thing is that doing the site made me add a new Calendar model to Zaapt and now that's up and going very well. We'll also use the new Calendar model over on KiwiWriters so everyone will know when all the challenges are. It's great how all these sites benefit from each other :-)

The one issue I need to fix up for wellington.geek.nz is the fact that it thinks it's yesterday for most of today since the server is running on Central European Time (it's in Denmark), but I'll fix that up soon when I get a chance.

We have some thoughts and ideas for the future so hopefully some of these will be added in the near future.

• being able to change the right hand calendar to Next/Prev month
• RSS feeds for the events
• iCal feeds that you can put in your own calendar tools

... and probably more, so let us know if you have any suggestions. The site is still beta (I've always wanted to say that) so please be kind.

Labels: zaapt, kiwiwriters, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, wellington-geek-nz

Inserted: 2007-11-19 10:21 (4 years, 3 months ago)

Random NaNo Happenings

NaNoWriMo isn't all about writing a 50,000 word novel in a month, it's all about random stuff too. Like podcasts.

Thanks to Kerryn organising the Wellington NaNoWriMo Kick-Off meeting, we had Phillipa Ballantine come along and interview us for a NaNoMonkeys podcast.

I love it the way they say we're from middle earth. Anyway, you can get to hear me on there once or twice. I'm one of the two English accents you can hear and in some people's minds, the funny accent.

Anyway, it was a fun gathering and hopefully we'll see Pip later in the month or at the Thank God It's Over Party.

Labels: nanowrimo, nanomonkeys

Inserted: 2007-11-14 21:24 (4 years, 3 months ago)

Tired of Cetain Types of People

Not sure why, but there has been a lot of this recently.

At the moment, I am tired of certain types of people who:

• aren't grateful when you've done them a favour they explicitly asked for
• don't say thank you when you've given them something you know they enjoyed
• take your ideas and don't give you credit or acknowledge you
• criticise something you're trying to do even though they've never attempted anything like it themselves
• reject something you're doing for the greater good, yet don't understand why you're doing it

Usually I see the bright side of things but there seems to be a lot of the above happening at the moment. This makes it all a lot harder but pushes me to do more of the same.

Now I'm just waiting for that thing someone does which will just blow me away, make me say "wow, that was amazing" and restore my confidence in the human race.

Labels: people, human-race

Inserted: 2007-11-14 08:31 (4 years, 3 months ago)

Debian EeePC Awesomeness

Good news for the Asus EeePC - in my eyes at least.

After I got my shiny new Asus EeePC last week I knew a community to put their own Linux distro on it would grow around it soon enough.

The OS that comes pre-installed is a Xandros-based system and while I'm happy with it now, I'll eventually replace it. Lots of people have already installed Ubuntu on it, though they had to use ndiswrapper for the Wi-Fi (new Atheros chipset apparently) and also suspend doesn't quite work yet.

Lots of people have also been adding both Debian repositories and Xandros repositories on the assumption that they will work, but there are also reports that some things stop working. I'm also not convinced that they'll be completely compatible.

But there is good news on the horizon. I thought a community to port Ubuntu properly onto the EeePC would crop up first but already Ben Armstrong has stepped up to the plate with his Debian-EeePC project.

Happy happy joy joy! I can't wait.

Labels: debian, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, eeepc

Inserted: 2007-11-11 21:30 (4 years, 3 months ago)

Playing Catchup with Macy Lights

This past week, I didn't managed to write a huge amount for Macy Lights but today I played a whole lot of catchup.

One of my friends wondered if my inactivity was caused by me not being interested in my novel much or it being too hard but it reality it's quite the opposite. It was just a busy week, that's all, not to mention that a couple of nights were completely wiped out.

Regarding my novel, before today I really liked - now I absolutely love it. I knew that when I had the chance to start writing again that I would just spill my ideas out onto the keyboard and that's exactly what happened today. I was on 9.5k this morning and after doing 4.8k today I'm almost back up to where I should be (on a quota/day basis).

I read in one of the forums on the NaNoWriMo site the people were falling in love with their characters or their plot and I'm doing the same. I mentioned that the story had grown on me every single day since Oct 29th when I first had the idea. I liked it then and now I love it - which makes the whole thing a fantastically enjoyable thing to do.

Not to mention that I'll be meeting up with the other Wrimos in Wellington tomorrow which is also always great fun.

As always, every single day's writing is being posted on my Macy Lights and the Battle for Ashton's Gate novel page. Today's is already up.

Labels: nanowrimo, macy-lights, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2007-11-11 00:00 (4 years, 3 months ago)

NaNoWriMo Widgets Up

NaNo has just put their widgets up again and there are more features than last year.

Instead of posting a load of links to them here (since blog entries are timed and these things keep changing), I'll just post the final versions at the end of the month.

I have posted two on my home page if you want to take a look how I'm going.

On the left is the Word War widget on which I've added myself, Kerryn and Travis.

On the right is my progress through the month.

I think that they've put some serious caching onto the widgets, so I think they'll only update every day or two. I reckon just putting a few hours on it would suffice but that's alright, better to have late ones than none at all :-)

Actually, I think the progress one is going off another timezone (one much behind ours) and that it'll only be generated after midnight of that day. That's why it says 22 days left. I dunno but there's something weird about it.

Labels: word-war, nanowrimo, macy-lights

Inserted: 2007-11-10 19:32 (4 years, 3 months ago)

Been Busy Writing

Before I started writing tonight, I ended up catching up with three days worth of blogs. I didn't realise I'd been so busy.

An interesting one I found was Kerryn's article about Subplots.

As it turns out, one of the things I'd been planning this year is to have more than just the main storyline which is what my previous two novels have done (they were very one dimnesional). I have also decided to write in the 3rd person too since NaNo '06 was 1st person and SoCNoC '07 was a mix of both (and a horrible mix of other stuff too).

Already I feel that I'm flowing through this one a lot easier than either of the previous two and you can probably tell this because of my wordcount. After two days, I am already at 6,177. It's going well so far and I hope to do lots more over the weekend.

For those who have missed it, I'm serialising every single day's writing about Macy Lights. Day 2 has been posted :-)

Labels: nanowrimo, macy-lights, writing

Inserted: 2007-11-03 01:54 (4 years, 3 months ago)

Google Almost Announces OpenSocial

It seems details are leaking about Google's new OpenSocial application API.

It also looks like the launch date for Open Social will be on Thursday which is what was rumoured at the end of September.

Unfortunately for me, it doesn't sound like what I was hoping for. I was hoping that there would be Application Services, Data Services and Mashup-Services and that you could do it on your own site anywhere.

From what I can tell, the Application Services and the Data Services will be there, but the Mashup Services won't be. This is because the final point above - being able to host your services anywhere - doesn't seem to be allowed.

So far, it looks like the API is for Application Services to be embedded into the Data Services' own website. Limiting or what?

As you might be able to tell, I'm a little miffed about that since for me, the big adventure was to open up where you can host your applications/mashups and not just copy Facebook's walled-garden approach and embed all the applications within one site.

It looks like my initial look at OAuth will be the thing that now excites me most and I'm going to have to start reading a bit more about it. I feel that this can be used for what I would like to see in the real Open Social scene ...

... and what is that? ...

... that the Data is open (using proper Authentication of course), and not just that the Application API is open.

The fact that an Application API is open really just means it is a standard and nothing more than that.

Things have changed in this day and age. The application doesn't matter anymore because the web is the application. Not one site. Not a few sites, but the whole web.

And while we used to say Content is King, in reality these days Data is King, or even more specifically Social Data is King.

Over the next few days, I hope to learn a little more about Google's OpenSocial and I'm almost preying it isn't what I think it is now.

Labels: google, open-social, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, oauth, magnolia, social-graph

Inserted: 2007-11-02 10:00 (4 years, 3 months ago)

I'm Releasing my Novel under Creative Commons

After attending the launch of the NZ versions of the Creative Commons licenses, I've decided to release this, my third novel, under a Creative Commons license.

The Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand site and NZ specific licenses were launched last Saturday and I had the pleasure of attending. It was a fantastic event but I shall be writing it up another time. Let's just say that I was amazed at the number and type of people who turned up.

In honour of the new license, I shall be making my NaNoWriMo 2007 novel available under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

The novel is called Macy Lights and the Battle for Ashton's Gate and I shall be filling in each day's quota, so check back every day for a new installment.

At the end of the month, I shall tie up all the pieces together and produce a book that I will print using Lulu. You are welcome to order a copy off me (to be honest, it's not going to be that good but hey, it's for the kids) and any profits will be given to a charity to be determined by me - I hope to find a writing/reading based charity here in New Zealand, so I'd appreciate any comments. Unfortunately, price is also to be determined but I don't expect it to be too high.

Depending on demand (yeah right) will depend on when and how many I order, so please be patient.

Overall, this is mostly an interesting excercise for me so it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

Wish me luck.

Labels: nanowrimo, planet-geek, macy-lights, planet-catalyst, writing

Inserted: 2007-11-02 00:38 (4 years, 3 months ago)

And we're Off

NaNoWriMo has begun and I've got a flying start.

We in Wellington had the Kick-Off gethering last night and it was great. Amazingly we got 17 people there and I know there were more who intended on coming. Overall though, it was a fantastic start.

And now, we're just 8hrs 25mins into it and I've already got my daily word quote. I'm on 1685 and I would love to double that tonight. I'm making no promises though I intend to finish at least more than a few days early this year.

The other news is, I shall be posting each and every day's writing on this site. I'm as yet undecided if I shall be just putting it up as content or as a blog, but I'm leaning towards the former since I already have a writing section and even though it's based on time (one a day) it's actually for a brief moment (one month). Every so often I'll point to any new stuff there from here so you don't miss out.

Wish me luck :-) This is going to be oarsum (oh wait, I should say awesome if we're talking about writing and not geek stuff).

Labels: nanowrimo, planet-geek, macy-lights, planet-catalyst, writing

Inserted: 2007-11-01 08:29 (4 years, 3 months ago)

Free Stuff is Good

I'm giving away free wine...

After Nate posted this - New Thing #98: Free Stuff, I decided to give away 5 bottles of wine.

I won them the other week but I'm not a wine drinker. It's really nice stuff, Grove Mill, Sauvignon Blanc 2006 and retails about $20 a bottle.

Here's the details. You must do ALL of these things:

• the first 5 people who leave a comment (only one per family)
• you must be able to pick it up (since I'm not sending it in the post) or we have a mutual arrangement to hand it over
• also give away 5 things on their blog

All entries subject to my decision. Judges decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into.

Finally, well done Nate, I was thinking of doing something like this anyway but you just forced my hand :-)

Update - 2007-10-23 20:02: requirement to be in Wellington removed

Update - 2007-10-24 08:56: Nate has update him entry with an email I sent to him. Just some ideas about how we can keep it going forward rather than backwards! :-)

Labels: wine, free

Inserted: 2007-10-23 18:58 (4 years, 3 months ago)

kapiti.geek.nz Now on Etch

After almost all of October being spent on polishing and shining Zaapt, I'm now making the move to Etch and Apache 2 from Sarge and Apache Perl.

After telling you about my refactoring on Zaapt I'm now migrating my sites over to Etch with Apache 2.

This site, kapiti.geek.nz, is the first to move. I did it last night and generally it went quite well. I got most of the bugs out last night before I switched DNS so that was good. I did find one this morning however regarding my RSS feeds, so I apologise if you had to wade through a list of broken links to my site from your feed reader this morning (one silly '/' is all that caused it).

Since then, I have found a few other back-end things which needed fixing, mainly caused by the migration from the old roles and privileges to the new RBAC. Overall though, I'm really happy. I may find some more problems when I migrate Zaapt and Zaapt Simple but hopefully all those things will be ironed out by the time I migrate KiwiWriters.

Labels: zaapt, planet-geek, kapiti-geek-nz

Inserted: 2007-10-22 13:00 (4 years, 4 months ago)

Zaapt is Unrecognisable from Two Weeks Ago

For a while I've wanted to refactor a lot of stuff in Zaapt and I finally got my chance to do it and much more.

I've been meaning to tidy up a few things in Zaapt for a while and over the past two weeks I've hacked on it lots and lots.

In short point form, the changes I have made are:

• updated the sessions to be Apache 2 compatible
• tidied up all the DB access modules
• re-worked a number of components into processing/rendering pairs
• added proper RBAC to Zaapt

As always, a small list doesn't do justice to the amount of work I have actually put in. Add to this that fact that I've been hacking on it constantly since the end of June and you can see where Zaapt has gone in the meantime.

In fact, Zaapt is still only 10 months old so it really has come a long way from being nothing beforehand.

Here, I'm just going to touch on a few different things related to recent happenings in the Zaapt world.

More Interest

There is more interest from other people around Zaapt these days but still no hard-and-fast site to say "hey looky over there, there's a Zaapt site and you know what and I didn't make it". I can't wait for that day to come and I promise you, it'll come before Zaapt is 1 year old.

Or at least, I hope it will.

From Apache Perl to Apache 2

This is something I had to do which just made sense. Apache Perl is looking a bit long in the tooth and of course, it's going to be removed from Debian in Lenny so I had to move away sometime.

As it turns out, porting Zaapt over to Apache 2 wasn't that hard, just a little picky. I had to change a few little things here and there once I'd Googled for the information I needed but mostly it was harmless.

From Sarge to Etch

Most of my sites are still running on this Debian Sarge box but I now have one running on Debian Etch. In the next week or so, I'm going to start porting all the sites over to the new box from the smallest to the largest. Firstly, Zaapt itself and Zaapt Simple, then kapiti.geek.nz and finally KiwiWriters. As they say, "it's quicker to build a 5" telescope and a 9" telescope than it is to build a 9" telescope".

From weirdness to Roles and Permissions

After I showed Donovan how my old privileges worked, I knew it was confusing by the look on his face. The good news is however that Zaapt now has a good implementation of Role-Based Access Control and it's much the better for it. Currently it does the simplest level but it's easy to add some of the more advanced levels later even though I think that will be unnecessary.

Adding RBAC has been the hardest change I've had to do to Zaapt so far. Not because it was tough, just because RBAC is implicit in a CMS like Zaapt and used in a lot of places. I had to change a lot of the Mason processing components as well as the database schema.

This addition to Zaapt had to happen now because otherwise it would become even harder later on when more sites, more users and more content models are using it.

Finally, because I'm changing servers, it gives me a prime opportunity to test it all works when I migrate the databases across but before I switch the DNS.

From Development to v0.1

Zaapt is still young but it is almost ready for the first official release. I know about the adage "release early, release often" but I just never felt that Zaapt was in that release position yet. Still you'll note that I'm only going to release as v0.1 but that's just because I know there are many more things to do before I get to a v1.0 state.

I will however now adhere to that phrase, moreso in the "release often" thing. That way, to upgrade from one version to the next would be relatively easy and certainly less of a headstrain.

And finally... a New Site

I wanted to get a simple-ish site going on Debian Etch, Apache 2 and all the new refactored stuff so I created Amazing Structures just as a hobby site. So far it just maps a few structures within a few categories but this is going to be expanded over time with many more features planned along the way.

As it turns out, its use of in-built Zaapt content models is straightfoward, but the site also has a very complex custom content model of it's own.

This is another great example of a custom content model which extends Zaapt without any trouble whatsoever. An even better example of a custom content model is the Challenge model (using SoCNoC as an example) over on KiwiWriters.

That's it for now, but remember to lookout for a v0.1 of Zaapt in the next few weeks (and as a bonus, with a new Event content model too).

Labels: apache, zaapt, debian, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-10-20 02:03 (4 years, 4 months ago)

NaNoWriMo Comes Again

I wasn't going to do NaNo this year but it just wouldn't feel right if I didn't. So I am.

Already things are getting exciting. The new NaNo site is up (still some teething problems but I'm sure they'll get it sorted). And for the geeks, it's now using Drupal.

Loads of names I know from last year are already on the forums, but even better I know more of them since many from KiwiWriters are also over there too. Added to this, we're getting crossover from NaNo and our KiwiWriters membership has gone up a lot over the past two weeks and hopefully some more during November.

The Manawatu Standard is being the best local paper which supports writing events like this one with this article - Have you got the write stuff?. Hopefully more of them will promote it too since it's a very enjoyable month - of course I have a view that they might support us with SoCNoC next year too.

It's all very exciting.

Labels: nanowrimo, kiwiwriters, planet-catalyst, novel

Inserted: 2007-10-17 21:50 (4 years, 4 months ago)

Trying to be Green

It seems that no matter what you do and how hard you try, you can always be greener.

Sometimes I feel I don't do enough to be green. Mostly I think I'm okay but in reality there are many many more things I can do to help out.

Here is some of the things I do, I've started doing recently or I want to do more of in the future. I'm going to centre on Reduce, Re-use, Recycle and public transport.

Reduce

This is the area I can probably do most in. Not that I'm bad but I feel I can do a lot more mainly by buying less! It's that simple. My main problem is food since I eat out a lot. I really should buy in more and eat at home more (but that's no fun).

Re-Use

Recently I got reusable shopping bags. Erm, can't think of anything else. Oh, I re-use water bottles instead of buying a new one all the time. I really should use my proper bottle.

Recycling

I recycle paper, glass and metals every week (thanks to the council picking them up). I took my old computers to Wellington's eDay recently and I usually give old clothes to various charities for re-use or re-sell.

Transport

I walked to school everyday from the age of 9 to 18. At university I always took public transport. I have always used public transport to work (except on the odd occassion I take the car).

I love trains, have a love-hate relationship with buses and wish Wellington would get proper trams (those silly old trolly-buses don't count).

My car doesn't guzzle gas, I despise the people around town who have 4x4's for no good reason and I really should get peddle cycle.

I will be moving closer to work at some stage in the future, for both the environment and so I get more hours in the day. Then, I'll feel like cooking at home in the evening and I might even be able to go home at lunchtime - which I did do for a while and it certainly means I eat healthier, cheaper and create less waste.

So, that's about it for me. But finally... this article was written because today is Blog Action Day.

Labels: green, wellington, blog-action-day

Inserted: 2007-10-15 22:50 (4 years, 4 months ago)

I'M IN UR DRUPAL HAKFEST HAXING MI CMS

...and having a fun time too!

I said to Brenda the other week that I'd come along to her Drupal Hackfest, but said I'd probably be hacking on Zaapt - which I am.

So far, I have refactored the Account model so it's a lot nicer and uses a lot of the newer functionality contained within Zaapt.

Now, and this is the big one, I'm going to hack in a better Accounts/Roles/Permissions. My original implementation wasn't far from wrong but I've decided it's time to make it right.

Once that's done, plus a few other fixes here and there and I will decide if it's time to finally release v0.1 of Zaapt.

Ah, happy days.

Labels: zaapt, drupal, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-10-13 16:21 (4 years, 4 months ago)

Blog Action Day

On 15th October, I have pledged to blog about the environment.

As it says:

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?

One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

That issue is: the environment.

Head over to Blog Action Day and pledge your support.

Labels: green, environment

Inserted: 2007-10-09 12:04 (4 years, 4 months ago)

PerlMongers and NZPGUG in Welly

Warning: advert for geeks to unite.

As has been always this year, I'm going to the Wellington PerlMongers meeting tomorrow night, so if anyone is interested, please come along. There are four speakers lined up so it's going to be a busy one.

Also, there is a new User Group starting next month. A few others in Catalyst (I think Finlay, Brenda and Penny) have been organising getting the New Zaland PostgreSQL Users Group up and going so put the first Tuesday of each month in your calendar for that one.

Labels: perl, planet-geek, postgres

Inserted: 2007-10-08 23:39 (4 years, 4 months ago)

Good Old Welly

Yet again, things are well in the land of Wellington.

So I meant to blog last week about going to see The Phoenix smash 4 goals past Perth Glory. That was one entertaining and hugely enjoyable match. As each match comes around, watching the Phoenix just gets better and better even if we are having fairly random results. You always bump into someone you know at the match, singing along with Yellow Fever is always funny and the crowd entertainment value is excellent.

This week, I managed to walk the Carbon Crusade and planted 5 trees for it too. All good fun.

In other news, both good and bad. I managed to win a crate of wine at the Carbon Crusade from More FM. It's the first time I've ever entered a competition on the radio but I only did it 'coz I figured I actually had good odds of winning - and I did :-)

But the bad news is, I've gone and made my injury worse. After not playing footy for 3 weeks, I then proceeded to jump across the stream eager to plant my trees - and promptly pulled my groin again. So it looks like I'll be out of action for even longer, which I'm very miffed about.

Finally, I went to the NZSO last night and can honestly say was my favourite night there in a while. Plus, I have tickets to see Turandot in a couple of weeks.

As always, Wellington is keeping me busy.

I love this place.

Labels: nzso, phoenix, opera, football

Inserted: 2007-10-07 20:06 (4 years, 4 months ago)

Everyone is getting into the Sharing Data Space

Ma.gnolia.com is also getting in on the act.

From a webpost on the Ma.gnolia.com blog, they are releasing a new specification called Open Authentication specification (OAuth).

The thing is though, they are calling it Open Authentication but really, it's not just authentication, it's actually also (maybe sneakily) authorisation too. Authorisation to your data, that's what.

Using Open Authentication certainly does allow one site (the web app) to confirm with another (the identity server) that you are who you say you are. But there is more to it than that...

It also allows the web app to gain access - on your say-so of course - to your private data on the identity server.

(As an aside, I think that Open Authentication, or OAuth, is actually a misnomer and really should be named something else.)

This can be most easily thought of as an example where a photograph printing site wants access to a user's images at their favourite image sharing site.

This OAuth specification is along the same lines as quite a number of different specifications which allow for authentication and authorisation of data access which are vying for adoption throughout the rest of the web. Much like what I said last week about the possibility of Google opening out their authentication/authorisation, it'll be interesting from here on in and the good thing is, if there is enough people looking at the problem and creating solutions, the best one will probably win - or maybe the biggest one.

One thing I forgot to mention in last week's post is about the type of data that can be shared. For example, having Ma.gnolia as your identify server and your data manager will give you access to your bookmarks from other web apps if given authorisation, but from this provider, that's all you can get at - since that's all they keep.

Opposed to this is some new abilities within Google Mashups which allow you to store any type of data against each user. When it was first released, you could only access the \c{${app}} variable (I need to confirm this) but now there is a \c{${user}} variable too.

So again, this is another step along the road where you'll actually be able to create and store anything with anyone and access it from anywhere, on the assumption that Google's new API allows this.

That's a lot of options and very much inline with the true spirit of the web.

Life is good.

Labels: google, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, magnolia, social-graph

Inserted: 2007-10-05 16:05 (4 years, 4 months ago)

I Can't Believe I Didn't See this Before

Things are looking good in the 'open' social networking scene.

For a while now, I've been interested in OpenID, open sharing of information and also the social graph everyone is talking about.

Heck, I even told a (non-geek) friend of mine the other day that 'information wants to be free'. He was laughing at me - very hard (hi Dave).

As it turns out, all the different thoughts and plans lots of people all over the globe have been having about how to open the social network out will all be pushed aside if this happens.

The interesting thing is though, even though it might turn out to be a big launch for Google, I think they've already started with the opening out of their GData JavasScript Client Library of Calendar. And we're promised, more of their Application API's to come.

The difference between this client library and the preceding ones is that it allows anyone to mashup an application of theirs to be writable as well as readable. What this means is anyone out there on the internet can now 'program' Google's Applications using a JavaScript library. The aim of GData in the first place was to standardised their internal applications this way so it's no surprise it's now writable.

The main point about this write thing is that, to be able to write to something of yours (yes, you own it, it's your data), that means the application has to know who you are - which is authentication.

So hang on let's recap:

• random website (example.com) wants to create an application using your calendar and your friends as source data - let's say a birthday party invitation application
• they mash something together on their own website (example.com/party-invitation.html)
• you connect up, say you're andychilton_at_gmail.com and they ask Google to confirm this
• you're confirmed and you also allow the Party Invitation site to access (some of) your personal data
• you create a party, it gets added to your calendar and invites gets sent out to all your friends

Does it sound like Facebook to anyone?

Yes, but there is one big difference. To create an application, you don't have to do it inside Google as you do with Facebook, you can just go ahead and do it.

That sounds like progress to me :-)

Two other things we need to consider are authentication and the personal data we're talking about.

For authentication we already have OpenID which can say that you are the owner of this particular identity. So maybe November 5th is the big day for Google giving all of their accounts users an OpenID (yay!) Even though they don't need it and their APIs won't use it, it would be really nice of them to do it.

So, the personal data that will be used in these PWMU's (Private Writable Mash-Ups) that might be used by an application may come from Google... BUT, and this is the best bit, I suspect that anyone in the world will also able to create an application which has a PWMU API which implements all the necessary features that the GData API does.

So, finally, what does this actually mean.

It means that anyone can provide an Authentication service, anyone can be a Data service and anyone can create a Personal Writable Mash-Up service.

Sounds like decentralised control of everything - which is exactly what the proponents of the Open Social Graph problem want.

The fact that OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick now works for Google and is leading this project gives me even more confidence that things will go in the right direction. As the techcrunch article above states, if Facebook is 98% open, then Google will be 100% open.

And let me finish on a more personal note. I've been planning on adding OpenID to Zaapt and hence KiwiWriters in the next couple of months but let's just imagine some other possibilities. We could create an application which implements a Work In Progress API which allows you to read/write you WIP information from any mashup site. Let's say that in the future people decide to move away from KiwiWriters (let's hope not), then they can copy/move the data that they own to another site which implements the WIP API. This means that the user is free to choose the best provider they see fit AND they actually have the ability to do it. Talk about keeping providers on their toes :-)

P.S. Most of the second half of this post is speculation about what will happen, but yeah, either way, it's going to be very interesting.

Labels: openid, google, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, facebook, social-graph

Inserted: 2007-09-28 10:47 (4 years, 4 months ago)

Epiphany Refreshes the Web

I'm not talking about me having an epiphany about the web, I'm talking about using the Epiphany Browser instead of Firefox.

For a while now, my Firefox browser has been going in fits and starts. More often than not it starts winding up to 100% CPU and that's just silly. My browser is fairly plain vanilla with just a few minor extensions so who knows what's causing it.

I have been using Google Maps quite a lot recently and I'm thinking it has to do with that, but really, it's far too often getting it's knickers in a twist.

Also a few other things have been getting on my nerves recently. For example, if I'm editing inside a text box, I can't Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn since the text box keeps the focus and gives you options for previous things you've typed in there in the past - not a feature I ever use.

So I decided last night to give Epiphany a go. Many years ago I'd played with Galeon from which Epiphany grew and also had an itch to give it another go. A couple of years ago it still didn't seem to be what I wanted but nowadays it seems fantastic.

So far, it's been a breath of fresh air. It's responsive, it renders really fast (oh I know it uses Gecko which Firefox does, it just seems faster) and there isn't tonnes of cruft to get in the way. I don't need or use history, I keep my bookmarks online and most things I do, I use the mouse for. It's a small slimline browser which goes wonderfully with my minimal desktop (I use Ion3).

Also, using Google Maps never seems to slow it down ever though I'm sure it's quite intensive. I've had 4 tabs open on 4 different pages with maps on them, a load of Flickr pages, lots of Wikipedia pages and other random pages and it's still super responsive. Apart from not stealing all the CPU it also just feels fast for the simple things like switching from tab to tab, which I do a lot.

I don't think I can fully switch yet since I need to check out the extension mechanism but so far, it's looking really promising. I'll definately switch on my home computer at some stage, maybe I'll keep using Firefox on my work one.

Yet another demonstration how free and open source software works. If something better comes along, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to try it out :-)

Labels: epiphany, galeon, firefox, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2007-09-25 22:17 (4 years, 4 months ago)

IRC Bots

Seeing as everyone else seems to blog about IRC, I thought I'd give an exchange between me and some bots.

The characters are:

• pie - that's me
• htaccess - a real person
• tabby (bot) - a random sentence generator
• dullbot (bot) - one who learns from reading other IRC messages

 15:06 < pie> tabby!
 15:06 < tabby> tabby(TM): Was it good for you too?
 15:06 < pie> absolutely tabby, you're the best
 15:06 < tabby> tabby(TM): Stop that or you'll go blonde! 
 15:07 < pie> I already am, you made me tabby
 15:07 < tabby> tabby(TM): 30% less redundant than itself.
 15:07 < pie> a-ha, I win
 15:07 <@htaccess> dullbot: pie!
 15:07 < dullbot> htaccess: Look, pie.  We had a nice conversation.
 15:07 < pie> dullbot: I thought you'd been evicted from #<channel>
 15:07 < dullbot> pie: No retard, from the moment i left you, this has been a good cat, and a pretty grim thought.
 15:07 < pie> lol
 15:07 < pie> dullbot: no, you're the best!
 15:07 < dullbot> pie: No, you're the best.
 15:07 < pie> :-)

Labels: irc

Inserted: 2007-09-19 15:16 (4 years, 5 months ago)

A Big Day for Kiwi Writers

After a long time planning, developing and testing, Member Challenges are now live on KiwiWriters.

Today saw the launch of a brand new section of the KiwiWriters site; the ability for members to create their own challenges. Not only that but it can also be of one of a number of different types of challenge too.

Most writing sites which hold challenges have two limitations, both of which I always wanted to avoid:

• they seem to only hold one per year (or at least just one at a time)
• the challenge itself is usually of one particular type

From the very start, the KiwiWriters committee said "let's have member challenges" (I forget who's idea it was), so since that day I've been planning on having something completely flexible. I have blogged about this before - My Proudest Moment for KiwiWriters - and all that hard work is now paying off.

We allow writing challenges, editing challenges, time-based challenges, preparation challenges and random-other-stuff challenges. There is plenty of variation and scope for whatever it is people out there want to do and best of all, they can do it whenever they want, there's no need to wait around for one of those other challenges to start. Also, any other member people can join in your challenge too, which after all, was the whole point in the first place.

Gladly one member has already added our first ever member challenge - Survival of the Human Race and we're hoping for a number of people to join. So overall, it's been a very exciting day.

Now then, it's not often I boast but for the first time in a while, I'd like to blow my own trumpet (as it were). Technologically speaking, I'd like to summarise what the KiwiWriters challenge part of the site has over and above all the other writing sites I've seen:

1. most sites only have 1 challenge a year, we have many
2. most sites only have 1 type of challenge, we have many
3. most sites only have challenges that the administrators add, we also allow our members to add them
4. some sites remove everything from the site regarding the old challenges, we keep a 100% record of everything

We also have all these added extra features too which not all sites have either:

1. working within everyone's own timezone
2. saving of each day's progress
3. a history of every challenge each member has ever entered
4. automatic certificates and progress banners
5. plus, soon to come, progress charts for each member for each challenge

So overall, it's been a hell of a lot of work to get everything going and now I'm just hoping that this new feature will be the 'killer app' for the site and that lots more people will start using it.

One area I'd love to expand is to get writing groups to use our site for their own challenges. Setting up infrastructure like that and getting it going is quite hard and really time-consuming. People shouldn't have to do all that themselves and instead, I've already done it. Instead, they just go to the site, create a challenge, get people to join and away you go. People don't even have to look at the rest of the site if they don't want to but hopefully, that would be a good drawcard to introduce people to other parts of the site. It's a great tool for encouragement and for being pushed (or pulled) along with a wave of other people.

One of my biggest dreams however, is to get schoolteachers, obviously English teachers, to add their bigger homework/project assignments as a challenge within the site and to get all of their pupils to accept the challenge. Just imagine all those extra words the kids would write if they knew their best friend was ahead of them. We all know from experience that doing something in a group gives you more encouragement, a greater sense of involvement and an incentive to do even more than you could ever imagine. I think that this would be a great way for kids to write more and have lots more fun in the process...

...after all, that's exactly what the whole site is aiming to achieve.

Labels: planet-geek, member-challenges, site-challenges, planet-catalyst, kwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-09-16 00:09 (4 years, 5 months ago)

Friday's After Work

On Friday afternoon's a lot of people stay around in work for beer o'clock. I do too, but not really for the beer.

Free beer, fresh bread and lots of chips and dips is great in anyone's book but I enjoy sticking round in work on Fridays for a whole lot of different reasons.

Instead of going to the cramped and loud room where everyone is gathering and chatting, I usually just wander the office, find someone to talk to and say "So, teach me something you learned this week." It reminds me of the mathematician Paul Erdős who used to turn up at colleagues houses and say "my brain is open." There's something I like about that, it's kinda cool and very geeky.

So for the past 2 months or so I've wandered past people's desks, sat down and just started talking. A few times, I've just stayed at my desk and one or two people would come and sit and talk. I find it a good situation to be in since then you can chat for real and get to know people a lot more than you do during the normal (hectic) work week.

Tonight was really, really good. Beer O'Clock was on my level today so I just sat at my desk. Firstly I had a good chat with Finlay about projects, technologies and management. Then, there were a number of us geektalking (and we even had Nathan Torkington there who is visiting Wellington for Bar Camp tomorrow). Sorry, but geektalk is always interesting.

Finally, Brenda, Caroline, Aaron and Joh were all teaching me sign language. I knew Brenda knew it but hadn't realised how many others did too. It's something I've been interested in for a while but never really did anything. Back in 2000 I printed off the signs for the alphabet and some other beginner's stuff, but there's nothing like having a group of people to learn from and ask questions of.

My first impressions of sign-language is that it's a really creative language. I laughed at a number of signs, such as the ones for various countries (like France, Italy, Russia and Germany) since they actually seem a little outdated. But better than that, signs for people themselves are really cool. It's about taking something to do with sign, a letter, or maybe two, an altogether different sign, mixing them together or with either the personality or the physical appearance of the person and creating something new. So, a letter, a pre-existing sign, a name, a personality and producing something (almost) unique for that person.

Caroline's sign, suggesting long shoulder length hair is very cool. Brenda's (Shiny) suggests something shiny or glittering by throwing your fingers apart (sorry, hard to describe in words, sign is so much easier) and Aaron's, using two thumbs (because pointing to one thumb is for the letter 'a') to point to his dimples on his cheeks is the best of the lot.

What it comes down to is, that people's sign-names are basically mash-ups of sign itself and the person they are for :-)

Wellington's sign is also kinda cool and I'll tell you how to do it. Take your main hand and put your 2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers up with your palm away. Then, move you hand from side-to-side as you also lower it from eye-level to chest level. Yep, that's the wind and rain you're hinting at and that means Wellington. It's brilliant and I love it.

A task I shall be setting myself for this week is to find an evening class somewhere so I can take sign language and learn a bit more. Also, like learning any other type of language (linguistics or programming) it's much easier to learn if you have people to practice with. So Brenda, Caroline, Aaron and Joh, I shall be looking for you guys so I can practice some more. It's lots of fun.

Labels: beer-oclock, planet-geek, sign-language, planet-catalyst, geek-talking

Inserted: 2007-09-14 22:49 (4 years, 5 months ago)

Talk About a Head Wrecker

So here's the deal ... and it's a head wrecker.

Over on \l{KiwiWriters|http://kiwiwriters.org/} we're releasing \b{Member Challenges} onto the site on the 15th September. So for example anyone who has signed up to the site can create a challenge that anyone else can join. It's going to be very cool.

There will also be other general improvements such as the one where we'll automatically track your daily progress for any of the challenges you're signed up for ... and this is where it starts to get complicated.

I need to know:

• when any timezone in the world passes midnight
• the list of 'active today' challenges at each timezone that has just passed midnight
• the progress of each member within that timezone partaking in any of the active challenges
• then finally to save their progress

This is kinda weird in two respects.

The first is that timezones are weird - we already know this, but I've just figured out something else a little strange. At 11pm tonight for example, the Pacific/Pago_Pago timezone just crossed into the 3rd September but the Pacific/Tongatapu timezone just crossed into the 4th September - at exactly the same time.

So, the list of active challenges is any challenge that was open for even just 1 minute today. This is the 2nd strange thing and it isn't as easy as it sounds. The logic is a little weird. You'd think it would be about checking the start and end datetimes but you actually want to know if a particular challenge was open at any stage of today - and as you've seen above, today might mean yesterday, also remembering that you've already crossed over into tomorrow.

Let's take midnight tonight for example. Once we cross midnight then the CURRENT_DATE is 2007-09-04. This means that the list of active challenges for today (the 3rd) are those who's start_date <= '2007-09-03' AND end_date >= '2007-09-02'. It seems a little strange at first and it took me ages to figure it out. I don't consider it to be straightforward logic since there was a lot of thinking time but it definitely works.

So as an example for my test data. For Pacific/Pago_Pago my test data said that there were two challenges active yesterday. But for Pacific/Tongatapu it said there were four because it was for today. Yet all of these are processed for different days at exactly the same time.

As we speak, Pacific/Chatham has just passed midnight and is therefore offset by 45 mins from mainland New Zealand so again, something different the fact that I have to check every 15 mins!

So tonight has been a bit of a head wrecker trying to get all these things in place. As it turns out, I think I've got it sussed but wow, it's amazing how much time can disappear on what appears to be a simple problem.

Labels: kiwi-writers, timezones

Inserted: 2007-09-03 23:28 (4 years, 5 months ago)

The First Hack Day Considered a Success

I managed to do fair bit of what I wanted today but playing with other things also reminded me how much you need to know to get the job done.

Yesterday, I declared that today was Hack Day. Overall, I didn't even finish my first task but that's because of two things: (i) coffee, and (ii) refreshing my memory.

All I want a simple cron'd script to do something every 15 mins. As it turns out there is lots more stuff you have to consider for that one ickl' script and it needs a lot more infrastructure than you expect. I ended up using:

• timezones
• cron scripts and using dh_installcron
• logging with Log::Log4perl
• creating system users in the postinst with id and useradd
• making sure the package remove and purge works correctly
• setting up and running logrotate and dh_installlogrotate
• and not forgetting the actual script itself that's doing all the work

It's funny how a simple script requires all this other padding around it. The good thing is, I've done it the once now so adding further scripts in the future should be easy enough.

I've set it going on my laptop and I'll check the logs tomorrow. If it seems fine so far I'll finish the script off to do the actual database insertions I need.

Phew! Like everything at the moment it's the small things that take the most time.

Labels: postgresql, kiwi-writers, planet-catalyst, timezones

Inserted: 2007-09-03 00:31 (4 years, 5 months ago)

I Declare that Tomorrow is Hack Day

I believe the weather is going to be bad tomorrow, so I now pronounce it hack day.

Actually, it doesn't matter about the weather at all. There are just some things I need to get done. I wasn't going to write a list of things I had to do because then I'd be bound by it, but that's probably a good thing and then I'll see how well I did.

Okay, here goes:

1. write the challenge progress cron for KiwiWriters so that we remember everyone's progress for every challenge
2. complete by changes to Zaapt for Role-Based Access Control
3. play with Google Maps more (see my current play thing (note: it only saves points locally in that page, so any additions you do, you'll lose - so just have a click and a play)

I don't hope to do all those things, but I may get the first and some of the second done.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, planet-catalyst, google-maps

Inserted: 2007-09-02 01:31 (4 years, 5 months ago)

Some Funny Marketing Tricks

I received an email from Genesis Energy today. I never asked for it and (in all honesty) I can't remember the last one they sent.

" Andrew, put your hands up before time's up!

We emailed you recently about the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act, which comes into force in September 2007. That means if you want to receive occasional Genesis Energy news, offers and information the environmentally friendly way, you need to give us your consent.

We haven’t received it yet, so here’s a reminder to give your consent before Friday 31 August 2007 if you want your chance in the draw to win one of six prizes of $1,000*!

Interesting. Getting you to consent to getting spam by spamming people. I haven't given my consent yet and not likely too either.

This reminds me of when the AA sent me a letter saying I should get Life Insurance with them. They sent me a second and a third letter. The third time I phoned their 0800 number and the conversation went something like this:

"Hi, I'm just phoning about the letter you sent me regarding Life Insurance." I said.

"Oh yeah, how may I help?" she said in a chirpy voice, hoping to get a sale.

"Erm, can you stop sending me them please."

"Oh okay."

Or how about when Vodafone phoned me up to 'ask me some questions'. Towards the end they pretty much stated that I didn't use the phone much.

"No, not much," I said.

"Would you consider upgrading your plan?"

WTF? I just said I didn't use the phone much.

"Er, no thanks."

"Okay. Would you recommend Vodafone to your friends and family?" she asked politely.

"No."

"Oh really" she sounded surprised (YA RLY I thought). "Is there anything we can do that would change your mind?"

"Yep," I replied "it's quite simple. Give us more, for less."

"Oh, okay. I'll er, put that in."

"KTHXBAI"

Nothing has changed yet. It's still a rip-off. I can but hope. Funny though :-)

Labels: genesis-energy, spam, the-aa, vodafone

Inserted: 2007-08-29 21:27 (4 years, 5 months ago)

I Feel Sorry for PHP

...but is it really PHP or just this developer?

Ignoring the title and the first half of this article, the second half makes me laugh. In the article Points of Attack: PHP and Ajax, Matthew McCool says:

Second, you should consider using standard functions for processing user input. You probably don’t want HTML tags in your database, so it’s a good idea to use PHPs built in functions. It makes sense to use strip_tags() for removing unnecessary tags and then running mysql_real_escape_string() prior to database insertion.

Firstly, I don't care if there are HTML tags in my database. If the user put them there, then fine, they go in the database. On the way out of the database and into whatever format the display media is, I might process that data somehow, be that HTML escaping it or whatever, but essentially I choose on the way out rather than the way in.

Secondly, mysql_real_escape_string() - are you serious (or should that be real)? Apparently you don't use mysql_escape_string() anymore, you use the real one - hmm. Seems to cause more problems than it solves when you end up seeing quotes in the database anyway, obviously escaped multiple times. I'm not surprised it's confusing with that add_slashes(), strip_slashes() and the numerous other things that mess around with quotes and backslashes. The more you have to process something, the more you're likely to get it wrong. I'm assuming that PDO finally lays that that old trauma to rest.

So yeah, I feel sorry for PHP. Or is that it's programmers I should feel sorry for.

Labels: php, database

Inserted: 2007-08-29 13:16 (4 years, 5 months ago)

Interesting News

I seem to read a lot about Linux. But I also read a lot about free software and freedoms in general. It seems today has lots of interesting news about the latter.

I've given up reading http://www.linuxtoday.com/ because of all the adverts and the fact that you have to click firstly to get a brief of the story, then the story itself. Instead, I just read http://lxer.com/ since they all pretty much list the same things anyway.

So, here are the articles I found interesting today:

• Why Proprietary Code is Bad for Security (which I think should also read "Why Proprietary Code is Bad for your Privacy"
• Freedomware free as in $$
• Microsoft kills off anti-Linux 'Get the Facts' site
• Bird Song: A requiem for DRM

I find these stories interesting for various reasons. I've spoken to friends about Skype and I'm still resisting using it, though the pull is string.

The second article because I just think it's funny - "Why is all this high quality software free?" they say. You say "Because it's priceless!" :-)

I'm still in two minds about what Microsoft is doing flirting with free software but until they do the right thing in every area (not just one or two), then I won't trust them until that point.

And finally, about the complete mess with DRM. People recorded LP's and tapes off each other. They copied 'protected' games off each other with the C64, Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga (the list goes one). They copy CDs, now MP3s, they've hacked the DVD CSS and they will any DRM format you put in front of them. I think companies are learning that people power is important and always wins. Therefore, go with the flow, chill-out and turn it to your advantage. Give the people what they want (not what you want to give them) and just watch, you'll make a killing.

So yeah, today's news was quite interesting for free software and freedoms in general.

Labels: free-software, drm, planet-catalyst, freedom

Inserted: 2007-08-26 20:28 (4 years, 5 months ago)

Always Busy

This week has, again, been fairly busy. Not just in social but other stuff too.

I really should be doing my The End is Nigh this month, but instead I keep finding geek things to do.

Firstly, earlier on in the month I implemented a new gallery content type in Zaapt. Then I rebranded and ported this site to Zaapt too.

Suddenly, I'm in at the start of a whole new adventure regarding Open Standards which is also related to Social Networks. No, I'm not talking about the Social Graph everyone is talking about, but just another little corner of the web which should be a little more open for everyone concerned. I alluded to this new project in a post last week but it's starting to get some momentum already.

No details to be posted as yet but rest assured, they'll be coming fairly soon.

I have found recently that I really enjoy the content management side of things, not only because of Zaapt but because of the fact that all the data generated for the site is by human beings.

On three previous work projects I've been on, most of the data was generated by computers or instruments attached to them, so it's good to realise what actually makes me tick. Added to this my recent interest in OpenID there are a number of things all pointing in one general direction for me at the moment, so that's good.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-08-23 21:23 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Chromatic Hits the Nail on the Head

A number of things which are near and dear to me at the moment, and chromatic talks about them all.

In his post Constraints and Software Development, chromatic talks about writing, software and volunteer projects.

Hmm, has he been reading my blog - it pretty much touches on everything I seem to be doing at the moment :-)

And yes, kapiti.geek.nz has a new design, courtesy of Free CSS Templates. Thanks muchly. But better than that, it is now using Zaapt :-)

Labels: zaapt, web-design, planet-catalyst, writing

Inserted: 2007-08-20 00:16 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Randomness is Good

You'd think that randomness, or pseudo-randomness, is something an electrical or software engineer is interested in. As it turns out, it's the life-blood for lots of people.

My brother, for example, would sometimes start stories with "It was a bit of a random night..." or "We met some random where..." etc etc

Well, today has been very random. Firstly, I woke up all happy and busy that I'd completed a fair chunk of work getting the new kapiti.geek.nz up and going (wait for tomorrow for the official launch).

Then I felt a bit weird that I was taking on too much and that I needed a break. At that stage, I felt a bit down about a few things.

Then tonight, I've been out drinking, which is the first time in ages. Not my usual style and pretty random for me I can tell you. We (the Wellington Perlmongers met up with Dave Cross (founder of the London PM and his wife who are visiting New Zealand and happen to be coming by Wellington. They are both really nice and easy going and it was a pleasure to meet them both - I just hope they enjoyed their brief stay in Welly as much as we enjoyed their company.

It also seems that both Andrew and Brenda have been checking out Zaapt and I hope that they found something of interest :-) While I know there are some weird things about it, if more people use Zaapt, those weird things will start to decrease. And also, the functionality will start to increase too (Lord knows, the documentation needs a lick or two).

Finally, as another random thing to add, I've had a couple of comments on this blog from Nate and I've added a few to his blog recently too. It's funny, I've never met him, but he seems like the kind of person I'd like to sit down with and chat to. Not sure about the whole Bill Gates comment though, but I guess everyone has their own type of weirdness along the way.

Oh, and Andrew, we all knew you were an extrovert from the start even if you didn't :-)

Labels: random, zaapt

Inserted: 2007-08-19 01:16 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Time Out

I'm holding my hands out, one upwards, one across the top. It's time for a Time Out.

This whole year has been busy. It's been fairly mad. Basically, it's been crazy since 1st January it seems. So I'm going to take a time out.

I've had people stay with me - which is nice, but each and every time this happens, I realise why I live by myself (and as Danny Bhoy said the other week - don't get loneliness and being alone mixed up). Of course, if I was with someone, that would be different, but at the moment, I'm not. Therefore, I like my own space.

Also, I've been hard at work with Zaapt and KiwiWriters. I've also tried to help set up 3 different people with a website of their very own. I realise that it's hard for me when someone says that they want a site, I end up saying "I can help". In the end, it's much more hassle than it's worth especially if I'm not going to get anything from it either. At first, I wanted people to use Zaapt, but now I'm not as bothered since I feel Zaapt will eventually get a life of it's own anyway. Also, when it gets to the point where the person I'm doing the site for wants changes, it just becomes like work but mainly if they are not sensitive to the amount of time I'm putting in or have put in in the past. As soon as something becomes like work, then I'm outta there.

Also, there is a difference between a site where someone wants to make money and a site which is aimed at improving either people themselves or the world as a whole. Of course, you guys know that the latter is much more dear to my heart than the former and that's why those other commitments have got to go.

These past three weeks have been interesting in that I've only been at home in the evening for about 4 in 21. There's been lots going on and all the while, all the things I should have be doing have been mounting up. All those things I don't have to do, but I feel I ought to because I'd promised someone something. I'm at the stage now where I'm cutting things out because, and let's be honest here, I'm not getting anything back!

There are, however, exceptions to this. There are many, many things I love doing and won't ever stop doing them unless I get hit by a bus. So basically, I need to concentrate on those things I enjoy and the things I truly believe in. Both of the things I mentioned above, Zaapt and KiwiWriters are intertwined into something I truly believe in but all the rest, I've decided, I'm going to have to cut out.

From now on, I'm going to bite my lip whenever I'm about to say the words "I can help" and instead, consider whether I feel that it's for a cause I want to support.

Currently, there are two new things going round in my head for websites that I want to develop and you can be rest assured that one is related to open standards and the other is related to charitable organisations. Both of which, I'll do myself, neither of which will have time pressures and each will be pleasantly enjoyable.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, time-out

Inserted: 2007-08-18 15:43 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Converting kapiti.geek.nz to Zaapt

Over the past couple of nights I have redesigned my site and currently have a staging version of it all set up and ready to go.

The main reason for re-doing the site was so that I could convert it into a Zaapt site. As stated before, currently this is running using some software called Slym which was a precursor to Zaapt. Also, the old modules are no longer maintained and were starting to get on my nerves - anyone notice my blog's archive dates don't keep up? :-(

All in all, the redesign hasn't taken very long at all. In fact, getting a site up and going with Zaapt is just getting quicker and quicker. Recently, I checked in some code into the Zaapt Demo project which creates a basic (and Debianised) site upon which you can add things. To get that up and going takes about 3 minutes from start to finish - customisations after that take longer of course.

So the conversion from this site to the new one took something under six hours! That includes about 3 hrs of setting the site up, templating the HTML and some quick testing and about 3 hrs for the data migration script for everything in the old database. Currently, I'm copying and converting three lots of content sections, one blog and lots of comments and labels.

So all in all, I think getting the site going in less than 6 hours (including a data migration) is quite impressive. Also, when I got the Zaapt and the Zaapt Simple websites going way back in March it only really took me three days to get those going - and they've hardly been changed since.

Also this week, Don has stated that he may also switch to Zaapt so that makes me very happy. Finally, Zaapt will be used by someone else. It's not that I'm pressuring him :-) but that would be oarsum when it happens.

It does mean however, that the Zaapt sourcecode will now be under scrutiny from my peers. This is a really good thing (I'll know if I'm on the right track) but may also be embarassing (for those times when I've been slack or silly), but hey, that's what free and open source software is about :-) Just having someone else use it will be great...

...and nothing makes me happier.

P.S. the new design will be launched on Sunday just so I can add some spit and polish tomorrow

Labels: zaapt, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, kapiti-geek-nz

Inserted: 2007-08-18 02:49 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Latest Happenings

Just a quick catch up on what I've been doing.

This past two weeks, it seems I've been out more than I've been in. Take this last week, you know I went for Rock'n'Roll on Monday and Indoor Soccer on Wednesday.

Well, I also went to see Danny Bhoy on Thursday (who is the funniest comedian I've ever seen, no doubt about it) and went to see the Wellington Phoenix on Friday. I'll get a season ticket for that very soon.

But, the best thing is, even though it's been busy, I have managed to add a new Gallery type to Zaapt. It's mostly finished with a few tweaks to make but it is site usable already. I shall be using it on a site very soon - which will be posted here - so watch out for that.

Labels: zaapt, planet-geek, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2007-08-13 00:05 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Who'd a Thunk it?

So at the ripe old age of 31 and a half, I have won my first ever sports award.

Yes, the lads pulled through in the final tonight and we won our league. See the results below.

 #  Team                    P  W  L  D FF FA  For Agst       %  BP  TP
 -  ---------------------- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---- ---- ------- --- ---
 1  Sift                    9  7  1  1  0  0   70   36  194.44  10  32
 2  Jones Lang La Salle     9  7  2  0  0  0  104   42  247.62  10  31
 3  Old Ladies From Picton  9  7  2  0  0  0   88   55  160.00  10  31
 4  Walk On                 9  3  4  2  0  0   69   75   92.00  10  21
 5  Terminators Mens        9  2  5  1  1  0   45   60   75.00  10  20
 6  Jan Molby               9  2  7  0  0  0   45   84   53.57  10  16
 7  Serie A                 9  5  4  0  0  0   71   69  102.90   0  15
 8  M I L F                 9  0  8  0  0  1   32  103   31.07   0   0
 
 P  = Played
 W  = Won
 L  = Lost
 D  = Draw
 FF = Forfeit For
 FA = Forfeit Against
 GF = Goals For
 GA = Goals Against
 %  = Percentage goals (For/Agst*100)
 BP = Bonus Points
 TP = Total Points

So yeah, the figure that stands out for me is that we scored a lot of goals. I think I contributed about 10 :-) And for each game we did:

 Rnd Opponent                  Date Rslt  Score   Pts
 --- ------------------- ---------- ---- -------- ---
  4  Jan Molby            30 May 07  Won  11 -  5   3
  5  M I L F               6 Jun 07  Won   9 -  3   3
  6  Terminators Mens     13 Jun 07  Won   8 -  7   3
  7  Serie A              20 Jun 07  Lst   4 -  6   0
  8  Sift                 27 Jun 07  Won   8 -  3   3
  9  Jones Lang La Salle   4 Jul 07  Lst   7 - 13   0
 10  Walk On              11 Jul 07  Won  10 -  8   3
 11  Jan Molby            18 Jul 07  Won  15 -  7   3
 12  M I L F              25 Jul 07  Won  16 -  3   3
 
 SF  Jones Lang La Salle   8 Aug 07  Won  13 -  6
  F  Sift                  8 Aug 07  Won   7 -  3

Not sure how we lost to Serie A in the league (I was away that week) but after we saw it was Sift in the final and we'd beaten them before, we thought we had a chance. Funny thing being that we also lost to Jones Lang La Salle in the league but we did well against them.

Overall, I figured my performance tonight was my best in the season so far. I think I was just a little rusty at the start (and not as fit) but it's coming together.

So anyway, we all got an award which says:

Wellington Indoor Sports
Queens Wharf Indoor Soccer
Autumn League 2007 Major Final Winners

Who'd a thunk it?

But at the same time, it's crap that they're planning on pulling Shed 1 down and putting some stupid crappy hotel piece of rubbish on there instead.

Labels: indoor-soccer

Inserted: 2007-08-08 22:58 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Long Time...!

Haven't written here for a while, so a quick update from last week.

Things have been good:

• I've started the Gallery plugin for Zaapt, almost done (oh, alright then, 40% done)
• Don is looking at installing and using Zaapt, which will be big news since that'll be the first install I'm not in charge of
• I've been to Rock'n'Roll again with Kerryn, always a good laugh
• spoke to my brother on the phone and gave him instructions to download Firefox, install it, use it and reject the evil ways of Internet Exploder
• caught up with Travis and the others
• started unf*cking the mess in the garage, in some cases 4 years worth of crap - I'm sorting it out and throwing it out

As always, it's been a busy week. Bumped into nem on Sunday and we were just saying how we both like Wellington. It seems to be popular at the moment, with Penny Pants saying similar things, as I have done here and here recently.

The one thing I'm not doing is starting to finish off those things I've promised for The End is Nigh challenge at Kiwi Writers.

Anyways, all in all, a good week but busy.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, wellington

Inserted: 2007-08-07 00:07 (4 years, 6 months ago)

The End is Nigh 2007

There is a new challenge over at KiwiWriters - go check it out if you want to finish that thing off you've been meaning to do for ages.

The End is Nigh challenge aims at getting you to finish off whatever it is you've been procrastinating about all this time. You know you have one or two, or five or six, things you've been meaning to finish off, but you just need that momentum to get you started.

This is your excuse to finish off whatever it is you've just not had chance to do. The best part about it though, is that you'll be finishing things off with lots of other people to push you, cheer you on and also who are doing it themselves, so you're not alone.

I shall be finishing off my NaNoWriMo novel from last year - The Bright Side of Casey Hill - as well as my SoCNoC novel from this year - Bit and Byte's Adventure.

And some people seem to have already started, so what are you waiting for, Join Us and let's just get it finished.

Labels: kiwi-writers, end-is-nigh

Inserted: 2007-07-31 22:16 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Happiness is a Cigar called Hamlet

There used to be an advert on the TV in the UK back when advertising tobacco was still allowed. It basically put the subject of the advert into an awkward situation, but smoking that cigar made him forget his worries.

Not that I'm advertising smoking (since I absolutely revile it, it's a disgusting habit) but there are some things at the moment which remind me of the advert.

Well, as you guys know, I recently started back at Catalyst. Since then I've been a lot happier there than at my previous place. All in all, there are ups and downs but that's the case in any job. Anyway, for the past while in work I've been grappling with using Oracle. It's been a complete PITA for so many reasons but it really does make me wonder why people still use it.

That aside, I was chatting with a friend at my old work on Jabber the other day. He asked me "Are you happy now?" This was in reference to the fact that I'd told him while I was still working at the old place that "You know, I'm not usually this sad". Anyway, he remembered and asked me. Of course, I said "Yes, 100%".

So this reminded me of the advert. Even if I have to grapple with Oracle, even if I'd have done things differently, even if this that and the other, all the chaos that usually goes with a project of any decent size, as soon as I realise I'm where I want to be work-wise, none of the little things matter.

Also, things have been pretty rosey outside of work too. As you know, I've been fairly busy and last weekend was no exception. A housewarming on Friday (hi guys), the NZSO on Saturday for what was an amazing concert, to see This is New Zealand at the film festival on Sunday and Rock'n'Roll on Monday evening - from which I can't get the moves out of my head!

I asked the other week, Can it get any better than this?. Well, it seems it can!

Labels: hamlet, happiness

Inserted: 2007-07-31 21:25 (4 years, 6 months ago)

The Zing Thing

This weekend, KiwiWriters is challenging you to write 2,000 words in a genre you have never written in before.

It's the start of a series of short challenges where we will try to get you out of your comfort zone and try (at least just for a short while) something different.

This month, we are asking you to write in a genre you have never written before. Already there are people have finished and maybe some of those have already edited their story too.

So far, I have written 860 words and I'm really enjoying it. I'm writing a medieval love story though already it has taken a turn for the worst. I think this might be the first romance where the guy didn't get the girl. Oh, and there is blood and guts in it too. It's turning into a mixture of things really, none of which I have ever written before, so that's a good thing.

We will be holding these challenges every so often so there is always a challenge or two coming up.

Once I've finished, I'm going to firstly post the unedited version and then add the edited finished version at a later date. It'll be over in my writing section.

Labels: zing-thing, kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-07-29 01:52 (4 years, 6 months ago)

My Proudest Moment for KiwiWriters

In all the work that I've done in getting the KiwiWriters site up and going this year, I have just finished the thing that I am most proud of.

Finally, after many months of wrangling, I have pretty much wrapped up the Challenge section of the site. So let's look at the stages I had to go through to make it happen:

• I needed to do a quick release so we could use it for The 6,000 Word Easter Challenge and prove the concept and implementation
• that initial release did pretty well and not much was changed to be able to add SoCNoC 2007 not long afterwards
• at the same time, I added the lovely participation icons and the progress bars for anyone that wants them
• since then, I've added the ability to choose your timezone and have the challenge work with your local time
• I've just released updated code to actually use it :-)
• next will be a script to log everyone's daily progress to the database
• soon that will also be reported on the site
• added to all this, the admin interface to add/edit/delete new events
• plus finally, the ability for the members to add their own events

So already there is quite a lot but the other thing I really like is that the challenges can be of many different types - not just word counting. I think it is an uber-cool feature that we wanted from the start and I'm very happy with the implementation being all nice and data-driven.

It seems other challenge-based writing sites put all their effort into one challenge a year, which to me, also sounds like manual-database-editing overhead-hell. Being someone who hates restrictions and one of the most important requirements for KiwiWriters as a group was to have the ability to stage many challenges throughout the year and the ability to let members create their own.

So I/we made it multi-evented from the start and now it's blossoming into it's own little world. Soon we will have even more challenges:

• The Zing Thing Challenge
• The End is Nigh Challenge

...not to mention lots more when we release the 'member' challenge section.

As always, what are you waiting for, Join Us!

Labels: kiwi-writers, challenge, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2007-07-27 00:02 (4 years, 6 months ago)

Some Updates

About Welly and Coding.

I chilled at work drinks on Friday, met a few friends for coffee on Saturday and had a pot luck dinner that evening. Went to see Wellington Phoenix thrash Sydney FC 3-0 on Sunday and enjoyed sitting and watching a film in the evening for the first time in ages.

Also, I'm back into coding (lots) again. I did quite a bit in the last couple of weeks - not on Zaapt but on KiwiWriters - some major things including timezone support, member challenges and fixing up lots of other little things no-one really notices.

With some smaller improvements being done for KiwiWriters I'm also adding a few things to Zaapt now too - in fact, I'm almost at the stage where I am re-factoring a few models and adding some new features rather than adding new models themselves. Maybe I'll reach version v0.1 one day. I still want to get some sort of photo gallery model in there first though. And Martyn has also suggested I put in roles for content-types too.

I should also write more documentation, as always.

Finally, I've also added Phliky to Ohloh too (see Phliky Page on Ohloh). I also received and gave out some Kudos :-)

After this brain dump, I should hit the sack.

Labels: phliky, zaapt, kiwi-writers, wellington

Inserted: 2007-07-24 00:10 (4 years, 7 months ago)

Public Sign of Unity

As a public sign of Unity, I shall be linking from this blog entry to the official OpenID community site.

Here are some details about a nasty bit of URL exploitation which is just plain wrong.

As a public show of unity, I shall link to the OpenID Community Site and not the one doing the exploitation. I did consider linking to the openid.net site using the words openid and org but I fear that's as bad as the original exploitation, so I shall refrain from it.

Finally, if you do require an OpenID, I would wholeheartedly recommended MyOpenID which has also been improved recently to show a log of your recent activities. I can recommend this because it's the one I use.

If you want to research this yourself, take a look at the OpenID Providers on this list.

Labels: planet-geek, open-id

Inserted: 2007-07-21 00:11 (4 years, 7 months ago)

My Personality Type

What type of personality are you on the Myers-Briggs test?

On Kerryn's blog, she posted that she had done a personality test and showed us the results.

I went and took the test too. In reality, it tells you only what you tell it, but it's funny how it fills in a few gaps and you think 'that's so me'.

But first, let me tell you a little story. You have to answer 4 questions and each has two answers. I noticed at the top that it is considered that there are 16 personality types. So yeah, 2^4 is 16.

I finished answering them. I knew the answers to Q's 1, 3 and 4 straight away but I wasn't sure about Q2. I answered it as best I could and found out my result. I'm of type ISTP, which is a Dominant Introverted Thinking. You can read what it says about me as an ISTP here.

Now, this is where I hit a problem with the page - it only gives you 8 explanations - but whoa, you said there were 16! I, as an ISTP, is lumped in with INTP, and yes, that happens to be Question 2 so obviously those personalities are quite close to each other.

In my quest for finding things out, there was another link to another page of explanations of The Sixteen Types at a Glance. It turns out that after reading both ISTP and INTP that I am more like the former than the latter - which was my answer to the original question.

Anyways, I'll just point out a few sentences from some of the descriptions I found to be quite interesting:

• They distrust action taken too quickly without the necessary investigation.
• They are fiercely independent, seeking input and comments from a chosen few.
• When reporting to others, they need to establish credibility first: their own and that of the person they are reporting to.
• They are less interested in running the world as they are in understanding it.
• They may spend a lot of time defining words, concepts and systems in order to define a problematic solution.
• Although they do have a spontaneous, even playful side, what people often first encounter with them is their detached pragmatism.

So yeah, a perfect fit for a programmer I think. I particularly liked point 2, the second half of which is exactly what I was talking to Kerryn about yesterday. Very strange.

Labels: planet-geek, personality, myers-briggs

Inserted: 2007-07-20 23:37 (4 years, 7 months ago)

A Superhero? I'm not.

I decided to submit Zaapt, my CMS, to Ohloh and here's the results.

The page for Zaapt on Ohloh shows a few interesting things about Zaapt the CMS.

Firstly, they show that I have done 3,039 lines of code, by hook or by crook (of course, they don't know that I have Perl generating at least a thousand or so more than that). I thought I'd done more than that, but hey, at least it's succinct. As it stands, they estimate that, at something less than 1 Person Year averaging $55,000USD a year then the Zaapt code base is worth a whopping $34,834USD.

It turns out that Zaapt is 7 months old today so I reckon I've done well to get it where it is now. Though I don't believe the calculations Ohloh generates I guess it's just an indication of what's been happening on the project.

What's more interesting is the code analysis page. I always think I comment code about right - who doesn't? - so I might have to compare (my 12.1%) with other projects and see where it fits in. I suspect that the weird mix of HTML/Perl in Mason might throw the 'Languages' used off a bit. Certainly there is more than 3% HTML and much less than 73% Perl so I reckon all Mason files are treated as solely Perl.

In the Contributors section (yes, I'm the only one), the other feature I find quite useful is my personal metrics for Zaapt. It's nice to see how many commits and lines I'm changing (per language and) overall on a monthly basis.

It's just a bit of fun so I'm not too bothered what it says, but it is interesting. I'd also like to know what adding the KiwiWriters repository would make all these figures. Unfortunately that SVN isn't public so I can't. Maybe I'd hit $50,000USD for half a year's very part-time work.

Not bad eh!

Labels: zaapt, cms, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, ohloh

Inserted: 2007-07-20 00:03 (4 years, 7 months ago)

Busy Weekend

The thing about Welly is, it's just so damn good.

On Friday evening, I met up with a friend and headed off to see (hear?) the NZSO. I really liked the Mendelssohn and she really liked the Sibelius, especially the last one (her opinion counts so much more than mine though).

On Saturday I met up with a couple of friends for coffee late afternoon, then with a larger other group for dinner (including Travis, Jason and Michelle). We had lovely food at Strawberry Fare, went to see Carl Barron and went back to Strawberry Fare for desert.

Sunday, a couple of other friends and I did a short version of the Southern Walkway and then we just chilled with coffee in Newtown afterwards.

Then last night, Kerryn and I went to a dancing lesson at Wellington Rock 'n' Roll Revival Club. It was my first ever lesson and yes, it was good fun, in fact, it was excellent. Thanks Kerryn.

Can it get any better than this?

Labels: nzso, walking, wellington

Inserted: 2007-07-17 11:37 (4 years, 7 months ago)

Open Letter to Information Technology Division, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

The Information Technology Division in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has chosen to push through the use of ECMA-376 OOXML as an 'approved standard'. This is a bad decision and is subject to a very short public comment period that will expire on 20th July. Here, I present an open letter from me, a Citizen of New Zealand, to the ITD on how this decision will adversely affect themselves, others, me and my country.

This letter was sent to 'standards at state.ma.us' and copied to Pamela Jones at Groklaw.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

---

Information Technology Division
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Attention: Beth Ann Pepoli

Re: Public Comment on ETRM Draft 4.0

Dear Ms. Pepoli,

I write to you in regard to considering adding Microsoft's OOXML to your list of approved standards in the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) 4.0.

Firstly I urge you to look further into the ECMA-376 Office Open XML standard to discover for yourself a number worrying inconsistencies [1], incorrect fundamentals [2] and dubious instructions [3] contained within the so-called standard. The standard itself reads more like a 'what Word does' rather than 'what an open document should describe' which is unlike any other open standard I know of. All of this is even before looking into the almost impossible technicalities of implementing such a long specification in itself, something that even Microsoft will find hard to do, let alone an independent software supplier. Considering that an alternative format, ODF, is already specified completely, already has a number of independent implementations and already provides a future proof format I consider the proposal of OOXML not only wrong but also redundant.

As shown in the above links, there are many arguments against OOXML but I shall not concentrate on those since I'm sure that others who write to you in regard to the same subject will already point these out. Alternatively, I'd like you to consider the following situation.

It has been recently reported [4] that the UK National Archives has chosen to access their old proprietary data using a proprietary operating system running a proprietary emulator to run old proprietary programs [5]. This, in my opinion is the wrong way of doing it. While this might be one solution to reading the data, there is no mention of actually converting it to a new format. If they did, in their case the UK National Archives may choose to convert to OOXML but this still leaves them in exactly the same position as they are now - their data will still be stored in what is essentially a proprietary format which can only be read by programs from one company, Microsoft.

No matter how you look at it, this still equates to a monopoly for one company and leaves the UK National Archives in the same position Microsoft admitted to putting them in in the first place. This is the same company who, by stating that OOXML is an 'open' format (they're wrong [6]) is trying to push ODF (a truly open format) off the rails and into oblivion. Who is to say that in 3 or 5 years time, if ODF has been pushed aside, Microsoft won't just go back on their word and create incompatibilities with OOXML just like they have deliberately done with previous versions of Word itself.

This then means that you are in exactly the same position, or worse, as you were previously and the good judgment of specifying ODF as an approved standard in ETRM 4.0 will have been all for nothing. It will also leave us in the 'digital dark age' Mr. Frazer, Microsoft UK, predicts, at his company's doing.

Finally, I'd like to mention why I, a Citizen of New Zealand, would want to write to you regarding your choice of approved standards within your state and how that affects me and my country.

You are probably aware in the importance of your decision for the future of data standards and accessibility. We live in an information age, a data sharing world, the Internet Revolution and make no mistake about it, this revolution is just as important as the Industrial Revolution before it, if not much more so. It is important that our decisions now are good not only for us but for our future and for those that come after us. Were it not for completely 100% open standards in the computer world this information age could never have happened. Computers wouldn't even be able to talk to each other let alone speak the same language, if truly open standards had never existed.

Countries like New Zealand are influenced heavily by decisions made in other countries. As a small country, we are ripe for the Government to take a stand against phony standards and choose to save and store all our data in open formats. It's an ideal situation to be able to choose open standards such that the Government won't waste public money on converting from one proprietary format to another and still get it wrong. We can't afford to spend millions of New Zealand dollars on incorrect storage and conversions to broken and incomplete standards unlike the UK tax payer is being forced to.

Massachusetts, as a state of 6.4 million people and we, New Zealand, as a country of 4 million people have many similarities and therefore any decision you come to may affect decisions that we, or other governments or central organisations throughout the world, make. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to take the lead, take a stand and show the rest of us the way.

So finally, I urge you again, please do not accept the ECMA-376 OOXML proposal as an approved standard in the ETRM 4.0 and choose only those which attain a 'true' standard, such as ODF. This will enable countries like New Zealand to point to previous examples, such as Massachusetts, where open standards have worked, are being used, have saved money and also have the freedom to choose supplier of such solutions. None of this would be true if ECMA-376 OOXML is chosen as an approved standard.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Chilton

[1] http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections#Ecma_376_is_immature_and_inconsistent
[2] http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html
[3] http://fussnotes.typepad.com/Achieving_Openness_1point0.html#sdendnote8anc
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6265976.stm
[5] http://kapiti.geek.nz/random/updating-proprietary-file-formats-the-wrong-way.html
[6] http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/06/14/achieving-openness-a-closer-look-at-odf-and-ooxml.html

Labels: ooxml, ecma376, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, odf

Inserted: 2007-07-15 01:43 (4 years, 7 months ago)

kapiti.geek.nz Now One Year Old

Yay! Party time. Excellent!

Not much more to say that that except I still need to update KapitiGeekNZ to a new design.

Am not sure where time has disappeared since June but consider Christchurch and Postgres being my major time sinks.

Anyways, am looking forward to a good weekend of doing things, lots of things, so I hope you have a good one too.

P.S. Fridays and Sundays are the best days of the week!

Labels: kapiti-geek-nz, birthday

Inserted: 2007-07-13 17:54 (4 years, 7 months ago)

For Those That Didn't Read the Previous Entry

I'm much happier today. 'Twas a good day.

Got many things done, sussed out a few things, made a number of things and generally just enjoyed myself.

Two of the things that had been on my mind yesterday have cleared up. There is still one or two other things nagging me, one of which is easily fixed, the other I'm not sure - but don't worry, it's nothing major, just a little hill I have to get over.

Labels: general, thinking, stuff

Inserted: 2007-07-13 00:13 (4 years, 7 months ago)

Timezones Freak Me Out

I've been playing with Timezones inside PostgreSQL for the last wee while, experimenting and trying to figure some things out.

The first thing I figured was that I couldn't use NZT, NZST or NZDT or any of the other acronyms (CEST, UTC, GMT, CET, CST, PST etc) for timezones since they are always calculated as offset from UTC.

Instead I realised that I would have to use something along the lines of America/New_York, Europe/Helsinki and Pacific/Auckland. This way any Daylight Savings Time will be automatically incorporated in any time calculations I have to do.

This is where the problems with Postgres started.

Using Postgres, you can ask for a date at a particular time zone, such as:

 db=> SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE 'NZST';
           timezone          
 ----------------------------
  2007-07-12 23:01:37.020998
 (1 row)

We knew that would work even if it isn't what I actually want. I also played with setting the time zone in the database session:

 db=> SET TIME ZONE 'NZST';
 ERROR:  unrecognized time zone name: "NZST"

That's a little strange! Why can I specify it as a time zone in a query but not as a default. Alright then, I'll try something else, something more akin to what I want anyway:

 kiwiwriters=> SET TIME ZONE 'Pacific/Auckland';
 SET

Aha, that's more like it. It recognises exactly what I want it to be. I didn't actually want to do this since I thought it would be better in the query. Okay, let's try it in the query:

 db=> SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE 'Pacific/Auckland';
 ERROR:  time zone "pacific/auckland" not recognized

WTF?

In the query you have to specify the time zone as an accronym (which may be wrong for 6 months of the year) and trying to set the default you can only use the location style. The other two combinations don't work which I find strange.

In which case, I still need to do something magical to get it all working. Today when I was thinking about it, it clicked that I could get around this, but before that, let me tell you the two things I need to do with these time zones.

Firstly, I need to know if a local time in a particular time zone has passed. For example, I want to know if 2007-07-12 11:59:59 has passed for me in Pacific/Auckland and also at a later stage, that same local time has passed in America/New_York. Quick test:

 db=> SET TIME ZONE 'Pacific/Auckland';
 SET
 db=> SELECT CASE WHEN CURRENT_TIMESTAMP > '2007-07-12 23:00:00' THEN 'Passed' else 'Not' END;
   case  
 --------
  Passed
 (1 row)
 
 db=> SET TIME ZONE 'America/New_York';
 SET
 db=> SELECT CASE WHEN CURRENT_TIMESTAMP > '2007-07-12 23:00:00' THEN 'Passed' else 'Not' END;
  case 
 ------
  Not
 (1 row)

Well, that looks good. I knew I couldn't ask for the timestamp using a location time zone so I have to set the default time zone first. So far this seems to work.

Secondly, I have to figure out when a particular time zone has just passed midnight. This way, I can do some processing just after midnight for each time zone and have it save off some data. For this, I need a big list of time zones. Luckily for me I found that the /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab file in Debian stores all the info I need and more. Wikipedia also has a list of time zones by country. I shall use the former since it is already machine readable and I need to insert all the time zones with their textual info in the database.

As it turns out, there are 394 different time zones which I bet you didn't guess (although maybe some of these are the same, just named differently). Here's a bit of analysis on each time zone.

I wrote a little script to loop through all the time zones, set it and retrieve the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. I ended up with a big list like this (alphabetical order):

 2007-07-12 11:17:03.967815+00 - Africa/Abidjan
 2007-07-12 11:17:03.967815+00 - Africa/Accra
 2007-07-12 14:17:03.967815+03 - Africa/Addis_Ababa
 ...
 2007-07-12 21:17:03.967815+10 - Pacific/Truk
 2007-07-12 23:17:03.967815+12 - Pacific/Wake
 2007-07-12 23:17:03.967815+12 - Pacific/Wallis

Not very useful but interesting nonetheless so I decided to also show them in time order instead. As it turns out, many of the almost 400 time zones are currently the same time (obviously). I was expecting a few more than just 24 since I knew some time zones were on the half hour and others were at UTC+13 or so. I was a little surprised however to see that there were currently 39 different time zones in play. So how many of each (for NZST 2007-07-12 23:23:12.967336+12):

  4 - 2007-07-12 00:23:12.967336-11
  5 - 2007-07-12 01:23:12.967336-10
  1 - 2007-07-12 01:53:12.967336-09:30
  2 - 2007-07-12 02:23:12.967336-09
  5 - 2007-07-12 03:23:12.967336-08
  8 - 2007-07-12 04:23:12.967336-07
 18 - 2007-07-12 05:23:12.967336-06
 24 - 2007-07-12 06:23:12.967336-05
 48 - 2007-07-12 07:23:12.967336-04
 27 - 2007-07-12 08:23:12.967336-03
  1 - 2007-07-12 08:53:12.967336-02:30
  4 - 2007-07-12 09:23:12.967336-02
  1 - 2007-07-12 10:23:12.967336-01
 20 - 2007-07-12 11:23:12.967336+00
 22 - 2007-07-12 12:23:12.967336+01
 46 - 2007-07-12 13:23:12.967336+02
 40 - 2007-07-12 14:23:12.967336+03
  1 - 2007-07-12 14:53:12.967336+03:30
  9 - 2007-07-12 15:23:12.967336+04
  1 - 2007-07-12 15:53:12.967336+04:30
 13 - 2007-07-12 16:23:12.967336+05
  2 - 2007-07-12 16:53:12.967336+05:30
  1 - 2007-07-12 17:08:12.967336+05:45
  9 - 2007-07-12 17:23:12.967336+06
  2 - 2007-07-12 17:53:12.967336+06:30
 10 - 2007-07-12 18:23:12.967336+07
 18 - 2007-07-12 19:23:12.967336+08
  1 - 2007-07-12 20:08:12.967336+08:45
  8 - 2007-07-12 20:23:12.967336+09
  3 - 2007-07-12 20:53:12.967336+09:30
 13 - 2007-07-12 21:23:12.967336+10
  1 - 2007-07-12 21:53:12.967336+10:30
  7 - 2007-07-12 22:23:12.967336+11
  1 - 2007-07-12 22:53:12.967336+11:30
 12 - 2007-07-12 23:23:12.967336+12
  1 - 2007-07-13 00:08:12.967336+12:45
  4 - 2007-07-13 00:23:12.967336+13
  1 - 2007-07-13 01:23:12.967336+14

So, as an example, there are currently 48 time zones which are UTC-4 and just one at UTC+14.

This proves that I can get the current time at each time zone so that's great. The second thing to work out is when one of those reached midnight.

At first, I was going to set up a cron job for every half hour but obviously from this data I'll need to do it every 15 minutes. Calculating when a timezone passes midnight can be done with a few neat tricks PostgreSQL provides. You can extract various aspects of the timestamp such as the hour and minute - you see where I'm going here. In the end, after setting the default timezone to the one I wanted to test, I came up with a quick test to give me a straight 0 or 1. If 1, then do my processing for that time zone, if 0, leave it be for the moment.

 SELECT
    CASE WHEN
        EXTRACT(HOUR FROM CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) = 0
    AND
        EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) >= 0
    AND
        EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) < 15
    THEN
        1
    ELSE
        0
    END AS yes

It's a little warped (any better suggestions welcome) but I reckon it'll do the job. In fact, here's another way I just thought of:

 SELECT
    CASE WHEN
        CURRENT_TIMESTAMP >= CURRENT_DATE::TIMESTAMP
    AND
        CURRENT_TIMESTAMP < CURRENT_DATE + '15 mins'::INTERVAL
    THEN
        1
    ELSE
        0
    END AS yes

If I cron for 0, 15, 30 and 45 mins then I'll pretty much know immediately which time zones have just passed midnight and therefore which ones to process.

It's taken me so long to write this entry, that it's now just gone passed midnight. So, at the moment, the following time zones are considered ripe for processing (both above queries gave the same results), including Pacific/Auckland which is mine:

 Antarctica/McMurdo
 Antarctica/South_Pole
 Asia/Magadan
 Pacific/Auckland
 Pacific/Fiji
 Pacific/Funafuti
 Pacific/Kwajalein
 Pacific/Majuro
 Pacific/Nauru
 Pacific/Tarawa
 Pacific/Wake
 Pacific/Wallis

All in all, I've been battling this for a while and now I think I've got it sussed. I haven't actually done the web page (which checks if a time has passed) or the cron (which checks each midnight) but I'm pretty sure it'll be alright now. I have done the database patch though that is by far the easiest part of the whole thing. It's been an altogether complete pain so maybe you'll find something useful in this lot if you have problems yourself.

Oh, and yes, all of this would have be really easy if I'd just stuck with using offsets from UTC (incorrectly), but yeah, you didn't expect that fudge from me did you?

Labels: postgresql, planet-geek, timezones

Inserted: 2007-07-12 23:54 (4 years, 7 months ago)

I have Loads to Say, but Just Don't Feel Like It

For some reason, I've been a bit down the last few days. Not sure why.

I wonder if it's because I saw some of my family at the weekend for the last time in a while.

I know there are a few other things niggling in the back of my mind which I'm not sure what to do with. Also, I think after being really productive for basically the first half of this year, ending with a novel in June, I just need a break for a while.

Also the things I'm meant to be doing are just really hard and I can't find a solution for them yet.

Oh, you know on LiveJournal when people post blog entries, they can also put in their current mood. Well mine at the moment is tired, frustrated and not quite so happy.

Bollocks to that, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning all refreshed and just ride it out.

Labels: tired, moody, family

Inserted: 2007-07-11 21:52 (4 years, 7 months ago)

Updating Proprietary File Formats the Wrong Way

The UK National Archives have chosen Microsoft to access their old proprietary data by using proprietary operating systems running proprietary emulators to run old proprietary programs.

Put your hand up if you see a problem with that approach (and put one up for me too).

Ah, the joys of silly decisions. Let's look at it from the top.

Natalie Ceeney (chief executive of the UK National Archives) says that they shall only be 'accessing' the data and not actually converting it. That basically means they will become locked into an eternal license-hell-money-eater with MS. Until they convert to something more sane (ie. open), they'll never get out of it. The archives obviously plan on rehashing this whole problem again in 5 years time, at which point they'll find they are in a worse position than they are now, it'll cost 100 times more and they'll end up choosing what should be the right decision now! Shame.

For the benift of the doubt, let's assume that they do convert their old documents to the newer MS Office Open XML right now. Unfortunately, that road still locks them into MS products. No other software vendor in their right mind will ever implement (the supposedly open) Office Open XML format since the standardisation process has been a complete failure at every turn. An unimplemented standard of 6,000 pages just isn't the best way to go.

Why do people never learn? The archives got into this mess in the first place because of MS (along with other companies) and now they'll just get deeper and deeper into this mess. It's just one bad decision after another.

I just hope that when the UK National Archives have to make this decision for a second time in 5 years or so, someone at the top will have a little more sense than to go proprietary again and finally convert to ODF, plain text or a simple markup language. Basically, something they should be doing right now.

If I was a UK tax payer I'd be pretty annoyed annoyed at the moment. It's going to cost a small fortune now and once again in the future. I just hope that the NZ government doesn't make stupid decisions like that on the data we all own.

Labels: no-ooxml, planet-geek, odf

Inserted: 2007-07-05 19:56 (4 years, 7 months ago)

SHDH this Weekend and I Can't Go :-(

SuperHappyDevHouse originated as a monthly hackathon in San Francisco and thanks to a few people here in Wellington, it is now starting over here too!

There's been quite an overwhelming response to go to it I hear. Both Penny and Brenda are 2 of the 4 organisers and you know what, it sounds like it's going to be oarsum (with a capital OAR).

So, I was one of the privileged few that scored an invite for the first event (yay me) but I can't go (which sucks big time).

Then again, I can't be too sad since I'm seeing family for the weekend and it might be the last time I see them for a year or two and even then it'll be sparse.

Still wish I could go though. Some expletives were said when I realised it was the same weekend. And I saw a preview of the T-Shirts today, which are also oarsum.

So sorry Penny and Brenda - will definitely get to the next one.

Labels: planet-geek, planet-catalyst, shdh

Inserted: 2007-07-04 20:53 (4 years, 7 months ago)

I Won the First Ever SoCNoC

Yep, I hit my word tally tonight. A nice 50101 words in total.

I'm still not yet finished on the story, so I might do a few more tomorrow to finish it off.

And for all to see, here's my winner's certificate to prove it:

Happy days.

Kerryn and I were doing 10 minute word wars all night and I was slowly catching up. As it turned out, we decided to do a 15 minute one at the end so we'd both make it before midnight. It was so much fun and we'd been pretty close to each other for at least the past 2 weeks or so.

Labels: soc-noc, kiwi-writers, winner

Inserted: 2007-06-30 00:35 (4 years, 7 months ago)

One Billion Words

Over at KiwiWriters, we're aiming for a very large number of words to be written this month. Oh alright, it's not one billion, but we are going for a million!

Between all of the participants in the SoCNoC challenge over at KiwiWriters we've done a massive number of words. At the moment, we're on a fabulous total of 949,389 words, just a few short of 950 thousand words.

...but our aim is to get to a total of one million words!

It's so close it is rather scary and yet we only have two more days to do it. Also, the problem is, a number of people have already finished and therefore won't necessarily contribute any more words. Contrary to that though, there are a few other people who have finished and are still going!

It's amazing to think that our little group has made so many people write so many words.

So, we're looking for about 15 winners and I think and I shall cross the line either tomorrow night or sometime on Satuday. Currently, I stand on 47252. I'll try and get something just over that to help getting towards the one million mark :-)

Wish us luck.

Update: 2007-06-28 23:59:00 - As I wrote this, someone updated and we're now on 951,392 - wahoo!

Labels: soc-noc, kiwi-writers, one-million-words

Inserted: 2007-06-28 23:56 (4 years, 7 months ago)

If Google Ever Does Linux

For ages and ages, people have said that Google will do 'their own' Linux. But the question is, why will they do it and will it work?

As far as I'm concerned, if Google ever does their own Linux, then I don't think it will make as big a splash as everyone makes out it will. Let's look at some history of Linux distros I think are applicable here and we'll see why it won't work.

A few years ago, Sun announced the Java Desktop. Yes, it was aimed at big multinational corporations but really, how much of a dint did it make. Sun's reason for making it - push Java onto everyone, no matter what they said back then, that was the plan. In reality, no-one at home wanted it and let's face it, the geeks rule this nest and that's why it didn't catch on.

Lindows, then renamed to Linspire, have had some success but their message was - "Let's make Linux like Windows". Again, the geeks don't want it even though it's not aimed at them, so it will eventually fail.

SuSe (under Novell) now seem directed at the "let's work with Windows" thing. Yes, this will fail to, for the same reasons as above and the fact that they dumped a whole pile of sh*t on themselves. Oh, and the geeks don't trust Novell anymore.

Linux distros don't succeed if they aim at the corporate world, especially the corporate desktop, at least not yet anyway.

But then, neither do they succeed if they aim at the non-technical home user, as Linspire shows.

However, what does work are the general purpose Linux distros that can be put to a multitude of tasks and don't force you to go in one direction. Debian, Ubuntu and Redhat all fall into this category and they are the most successful of all (to varying degrees of whatever your successful means). Any of these distros can be put to use on the corporate desktop, the corporate server, the slightly technical home user and all kinds of uses for the most important, the geeks. Ubuntu claims the crown of the most diverse uses with it's certified server editions, LTS editions and it's desktop editions and it is this distro which looks most likely to succeed on the corporate desktop too.

So let's get back to what will Google do with 'their' Linux?

That's easy - they want you to use the internet.

For searching, for email, for storing your documents, your bookmarks and notes, your diary, your contacts and pretty soon, almost everything you ever wished for, including word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents.

And this applies to both home users and the corporate world, as their apps prove - already being used for large universities and other organisations.

So to have all of this internet stuff going on, what will they do?

They will make the browser the number one application in the distro, that's what. I would even think that they will build in a remote data store and remote backup (to their servers of course) to get into the realm of your personal documents too. For example, what about storing your photos (they've already done that) or your music collection (what this space). How about your videos (a variation of YouTube anyone)?

So what does this mean for the rest of the imaginary 'Google Linux'?

Well, it means that it'll be cut down. Or at least it'll cut things out. I mean, why would they put a native email client on there when they want you to use Gmail? Why would they install OpenOffice if you can use their online docs? And why would you even put your bookmarks in your browser if they can do that for you too!

Maybe they will let you do these things but my guess is that they won't be installed by default and of course, only the more experienced bods will be able to install them anyway. This leaves everyone else using the Google OS as a proxy to the Google services and it'll be like AOL taking over your computer all over again.

Therefore, in conclusion, I think if Google ever do an OS of their own it will go two ways depending on how they push it. If they push it like above, then it will fail. The geeks won't like it (and let's face it, they're already divided about Google anyway). If they make it generic, add some niceties and maybe even with lots of goodies to interact with their services, then I think it will succeed. If the geeks like it (which Google does aim to please), then it will work.

I do hope they don't push their own services too far at the expense of the rest, that's all I'm saying. Personally, I like Google and their services but I just hope they don't try to become both the computer AND the internet, otherwise people will move on. We're very fickle you know :-)

Labels: google, linux

Inserted: 2007-06-26 23:17 (4 years, 7 months ago)

Why I'll Never Use Windows Again

On my last laptop, I decided to dual boot the Windows install and Linux. After 2 hours of trying to download stuff, I installed over the whole thing.

On this, my newer laptop, I loaded XP up only to backup the Windows thing onto 7 CDs. I'm not sure why I did that but I decided that was after that rigmarole, I'd had enough. I installed over it within the hour.

This guy decided to take Windows Vista for a spin for 14 days. What a brave man he was. Read this, it's funny: Vista: They took five years for this?

It only goes to prove to me that I am better off in the world where you have choice and all of it free. Choice of what programs to use and choice of freedom.

Labels: windows, linux, freedom

Inserted: 2007-06-24 21:25 (4 years, 8 months ago)

Need to Re-write Kapiti.Geek.NZ using Zaapt

This website was a precursor to Zaapt. It laid the foundations for what Zaapt would be based on but with a many more nicer features.

It's about this stage now that I need to re-write this site, kapiti.geek.nz using Zaapt and that means three things:

• I'll get a nicer interface, more functionality and a better framework (one that is updated, this one is just static now since I'm not developing it further)
• I have to migrate all the data across. I guess I'll just write a quick script to import all the blog entries and the few content managed pages I have
• I'll use this opportunity to do a re-design (or should I say re-skin) of the site

As always though, the main problem I have is time. Maybe one day someone will invent a way to make more time to use in each and every day...

...or is that called retirement. :-)

Labels: zaapt, planet-geek, kapiti-geek-nz

Inserted: 2007-06-23 17:33 (4 years, 8 months ago)

Back On Target

After a few days where I was behind the daily projected average, I'm now back on target for getting the novel completed.

This week, I've managed to pull off quite a few words. So I reckon about 10,000 in about 6 days. Funny thing is, while that sounds like it'd on track, I had a few days where I was behind.

Anyway, after a number of 2k's and a 4k one day, I'm back on track.

In other news, the collective word count for the whole of KiwiWriters is now over three quarters of a millions words!!! I find it amazing that something a small group of us started can get so big!

Go take a look at the SoCNoC challenge page. We already have 3 winners and I think a good number of other people are still in with a chance to complete it too.

Labels: soc-noc, kiwi-writers, novel

Inserted: 2007-06-23 00:51 (4 years, 8 months ago)

Octal Numbers in Code

I always thought putting a single zero in front of Octal numbers in code was pretty bad, or at least, pretty error-prone. But someone is doing something about it.

In this article, Python 3000 Status Update, Guido van Rossum is putting a new syntax in for Octal numbers and Binary numbers too (see 'Other Significant Changes' towards the bottom).

Not that I ever use them much, but I think it will help. In fact, I said to someone at least a few years ago that '0o....' should be used for Octal numbers :-)

Labels: python, code

Inserted: 2007-06-22 11:52 (4 years, 8 months ago)

It's Official, I'm heading back to Catalyst

I've been waiting until the end of my current contract until I make the news official - though I've hardly been hiding it.

Some of you (and now \l{Jason|/random/openid-presentation.html#comments}) already know that I shall be returning to Catalyst to work, some of you don't know and besides, it's already \l{out there|http://she.geek.nz/archives/432-complete-failure-to-update.html} anyway - hi pennypants, you beat me by a day :-)

So yep, today was my last day contracting but to be honest, I'm not going to talk about it much, except to say that I now know where I am meant to be.

When I left Catalyst before Christmas, it was because of the pull of the new place rather than because I wanted to leave. Maybe it was a rash decision (hindsight eh!) but these things happen. Yes, there were a few other factors but nothing in this life is simple. So instead of seeing out my current contract, I decided to make a decision and go with it - I'm fairly headstrong when I make a decision. I spoke to one of the Catalyst directors a few weeks ago and I said "I'd love to come back, I miss the place and the people too much." He replied "We'd love to have you back" and that was that, decision made.

Ignoring many (many) things that contribute towards work and a workplace, two things stuck out in my mind as being quite important to me. Yes there are other factors, but as I said, I'm ignoring those here.

The first is that, within Catalyst, it's the IT staff who make the decisions because first and foremost the company creates software. Unlike many other places of work the geeks come first - I obviously like that being a programmer and all. For example, in many other organisations (think banks et al) the geeks are just overhead trying to keep things ticking over so that other people can do their work.

Maybe I don't like being an overhead.

Secondly, one of the things I miss the most is the Open Source world. You knew that right? There is so much going on, things you can play with, learn, use open standards (which always comes in handy), new technologies spring up all the time and to top it all off it has some of the brightest people I have ever worked with. I feel it's a constant learning curve with so much to know and everyone is always willing to help.

It just creates a really nice atmosphere and Catalyst pretty much embodies the Open Source world to which I feel such an attachment.

Recently, I started a CMS called Zaapt and knew from the start that I would give it away freely as open source. I may never make any money off this thing and God knows I've put enough hours into it but that's missing the point. I have worked with and enjoyed using other people's software for many years, which they too also open sourced, and I feel that giving back to the community is the right thing to do. Hopefully Zaapt will get bigger so that many other people use it (fingers crossed) and only then I can feel my contribution back to the Open Source community has helped.

So, I have a week off to chill out and go see some family, and I'll be starting on the 25th June. Maybe by then I'll have finished my novel too.

Labels: open-source, planet-geek, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2007-06-15 14:58 (4 years, 8 months ago)

OpenID Presentation

Last night I did an OpenID presentation to the Wellington PerlMongers.

I think it went okay. It had a fair bit of introduction to OpenID and a bit more Perl later on. There were lots of questions about it. I think it's one of those things that people have heard about but never really looked at it. So hopefully, it'll get people talking about it a bit more and maybe even have a play with it.

I think it's quite cool and my example (which I'll tart up one day and put here) works quite well.

There were some things I couldn't work out about it though so I'll have to try one of the other modules.

I'll add the link to the slides once I get them up and going.

Update: 2007-06-14 11:58 - Slides are now up - Consuming OpenIDs

Labels: planet-geek, open-id, perl-mongers

Inserted: 2007-06-13 23:37 (4 years, 8 months ago)

My Second Novel is 25% Complete

After just one week of SoCNoC, I'm already 25% done!

After one week of NaNoWriMo, I'd probably only does a few thousand words, but now I'm sitting pretty on over 12,500.

This year is so amazing so far. I've pretty much been living and breathing the KiwiWriters site for 6 months or so now and just having it all come together is fantastic. It's beyond all our expectations so far and I'm sure this is going to continue.

We now have:

• 56 participants
• average of 2,000 hits per day
• collectively written almost 300,000 words - that million is definitely possible

So all in all, it's great so far and I hope it'll get better as the month wears on.

Labels: soc-noc, kiwi-writers, novel

Inserted: 2007-06-07 23:18 (4 years, 8 months ago)

KiwiWriters is getting 3,000 Hits per Day

Before SoCNoC started in June, our hit count was ramping up. Now it's gone off the scale.

Our progress over the last few months has been reasonably steady. In February we were hitting a couple of hundred hits a day. In Mar and April, it was more like a few hundred.

Then May really started taking off. We hit our record on about 6 different days, going from 300ish to well over 600 and hitting, 700, 800 and then 900 on the 31st May,

I expected June would take us over a thousand, say 1,500, but it's gone completely crazy. We're now getting almost 3,000 hits per day!!!

Of course, me being the optimist says that if we keep this up and do a few more, then we might even get 100,000 for the whole month. Now that would be something special.

:-) Happy :-) Happy :-) Joy :-) Joy :-)

Labels: kiwi-writers, planet-geek, google-analytics

Inserted: 2007-06-04 22:54 (4 years, 8 months ago)

An Oldie but so Very Cool

How about a crop circle with the Firefox Logo.

Here's a fantastic story of how they made a Firefox Crop Circle.

How great is that!

Labels: firefox, crop-circle

Inserted: 2007-06-02 19:46 (4 years, 8 months ago)

SoCNoC Underway and it's Already Mad

Just a short post to say hi and that SoCNoC is going mad.

In just two days we have had:

• an explosion of people, now 80 people signed up to the site
• 50 people signed up to the challenge
• we have already passed a collective 50,000 words
• a new blog on KiwiWriters.org, called the Klog

And last but not least:

• there is an interview with a member (madscientist aka Lesley J. Collins) in the Tribune (in Palmerston North) on Sunday

It's going completely mad at the moment and I'm sure it'll get madder as the month goes on.

Labels: soc-noc, planet-geek, press-clippings

Inserted: 2007-06-02 19:09 (4 years, 8 months ago)

SoCNoC is about to start

It's finally time for some serious writing.

In about 2 hours, there will be the feint tapping of keyboards as they start ramping up at midnight for the inaugural Southern Cross Novel Challenge.

Amazingly, there are 40 people signed up for it, though I estimate there are at least another 4 or 5 who are doing it but haven't yet signed up. I consider that - even before the month has started - to be a major success.

I'm also hoping to get a lot out of doing this type of challenge again. When I first wrote about starting NaNoWriMo (NaNoWriMo Starts in 1hr 03mins), I had no idea that it would be such an influence and have such an effect on me. Initially, that was because actually doing it and achieving it, I consider to be one of my best ever.

But lots more has happened since the end of NaNoWriMo. I met a whole group of really great people (Kerryn, Jane, Chris, Cassie and Josh, Travis I already knew) and since then we started our own writing site, KiwiWriters, have our own challenges, and in developing the website for it, I now have my own Content Management System too :-)

Isn't it amazing how one tiny thing can blow into something of mega-proportions. Brenda's one line message to the IRC channel in my old work about a year ago has produced all of these things. Wow, just like a domino effect.

And finally in other news for those who don't know, I shall actually be going back to my old work, Catalyst IT, and it shall become my current work again :-)

Ah, happy days are here again. Oh, and wish me luck for the novel.

Labels: random, soc-noc, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-05-31 22:21 (4 years, 8 months ago)

My Predictions

I'm going to estimate a few things for the inaugural Southern Cross Novel Challenge.

At the moment, the statistics on the KiwiWriters site reads something like this:

• there are 80 who people have registered on the site
• of these, 40 are signed up to the SoCNoC challenge

Obviously, not everyone will complete the challenge (here's hoping they do though), but I predict we'll get a good percentage of finishers. Basically, because the whole thing is new, everyone is getting really excited, therefore I think the percentage will be higher this year than in later years.

So, I hope that 50% of that 40 will finish, therefore, 20 people will get their gold stars and certificates. That also means that from those 20 people, we'll have written something over 1,000,000 words!

Wow, that's a lot of words.

Of course, it might be higher (fingers crossed) or lower than this, but remember this figure also doesn't include the people who write 5,000, 500 or 50 words rather than 50,000!

There's going to be lots of bashing on keyboards in the next few weeks, both in New Zealand and abroad. Ah, happy days!

Labels: soc-noc, kiwi-writers, one-million-words

Inserted: 2007-05-29 23:10 (4 years, 8 months ago)

Bit and Byte's Adventure

Just a few days before my SoCNoC novel starts, I've finally done a brief outline of my story. Please comment and let me know what you think.

Synopsis

Computers don't run off electricity. They run because each and every one of them have some little people who live inside. The little people keep everything working from opening and closing gates, charging the batteries and moving all those teeny-tiny electrons around.

As it turns out 'Bit' and 'Byte' (who are twins and the logical opposite of each other) want to escape from their home computer. Through cunning tactics they switch, charge and spark themselves through the wires. Finally they manage to escape but unfortunately find themselves in the big bad 'Outernet'.

This is the adventure they have battling viruses, spy-ware, drive-by-downloads and ultimately come up against the evil SpamBot! They also find time to fix broken sites, help with compatibility problems and even spell check a webpage or two.

Their plan is to get back to 'localhost.localmachine', their own home.

On their own, this would be a hard task (I mean, who can map-read through network switches anyway), but by making friends with other little people who can help them, they might just do it.

Labels: soc-noc, bit-and-byte, planet-geek, novel

Inserted: 2007-05-28 22:59 (4 years, 8 months ago)

Zaapt Going from Strength to Strength

Recently I mentioned I'd added the ability add friends for users of a Zaapt site - well there's more!

I've now added the ability to Message each other - basically, a very simple form of email. It's small, it's funky and it works really well.

Granted some features are missing, but those are features for email clients and there's no way I'm implementing all that. Instead, people will use personal messaging on the site for two reasons:

1. so they can swap email addresses and communicate
2. so they don't have to swap email addresses and can still communicate

It's great. It also means we can chat to other users privately which helps from an admin point of view too!

Anyway, even though KiwiWriters still remains the main showcase for Zaapt (and probably always will be), I don't mind and it's only a matter of time before they both become really big!

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-05-22 23:20 (4 years, 9 months ago)

SoCNoC is Getting Exciting

And the weird thing is, it hasn't even started yet!

Currently, we stand at:

• 27 participants (which is 8 more than NaNoWriMo's first year)
• 2 special word count widgets
• 2 flyers (NZ and General - so please, put them up in your school, your work, your place
• lots of other stuff
• and one more thing coming tomorrow I can't yet tell you about

Once all this organisation, code development and general work for the site has been put aside on 31st May, I'll actually be able to write the novel!

It's going to be so cool.

Labels: soc-noc, kiwi-writers, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-05-17 22:08 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Zaapt has Friends

Recently I've updated Zaapt to allow member to add other members to their friends list. It's a good base for some fairly interesting forthcoming developments.

So even though having friends doesn't mean much, it's what you do with them that counts! Isn't that just life in general.

On that point, I had a great weekend seeing people. On each of Friday, Saturday and Sunday I met up with a number of groups of friends, listened to Wellington Brass Band, had food and drink, went to the NZSO and had a walk in Otari - Wilton's Bush. All highly enjoyable and very lovely. Especially in this Indian Summer we're having.

Labels: zaapt, nzso, friends, otari

Inserted: 2007-05-14 22:56 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Earthquake #0004

At 2007-05-14 01:25.

This was quite a big one. I was only just half asleep when this one hit. It lasted about 10 or 15 seconds though it did give the bed a fairly good shake.

I had a look at Geonet as I usually do and realised that they'd updated the site. Nice. Ah but wait, now 2 of my 3 old links don't work. That's very annoying - really, if you re-arrange your site, please make the old URLs forward to the new location. Rah!

Labels: earthquake

Inserted: 2007-05-14 22:49 (4 years, 9 months ago)

A Good Night Listening to NZ Music

Tonight I went to see an event run specifically for New Zealand Music month.

The Perlorus Trust Wellington Brass Band put on a great display of New Zealand music and one of the best things about it was that many of the actual composers were actually there.

An excerpt from their site (before they take it down):

This concert will feature New Zealand works of music by Ken Young, John Rimmer, Nick van Dijk, Aaron Lloydd, Norman Goffin, John Ritchie, Andrew Weir, Ross Harris and Anthony Ritchie several of whom will conduct their own music.

Soloists will be David Bremner (NZSO principal trombone) and David Chaulk (euphonium).

So, all in all, it was very enjoyable. You should come along the next time they do something. It's a great tradition for Wellington to have and long may it continue.

I've been along twice now and though I wasn't sure if I was a brass band fan before then, I am now! Looking forward to the next one too.

Labels: brass-band, wellington

Inserted: 2007-05-11 22:58 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Amazing Take Up for SoCNoC

So far, we now have 19 people signed up to do SoCNoC on KiwiWriters.org

That's actually quite amazing and we're still only the 10th May! Hopefully by the start of June, we'll have quite a few more.

At first, I thought having 10 people would be fun, so I think that any more than that is excellent! So come on, come and join us! Don't forget to sign up for SoCNoC too.

I still haven't prepared anything yet so that's something I'm going to have to work on this weekend. Thanks to Kerryn, she's posted a number of challenges which help with preparation. You'd have to see the forums for full details.

I've also recently added word count widgets to KiwiWriters - making graphics on-the-fly using Perl/Mason, which is always good fun. See my Homepage to see one of them.

Labels: mason, soc-noc, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-05-10 22:36 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Wotcha Doin' in June?

If you've ever thought about writing a novel, then now's the time to do it. Otherwise, you never will.

Based on NaNoWriMo, we over at KiwiWriters are planning on writing a 50,000 word novel this coming June.

It starts on the 1st, it ends on the 30th and the only goal is to write 50,000 words - which is basically a short novel. I've done it before so I'll be writing my 2nd novel and I can tell you, it's one of the best feelings in the world.

If you've ever thought that you'd like to write a novel, this is the perfect opportunity to start along with a group of very enthusiastic people, all there together for moral support. Remember, if you don't do it now, you never will.

Come along to Kiwi Writers and Join Us! See Challenge information for SoCNoC for further details.

Labels: soc-noc, nanowrimo, kiwi-writers, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-05-04 18:46 (4 years, 9 months ago)

OpenID is Very Cool

I've just signed up for my first OpenID. It's nice.

The best thing about it is that I'm using this site http://kapiti.geek.nz/ as a delegate to my OpenID provider. That way, if I ever want to move to another provider, I just have to change some of information in the <head> section of my index page and we're done.

Since then, I've used my new OpenID to:

• add a comment to a LiveJournal blog - http://jenny-1260.livejournal.com/
• sign in to http://ma.gnolia.com/
• soon, I will be claiming blogs at http://technorati.com/
• (probably lots of other stuff too)

It's very cool.

If you want to use your own site for your OpenID go to this help page - Using your own URL.

Finally, I might try and add OpenID comments to Zaapt or even make it (and hence KiwiWriters) become an OpenID Consumer! Now that would be something special.

P.S. If she hasn't got an OpenID already, I expect Brenda will get one almost immediately after reading this!

Labels: live-journal, technorati, planet-geek, open-id, magnolia

Inserted: 2007-05-03 22:50 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Planet Andrews?

So there is a new planet, for Geeky Andrew's in New Zealand.

I didn't create it, Brenda did. Not sure why, but I think she snapped under the social pressure that is Andrew.

Oh, and I like the design too. Simple and very Red.

Labels: planet-andrew, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-04-30 20:50 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Daylight Savings Extended

By a massive 3 weeks!

I always thought NZ summers were short - and not just 'coz of the weather!

Article at Stuff: Daylight saving extended by three weeks.

I'm glad it came forward a week, but putting the end of summer back by 2 weeks is great. Now, instead of artificially cutting the summer short - especially because it's still nice in March - we get the daylight for as long as possible.

Am happy with that!

P.S. My speaker system keeps on putting the volume up and down whenever it likes. Maybe I have a poltergeist.

Labels: weather, time, clocks

Inserted: 2007-04-30 20:21 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Just Saying Hello

Thought I'd post to say hi and let you all know I'm not a missing person!

Things have been busy as usual. In short:

• Zaapt has had a lot of Account Admin done recently
• I'm putting some finishing touches to a small part of KiwiWriters
• I've developed another site (but not sure if it's going to be used)

This weekend, I shall be mostly eating chickens. Oh er, I mean, I shall be tieing up loose ends in blogs for Zaapt.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, planet-geek, fast-show

Inserted: 2007-04-28 13:50 (4 years, 9 months ago)

Got my Car Towed, didn't I?

The thing is, it wasn't blatently clear, though of course, when I looked after, it is!

D'oH!

Anyway, the real question is, how the hell do I know that it hasn't been nicked? I mean, there's no note, nothing saying "Hey, dude, we've got your car, huh, huhuh, huhuhuh!" No phone number to call.

Not like you can call the fuzz and say "So erm, I'd like to report a stolen car, unless it's been towed. Can you find out for me, oh gowan, please!"

So I guess I'll get a letter in the post in a week or so, so instead I'll call some towing places around Welly. It's a bit shitty actually and I have no idea how much it'll cost me. Wish my car was crap so I could say "Just keep it, it's yours!"

I want my dragster back (those of you who have actually seen the car understand what I mean by that - it's one hot metal machine I can tell you).

Anyone had their car towed before, or know what to do? I have no idea.

Update: 2007-04-23 09:54 - So it got towed to Barnett St by Te Papa. Looks like I can just go pick it up (with a fine attached to it). I asked Wellington City Council, who put me through to ParkWise. I can't find an outside number for them though. Wish I'd have known all this last night. It sucks big time.

Update: 2007-04-23 14:16 - Got the car back. $110 it'll cost me. But that's only $40 for the fine, a dastardly $70 for the tow around the corner. I'm in the wrong job :-)

Labels: wtf, car

Inserted: 2007-04-22 23:01 (4 years, 10 months ago)

Life is Busy

For whatever reason (and there are a few), life has become somewhat busy. It's not like at the start of this year, when it was manically busy - instead, it's a good type of busy.

It seems that I have to juggle quite a few things at the moment, both $work and !$work. Instead of settling into one big project, or even two, I have a number of things on the go.

I'm not telling about $work though.

Instead, here's some things I've been juggling at home. I seem to be hitting KiwiWriters every now and again. I did a three-week stint up until a week ago, but it seems that there is always more to do. I'm trying to give it my due attention, but at the same time, sometimes I feel it's a lot of work for a smallish site. It will get bigger though - promise.

I have also been hacking Zaapt a lot, in fact, quite a lot this week. I also have more interest in it but this time I think it'll go a bit further than the nibbles I've already had and a site will appear sometime soon - watch this space.

My plan for Zaapt now is to get a v0.1 out there, but that is still about one or two months away (let's say three for good measure). It' not that it can't be used already - oh no, most of the content management stuff is ready. It's moreso the administration side of things which have been shouting for more user attention instead of me hacking the database.

In the near future, I have plans to implement two new sites and further down the line, another site for a friend of mine. She obviously thinks I'm slacking, or at least, not developing it. As it turns out, it'll be using pretty much everything Zaapt has to offer, so hopefully all this work will pay off.

Anyway, nice to check in witchyer! Laters.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-04-16 23:11 (4 years, 10 months ago)

The WTFPL

Just found a new type of Public License... :-)

Here it is: The WTFPL.

I would say Caution: Swearing but it's pretty obvious what word it is from the title.

Now, I wonder what I have of mine that I can publish under The WTFPL.

Labels: wtfpl, license

Inserted: 2007-04-15 11:46 (4 years, 10 months ago)

New Writing Section

You know, I'm not really a writer, but I do enjoy doing it - that's all that matters right. And the fun of reading it too.

In honour of fun and nothing more (and nothing less), I present a new writing section on this site. In all honestly, I don't expect much in the way of hey, that was great, you should be an author but more in the way of haha, you're such a fool, that was only just slightly funny, but thanks anyway.

Anyway, to kick off the new section, I have added The Time Riders which is a Choose your own Adventure. It's only very small and won't take long to read so please, let me know if you enjoyed it (but please read the intro first so you know under what conditions it was written under - see there, that was my excuse).

Finally, the best part about it though is that all writing that appears on this website under the writing section, will be licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. See the writing index page for more details.

Just as a thought, if you read a Choose your own Adventure and then under the ShareAlike part of the license, then you'd be doing a Make your own Adventure.

But what if you did that to more than one story...

...Mashup your own Adventure :-)

Labels: kiwi-writers, planet-geek, short-story, writing

Inserted: 2007-04-10 00:49 (4 years, 10 months ago)

Finished KiwiWriters Easter Challenge

After 3 days of hard work, I've completed the 6,000 words required for the KiwiWriters Easter Challenge.

And here is my winner's banner to prove it:

My next problem however, is that I have only written 11 scenes out of 15 I so still have four more scenes to go. I knew I had 15 to write and thought I'd hit around 7,500 words but it looks like it'll be more like 8,000 words in total.

I've promised that I will edit this story, but watch out for a full (unedited) posting here in the next few days.

Take a look at the Easter Challenge if you think you might want to try it next year or for any of the other challenges we have going over at KiwiWriters.

Labels: easter-challenge, kiwi-writers, planet-geek, short-story

Inserted: 2007-04-09 00:28 (4 years, 10 months ago)

Quick Update

I know I've been away for a short while, but here's a quick update.

I am participating in the Easter Challenge on KiwiWriters. It says to write a 6,000 word short story over the long weekend. I have a slightly different plan which will entail 7,500 words. More next week. Oh wait, here's my participation icon:

I've been watching the first season of Scrubs. Dr Cox is Oarsum and Elliott is just, like, amazing (and then I found out that she was the 2nd Becky in Roseanne and I liked her even more)!

Also watched Shaun of the Dead this week too. Funniest film I've seen in a long time.

This blog (or parts thereof) is now being syndicated on http://planet.geek.nz/ and http://planet.nztech.org/.

Finally, there will be some big news over at KiwiWriters today (can't mention it yet)...so look out!

Labels: random, nz-tech, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-04-05 13:23 (4 years, 10 months ago)

More Fun with Perl

After my article last week regarding Dynamic Method Generation in Perl, here's the conclusion.

See Fun Hacking Perl first unless you've already seen it. It took me a week instead of a day to post this follow up... :-)

Overall, dynamically creating methods can seem like a bit of black magic, some hand waving, smoke and mirrors or all three. But in reality it's fairly straight-forward.

Go take a look at the Class::Accessor module (source) and search for ::$accessor_name (there are 4 instances). It's fairly straight forward and really there are only two steps you have to do:

1. create an anonymous subroutine (or closure) using sub
2. inject it into the caller's (being $class} namespace

Of course, there is a few more things you have to be weary of and a few more details to look out for but essentially, that's it.

So far, I now have 5 ways of generating 5 different types of methods. It's kinda cool and means I can remove a lot of template code from Zaapt.

Labels: perl, nz-tech, planet-geek

Inserted: 2007-03-28 22:35 (4 years, 10 months ago)

sshfs with Lots of Space

I just used Fuse to mount my home directories on two remote machines - and was pretty painless.

I'm using Ubuntu 6.10 so was fairly easy. I followed the instructions from here - How to mount a remote ssh filesystem using sshfs.

So I did:

 # apt-get install sshfs
 # adduser andy fuse
 # mkdir /mnt/fowler /mnt/rush
 # chown andy.andy /mnt/fowler /mnt/rush

Then (after logging out and in again to refresh my groups list):

 $ sshfs fowler:/home/andy /mnt/fowler
 $ sshfs rush:/home/andy /mnt/rush
 
 $ ls -l /mnt/fowler
 ...stuff...
 $ ls -l /mnt/rush
 ...stuff...

Note: sshfs fowler:~ /mnt/fowler didn't seem to work. I don't know why, I suspect it should.

Since I use KeyChain for my SSH keys, I usually have those loaded by the time I want to look at a remote machine.

Anyway, it's fairly cool and dead easy.

One funny thing though was:

 [metis:~]$ df -h /mnt/fowler
 Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on sshfs#fowler:/home/andy/
                       7.5T     0  7.5T   0% /mnt/fowler
 [metis:~]$ df -h /mnt/rush
 Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on sshfs#rush:/home/andy/
                       7.5T     0  7.5T   0% /mnt/rush

A total of 15 Terabytes of storage :-) especially because fowler only has 40Gb of storage and rush is a 4Gb VPS :-)

Labels: fuse, ssh

Inserted: 2007-03-24 17:29 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Adventures with Zaapt

Many things have happened this week. Here's a quick run-down.

Following on from yesterday's article about Dynamic Method Generation I didn't get chance to play with it further tonight.

Instead, I had some outside interest (I can't talk about yet) regarding Zaapt and it's blog capabilities. I'd been putting it off, but I just about got it up and running. The example Zaapt sites now have a blog (plus feed).

In other news, I'm in the middle of a big custom content addition for KiwiWriters so hopefully I'll have that out of the way by next week sometime. It's amazing how you're not busy, then three things come along at once.

It's all happening.

Labels: zaapt, hacking, blog

Inserted: 2007-03-22 23:50 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Fun Hacking Perl

I've known Perl a while - a long while. But still, there is more to learn!

Tonight I have been hacking at dynamic method generation. I've never done it before so it has been like a voyage of discovery for me. Of course, I've used many modules which dynamically generate methods but I've never tried doing it myself.

More times than I can count, I've used modules like Class::Accessor and various others. While I know I've browsed over them in Emacs every now and then, I have usually skimmed over the dynamic parts of it.

So learning about it comes down to scratching an itch.

With Zaapt I've been scratching a rather large itch recently so I thought why not go a bit further. Up until now, many of the methods in my database classes have done much the same things - the insert methods look similar, as do the update and delete methods. Mainly the select methods look dissimilar but sometimes they look the same.

Tonight, I started hacking a rather large custom content type for KiwiWriters. I can't giveaway the details at the moment, but suffice to say I was getting bored writing all those methods all the time.

So I searched and stumbled upon this article, Why I Am Not A Java Programmer. As well as being an interesting read, it also has a small section on Dynamic Method Generation. It mentioned Class::Accessor so I took a look at it...

...and It's not quite as scary as I thought it might be.

After reading around and learning a bit more, I'm up to the stage in my own module whereby I've got my initial code for inserts written and ready to test. It doesn't complain with perl -c and I guess it should be okay.

Unfortunately though, I feel fairly unwell at the moment and really will have to go to bed :-(

Overall, it has been a very intriguing evening. I haven't written much of my content model, but I have been learning something new about Perl. That's the first time in a while I have taken that big a jump but damn-it, I have tired and need sleep.

Part Two of this story will be posted tomorrow, when I find out if my code works the way I want it. I'll also post some examples too.

Labels: perl, hacking, dynamic-method

Inserted: 2007-03-21 23:32 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Living Close to Work

You guys may have noticed that I have been doing a lot recently - due to one thing...having more time.

Living up the coast, a good three hours each day to/from work was good but very time consuming. Now, I live about 5 minutes from work. Some people don't like living that close - I think it's great.

I get so much more time each and every single day that I can get lots and lots more stuff done. I am sleeping more and therefore sleeping well. I have started exercising again. I am helping people do stuff and am also doing more for myself. It's amazing what you can come up with.

I also come home at lunch, which means I can do other chores - like the washing up, washing, tidying and because I have to be back at work, I just do it in little 15 minute stints. A bit strange, but it does mean I don't have to do it in the evening or the weekend - another time saver.

At the moment, I feel so refreshed doing all this stuff. I'm also going to enrol on an evening course of some sort, but not quite sure what it'll be yet. Should be fun!

Labels: time, work, play

Inserted: 2007-03-20 23:12 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Ghosts of Gondwana Talk

I just attended a fantastic talk by George Gibbs about his new book, 'Ghosts of Gondwana'.

I became a member of the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in January after going twice in December and January. As well as being able to get into the sanctuary for a year, I didn't realise that I also get a newsletter and the ability to attend seminars that are on 4 times a year.

Tonight was the first one I was able to attend and it was amazing. The seminar was on The History of Life in New Zealand and it was presented by George Gibbs. His new book, Ghosts of Gondwana, explains a lot but he managed to talk about some of the things that didn't make it into the book.

Learning about the unique fauna of New Zealand is fascinating since we separated from Gondwanaland over 100 million years ago. He told us how some geologists have the theory called "The Drowning of New Zealand" where Zealandier (a geologist term for the larger landmass that originally split off) basically went underwater for a time about 25 MYA - a theory he doesn't subscribe to but interesting to know about.

Of course, this theory would mean that all the animals here would have had to have come here since then. This would also show a major change in the pollen records too but that doesn't look to have been the case. Finally, fossil records here are severely lacking since the country has changed so much over time (and still is) that there isn't that many about apart from a new discovery in Otago. So that doesn't help us either.

(Note: all of this is information in passing, I hold no guarantees any of what I said is right and I also missed out a big chunk of his talk. That's about as much as I understand it anyway.)

My mate came along too and bought himself a copy of the hardback book. He also got it signed by the author, George Gibbs, so that was cool too.

I can't wait for the next seminar. Whatever that is about, I hope it is as interesting as this one was.

Labels: karori-wildlife-sanctuary, george-gibbs, ghosts-of-gondwana

Inserted: 2007-03-20 23:05 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Retainer of the Inter-Island Cup

I took my golf clubs down to Christchurch for the weekend and beat my brother-in-law by one shot.

I was lucky to be honest and he was unlucky, but still, I retain the inter-island cup - a small competition we have each time we meet up. Usually we just make rules up at a driving range but this time I took my clubs down and we played a full round.

The course was nice (it was by Darfield, I forget the name) and was mostly forgiving. It was very dry though that didn't really matter and is to be expected on the Canterbury plains at this time of year. The greens though were absolutely lush and were like walking on carpet.

For $15 a round and there being no-one in front of us and no-one behind us, it was a very enjoyable round. A putt on the first hole and a chip onto the green around the 8th or 9th were my best shots.

I think I got 118, which doesn't sound good in itself, but I haven't played for about 9 months so I'm happy with that.

Labels: golf, christchurch

Inserted: 2007-03-19 23:51 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Speaking at Wellington Perlmongers

Tonight, I spoke at Wellington Perlmongers. I volunteered to do it last month and guess what, I only started my slides last night!

I did finish them before 3am though, so I got at least a few hours sleep.

All in all, I thought it went well. I meant it to last for maybe half an hour, but I suspect it was more like 45 mins if not a bit more.

My presentation was in two halves: the first was an introduction to Perl/Mason since I don't think the Wellington Perlmongers had had one before, so I had to go over a lot of material. In fact, I hardly touched the surface of Mason at all and I realised that it is a huge subject to tackle.

This was all in preparation of the main part of the talk. It was titled: 'Using Multiple Mason Component Roots: An experiment in CMS Design'.

Basically (ignoring the grand title) it was about writing and using Zaapt using all the technologies and methodologies mentioned in the titles. I told them about KiwiWriters and also about the two demo Zaapt Sites.

All in all, I think my presentation was okay but possibly a bit boring in the middle. It seems that more than just a few people already knew Mason (in fact, probably the majority) but there was certainly a percentage who didn't.

There wasn't many questions about Mason though I learnt a couple of things too. There was, however, quite a number of questions about Zaapt, especially when I started showing them the sites.

One good thing though was that, I now have a copy of Advanced Perl Programming (signed by Simon Cozens) which I was given in return for the presentation. I also have a borrowed copy of Perl 6 Now (Apress) which I shall have a read of and try and write a review for.

I'll throw up a link to the slides once I have them. I reckon they'll appear somewhere on Wellington Perl Mongers Archive page.

Update: 2007-03-14 10:59:54 - The slides are now up. I'll see if I can try to fix the blatent mistakes I made :-)

Labels: mason, zaapt, perl-mongers

Inserted: 2007-03-13 23:13 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Zaapt Now has a Life of it's Own

After almost, but not quite, 3 months of development, Zaapt now has to move on, grow up and leave home.

This blog has been a lot about Zaapt recently and it's about time it went back to it's varied but still technical days. Zaapt has been lopped off.

But don't worry, it wasn't hurt. Instead, Zaapt has found a new home. In fact, it has found TWO new homes - the other being Zaapt Simple. There might also be a 3rd on the way.

All these sites, along with Kiwi Writers demonstrate the power that Zaapt already has. Even though Zaapt is still in it's infancy there is enough functionality to demonstrate fully working sites - aided by the fact that menus had just been added.

There is some information on the new site already but it only started a few hours ago. Over time the content will grow, just like the Zaapt CMS did. So from now on, Zaapt news and developments will be posted there with an occasional prod from me here if something major is happening.

It seems there are a few big adventures I am currently journeying on! Long may it continue.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-03-11 23:00 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Using Sitemaps on Yahoo!

I have used Google Sitemaps for well over a year, even before they were standardised across search engines. In the spirit of freedom to index, I've claimed the KiwiWriters.org site on Yahoo! Sitemaps too. Let the battle begin.

The problem is, the Yahoo! Sitemaps (or should I say 'Site Explorer') just doesn't have as clear an interface as the Google one does. Neither does it have as many features. It does provide some that Google doesn't but not much.

Maybe I'll go into a discussion one day about the differences, but for now I'll leave it there.

Anyway, at least Kiwi Writers should be indexed properly by Yahoo! now. It's been a few days already so maybe I'll give it a few more.

Labels: google, sitemap, yahoo

Inserted: 2007-03-11 17:07 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Open Source in British Government?

After reports in the past saying it would be good for the British Government, finally someone is backing it.

See this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6430069.stm

I think this quote is great:

"All too often a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation"
- George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor

I still think smaller governments, like right here in New Zealand, are ripe for converting over to Open Source and can pave the way forward. The British Government is a lot bigger and I fear would wait until it has been proven elsewhere.

Then again, I remember something about one of the South American countries converting. I'll have a Google round to see what I can find.

Labels: open-source, government, foss

Inserted: 2007-03-10 11:47 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Zaapt now has Menus

You'd think that menus would be easy. After a good 5 or 6 hours, I've polished them off.

It's funny because some of the things you'd think would be easy take a little longer than you'd expect. Menus for instance.

The one thing menus have is order. Content managed pages don't have order since they're like a hash (yes, this is Perl). News and blogs have an order but that is implicit because of the current_timestamp. Menus have both an implicit order (the order they were put in) and an explicit order (the order the user has re-arranged the items to).

Anyway, in doing the algorithm to figure out which two display fields I had to swap round was a bit of hassle but I got there in the end. Then again, I was (am?) tired, so that didn't help. Moving on...

The menu is a simple list with each item having an integer level. This means I don't have to deal with hierarchical data - in a relational database - so that makes it a little easier. It also means it's really easy to figure out what you want your HTML to do at each level.

As an example, over at KiwiWriters, we only have a 2 level menu. If the level is one, then it is a top-level menu. My implementation writes out each <div> and only puts an extra class on it (to indent it) if the level > 1. As an added trick, if the level == 0, it isn't shown! Nice to hide those Coming Soon pages :-)

Even though the above workings of the menu are simple, it can pretty much accommodate a number of menu systems I have come across in the past. Also, the way Zaapt is designed, means that if someone wants to come along and create AnotherMenu, a HierarchicalMenu or even a SuperWhizzBangMenuWhichGlowsInTheDarkMenu, then that's perfectly fine with me.

Implementations at the ready...!

Labels: zaapt, content-type, kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-03-10 01:35 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Swimming

A short title and that's exactly what it is.

I went swimming yesterday for the first time in a long time. I decided that I really ought to get myself active again since the past few months have been fairly sedative.

I haven't been swimming for a while - about 3 years or so but I found the Wellington Aquatic Centre to be very good. It is also kinda cool since there is shedloads of space for people wanting to do lanes.

When I was a kid, we used to watch the oldies swim up and down and become completely bored, but I guess it's amazing how things change as you grow up (something I'm still working on). But now when I go to the swimming pool, that's exactly what I want to do. Even better than that, there are no kids around since the whole of the middle pool (yes, there are three) is for lanes only.

There is a diving board area and there were also people doing aquajogging, which I found fairly funny. Hopefully as I get older still, I won't be doing that. Overall, the place certainly tries to cater for every audience so full marks to them.

The only downside is that they charge you $4 to get in and then another $1 for a locker! I find this unreasonable since they know there is nowhere else you can put your clothes when you're in the pool. This is like having to buy food from a train buffet car or when you're on a ferry - since you have no other choice they charge the earth.

Very irritating though I now have to come up with a plan to get around it short of turning up in my trunks and goggles.

Labels: swimming, exercise

Inserted: 2007-03-06 23:30 (4 years, 11 months ago)

KiwiWriters is getting Bigger on a Daily Basis

Every day, something seems to be happening on KiwiWriters.

Members are getting into challenges, the site is improving and there's always something going on.

By the way, this post is a blatent advert for KiwiWriters.org and therefore I have nothing else to say :-)

Except, come and Join Us!

Labels: kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-03-06 23:24 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Zaapt Continued Progress

While I haven't done a huge amount to Zaapt recently, it is still getting added to and tweaked.

Each time I add something new to Zaapt, I realise something else about the way in which it all needs to fit together. For example, I just added the ability for a user to edit their signature which will be added to all of their forum posts.

This doesn't sound like a hard thing to do: edit a text field and display it when necessary, but it does throw up a few things to think about.

As I've mentioned before, you learn what a user can or can't do (should or shouldn't?) for each of the content types which have already been added. For the forums so far, the only information that was specific to the user was the total number of posts they had made. This has now changed with the addition of being able to edit their signature (though they are both specific to the user, only one is editable, the other is generated).

Along with the 'Account' type and the 'Profile' type (specific to KiwiWriters, this means there are now more types in which a user can edit information. This could also be used for their site preferences too though that will come at a later date.

All in all, it's been very interesting developing Zaapt so far and though there is a long way to go, I feel it's worthwhile me doing it.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-03-04 19:06 (4 years, 11 months ago)

A Descriptive Challenge

I have added a new challenge in Kiwi Writers, is small and simple. Why don't you join us?

Have a look at my latest challenge on Kiwi Writers., It is A Descriptive Challenge.

It's only small, will take only half an hour per day over this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday and is really easy. Why not come and Join Us and join in the fun.

Progress can be posted in the writing forums and usually there are people offering encouragement there too.

What are you waiting for?

Labels: kiwi-writers, challenge, writing

Inserted: 2007-02-27 23:37 (4 years, 11 months ago)

KiwiWriters' expanding Horizons

KiwiWriters is going from strength to strength. We now have a number of people who have joined up, an active forum section, lots of resource links and a new interview section.

Following a great interview of Michelle Waitzman by Travis, we now have the start of an interview section, which I think is a great stepping stone in furthering Kiwi Writers development.

Also, I have a couple of new features in the pipeline which need to be finished off.

One is a new section which is specific to KiwiWriters and the other is something which will be added to the Forums. In both cases, they will test Zaapt's capabilities further and make sure I'm still on the right track.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, writing, interview

Inserted: 2007-02-27 23:32 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Resources for Writers

Kiwi Writers now has a great Resources section for Writers, go check it out.

These Writing Resources aim to collect together a number of different web pages which might be of help to the aspiring Kiwi Writer. Go take a look.

Labels: kiwi-writers, writing

Inserted: 2007-02-26 23:23 (4 years, 11 months ago)

Twilight Cinema a Shambles

The Twilight Cinema came to Wellington for the summer. Like most of their audience, they really needn't have bothered turning up.

Two weeks ago, myself and a couple of friends went to watch the screening of An Inconvenient Truth. When we got to the Twilight Cinema we were told that for technical reasons the screening wasn't showing and instead some other (already previously shown) film was to be shown (Dave Chappelle's Block Party).

We had no interest in watching it.

We went home.

Tonight, we went to see Little Miss Sunshine. One of the best films to be released in recent years, with a load of other people, all laughing together at a truely great and funny movie. At least that's what we hoped.

We should have known better.

Before we were even inside, the lady came along the row and said that they were having some technical difficulties, but it would be starting just half an hour after it's scheduled start. If that didn't work, then they would show An Inconvenient Truth instead.

So I thought, "Ok, I'd like to see that too" seeing as we hadn't seen it the last time we went.

By well over an hour after the scheduled start time, we saw something happen on the projector. We could see the film being put in though it wasn't quite in properly. The light from the projector then proceeded to burn a hole in the film and before our very eyes, it disintegrated. 'Oopse' we thought. I hope that wasn't the film.

When the film did finally come on, about an hour and a half late, there was no sound. Ah great, another hiccup. Fifteen minutes of the film were shown with no sound before they then told us that they were going to pack it all in and show the alternative instead.

By this time it was late and I was tired - tired of the whole thing. The pre-show entertainment wasn't really entertainment (though you couldn't hear the first person since she had no microphone) and by this time I wanted to go home.

All in all, the whole event was a complete shambles and it has completely put me off going to any of their events again. They gave me a ticket that I could use another night, but now I wished I'd just asked for my money back.

I mean really, if I went again, it would be a complete waste of time like the previous two times before. I had heard that they were not enjoying as much success as they'd hoped and from what I've seen, they really don't deserve it.

If anyone has any good experiences I'd like to know.

Labels: twilight-cinema

Inserted: 2007-02-17 23:23 (5 years ago)

My First PerlMongers Meeting

For two years I meant to go to PerlMongers, but always convinced myself that I just wanted to go home. I went the other night for the first time, now I wish I'd gone earlier.

We had a Lightening Talks meeting where we had a number of speakers (see 13 Feb and had a good chat afterwards too.

It was also really nice seeing a few of the old faces and hope to see them again...

...in fact, I've signed up to do a talk there next month. I'm not going to tell you the title of the talk since it is still a work in progress, though I will tell you it has to do with Perl/Mason and a few things I learnt implementing Zaapt.

Labels: mason, zaapt, perl-mongers

Inserted: 2007-02-14 23:13 (5 years ago)

I'm a Winner in wwwW

KiwiWriters.org has just finished it's first site-wide challenge, the wwwW - Waitangi Weekend Word Wace.

And here is my icon to prove it :-)

The idea of wwwW is to write a short story of 7,500 words in just four days over Waitangi Weekend.

It was a lot harder than I thought it would be and I think this is for two reasons. In comparison to NaNoWriMo, because you only have four days, it's a huge amount harder to catch up if you fall behind - a trap a few of us got caught out by.

But the other reason is also because, instead of writing to 'fill out' the novel (as you have to doing NaNoWriMo), you can't pad as much - you have to keep the story rolling and every scene has to count. This means you have to think more about it. I might make the suggestion that we spread it over a little more time next year, dunno yet.

Finally, to tell you a little about what happened, I actually got to 6,002 words with the story and then killed it off. It was about fighting and blood and stuff like that, stuff I really don't like reading about let alone writing. In the end, I started a new story which was about toys, kids, sprouts, cabbage, Star Wars and Transformers. It was much easier to write and a lot funnier. I managed 1,600 words in not much over an hour. Prior to that, I was managing maybe 500 words an hour which isn't very good.

Just proves that you should write about what you like.

Update: 2007-02-09 11:30 - Kerryn has put her wwwW winner icon up too. Update: 2007-02-09 15:19 - Travis has also put his wwwW winner icon up.

Labels: kiwi-writers, short-story, wwww

Inserted: 2007-02-08 23:09 (5 years ago)

What you can do "In about 10 Seconds"

Travis just made me laugh. What he said pretty much sums up how I feel about Web Development these days.

In his introduction on KiwiWriter (5th post down), he said that we (the KiwiWriters group): went from "I want to do something with writing" to "let's get a web domain and pick a style" in about ten seconds.

That pretty much sums it all up for me. It tells us that when this group of ours got together, we wanted to make things happen because we all enjoyed it so much.

Additional to that, we also went from an initial idea to an 'actual, functioning and live' website in less than two months.

It just all moves so fast and that's exactly what I like about it.

Labels: website, 10-seconds, kiwi-writers, writing

Inserted: 2007-02-06 00:01 (5 years ago)

One Third of the Way Through KiwiWriters wwwW

wwwW stands for Waitangi Weekend Word Wace and it's a site-wide challenge on KiwiWriters.org to write a short story.

If you've never written a short story before (like me), then it's an ideal chance to try something different. A short story is generally regarded as being around 7,500 words. For this year, since Waitangi Day is on Tuesday, we're suggesting writing a short story between midnight Friday and midnight Tuesday.

So far, it's been really enjoyable though I am finding it harder than NaNoWriMo. The aim of writing a short story means it's harder to find padding to fill out the words since you really have to keep the story going. I'd never thought of this before but it has been driven home to me by the act of doing it. Also see this thread on getting the words out on KiwiWriters.org.

Overall though, I'm on course and should be able to manage another 2,500 each day to get the 7,500 needed.

Labels: kiwi-writers, short-story, wwww

Inserted: 2007-02-04 20:02 (5 years ago)

Zaapt CMS Working under Preassure

There are two types of pressure: technical and environmental. Let's talk about technical pressure to start off with.

On the technical side, I had a bit of a personal challenge last night, but I managed to fix it up in what I thought was a nice way.

As a bit of background information. Each content type contained in Zaapt comes with a Perl Module for (database) abstraction and a load of Mason pages to render that content to the web page. So far, I have been dealing with the administration side of things (the edit pages) and the public side of things (the view pages). Most of the content types fall into this category: the news, blogs, content pages, FAQs, etc

Last night I realised there was a third category. For the Forums, I had written the view and the edit pages. So far this has worked since the view pages were only seen by people once they had logged in, but we (KiwiWriters) also wanted the forums to be publically viewable too.

Therefore, I had to think about what I could name the type of pages which can be read but not changed. This kinda threw me for a while but then realised that it was simply these pages which should be called the view pages.

I set about renaming the current forum view pages to the new category I have called user pages. After a fair bit of renaming I then added the proper view pages. And guess what, it worked a treat :-)

The best thing about it is that there is now a more formal idea about what types of pages there are. This will also come in handy in the future for things like Wikis and being able to post comments or trackbacks on blogs. It is these pages which blur the line between site content and user generated content as demonstrated yesterday with forums.

Labels: zaapt, content

Inserted: 2007-02-03 12:12 (5 years ago)

KiwiWriters.org is Now LIVE!

Go check it out, post a challenge, wander around the forums and join in the fun.

After just over a month of solid and rapid development, Project X, oopse, I mean KiwiWriters.org is now live. This also means that the features I have implemented in Zaapt already are also out there and being used :-)

But more to the point, there are many many interesting things going on over at KiwiWriters.org. For example, the forums are already bustling and there are a few challenges already outlined.

If you enjoyed doing NaNoWriMo last November, then we'll be presenting a similar event in June for the Southern Hemisphere. It's called SoCNoC (pronounced sock-nock) and stands for Southern Cross Novel Challenge.

In fact, a lot of the site is based around Challenges and the first one we'll be presenting is the Waitangi Weekend Word Wace. The aim of this challenge is to write a short story over this 4 day weekend, from midnight Friday until midnight Tuesday. It should be heaps of fun.

Finally, other people are already posting their challenges too. For example, today we had a short Limerick Lunchtime and there will be a comedy weekend next week to try your hand at a different style of writing.

Overall it's going to be lots of fun and all of us in KiwiWriters are already proud of our achievement. I must admit however that I'm really really happy I've managed (I think) to get the site going in a little over a month or so. So why not Join Us and tell us what you think.

For other articles about the launch, see the other member's blogs:

• http://writingangel.blogspot.com/2007/02/project-x-kiwi-writers.html
• http://cottreau.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-writing-resource-page.html

(more to be added)

Update: 2007-02-02 12:52 - Fixed Acronym of SoCNoC

Labels: zaapt, project-x, kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-02-01 22:58 (5 years ago)

Some Great Sights Recently

After my post the other day regarding moving to Seatoun, I went back to Paraparaumu - and it was lovely. But confirmation of the beauty around here also hit home this week.

The weather up in Kapiti was great today. I had to go up there on errand, but after that was finished, a couple of friends and I went for a walk on the beach.

It's not the nicest beach to sit on, but then, I think sitting on a beach is a waste of time. It is, however, an excellent beach for walking along. It's very intriguing along there in that lots and lots of sealife gets washed up onto it. We saw many fantastic curly shells, lots of driftwood and a few half-rotting fish.

In other news, I went to see Comet McNaught again last night. Although it wasn't as bright as last week, it is still spectacular.

I do find it amusing however that a group of us has been us up at least 3 times each week recently with no-one else around but last night there were a whole host of other people. Funny how they all come out of the woodwork on a Saturday night. Also annoying that loads of them had torches and were shining them into lots of faces - my eyes were just about adjusting and bang straight into my eyes they shine.

Thank you, thanks a lot.

Labels: paraparaumu-beach, beach, mcnaught

Inserted: 2007-01-28 22:53 (5 years ago)

Zaapt and Project X Getting Very Very Exciting

Both are well underway. Zaapt is progressing and Project X is almost ready for launch.

Over the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time working on Zaapt and ProjectX. Zaapt is a CMS which provides content management for small to medium sized sites, but it doesn't force the site structure in which you have to work. The reason for this is explained in a previous article Zaapt, a new CMS.

The best part about Zaapt CMS though is instead of developing it and then developing a site, I have had a fairly big site to develop alongside it - Project X. This means that straight away I can analyse the CMS skeleton I have put in place and verify that it actually works the way I want it too. I also have people playing with it too, which is great to track down bugs and get them fixed early (thanks guys).

The current high level of achievement hit home to me a couple of days ago when I realised that my design was on the right track. Up until that point, I had been adding generic content types that almost any site can use (blogs, news, managed pages, forums, etc) but I then had to add a type which was specific to the site. For example, the Account information is generic across all sites - but this site required a Profile for each user.

Now you might say profile is generic, but it's not. Yes, the idea of a Profile is generic, but the contents aren't. For example, if you've just joined a Photography site, you may want to say who your favourite photographers are. If you've joined a games site, they won't care about your favourite photographer, but will care about the game you've played the most.

From a Perl point of view when I added the generic type, instead of using the Zaapt namespace, I used the ProjectX namespace. It inherited the various things from Zaapt it needed and the model worked fine. There is also generic database patch scripts which live in the project instead of Zaapt, and finally, the Mason pages live under the project's htdocs instead of Zaapt's Mason hierarchy.

So there was three things it seemed I had designed correctly in the beginning with a view to generic and specific types and all of them worked out perfectly. It made me very happy.

You'll be able to get a feel of how Zaapt is progressing soon when ProjectX is released. Then you'll also be able to see the fruits of labour from a great group of people.

Unfortunately I can't link to it yet (which is okay) but will do really really soon :-)

Labels: zaapt, project-x, cms

Inserted: 2007-01-27 12:23 (5 years ago)

Sunsets in Seatoun

A walk when I got home from work and a quick drive to see the sunset.

Being here in Seatoun has been like a breath of fresh-air for me. I did like it up in Kapiti (hence, that's why I'm keeping the kapiti.geek.nz domain), but I just feel more at home here. It's only a few minutes to work which is absolutely great.

We're cut off from the rest of Wellington due to the hill over Seatoun Heights, but that's not to say we're very far from it - it's still only 15 mins to the centre of town. Also, over the past few days, I have headed out for a walk just to chill out after the working day. Up and around the headland is a beautiful walk from which you can see the South Island on a clear day and over the whole of Wellington harbour and the harbour opening.

One of the other bonuses though is the ability to head to Wahine Memorial Park on the south coast and watch the sunsets from there. It's very rocky on the coast and it's great for chucking stones into the water (nope, I haven't grown up yet). Already I have already seen a few good sunsets this year, though the low clouds in Wellington sometimes spoil it slightly.

Did I also say that there isn't much traffic round here either :-)

All in all, I can't think of a more beautiful place to live, work and enjoy the scenery.

Labels: seatoun, walking, sunset

Inserted: 2007-01-25 22:23 (5 years ago)

We saw Comet McNaught

After thinking we were too late, we caught a glimpse - it is beautiful.

After reading all those articles yesterday and this morning, I got the impression that the comet was really close to the sun and you'd only be able to see it for a few minutes afterwards.

After heading to the coast and getting some good photos (I'll try and post some) of a really nice sunset, it was time to go. We had arrived just after sunset, but more importantly, there were clouds on the horizon - which is why we thought it had gone.

At around 9:20pm, while it was still quite high in the sky, one of our group spotted it.

It really is quite stunning :-)

Certainly, I'll try and see it again over the next few days and probably weeks. It will get feinter, but by then I hope to have seen it many more times.

This weekend, I'm planning on going out to the Wairarapa where it will be a lot darker (no light polution) and hopefully a flatish landscape around me. Should be fun.

Update: 2007-01-17 12:04 - Don has taken a \[p]{great photo of the comet|http://www.gamma.net.nz/?p=309}.
Update: 2007-01-17 23:44 - So it's not really his picture, but it is a great image.

Labels: comet, sunset, space

Inserted: 2007-01-16 23:12 (5 years, 1 month ago)

Space and other Celestial Bodies

That last entry reminded me about a naming convention I have.

A few years ago, I bought a laptop computer. It was a Toshiba Satellite and I must admit, it has been like an old friend for a number of years. I called that computer Satellite.

When I got my next one, I called it Comet, even though the model name of the laptop wasn't anything to do with space. My next computer has the name Asteroid. At one stage, I also owned a server called Meteor.

Now that I've kinda used up those names, I started a new naming convention for my new computer. I found a list of \[p]{Jupiter's moons|http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Jupiter&Display=Moons} and started at number one. This new computer is called Metis. I don't think I'll ever get up to 63 however, though the naming goes a bit funny from 41 onwards.

The other convention I have is for servers, but again that is so far still at number one. The convention for my servers is \[p]{Liverpool FC|http://liverpoolfc.tv/} players and ex-players. My first server didn't have a name, but my current one is called Fowler.

Maybe in the future when VPS or Dedicated Servers are a lot cheaper, I'll be able to get a whole solar system or football team!

Labels: liverpool, space

Inserted: 2007-01-16 00:42 (5 years, 1 month ago)

Comet McNaught Coming to our Skies

The brightest comet for 30 years should be viewable in our evening skies over the next few days.

Here's some pictures from the UK: \[p]{Comet McNaught|http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6251663.stm}

It looks quite stunning.

Here's an explanation of how to find \[p]{Comet McNaught in the New Zealand sky|http://www.carterobservatory.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1095&Itemid=81}, just after sunset.

Update: 2007-01-16 11:36 - Stuff has finally put up \[p]{an article|http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/3929492a11.html}.

Labels: comet, space

Inserted: 2007-01-16 00:20 (5 years, 1 month ago)

Sorry, I've been away for a while

I've been head down in writing my new CMS and the new site for ProjectX...just wait and see, it's going to be great.

After a number of weeks with my head in the laptop (like your head being in a book, but slightly different), I've made great strides in the functionality of the new CMS and the first site which will use it. There are page types for content managed pages, blogs (50% done), news, FAQs, Forums (90% done) and accounts (25% done).

For those wanting a sneak peak of the CMS, take a look at Zaapt Home and \[p]{Zaapt Project Home|http://code.google.com/p/zaapt/}.

As for ProjectX, I have 2 more things to implement before we can go live. I want to add some Profile information for each account and then I can get started on a few added extras specific to the site itself.

I'm really, really dieing to tell you all about it but I can't yet. Once we do an official launch, then I'll be able to write something here. Let's just say I'm excited and I think the rest of the group are too.

Labels: zaapt, project-x, cms

Inserted: 2007-01-14 21:12 (5 years, 1 month ago)

Zaapt CMS Progressing Well

As stated in an earlier post, my ambitions for a simple but powerful CMS is progressing well.

I have added various content including Accounts (partial), Content Pages, FAQs and Blogs (partial). Planned content types to be added soon includes News, Forums, Links and Menus. I'm sure others will be added as it all progresses. Also, there is provision for sites to add their own content types on top of the boxed content types.

Progress is going well though of course it is still in the early stages of development. Even though I am taking the traditional route at the moment, there are plans to add shiny new Ajax to make things even nicer.

Finally, the project code can be found at Google Code under the \[p]{Zaapt|http://code.google.com/p/zaapt/} project. See the \[p]{Zaapt|http://kapiti.geek.nz/software/zaapt.html} home page for the commit, issue and discuss groups...though these are quiet at the moment that's fine by me while I carry on.

Labels: zaapt, cms

Inserted: 2007-01-04 01:44 (5 years, 1 month ago)