Brighton is made of awesome.

I had a fantastic time at dConstruct and BrightonBarCamp over the weekend.  It was great to meet new people and hang out with familiar faces as well.  I will be putting up the list of games I presented on in a post today (unless I collapse after work and exercise, it was a *long* weekend!)

Hack Day, here I come!

I’ve been accepted to go to HackDay!  I’m very much looking forward to it, despite having absolutely no idea what I’m going to be doing for it.  Gaaaah.  Must brainstorm now.  Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

Persistant PBWiki Hacking Wankers…

Ok, I’ve fixed the Barcamp page again. Looks like Jan Nontivy (or however it’s spelled.) has put the script tag back in. I seem to have caught them in the act, I stole the edit lock back from them and restored the page. Does anyone know who actually ‘owns’ the Barcamp Wiki? Maybe I can talk them into blocking an IP or two…

PBWiki hacking wankers.

Ok, someone (who I won’t link to because that’s rewarding their behaviour) hacked the barcamp.pbwiki.com site. They did it by putting a simple <script> tag redirect. Simple, stupid, annoying. I’ve fixed the page but if you find that your own site has been hit by this amazingly stupid exploit, just do the following:

1. take your normal site url (like http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/)
2. add the following to the end: ‘FrontPage?edit=1&login=1’ (so you end up with https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/FrontPage?edit=1&login=1)
3. remove the script tag.
4. save.

BTW, they’re using google ads to get some revenue out of this, does anyone know how to contact google to tell them to not give those jerks any money?

Let me just blow the dust off of this…

Wow, ok, I suck. I haven’t posted for about mmmm… three months. Gaaah.

For those of you that I met at Barcamp Dublin this weekend, hello! It was fabulous to meet all of you and to talk with as many of you as I had that chance.

Big Kudoes and thanks are due to the organizers of the event! I had a wonderful time and can’t wait for the next one.

Also everything that I’ve said above also applies to the people I saw at Barcamp London 2. err…

I do apologize for letting this go so long without contact. Part of the problem is that I worry that if I don’t post really cool contentful stuff, then the people who read me through the aggregated Planet Python blog will be annoyed.

Speaking of python I’ve spent the last few months programming and very much enjoying working with Django.

I’m not working this week, I’m actually heading back to Minneapolis to visit my family and friends. So there’s a lot of travel going on. But I’m hoping to start doing a bit more with this soon. Also, I’ve finally bought my own domain, and will shortly start looking into hosting solutions so I can be one of those cool kids.

I think I’m going to need to sleep soon, there was a lot of drinking going on last night.

Django annoyances.

I’ve spent the better part of two days wrestling with a django install onto a mac mini.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that a significant part of the blame lies with the mac, but I have to say that the django site could do a much better job of saying things like:  “This wonderful linked-to-from-the-front-page tutorial book that we’re working on is in fact based on the absolutely latest bleeding-edge version of django and if you try to follow it using our also-linked-to-on-the-front-page stable-build of django it will probably cause you to hemorrhage out of your eyesockets in frustration.”

I’m just sayin.

Otherwise, I kinda like it.  I’m looking forward to making real stuff happen with it real soon!

And we’re back.

New year’s was wonderful, had a great, if hectic holiday season.  Looking forward to the next couple of months which are now getting stupidly busy.  In the mean time I’ve been continuing my painful learning process with ubuntu, which this time, included learning how to recover the system from a mis-typed chown command.  Eeek.  Kudos to the IRC help channel which was actually quite helpful with this one.

I’m also hoping to make it to Barcamp London 2, if I can manage to be in front of my computer during the 30 minutes between the sign up page going live (and no, I don’t know where it is) and the sign up becoming completely full to the gills.  Gack.  Yeah, I’m sure all the really cool kids will be doing it by their phone, lucky bastards.  I’m on Twitter now (rnalexander) but I don’t generally keep up to date with texts as that makes my phone go off about every 3 minutes or so.

Oh, I also suppose I should come up with something to present on.  That’s usually not a problem, I can talk forever…  Just ask anyone.

A stupid mistake I hope to never make again.

And by copping to it here, in front of all of you, I hope the embarrassment will burn it into my skull.

So… on the Ubuntu server install, it’s not actually enough to just have the LAMP software choice highlighted, you actually need to make the x go in the little text bracket boxy thingy.  Yup.

On the other hand, it’s all working just fine now.  One of the nice things about being a programmer is that often losing at ten internets provides you with just the clue-by-four to the head that you need to subsequently win at teh internets.

Ubuntu fun and US paranoia hits closer to home.

OK, did some hardware re-arranging and now have a slightly faster Ubuntu box with more memory in it.  I also now have a LAMP install that I’m slogging my way through on the slower box.  I’m having trouble getting swat to run.  But hey, this is the kind of learning experience I need for this sort of thing.  I’ll just keep hammering away at it and get it eventually, and then I’ll have learned all those hard lessons that I won’t forget.

In more disturbing news there was a recent boingboing post about technical equipment being exploded at one of the Minneapolis Airports.  Well, as it turns out, that equipment belonged to my father’s department at the University of Minnesota.  Nice one guys, way to save the world from the terror of knowing what temperature it is.

Life is what happens when you’re not blogging.

Bit late on the uptake here.  The week got busy on me again, today I got a load of IKEA goodness delivered to my home.  I now have a semi-functional office space, although a small one.  This is quite a relief to me.  Next up is a decent flat-screen monitor and a good KVM switch.
It was great to see everyone at the London Web 2.0 RC9 meetup on Monday.  People were finally kind enough to explain microformats to me in a bit more depth.  We also discussed the benefits of these kind of meetups and in particular the benefit of what I phrased as the ‘boozy Socratic method of learning’ in a conversation with Simon.

Now that I finally have a proper working space I’m hoping to get some improvements done on the site, so I can start to look half as cool as the people I keep talking with.