SuperHappyDevHouse

After the successful Software Freedom Day hackfest organised by Brenda of SHDHNZ, we're going to be having a mini happy dev house on November 2 at Southern Cross. As always, it'll be a hackfest with a friendly atmosphere, food and beer nearby, and other patrons wondering whether people gathering in public with laptops is illegal.

If you're thinking of coming, head over to the November projects page on shdh.org.nz, and add your name and what you might work on.

Hope to see you there!

June SHDH yesterday. Brenda has a writeup. I must admit, I also noticed the stares, and the people hurriedly looking away when you looked at them. Ah it feels great being misunderstood and feared ;)

In terms of actual work done, I added apache2 proxying support to autovserver - and did that mostly in the last 10 minutes of being there. I keep spending lots of time talking to everyone else there rather than coding, especially Andy, who is as die-hard open-source as they come. We were talking about cil, his little distributed command line bug tracker, and got on to talking about some kind of "Insta-Project"(tm) thing, that would populate a directory with a README, COPYING, basic debian packaging, a gitrepo (if it doesn't have one, which it should!) and a cil tracker so you can turn those little scripts you want to publish into a project with minimal effort. I'd like to see this implemented some day, though I can't see me having the time for a while because work is so hectic :(.

That's one thing I do like about SHDH. It's a chance, once a month, to go somewhere and code on something I want to work on. Not that I don't like working on Mahara - on the contrary, I love it - but it seems I have a million ideas for things I could do and not enough free time to do them. If I quit my job I don't think I'd ever get bored - at least, not until the moneys ran out ;).

Another MHDH in June. Themed "Hello World in strange languages". Should be a blast, and hopefully I'll get a chance to work some more on autovserver.

Meanwhile, my list of stuff to do at work has got amazingly long again. My current project, which is doing some performance benchmarking, is really interesting. A chance to play with some grunty hardware and see what the limits are. It's not often you get a chance to do such work - most of the time you're just causing the performance problems^W^W^W^W coding *ahem*.

Some Mahara work looms on the horizon as well. Yay!

Well the fact that you're reading this means that I've been successful in my SHDH mission - to fix the script that lets me blog! That's why the currymail was so late this week.

I can also upload images via a script too. So adding content to the site is dead easy now, which is the way it should be :)

The SHDH (actually a minihappydevhouse) had quite a few participants, I reckon we had 20 or more, which was a great effort. Good to see so many people hacking, eating or just talking about stuff. Things that happened, in no particular order:

1. Martin Langhoff was late (of course! He's from South America :)
2. Andy showed me cil. Command line bug tracking, git style. He's debian packaging it, so hopefully I can start using it for a few things soon. I think the idea has great promise...
3. I preached to a small crowd about performance of websites, only to be caught out when my site wasn't practising what I was preaching ^_^.
4. Francois and Andy found out about the sneaky requirement for tabs in Getopt::Declare
5. Lots of people found out about the OLPC. I presume some hacking may have been done on it. Ben spent his time playing Sim City on it instead.

There was a lot more, I'm sure.