Planet Gold Coast

I thought I would have a crack at Project 365. You basically take a picture every day for a year - I know a few people doing it - so thought it would be fun joining in. Today was a Refactor lab day - so my picture for the day is fairly boring... my laptop keyboard which has been getting a pounding lately and is starting to look pretty grubby.

Anyway - I'm not going to post every day's photo to the blog - I'll just put them in a flckr set and comment on them there. I need a very very simple way of doing it to make sure I do it every day and I procrastinate too much on the blog. If you click on the image above it takes you to the set.

Aaron Spence from Panedia also took a rather nice picture of my Kahdo as he came over to drop some stuff off:

http://photos.panedia.com/p1013038409/h3a82fafc#h3a82fafc

Working on a content repository for a client at the moment - have been evaluating JackRabbit and Alfresco as a backend repository for an existing site. Anyway - I was already familiar with Alfresco, but spent a bit of time with JackRabbit today to give a comparison. It's a nice simple implementation of the JCR (JSR-170), but suffers a little from lack of doco when it comes to using it in something other than it's standard configuration.

I needed to test it with Mysql on Tomcat 6 - didn't really have any doco on this - so I added a new page to the wiki. Hopefully this is of use to someone:

http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/JackRabbitOnTomcat6

If you are not into Java and are looking for a way to access JackRabbit, there is WebDAV and also Apache Sling - which provides a RESTful api to JackRabbit. It's in the incubator still - but looks quite nice and has some potential.

Ok this is a rant... after coming off the phone with Canon this my last resort and spleen vent.

After always buying Nikon we recently switched allegiances and bought a Canon IXUS-80 from Kmart in Helensvale for the birth of my 2nd child - it was about $250. After about a couple of months the lens decided to jam. My wife did a search on the net and this is one of the most common problems experienced with this camera - tried all the suggested solutions with no luck. Anyway - we thought "No problem" let's just take it back to Kmart and get a new one... I have always been very impressed with Kmart's no-fuss exchange policy and is probably the number 1 reason I shop at stores like this.

Anyway - for the first time ever, Kmart actually sent the thing away for repair... and we have been waiting several weeks for it now and my wife has been pulling her hair out as she has no camera to take pictures of my daughter. The camera just came back from Canon saying there was "Foreign Body" inside the camera and that we had to pay $200 to get it repaired OR $50 quotation fee to get it back!!

I phoned Canon - apparently there was sand in the camera (why didn't they say that on the quote???) and warranty is invalid. I don't know how there is sand in there - the camera was only at the hospital and home, but meh. She also adamantly denied that they charge $50 quotation fee but it's right there on the piece of paper....

Anyway - not very helpful, and they aren't budging - so all I can now do is buy another (not canon) camera from a store other than Kmart. Shame - the camera was pretty good until this - but I gather from the net there are a lot of problems with this camera lens and if Canon is like this with warranty, then buyer beware!

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Saturday 29th November - and it's Barcamp Gold Coast #2. This is the 4th Barcamp in Queensland that I have involved with organising. I must have it pretty down-pat now as I did most of this one on my own. I think keeping the venue the same and the details as much the same as possible as the previous ones really helps things.

Sponsorship was must easier this year as I didn't do T-shirts which sucked a lot of our money last time. I also had a lot of stationery & materials left from the last one. Main sponsors were Griffith Uni (venue), MindWorx People (pizza), Apress (great books again), Refactor (internet) and Gold Coast Business (some Media/PR work)

Anyway - we had about 25 people, many of the same uber-networkers we have come to love at barcamps, such as Des Walsh & Michael Rees - but some new ones too. Thank-you to you all.

Our usual photographer DJ wasn't present, but Aaron Spence did an awesome job of photographs and even took one of his uber cool panedia photos. Thankyou so much Aaron.

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We recently got let down my our main client - and as a result are looking for work (no notice given). If anyone just so happens to be reading this who is looking for developers - please get in touch. There are 3 of us - 1 has just been hired but 2 still remaining (me and Rob Nielsen). We do Java, RubyOnRails, Groovy/Grails and lots more - based around Gold Coast/Brisbane. Our consulting company is http://refactor.com.au if you need more info on us. Email me s at dalts dot net to get in touch.

We are also at OSDC next week if anyone wants to catch up with us.

Just a quick post to say that Barcamp Gold Coast #2 is all pretty much ready to go for 29th November at Griffith Uni! All the info you need is at

http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast

We are doing pretty much the same as last time, pizza is sponsored by MindWorx this time, hardware giveaway and also a book swap if anyone is interested in offloading some unwanted trees (idea copied from Sydney). Coffee guy will be there too and we have the wireless internet like last time.

Not much more to say apart from please register at http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast2 - oh and tell everyone you know.

See you there

I've just started reading a rather cool book - I got it on a tip from Obie Fernandez in his now famous Do The Hustle talk at Ruby Fringe. It's called Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely - it basically explores why we make the decisions we make - the journey is fabulously interesting and often (as the author puts it) delicious!

Anyway, ironically, just this morning there was an example of this in my street.

I live in a small dead-end/cul-de-sac street of about 12 houses - we have 2 bins - a regular bin (green lid) and a recycling bin (yellow) lid. The green bin is collected every week and the yellow one every 2 weeks. Anyway - this week is NOT a recycling week, but we often get one person in the street accidentally putting their bins out. However, this week 2 people put their yellow bins out. By the time I went to put my bins out late last night everyone in the street had the yellow bins out! At this point I even put my yellow bin out as I thought maybe the others knew something!

As I rode out of the street on my bike this morning into the next street I of course saw of course that no-one else in the neighbourhood had the yellows out... herd mentality at it's best!

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