I’m now at BarCamp, hyped up on free coffee and looking forward to the upcoming geekiness. It’s been years since I set foot in a lecture theatre at Queen’s and in fact, I think I used to attend Computer Architecture lectures in the very room I’m in now. The line-up for today includes both technical and non-technical topics. and unsurprisingly, it’s the techy stuff that’s appealing to me more, in particular the planned talks on Zope and Ruby.

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It looks like I’ll be attending BarCamp this Saturday. I had initially ruled it out, what with my hectic schedule, but my employer is sponsoring the event and as such I’ll be able to get Monday off work in exchange for representing the company. Happy Days.

Not 2 days after mentioning my initial impressions of EuroFeeds usenet service I get an email notifying me that they have upgraded retention on binary newsgroups to 60 days, with a planned upgrade to 85 days over the summer, as well as doubling the number of simultaneous connections on unlimited accounts from 4 to 8. Nice. I’m looking forward to testing this out :) Update: Ninan is now maxing out at 1.

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My annual subscription to NewsHosting expired recently and as I had a huge backlog of media to get through I put up with the lack of new stuff for a while. I managed to leech a couple of releases from my ISPs servers but was unable to obtain a few others which piqued my interest, so I endeavered to remedy the situation. A credit card is not something I currently have access to, so I had no option but to go with a European based provider which would accept payment via Maestro.

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Now that MacServ has been deployed keeping development and production copies of the code synchronised has become an issue. The app is still very much a work in progress, with daily requests for fixes & tweaks from the technicians using it and instead of keeping track of modified files and then manually updating them via scp, I decided to let laziness motivate me to utilise a less painful system. I spent a bit of time researching the use of rsync but decided that subversion would better suit my needs.

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The initial version of my latest project, MacServ, has just been deployed. MacServ is intended to model the work-flow at Mac-Sys and to replace the existing paperwork. Deployment was scheduled for close-of-play yesterday and I thought I was home clear: I’d uploaded the scripts, configured the database and at a quick glance things appeared to be working. I was getting ready to leave the office and hit the gym only for one of the staff to discover that one of the apps controllers wasn’t operational…

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My brother got married at the weekend and as part of the preparations we had to transport the wedding cake from my uncle’s bakery to Lusty Beg island, where the reception was held: a distance of 10.6 miles, according to Google. Due to the size and weight of the cake it was decided that I would hold it on my lap while my brother drove, here’s an action shot: At every twist and turn in the road my nerves were jangled and by the end of the journey Tim had sweat stains under his arms.

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I can’t believe it, but I actually took the time out yesterday to make this. Here’s what it’s meant to look like: ..and here’s my effort: It is safe to say I drank too much coffee yesterday ;)

It was Sunday morning and I went through my usual routine: I got up, flicked on the coffee machine which I had filled with water and ground coffee the night before and went to the bathroom. I decided to get back into my bed for a bit and whilst I was lying there I heard a cracking sound. I feared the worst, thinking: “please not my precious caffeine preparation paraphernalia" and sure enough the black goodness was weeping from the pot and sizzling on the hotplate.

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The latest stable of Ninan was released a few days ago and I’ve just gotten around to upgrading my installation of it. There wasn’t much to the upgrade process: I downloaded and untared the archive and I thought I’d play it smart and copy over my old ninanconfig.xml and it appeared to work, but gave up the ghost when it came to actually downloading something. I renamed the file, restarted Ninan, reentered all my details and preferences and I’m now happily downloading at 1.

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