OSDC Keynote; dopplr and flickr
I've just been asked to present the dinner keynote at the Open Source Developers Conference in Brisbane this year. This is a great honour, and also just a little bit scary. Not only will I have a hard time approaching the amazing delivery of Damian's keynote last year, the Da Vinci Codebase, but I'll be standing in the way of hundreds of hungry developers eager for their dinner.

In other news, after a little delay (ironically due to travel) I've accepted Skud's invitation to dopplr. If you're a dopplr account holder, then feel free to look me up. If you need an invite, feel free to ask.

I've also got photographs online from my recent trip to the Walka Water Works near Maitland NSW. I didn't exactly take the regular tourist route.

Building a StepMania machine
My social demographic consists almost entirely of geeks. When I go to parties, activities intend to include Wii Tennis, boardgames, and physics debates. They usually don't involve much in the way of dancing. Overall, that's a good thing, because if I were to dance then anyone nearby with a camera is likely to record the moment in an attempt to squeeze $500 out of Australia's Funniest Home Videos. That's why I love the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) style games so much; I can still look like a fool, but I can get points for doing so.

The simple addition of a couple of dance mats and a scoring system results in an amazing behavioural change. Songs which would previously had one silence the radio with a sledgehammer suddenly become "cool" and "groovy" with "interesting footwork" and "awesome combos". As such, I've been putting together my own StepMania setup. This post is primarily to record two painful experiences that I'd rather not have anyone else encounter.

The first involves video drivers. I'm using a mobile GeForce 7800 Go graphics card, and all the official drivers are ancient. Using drivers from Laptop Video 2 Go have always provided me with some relief here, however the more recent versions would install fine, but break the control panel. It seems this is a well-known problem, and an .ini fix is available for those wishing to try it. It didn't help me with all versions, but it helped me enough to get the control panel happening in 9424 release, which made stepmania happy to run on my TV's native resolution in fullscreen.

The second involves my purchase of a Super Joy Box 5 Pro, which are readily available on eBay, and sound awesome, allowing four playstation controllers to be converted to USB using a single box.

Do not buy the Super Joy Box 5 Pro. It is not awesome. It allows only a single controller to be attached; any more and they start interfering with each other, which makes all controllers but one effectively unusable. It appears that this isn't unique to this particular device; a number of the items from MayFlash have similar problems. I'd be very cautious before buying anything in the Super Joy Box series.

Instead of paying for some crapola from eBay that doesn't work, go read the StepMania page on USB adaptors and ignore the ticks. The ticks lie. Read the user comments; all USB adaptors suck, but some of them suck less. Play-Asia delivers to Australia and seems to have reasonable prices and postage. I've just ordered a EMS dual shooter from them, which seem to be highly recommended.

pjf.id.au ATOM enabled
In an attempt to make technorati hate my blog less, I've added an ATOM feed to pjf.id.au. This was reasonably easy using XML::Atom::SimpleFeed once I realised that despite the fact that lots the fields in ATOM are optional, most readers really want them to be there.

The ATOM feed is also allegedly exporting tags, although I haven't seen any reader currently pick up on them. Either I'm using the wrong readers, or I'm doing something wrong in the export. I don't know yet.

The ironic thing is that despite this making my blog extra swishy in every other reader, technorati still seems to think it has only one post, and links that to the wrong page. I'm hoping that the posting of new content (and a ping) will help it realise things are different now.

Open Source Developers Club
Last night we had another Open Source Developers Club (OSDClub) meeting. I had volunteered my talk on An Illustrated History of Failure, and Simon Hildebrant had volunteered a talk on Selenium.

The night seemed to go well, but I can't help but be disappointed with my performance. I've been teaching all this week, and this is extremely time consuming. Waking up very early and then standing in front of a class for eight hours can sure be tiring, but that's not the real problem. After a full day of teaching, the last thing I want to be doing is spending an hour or more rehearsing my talk. I'd much rather be playing Pikmin (thanks Ian!), or mucking with technorati, or even watching commercial TV. This is especially the case when I've been teaching roughly every second week for the last two months.

I hold myself to a particularly high standard when it comes to presentations. Presenting is my job, and if I flub my lines or forget my slide order, then I'm extremely unhappy. For anyone who noticed my errors last night, I apologise. For anyone who didn't notice, thank-you. You're a great audience.

Simon's presentation last night was on testing the web with Selenium, which is an awesome tool, and which has lots of ways to plug into TAP and other testing frameworks. There were some interesting ideas being thrown around about how one can use Selenium to provide repeatable test cases for web applications, the same way that one would provide test cases when submitting a bug report for a traditional application.

The discussion got me thinking more about what if one finds a bug, but can't get it fixed. It's a good introduction to my next talk, which is Fixing the web with Greasemonkey.

SAGE-AU 2007
Last week was the Fifteenth Annual Australian System Administration Conference, aka SAGE-AU 2007.

Before I say more about the conference, let me mention the conference dinner. SAGE-AU conference dinners come with an open bar; and not just beer and wine, either. If you're willing to go to the effort of walking to the bar you can get some quite snazzy (and strong) drinks. As you can imagine, there's a tendency for the conference delegates to get quite happy as part of the evening festivities. The reason why this is important is due to my role in the conference each year.

Each year, for the last three years, I have been given the first talk after the conference dinner. Out of all the talks at the conference, mine is the one conference delegates are most looking for an excuse to miss. I need to have a talk that a room filled with hung-over sysadmins can grasp and find entertaining.

This by itself is not a great challenge. Where things become really tough is that I'm invariably presenting the talk with a hangover myself. As can be seen from the conference photographs, I've never got the habit of leaving the dinner early. It doesn't help that I feel compelled to rise before the sun to do dry runs of my talk, either.

Despite all this, I'm very happy with the arrangement. Not because of the honour of being deemed worthy of dragging the conference out of bed. Not because of the invariable praise and invitations that comes from a successful presentation. Not because of the perks that come with being a speaker, or the feeling that I've imparted valuable knowledge to the audience.

No. The thing that really, really makes me feel wonderful is watching the pain and anguish suffered by the delegates who slept in and missed the talk, and then are repeatedly told by their colleagues how good it was. There's something about getting up before the sun with a hangover that really improves one's appreciation of schadenfreude.