Donna and I hooked up with Jacinta Richardson and Paul Fenwick after LCA. We had decided to hire a car and spend a few days hooning around the Huon Valley. Note: don't spend your money on a Toyota Aurion, they're like rudderless boats, huge and wallowing.
Waiting for the projector in Burbury 2 to sort itself out, I thought I'd say that the first two days of not-quite-lca (Sunday/Monday) have been great. They mainly involved eating and drinking, not so much the attending of mini-confs, though.
If you're in Hobart and you're looking for somewhere to eat, I can heartily recommend the Bay Leaf Bistro at 160 Sandy bay Road - a short walk from the university, which serves decent home-style food.
Airfare to Hobart - one hundred dollars.
Accomodation - three hundred dollars.
A few rounds of drinks - sixty dollar.
Attending linux.conf.au - priceless.
I seem to have missed the activation of planet linux.conf.au on account of not paying attention.
Well, it exists, so here goes a properly tagged blog. Oh, flying to Hobart this saturday - whee!
I added the memcache module to my Drupal this morning.
Mine is a stand-alone install, so I can test it without affecting all the other ones, that run via a shared codebase.
It requires an updated PECL extension (the default one in Hardy is too old and doesn't support multiple memcache servers) and some code patching as well. The latest version listed in the patches/ subdir is Drupal 5.8, but it runs fine on 5.14. Sofar anyway. If you can't read this, it's possibly broken ;-)
I
got a bit of a surprise last night.
It was decided some time ago that we wouldn't do presents, but instead all put a set amount of money into a piggy bank, to spend on a suckling pig banquet early next year.
However, just as we were about to go, I was herded into a room with a huge box, which turned out to contain a 650mm f/5 newtonian "zoom lens" on an equatorial mount, for use with the digital camera :-)
Woot!
Having tried to drive near the Queen Victoria Market just before lunch time this morning and failing miserably due to people from the suburbs, the pre christmas shop this afternoon turned out to be the complete opposite.
My hot inner city grocery shopping tips for your pre-christmas needs:
For some time now Yarra Trams have had a little form on their website that allows you to get the arrival times for the next three trams for a specific tram service at a specific stop.
Unfortunately their site renders extremely badly on Firefox 3 and they don't provide a documented API, so the only way to get this data is to scrape it by submitting the form on their site and parsing the results.
A friend pointed me at http://outreach.atnf.csiro.au/visiting/parkes/parkeswebcam.html, which I think is rather cool.
Mary Gardiner wondered about easy backups for Linux, possibly something like Tima Machine. As far as I know, work has been progressing on a project along these lines, called TimeVault.
Unfortuntately Marys blog doesn't allow comments and I don't do LiveJournal, so I'll have to reply via the blog-o-tubes ;-)