oldmatebrendo.com

In my project management tutorial at uni yesterday, the task was to get into groups and firstly write the tasks you think you would need to plan a party, then create a work breakdown structure and see if you missed any.

I got together with my group. Being the only non-asian in the entire subject my group was me and 4 asians, Chinese to be more precise.

Me: So first thing we do… buy beer, work out the rest later?

Chinese Student 1: Shouldn’t we first ask the government if we can have a party.

I paused to see if it was a joke, it wasn’t – he was deadly serious and argued the point that we should ask government.

I recently attended the ACS Young IT Conference 09 and after having the fact that “you young people are doing it wrong, supposed to be networking but instead, just standing around drinking and talking” pointed out to me at the networking dinner, it got me thinking.

I barely saw any business cards change hands, but I (personally) have a heaps of new twitter followers/followees and a bunch of new facebook friends. This lead me to the question; do Gen-Y prefer social networks to business cards?

The person that told me this was bragging about the guys he got business cards from… I wonder if he’ll get home and start calling CIOs?

I think they’ll go in his rolodex and any chance of a relationship with it.

I have business cards, I even had a stack with me, but when I think about it; having someone on my social network(s) suits me more.

Why?

For me, it’s about commitment, building a relationship and convenience.

It is assumed that I will have things in common with most other attendees of a conference I attend, but if I meet someone, have a short chat – a few things in common – then end it by exchanging cards, the chances are high that I will not build a relationship with that person after the conference. However, if I add that person to Twitter and Facebook on the spot; it is highly likely that I will converse with them again. Having them in these networks means there is no commitment to interact, as with “Yeah, I’ll give you a call,” but there is an opportunity.

A business card generally contains an email address and phone number as the two primary points of contact, but I find ringing someone I met at a conference a little intrusive unless there is prior “permission” to do so. Addressing something they post on twitter/blog/facebook however is an acceptable way to build a relationship with someone. It also allows you to mine the interests and specialities of those that you meet to build better relationships.

We’ve all met the person at a conference who wants something off you, but has very little intention of it being a 2-way relationship. They want an introduction to a member of your network because they want to hassle them for employment, and they will pester you until you give that to them. Once you have, you won’t hear from them again until they need something else off you. Do you really want that person to have your phone number? I’d prefer them to contact me via a social network where I can respond when I am ready to, on my terms.

Now I realise that if someone gives you a business card you can go and look them up, but I would argue (especially with the number of iPhone’s I saw) that (virtually) everybody there was able to easily access the internet from their chosen mobile device, so why make it difficult. As people in technology, we are always connected so let’s use that to build better, stronger relationships within our network.

Hell, I don’t even own a rolodex.

This is one that consistently annoys the crap out of me. It usually happens when someone else has been messing with a layout I’ve developed – usually the type of web developer that uses tables for layout and loves the <font> tag.

When I find that my container div isn’t stretching the full height, it is usually because the HEIGHT property has been specified. Specifying height: 100%; Doesn’t have the effect you might think it would. Removing height: 100%; has the effect of making the parent container extend the full height of the child container, even if the child is a float.

The annoying, uninformative error message.

This message can’t be saved to the Outbox.
The message contains one or more attachments that are too large to be saved in the Outbox. Try deleting some attachments.

Have you ever got this error message before? I use Mail.app IMAP’ing from my GAFYD (Google Apps for Your Domain) account and thought I was going insane when I was getting this error message the other day.

I went in and emptied trash, cleared out a bunch of emails – basically got back to 50% free space, which was moooore than enough for the 5mb attachment I was sending. I also checked my local hard-drive to ensure I had plenty of free space, and I did.

It turns out this error message actually means that the attachment that you are trying to send on hasn’t finished downloading yet. 

A more descriptive error message would be nice!

I have recently moved over the the dark side and have a mac now. Part of what has made that change over so smooth has been VMWare Fusion. I have been very very impressed so far with how it all works, even more so once I reduced the RAM available to my XP VM from 1GB down to 512MB. This improved the performance significantly because OSX had enough resources to be able to run smoothly, therefore the VM benefited.

One of the 2 apps that I am currently using in XP is Netbeans. I realise there is a Mac version, but for JVM reasons I need 1.6, which isn’t available on the Mac just yet. I have found what appears to be a bug.

Whenever I leave Netbeans running when I suspend the VM, the next time I start it, the java process has spiked to 100% and netbeans is virtually unresponsive. Even then when I close Netbeans properlly, the java process remains (still at 98%-100% CPU usage) until I manually kill the process.

The simple workaround is to make sure Netbeans is shutdown before suspending the VM, and ensure that the java process has terminated, but this is not always an option (especially if in a hurry).

I will investigate this a bit further, possibly a VMWare Fusion bug, as I never saw this behaviour in VMWare Workstation running the same VM.

Just installed windows server 2008 for our test team and remoted in to configure it. I set up remote desktop and gave it the max number of connections (which was limited to 2).

I restarted the server to ensure the changes would be applied and logged into a remote desktop session. A colleague then logged in off his machine and it booted me out, sighting someone else had logged into this session.

After a number of searches through the remote desktop settings, it turns out that by default, Windows Server 2008 only allows one remote desktop user per session.

To change this, go to Administrative tools > Terminal Services Configuration and double click on the item “Restrict each user to a single session”. From this window, uncheck the “Restrict each user to a single session” box. Voila! 2 users remote desktop’ed in simultaneously.

So I finally got around to moving my domain to use google apps for your domain. So far I like it, but migrating from 2 years of Gmail use has been tough. I haven’t moved much email yet, though I’m pretty sure that a temporary upgrade to a pro account can take care of that – steps will come in another post once they are completed.

So now it’s time to move my calendars. I run out of 3 calendars, one for timetables (hours worked, uni classes etc), one for due dates (projects, assignments) and one for everything that doesn’t come under either of thsoe 2 categories like personal dates.

I expected it to be an annoying and arduous task, but low and behold, it is extremely simple!

First you need to log into your Gmail account, click settings up the top rightm, choose the calendars tab and export all your calendars.

Unzip the file and keep the .ics files somewhere handy.

Next, log into your Google apps calendar and create the neccesary calendars.

Then click the little arrow next to Add and choose import calendar

From here you select the file you want to import, the calendar you want to import to and voila! Calendar moved from Gmail to Google Apps for your Domain.

So I just got back from watching Wanted… I’m not going to say I didn’t like it, because I did. It just left me feeling a little awkward. I think this quote describes how I felt walking out of there, “It was like a reach around, then I turned around and it was from a guy… now everyone feels a bit awkward” (Please note that I was on a 4way man date, but noone reached for anything).

If I had to sum up the movie for someone going to see it it’d be like this:

“Dude… y’know what’d be cool… if people could shoot bullets and bend them…”
“Yeah, that’d be awesome, let’s make a movie about it!”
“Yeah sweet. We better make sure Angelina Jolie is in it.”

I’m not going to spoil the ending or story line twists or anything, but I will list my favourite and least favourite parts.

FavBits:

• Angelina Jolie getting out of the bath
• Angelina Jolie pashing the guy in slow motion for about 45 seconds
• The main guy smashing the keyboard across his mates face.

Least fav:

• When they flip the cop cars (cool) and land on the bus (still cool) then they magically do a mono/wheelie off the bus and land smoothly on their rear wheels (stupid – made me question my sexuality).
• The bit where the train snapped off and they were in the carriage that crashed ~50m down into a cliff, and survived easily
• The last line of the movie “What have YOU done today?”… Well I sat next to a really fat guy on the train home, and I ate schnitzel, then I went to watch a movie that was almost great, but in the end, just ok…

Overall I didn’t mind it, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought it would be.

Tonight was one of the most frustrating games of indoor cricket I’ve played in a long time. It was the first time we have played at North Wollongong in our 4 seasons in the comp, and I never want to play there again. Every week we hear teams complain about it – the courts are poorly maintained and too small, the umpiring is terrible and the players are a pack of wankers. The 3rd one (barring a couple of exceptions) we knew, but we suspected the rest was just bitter teams.

I hate when an umpire 1. doesn’t know they rules of the game they are umpiring, and 2. deliberatly makes decisions in favour of the team they support (cheats).

There has only been one other centre we have played at that has had an umpire that cheats until now, and she did it both times we played there, blatantly. This frustrated us, but we know to expect it now.

After tonight, I would prefer to play there every week than ever play at North Gong with that umpire tonight. He gave 2 calls of ‘not out’ for the home team where the batsman was at least 1m out. AT LEAST. These were not close calls that went in their favour, these were blatant disregard for the spirit and rules of the game. It made our team angry. We are happy to accept that umpires make mistakes, and not every call goes your way – but when he is clearly basing his decisions on which team is batting, it is wrong. I suggested to a team mate that it is no wonder they make the semi’s every year playing half their games in front of this joker… A guy from the sideline said “yeah, but we’re ahead of you on the table”. I turned and told him “you were ahead of us last year… until we beat you  twice by 100 runs in the semi finals andwe finished second..”

Getting sledged by people from other teams pisses me off. It happened again later on, after bowling a great over, a guy from the sideline sledged the shit out of me. Normally I would flash him a smile and get on with it – but he was a guy that had attacked me before. I walked over to where he was sitting and asked “when do you bat? oh… that’s right, you’re not good enough to play top grade… oh well.. it’s probably more satisfying being the best player in 3rd grade.” He stuttered and had no comeback.

There were a few funny moments – a wanker from their team faced up to the first ball of the over, then missed it, turned to the umpire and asked how many left. I walked over and said “8 minus 1 and you can’t work it out yourself, that does explain a few things”.. He then tried to hit the ball at me and got out. Score 1 to us.

At the end of the game the umpire began to have words with our team (after the 4 nationally accredited umpires questioned the rule he made up). I got the shits, gave him a spray and left.

I am pissed off with cheaters, we lost the game, the umpiring was shit, I have a massive bruise on my leg, yet still – I can’t wait for next week… Am I a sucker for punishment? Yes… but fuck I love my cricket

After making the sickipedia twitter bot, I decided to make another that made use of a little bit more of the Twitter API this time. I call him lyricbot. Basically, you send a reply to lyricbot (after you have followed) with a line from a song and it will have a red hot go at telling you what the song is…

I decided to post some of the code for anyone interested in how I did it.

The bot is written in Python, and uses the python-twitter library for the Twitter API calls. I will apologize upfront, the code is probably disgusting, but this is only the second thing I’ve ever written in python, so I’m still an L plater.

The first thing we want to do is import the 3 libraries we need; re, twitter and urllib2.

import twitter
import re
import urllib2

Next we need to authenticate with the twitter API, then we’ll get the replies in the form of a Status object.

api = twitter.Api(username='lyricbot', password='nottelling:)')
status = api.GetReplies()

Now that we have all the replies sent to that user, we can iterate through them to decipher what people have said:

for stat in status: #iterate through replies
lyric = stat.GetText()[10:] #strip the '@lyricbot ' from the front and grab the text
userN = str(stat.GetUser().GetScreenName()) #grab the name of the user that replied
idno = stat.GetId() #the unique id no of the message. This is for ensuring people don't get multiple replies for one request

Next I parse the string for use in the URL and get the html:

lyric = urllib2.quote(lyric)
f = urllib2.urlopen(url) #open the URL into the stream
html = f.read() #read the url into a string


Once I have the html of the search results, I need to use regular expressions to find the song names from that site.

#compile the regex that finds the first 3 song names returned
re_lyr = re.compile('[123].([A-Za-z0-9].{10,80}).Lyrics', re.DOTALL)
#find the matches for the expression in the html
newRes = re_lyr.findall(html,1)
songs = ''


Once I have the (1, 2 or 3) song results stored in the newRes tuple, I need to check how many (if any) it found, or deal with none being found.

reslen = len(newRes)
if reslen > 0 :
songs = songs+newRes[0] #append to the string that gets sent
if tuplen > 1 :
songs = songs+' '+newRes[1]
if tuplen > 2 :
songs = songs+' '+newRes[2]
else : #if there were no songs found
songs = 'Sorry I couldn\'t find that one!


Now that we have a string to post (either the song names or the fail message), it’s time to send:

api.PostDirectMessage(userN, songs)

That’s about it really.
There will be another post after I launch it properly, probably with some updates.