James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

A good friend of mine up in Brisbane - James McPherson is organising a new Australian tech conference aimed specifically at those who work on Open Source Kernels for this year. So I figured I would use my "awesome promotional powahs!" and spread the word.

Kernel Conference Australia

Do you want to meet the brains behind some of the most innovative, groundbreaking and useful features in Open Source operating systems?

Have you ever wondered what it takes to make useful features or technologies appear in different operating systems?

Some of the finest minds in Open Source operating systems are coming to Brisbane for the first Kernel Conference Australia - come and hear them talk about what they're working on, learn about other operating systems' features, and be inspired to contribute.

Kernel Conference Australia is a Kernel-focused technical conference to be held in Brisbane, Australia, from July 15th to 17th, 2009. Any and all Open Source kernels and the technologies within those kernels are open for discussion. The only hard criteria is that the kernel must be covered by an OSI-approved license.

The Call For Papers is ending at the end of this week and they've only recieved one talk from the Linux Community. I figure we can do better than that. Also it's going to be in Brisbane, remember people, Brisbane is warmer than the southern states during winter.

Flyer

I've been working this afternoon to update our plone offering and I've got to say that I love the buildout system. I can how you could combine it with something like puppet for some very funky foo.

Anyway, one of things I needed to do today was build a second mountpoint.

For those of you who don't know, Plone is slightly different to most other Content Management Systems. It's built on top of the Zope Application Server and Zope has it's DB format. This means that everything in an instance is held as an object within the one file (most routinely called the Data.fs). This Data.fs file is "mounted" at the Zope Internal / point and is where all of the system information as well as the site itself is held.

You can create as many mountpoints (and as many [blah].fs files) as you like, which I'm finding quite handy in dealing with backups and seperation of client data.

In the old system it was quite easy to setup a new mountpoint, just edit the zope.conf file and restart the system. However the new buildout system means that you shouldn't be touching the final zope.conf at all. Instead all of your config foo goes into the buildout.cfg and it's supplementals. So I've had to hunt down how to setup  new mount for a default zeo (plone_hosting) buildout.  Anyway, after a bit of hunting around I found the right magic.

The following is a very basic snippet. It doesn't go into the detailed work you can do with the mounts but it should demonstrate the basic idea.

If you're using as I am, the plone_hosting paster recipe then in your base.cfg find the instance1 section. At the very end of that paste the following in (making changes where necessary)

I'm going to be running a workshop for Not For Profits in the Illawarra. We're going to be covering the cool tech and services available to NFPs in the web2.0 space, including social networking, extranets, and all those cool things which don't cost the earth.

Details can be found here so if you know someone involved with a NFP in the Illawarra who might be interested, point them our way.

7 years ago today.

That's when it happened.

7 years ago today.

We had already been through hell and back and you stuck by me through it all.

7 years ago today.

I asked when everything seemed it's bleakest, and you said yes.

7 years ago today.

My life was made complete.

7 years ago today.

Our lives were joined, never to be seperated.

7 years ago today.

I became the luckiest man alive.

Happy Anniversay Karin, I love you with all my heart and soul.

I watched a good portion of Q and A last night. Specifically the bit dealing with the ISP level Internet filtering proposal put forward by the Government.

Don't have time for an in-depth analysis, so here are some points:

• The only person who supported Steve Conroy on the Panel was Andrew Bolt
• Apparantly it's the Russian Mafia's fault that the dentist was on the list
• The first list was a filter makers list, didn't deny the veracity of the next two lists
• Steve Conroy cannot get his head around the fact that people might not want a blacklist. He seemed to be genuinely confused.
• Still no answer on the "what if the next government decides to block other stuff" question
• Apparantly ACMA review their list every three months to check for dud links. Dentist was still there even after being cleaned up
• Andrew Bolt is truly a piece of work

That's about it for the moment, might watch it again later (thankyou mythtv) and see if I can come up with something more indepth.

Okay, now that I have roughly three litres of filtered waste vegie oil I need to be able to turn it into bio-diesel. In order to do that I'm going to need the following:

• Methonal (99%+ purity)
• Sodium Hydroxide (caustic soda)
• Isopropyl Alcohol
• Distilled Water
• An Acid/Base checking mechanism
• Vineger
• Normal Tap Water

Needless to say I'm also going to need a well ventilated area and preferably rubber gloves and goggles as some of the chemicals mentioned above are incredibly dangerous.

By the way, for anyone who is interested I am following the process as laid out here:

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_mike.html

You know, with all the pain and financial crisiseseses going on around the world sometimes it's good to read some good news for a change.

Also it appears that I missed Ada Lovelace day.

" Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology."

I don't have a single woman in mind when I think of those who excel in technology, rather I think of all the women working both within the IT industry and without who have taken to technology and built new things on it.

I think of the local Breast Cancer Support group here in the Illawarra who have just started classes to teach some of their older members how to use computers. I think of my sister who has slowly come to realisation that she has geek genetic makeup. I think of my daughters who will grow up with technology that I could only have dreamed about when I was a kid.

Speaking of my daughters, I want them to have the choice to go into the field of Information Technology free of any stigma attached to them for their gender. However I'm not going to push them in that direction. If they decide to take up the keyboards of the future then fine by me, but I want them to make up their own minds.

This is what it boils down to I think. Choice. The ability to choose to pursue a goal without the added crapness that is blind prejudice.

Just a quick test to make sure I've set the identi.ca api thingy right in the drupal twitter module.

Just a random thought.

Around the country there are coops for everything. From market gardens, to insurance, banking and more. However, there doesn't seem to be too many energy co-ops.

I wonder what it would take to set one up. I'm thinking it would take the following form (warning this is coming off the top of my head, and hence is most likely to be wrong).

• Each member must be producing enough energy to meet their own needs and be able to contribute to the collective store
• There should be a way to be able to store the energy that each member contributes
• Members should be able to purchase energy from the co-op.
• The co-op might be able to onsell the energy (excess to requirements) to the wider grid.

Setting up an energy co-op would take a lot of work, however I think it might be interesting to chase down what would be required.

Well the first round of filtering has occured, and below is the result:

As you can see, there was a hell of a lot of crud in the unfiltered oil and to be honest if I'd stuck with the paper towel I was initially using, most of it would still be in the oil. However Karin found a set of coffee filters and four filters later, the result is only a smattering of crumbs in the bottom of the bottle which I'm planning on washing out once the actual processing has occured.

The next stage in the processing is going to be titration. Given that this is used vegie oil, the exact levels of caustic soda I need to add to start the reaction are going to be variable.

Of course once this journey is over the next step is to work out how to do it with as little effort as possible and also, what the hell am I going to do with it?