mikal – Page 97 – Made by Mikal

Dave and Busters

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 18, 2006
Post category:Travel

To celebrate a recent launch the team went out to an "adult arcade" called Dave and Busters today. An adult arcade is pretty much what it sounds like -- imagine a huge collection of arcade games, pool tables, bar, and restaurant. I of course had the most American thing I could find, which was a double cheese burger. It was sufficiently huge that I didn't really have dinner, just a light snack. Dave and Busters was cool, and I recommend having a look if you ever see one of them. The food is generic, but of a reasonable quality and quite cheap compared to what you would pay in Australia. The games are expensive, but given I have basically never been to an arcade in Australia I don't know if that is run for the course or not. I had fun, and I suspect that James with his fifty fluid ounces of Guinness did too. Oh, thats 1.47867648 liters by the way.

MySQL User Camp 2006

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 15, 2006
Post category:Conference

I "sort of attended" the MySQL user's camp on the weekend. More on that later. This blog post from the guy who wrote WordPress makes me think I should have made it to more of the sessions. Oh well.

Mi Pueblo

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 6, 2006
Post category:Travel

The phrase "Mi Pueblo" is remarkably over used, which made web surfing for this one hard. For some time, Catherine has been doing some of our food shopping at the little Spanish grocery store in Mountain View. For the first time I went along yesterday (she normally goes when I am at work). Imagine a food shop full of kids running around the place, loud Mexican music playing, where you're the only ones speaking English. It was great fun... Like a very short trip to Mexico. Oh, and it's cheap. Really cheap. For example, half the price of Safeway for Sirloin steak, and most fruit. For some time I've been thinking I should learn some basic Spanish. I really should get around to doing that...

Getting ready to leave Sydney

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 1, 2006
Post category:Travel

I haven't written much about the couple of weeks I've spent in Sydney. Nothing really exciting happened, apart from a trip home to see the kids (the Southern Tablelands were greener than I expected), a visit to CLUG another to SLUG, and a lot of time spent eating at restaurants on King Street in Newtown. I've decided that I like the Sydney train system, but not the trains themselves. The trains fall into several categories: Millennium trains: the standard one would expect from any world class train system. There are hardly any of these, but they're the only ones with screens saying what station is next, and are in a good state of repair. It seems that they're mainly devoted to the tourist-centric airport runs. Tangaras: about 15 years old I'm told. They're ok but nothing special. Craptastics: these are the ones older than Tangaras but with retrofitted air conditioning. They must be about 30 years old from the look of things. They're crap. Craptanics: imagine a Craptastic before it had the air conditioning retrofit. This is that train. At least you can open the windows, which helps let some of the reek of sweaty office workers and teenaged boys…

Go see the stilty building

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 1, 2006
Post category:Travel

If I find myself in New York, New York I should try and see the stilty building of doom, a sky scraper which stands on nine story high stilts so that it could use a site occupied by a church. I can't work out how to deep link to Flickr images, so click these instead! http://www.flickr.com/photos/geneko/253774855/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/musiclover-uk/272615715/

A MythTV Jabber bot

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 29, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

While I love my wife and kids to distraction, the distraction bit is real. Then again, I'm sure they have a counter argument that I tend to end up deep in thought, and which point you could probably push me off my chair and I wouldn't notice. Anyway, that's mostly beside the point. What is relevant is for the first time in nearly a year (since 18 November 2005 to be exact, but who is counting?) I'm alone. All alone. So, apart from watching the West Wing (which I haven't seen before, and is fantastic), sleeping in, and going to a party tonight, I am coding. What I'm writing is a follow on from my night hacking the other day, which was getting PyXMPP working with Google Talk. What I want is a bot which will take IM messages, and execute them using the MythTV front end. Oh, and it will display text using the on screen display if you ask nicely. So, does anyone have any thoughts on if that sort of thing is useful to them? I think it sounds useful to me, but perhaps I'm odd. Back to hacking.

Hypothetically speaking

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 19, 2006
Post category:Conference

Hypothetically speaking, if you needed to write a four hour long presentation (probably around 200 slides), shared with another speaker, and wanted to keep the style consistent and conforming with your approved corporate style, how would you do it? I'm thinking of some sort of intermediate language, which can then be used to generate slides from a template? Is there anything like that out there?

AUUG 2006 Slack talk

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 18, 2006
Post category:Presentations

I gave a talk on how Google deploys software configuration to machines at AUUG 2006, and this reminded me to put the slide deck and paper online. So, here they are: slides in PowerPoint and PDF, as well as the conference paper. Update: Now with URLs that are correct! Sorry for the cut and paste error...

Cat, bag, out

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 16, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

So, I guess the cat is out of the bag then... Stewart and I are working on the finishing stages of a book on MythTV. Amazon now has it listed for pre-order. [btags:]

In Sydney!

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 15, 2006
Post category:Travel

So now I am in Sydney, with Grant and Lindsay (old friends from Canberra). Newtown seems nice, in fact the house itself is very nice. However, the streets are pretty Victorian and built up, which is a bit oppressive. Then again, I am told there are a bunch of parks I haven't seen yet, so I'll delay any further comment until then. It appears it's only about 15 minutes on the train from here to work, which will be nice during the week. More news later...