Dear Lazyweb,
I was commenting on a blog by Alec about social media and conferences and looking at the LCA 2007 programme for the first time (as I couldn’t go this year) and spotted this on the research track..
Panel Session by Chris Samuel & Gernot Heiser
Now given that this Chris Samuel couldn’t go to LCA does anyone know who that was ?
“Perl, in a Nutshell” sung by Pudge, thanks for the pointer Alec!
I read on PLOA that Michael Carden briefly tried to open his blog for comments, only to find:
The WordPress UI balked at deleting 194,000 (okay, I ignored it for a while) comment spams. I had to dig in as admin and run a fun sql query on the database to delete all 47 meg of them.
I guess I’ve got a couple of suggestions for Michael to make his life a little easier should he decide to try again.
Automatically discard spam comments older than a month“, that might help (though it’d be nice to be able to adjust the time).Deny From” rules for the offending IP addresses. It’s also worth bumping the number of IP addresses it can ban up, Donna’s blog is up to over 8,000 at the moment!Anyway, I hope that helps some people out.
A good friend and ex-colleague of mine, Shoaib Burq, will be running an afternoon tutorial on the 17th September at RailsConf Europe called Rails GIS Hacks.
Since the advent of Google Maps and a number of other free web APIs for mapping, there has been an exponential increase in the number of mapshups and geography-related web sites. In this tutorial we will introduce what’s happening in the Ruby/Rails Geographic Information space. We will go from defining the key concepts behind the geospatial technology to developing a full-blown mapping application in Rails. In the process, we will make use of a number of cool Rails plug-ins that will let us integrate external geographic data sources as well us share our own data. […]
Sounds like fun.. 🙂
My old friend Alec Muffett has switched his Dropsafe blog to WordPress. Looks a lot nicer!
Last night Donna and I managed to get her first YouTube video online called “From Autism to Artism“, based around her photos from childhood, her paintings and the song “Beautiful Behavioural Mutations” from her Mutation album (and no, I can’t keep up with her creativity!).
Linux.Conf.Au 2008, which will be held right here in Melbourne, has just (( I started writing this around 11am, now I get to post it about 9 hours later.. )) opened up its Call For Papers, some come on in!
The closing date of the CFP will be 20th July 2007.
They are also accepting proposals for mini-confs too.
The mini-conferences are dedicated conference streams for specific communities of interest. The linux.conf.au organisers provide the space, and leave the rest up to the organiser of each mini-conf. Mini-conf speakers and delegates need to register for the main conference to participate.
Go on, give those of us on the LCA 2008 papers committee something exciting to read!
Great news today, Rich Boakes has gotten his doctorate! He’s even got the photos of his viva on his thesis “Semantic Web based Log Analysis for Distributed Systems and Applications“.. 🙂
14:56 : phd awarded. 🙂
Nice one mate!
Update: Rich now has his own blog about his viva voce up.
Inspired by Alec, I just checked using the Great Firewall of China checking site and found out that my site, along with Donna’s, her blog, her podcast, the site for her first book and the web site we set up to promote self-employment for folks on the Autism spectrum, Auties.org, are all blocked!
Presumably it’s working by IP address and so anything that happens to be on that IP address is persona non-grata in China. 🙁
I did a bit of testing and found that VPAC (where I work) is blocked too, as is Melbourne Uni.
In response to a blog from Alec I left the following comment, which is really a “dear lazyweb” question..
Err.. I might be missing something here, but..
What’s the point of twitter ?
AFAICS all you get is out of date information about what someone claimed to be doing some hours, days or weeks ago.
Sorry if I’m being dense..