Five Minutes

First, Shalom wireless news: we now have coverage of the first floor common room (which is next to the dining room, for those who haven’t quite figured out the building layout yet) and the couches at the top of the stairs. The Internet is spotty and not especially quick, but it does work. Massive thanks to John Ferlito, Ian Beardslee, Steve Walsh, Andy Kirkpatrick and the people whose names I didn’t catch but who helped while getting our insanely hackish wireless network happening, particularly Ian’s friend with the OpenWRT-fu.

In non-Shalom-wireless news, there was a party tonight. It was good, since it involves an open bar and free swag. Of course, said bar and swag led to… the Linux ninja!

Moving right along, the bar tab partway through the night can be seen below. I feel sorry for whomever’s Google corporate credit card is being used.

Still, I think everyone had a good time. Much networking (of the social variety) took place, which is always excellent. The dancing, however…

Anyway, in other news, the PostgreSQL talks I went to today (the ones before and after lunch) were terrific. I think you would have learned something from those sessions pretty much regardless of your experience with Postgres, which is the sign of a really good talk. Kudos to the organisers in general for shuffling the rooms allocated to each talk around after lunch, too — the Postgres talk, for one, really benefitted from the larger room.

Before I go to bed, a question. Can anyone explain how the fan seen below, which is in one of the Shalom common areas, is supposed to work? Note the length of the power cable attached to it and the location of the power point.

Truly, a mystery for the ages.

Just ran into some orange shirted guys while warwalking around Shalom. Basically, the deal with wireless at present is this: if you are immediately around room 113 (or 213, or maybe G13), chances are you can access wireless. If you are anywhere else, chances are you cannot. Unfortunately, this doesn’t encompass any common areas except for maybe the first floor pool room — it didn’t work for me, but if you have a good wireless chipset or coathanger antenna or something, you might have more luck.

As I understand it, there’s just no way to get LCA network infrastructure into anywhere more useful in Shalom, and after talking to them, they (for understandable reasons) won’t let us run a cat 5 cable down to the first floor common room or somewhere equally useful. Therefore, it looks like we may be, as the technical term goes, SOL.

As further proof that God exists and His name is Steve Walsh, I present the following images documenting how the Frankenet providing Internet access to the Shalom common room…

The overall setup. Note the iBurst card on the laptop at left.

The iBurst card in close-up. I think Steve’s very thankful he doesn’t pay per megabyte at the moment.

GKrellM on the laptop, showing the Internet usage — which, given it’s shaped to 64 kBps, is pretty hefty.

Courtesy of the organisers and the persistent Steve Walsh, we now have some wireless access for the evening in the first floor common room in Shalom College. Apparently something more permanent will be in place later, but for now, it’s working.

Day one of LCA 2007. Went to Jeff’s tremendously entertaining conference opening, dealt with a server at work that managed to fall over while Adam and I were still on the plane yesterday, and finally decided that I could skip a few sessions and check out Sydney City.

Of course, what that really means is that I went to Circular Quay, went over the Harbour Bridge, got a ferry across the harbour, walked around the Opera House, and got incredibly cheesed off at the price of going up Sydney Tower. I think that gives me the authentic Sydney tourist experience in three hours flat.

Now back at the Pavillion sucking up some sweet, sweet wireless. There was talk on the Shalom whiteboard of there being a New Zealanders dinner (with us West Islanders invited too), but I think it’ll end up just being a quiet dinner at one of the restaurants on Anzac Parade and an early night, because let’s face it, there’s not going to be too many more from here.

Tomorrow: Chris Blizzard, Jokosher and tonnes of Postgres.

It’s been one of the less eventual day’s travel in my life, and I’m glad of that. Suffice it to say that the flight was efficient, the taxi ride from the airport easy, and checking into the college simple enough once a working intercom was found.

So, what of the conference and Sydney? Hard to make a definitive call after less than eight hours, but first impressions are positive. The conference Internet access is yet to be enabled (It was enabled on Monday morning, so no complaints there.), but since the conference proper doesn’t start until tomorrow that’s hardly a big deal, although it did cause a little consternation while trying to work out the arrangements for getting to the Löwenbräu, since the details were on the Wiki.

Once there, though, a good time was had by all. I think rather more people showed up than Steve, who organised it (and was quoted late in the night as saying, If I do this again in Melbourne (LCA 2008), shoot me) or the Löwenbräu staff expected, but it still went off without a hitch. Adam and I even managed to find our way back to UNSW without help, which surprised me a tad.

Beyond that, I can’t really comment on Sydney. We did get a really quick look at the bridge and Opera House from Circular Quay, which at least means that I probably have now qualified as Australian under some sort of eastern states metric.

Really, though, it’s just good to be here. The conversations about DRM and PHP on the bus, Dayvd stoking the vi/emacs war at dinner… the next week promises to be enjoyably geeky. Both Disco Stu and I can’t wait!

In a little over twelve hours, I’ll be on a plane to Sydney for LCA. I imagine there’ll be blog entries galore from that point on.

So long as I don’t get food poisoning and a major allergic reaction to anti-nausea medication again, at least.

Anyway, Sydney here I come!