dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

I've heard a few people at conferences over the last few years stress the importance of saying "Thankyou" to people that contribute to Open Source and organise all the great events and conferences that we are so lucky to have available to us.

I'm currently trying to complete the 2nd in the series of articles "Groovy around the Globe" for Groovy Mag. Whilst collecting the list of names and what they contribute, it's really hit me just how awesome they all are. The recognition I am giving them in the articles is my personal thankyou to them all for their continued efforts. Thankyou. Thankyou. Thankyou.

I was introduced to a new coffee place in Brisbane yesterday - can't believe I hadn't noticed it before. It's called Glen's Espresso and it's on Ann St opposite City Hall.

Anyway - Glen has the whole Keep it Simple (KISS) / Agile approach to his business down pat (he probably doesn't know what Agile is - but I thought it was fun to call him the Agile coffee man anyway!).

A few cool things he has implemented (with my feeble attempts at Agile parallels)

1. You step up and write your name on the cup along with what coffee you want, and stick it on the counter in the queue. SELF ORGANISING TEAMS
2. The coffee cups are lined up in order, but they don't necessarily come out in that order, depending on most efficient use of milk etc. ITERATION BACKLOG
3. You put your right money down on the counter and you are trusted to take the right change, your first coffee is just $1 - again on the trust system. HONESTY AND INTEGRITY
4. Coffee prices are very simple and very clearly displayed (so that number 3. works). PRODUCT BACKLOG
5. There's a nice atmosphere, he's a friendly guy - knew the regulars names and he has some great Asterix and Far Side comic book laid out for people to read and chill out while they wait. KEEP THE CUSTOMER HAPPY
6. He has a unique low-tech "Classifieds" system where people can put up adverts on cups and display on the counter top. Someone was selling a house and a car on the day I was there! I don't think he charges for this - it's just a nice extra for regulars.

Ok - I'm losing the Agile analogy there a bit.

Anyway - what all this allows him to do is concentrate on the main game here... making great coffee. FOCUS ON MAIN DELIVERABLE!

The coffee was excellent - one of the best I've had - so something is obviously working!

We're just in the process of getting one of our startup ideas ready for a public beta launch. The site has an advertising component to it
(for raising money for charity) - and while we currently have the engine all setup, we don't have the advertising inventory sorted yet.
So to show something on the page during the beta period, I am offering a FREE advert to all the business owners that I know. No obligations, nothing... It will help us to demo the product and you'll get some free exposure and clicks.

If you are interested, all I need is:

• A 300x250 medium rectangle advert (Landscape). This can be png, gif, jpg or even flash if you like.
• A website link to where you want the advert to click through to
• Any keywords you want to associate with the advert to make it more relevant to audience (not mandatory - the real system will also have geographic, demographic etc - but for now it's just keywords)

I'll also make sure you have a login to the private beta site so that you can see what it's all about.

Feel free to pass onto anyone else - as long as I vaguely know them - then offer is open to them too. Please send ads to "my first name" at refactor.com.au

Steve

Saw a rather devious comment spam yesterday.

My wife is a Marriage celebrant and is registered on several "portal" sites where potential customers can contact a celebrant via a contact form.

Anyway - my wife got an email via one of the sites yesterday which looked quite genuine - the customer was inquiring about a wedding on a particular date. When she crafted a reply back to them she immediately got a yahoo out of office response with a spam message in it. I suspect her email has also now been added to a spam list.

So it's either
- someone who as written a bot to input valid data into forms trying to trick the receiver into replying, then capturing the address and spamming them back immediately. Some of these sites would have a lot of clients - so wounldn't be hard to write something generic enough to get a lot of responses.
- a genuine request and someone has hacked the person's yahoo account and put a spam out of office reply in there

I'm hoping it's the 2nd one for her sake!

I know most people that read this wouldn't be fooled by something like this - but I thought I'd just quickly post this incase anyone else had been targeted by this little scam.

If you have registered an Australian trademark - this goes onto a public database and some people are trying to take advantage of people's gullibility when it comes to international trademarks.

The letter comes from a company called TMWorldwide - International Catalogue of Trademarks and encourages trademark holders to pay them 1100 Euros to register their TM worldwide. The address & bank details on mine are Sarvar, Hungary - but I'm guessing they could come from anywhere.

I'm sure they probably do put you on some database (to get around trade descriptions) but I called IPAustralia and it is a scam and they have no jurisdiction in this area.

I thought I would have a crack at Project 365. You basically take a picture every day for a year - I know a few people doing it - so thought it would be fun joining in. Today was a Refactor lab day - so my picture for the day is fairly boring... my laptop keyboard which has been getting a pounding lately and is starting to look pretty grubby.

Anyway - I'm not going to post every day's photo to the blog - I'll just put them in a flckr set and comment on them there. I need a very very simple way of doing it to make sure I do it every day and I procrastinate too much on the blog. If you click on the image above it takes you to the set.

Aaron Spence from Panedia also took a rather nice picture of my Kahdo as he came over to drop some stuff off:

http://photos.panedia.com/p1013038409/h3a82fafc#h3a82fafc

Working on a content repository for a client at the moment - have been evaluating JackRabbit and Alfresco as a backend repository for an existing site. Anyway - I was already familiar with Alfresco, but spent a bit of time with JackRabbit today to give a comparison. It's a nice simple implementation of the JCR (JSR-170), but suffers a little from lack of doco when it comes to using it in something other than it's standard configuration.

I needed to test it with Mysql on Tomcat 6 - didn't really have any doco on this - so I added a new page to the wiki. Hopefully this is of use to someone:

http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/JackRabbitOnTomcat6

If you are not into Java and are looking for a way to access JackRabbit, there is WebDAV and also Apache Sling - which provides a RESTful api to JackRabbit. It's in the incubator still - but looks quite nice and has some potential.

Ok this is a rant... after coming off the phone with Canon this my last resort and spleen vent.

After always buying Nikon we recently switched allegiances and bought a Canon IXUS-80 from Kmart in Helensvale for the birth of my 2nd child - it was about $250. After about a couple of months the lens decided to jam. My wife did a search on the net and this is one of the most common problems experienced with this camera - tried all the suggested solutions with no luck. Anyway - we thought "No problem" let's just take it back to Kmart and get a new one... I have always been very impressed with Kmart's no-fuss exchange policy and is probably the number 1 reason I shop at stores like this.

Anyway - for the first time ever, Kmart actually sent the thing away for repair... and we have been waiting several weeks for it now and my wife has been pulling her hair out as she has no camera to take pictures of my daughter. The camera just came back from Canon saying there was "Foreign Body" inside the camera and that we had to pay $200 to get it repaired OR $50 quotation fee to get it back!!

I phoned Canon - apparently there was sand in the camera (why didn't they say that on the quote???) and warranty is invalid. I don't know how there is sand in there - the camera was only at the hospital and home, but meh. She also adamantly denied that they charge $50 quotation fee but it's right there on the piece of paper....

Anyway - not very helpful, and they aren't budging - so all I can now do is buy another (not canon) camera from a store other than Kmart. Shame - the camera was pretty good until this - but I gather from the net there are a lot of problems with this camera lens and if Canon is like this with warranty, then buyer beware!

Saturday 29th November - and it's Barcamp Gold Coast #2. This is the 4th Barcamp in Queensland that I have involved with organising. I must have it pretty down-pat now as I did most of this one on my own. I think keeping the venue the same and the details as much the same as possible as the previous ones really helps things.

Sponsorship was must easier this year as I didn't do T-shirts which sucked a lot of our money last time. I also had a lot of stationery & materials left from the last one. Main sponsors were Griffith Uni (venue), MindWorx People (pizza), Apress (great books again), Refactor (internet) and Gold Coast Business (some Media/PR work)

Anyway - we had about 25 people, many of the same uber-networkers we have come to love at barcamps, such as Des Walsh & Michael Rees - but some new ones too. Thank-you to you all.

Our usual photographer DJ wasn't present, but Aaron Spence did an awesome job of photographs and even took one of his uber cool panedia photos. Thankyou so much Aaron.

We recently got let down my our main client - and as a result are looking for work (no notice given). If anyone just so happens to be reading this who is looking for developers - please get in touch. There are 3 of us - 1 has just been hired but 2 still remaining (me and Rob Nielsen). We do Java, RubyOnRails, Groovy/Grails and lots more - based around Gold Coast/Brisbane. Our consulting company is http://refactor.com.au if you need more info on us. Email me s at dalts dot net to get in touch.

We are also at OSDC next week if anyone wants to catch up with us.