I was pleasantly surprised to note, then, that at the recent TEK-X conference, there was one slot where you could not AVOID seeing a female speaker. While Elizabeth Marie Smith delivered her slightly ranty “Cross Platform PHP”, Ligaya Turmelle was sharing her wisdom in her session “Replication with MySQL”, and in the remaining track there was a community roundtable, with my noble self on the panel! (OK so a panel is not a talk but hey, bear with me!)
I want to say thanks to TEK-X for being an amazing conference, to the community for being generally fabulous, and to the women in particular for being awesome beyond belief – this was a good day :)
I’m so excited about the unconference, although I don’t know how our wider attendees will take to it as it hasn’t been done before locally. In order to include as many people as possible (and to keep the admin overhead to a minimum) we’ll schedule during the conference, on a first-come, first-served basis. This avoids the in-crowd getting voted into all the slots in advance; the uncon is for everyone to take part, not just for the people who are already well known! The uncon will also give us space to include extra on-demand sessions where people are wanting to see more about a particular topic, or see a demo of something a speaker mentions in a talk. Managing a changing schedule in real time will be interesting, we’re planning a two-pronged approach with twitter and Joind.in and I’m hoping this will allow attendees to hear about things they want to see in time to actually see them!
Its a new venture and I’m really interested to see how it turns out … if you’re coming to the conference then I hope you will give the uncon a look (in between the other awesome sessions on the schedule of course) and also take the time to share your thoughts on this and on the event as a whole. If you’re going to be there – leave a comment and let me know :)
In real terms, not a whole lot has happened in the house this year. I’m not exactly sure what we did with our time but Kevin changed job twice and I’ve been pretty busy so home improvements have definitely been getting neglected! One major thing we did, which I absolutely love, is we decorated my office (scroll down to see the “after” photos!). I have spent quite an insane amount of time at this desk over the last few months, between working, writing, preparing talks, and who knows what else, so having a place that suits me so well makes that so much easier! Control over my environment and only the cat to interrupt me most of the time is my idea of a good working environment! I’ve been working from home for almost 2 and a half years, and still enjoy this as much as ever, which is good news since although Ibuildings now has an office in Sheffield, that’s still a commute that is way too crazy to do regularly.
The office looks over the garden and the garden is one part of the house project which is really coming together in a way that I like. Looking at those initial photos of the space, and remembering that we just strimmed the 4-foot-high weeds down to a couple of inches for our housewarming party … it was a junk yard, really. And now, the flowerbeds I dug out last year have everything just a bit bigger and better this year, and mum has brought me lots of new plants. The climbers I planted along the edge of the nasty garage are getting the idea and growing themselves into beautiful flowery garage-hiding wallpaper (well and they’re growing across and onto everything else that gets close to them also, I had to rescue the barbecue from getting assimilated this week!) After laying the lawn about 18 months ago, and the patio last summer, we now have an apple tree growing in the lawn and some furniture for the patio … all in all its quite a suburban garden:
For me the garden space always had the potential for this, and now I’ve got my own herb garden, annual flowering things (plus a few pretty weeds that I’m allowing to remain), and rhubarb, it really does feel like home!
For the coming year, we’re hoping to sort out our basement/damp problems, once and for all … if we can afford it!
I was privileged to get a tutorial slot alongside my good friend Matthew Weier O’Phinney for a second consecutive year. This year we presented “PHP Best Practices” which was a lot of fun. We squabbled over topics and took turns presenting them from our own point of view. A description of the session and a link to the slides are on the joind.in page if you are interested.
Now that this talk is finally over, I don’t mind admitting that this was the one that I regretted submitting pretty much from the day it was accepted until the day I delivered it, including some rather sleepless nights. It was an adaptation of my “git folks are fanbois” bar rant but I got so concerned that I wasn’t supporting my accusations with facts that it evolved into a very coherent evaluation of what I consider to be the four main version control tools around at the moment: Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar and Git. The talk went over better than I could ever have dreamed, and again you can find description, feedback and slides on the relevant joind.in page. If someone could please stop me next time I submit a talk that needs as much work as this, that would be awesome!
I almost didn’t submit this talk, since its so very difficult to get a community talk accepted at the big conferences. They usually have one, at most, and I wasn’t sure I was in the top one of submitters on this topic. But, I had a transatlantic airfare to justify and I figured it might make a good second talk – I also know Cal well enough to know he likes a slightly contraversial take on these things. When he accepted it I was fairly surprised and actually quite nervous about spending an hour talking about myself in a conference session! I spoke without slides, so there aren’t any, but you can read the outline and feedback on joind.in. In a nutshell: get out and do things, you will reap the benefits one day.
I had a great time in Chicago, and also managed some touristy outings into Chicago:
The conference itself was quite a rollercoaster, not least because every session I delivered was written from scratch for this conference and I spoke at two other big events this year already – 4 sessions over 4 days is a tall order however you look at it and I had pushed my own boundaries a bit with the talks I submitted (for the record, I submitted plenty of perfectly nice, ordinary, technical talks that somehow didn’t make the cut!) On the final morning I delivered the career talk and then immediately sat on the community panel. I was aware of people saying to me “have you seen twitter?” but I had to turn around between sessions so I just nodded, smiled, and got settled for the next session. The upshot of that was that I sat in Marco’s closing remarks and read 2 hours worth of tweets about me, plus all the joind.in feedback on both sessions, all in one go.
At the risk of understatement, the feedback was totally out of this world, I couldn’t believe how well the sessions had gone over and it took me about 3 days to get over the shock … which is another reason it took me so long to write this post.
I’d like to say thanks to everyone who was there, left feedback, helped me prepare or just showed up to the conference and joined in the event as a whole. Stay in touch and I’ll see you all next year :)
I’ve now had the machine more than 18 months and I’ve been using it for events and keeping it by the bed pretty much ever since. However this year I’m speaking at TEK-X in Chicago and found myself wondering if I should get a new little machine to take with me. A few months back I upgraded the RAM in the machine (it had 512 MB originally!), and I came to the conclusion that actually, I didn’t need to splash out for a new netbook since with a bit more memory, its pretty usable.
Instead of replacing the machine, I bought the extended battery for the aspireone, taking me from about 2 hours to about 6 (I think, haven’t tried this battery life in anger yet). Its chunky, but not offensive:
It is quite a bit heavier than the old one – my original post about getting the aspireone weighed it with its original battery at 971g and with the extended battery, its 1274g, which is still only half the weight of my current work laptop.
Reading back to that original post about the netbook it was pretty obvious that I was hating that operating system. A couple of years ago, the support for aspireone in Ubuntu Netbook Remix became usable, and I installed that. Its been fabulous and I had no intention to do anything more than upgrade … until someone at OggCamp showed me they had the Kubuntu Netbook edition on their netbook.
It is shiny and blue, and since I use KDE on my laptop I couldn’t resist and I upgraded it with a week to go before I take it as my only machine as a speaker at a conference!
I haven’t spent a lot of money on the upgrades, the battery was about 50 GBP and the RAM came out of something else. I did have a large capacity SD card in the expansion slot since I only have 8GB hard drive. Then there was a problem with the machine suspending with the expansion slot in use and at around the same time I got a camera that takes SD … so I put my big card into there instead :) I don’t keep data on the netbook so its not an issue for me. I’ll be flying to Chicago for Tek in a few days, and presenting off my netbook as usual. For a budget machine with a little bit of love and attention added in, “Merry” (short for Merope) the netbook has been quite a fabulous investment!
Let me know what you think, and if you have any other advice you’d give to someone who isn’t yet speaking.
I spoke again this year, it seemed to me like since there was voting on the talks, if my talk wouldn’t be a good fit then I wouldn’t get a slot! So I did put in a talk about source control; a topic that I’ll be speaking on in a couple of weeks at TEK-X in Chicago and one that I still feel a little bit wobbly about. Taking the main stage to give a hastily-reduced version of the talk to such a well qualified audience and coming off the stage to feel like it went OK was an excellent preparation for my next speaking event and I got chatting to all sorts of people while I was there. I’m not really a linux nut but I do have ubuntu or kubuntu installed on everything, and it was great to hear a bit more about so many aspects of technology that I use but don’t know much about.
The event ended in the traditional live podcast with all the presenters of Linux Outlaws and the Ubuntu UK Podcast all on stage at once. This is always good fun and there were some laughs from the crowd as always.
All in all, a great event, and I’m very much looking forward to next year’s!
Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [2] Access denied.
Further investigation led me to this forum post – web services are separate users and you must first set them up through the admin screens – and make sure also to allocate roles to them.
The slight pitfall at this point is that you create a username and an API key – these then become the apiUser and apiKey variables mentioned in the documentation. The key is basically a password, its starred out in the settings and you have to enter it twice. Now I know that, I can log in to my service! Hope this helps someone else get to the point faster than I did.