Category Archives: tech

14 May
2008

Manchester Is Decidedly Undiverse

So last night, more or less on a whim, I popped to the Geekup that was on in Manchester. I was slightly alarmed when I enquired at the bar where the event was and was told there was nothing like that booked for that night … anyway I wandered outside and found 30 or so people looking likely … predominantly t-shirted white males standing around slightly awkwardly, with an above-average ratio of laptop rucksacks :)

It was only after an hour or so when I properly looked around me, I realised I was the only woman there. The only one?? You can’t tell me there are no female geeks in Manchester, I refuse to believe it! Manchester is one of the most vibrant and happening cities I think I’ve ever been to in my life. Seriously, what’s going on? I can only think that either there really are no female geeks in Manchester, or there are – in which case they’re either oblivious to geekup or they’re avoiding it.

So, for what its worth I had a perfectly nice time and chatted to some interesting people (thanks guys!) but I would love to know which scenario above is actually the real explanation. If you have a theory then please post a comment!

08 May
2008

Inaugural Sheffield Geekup

Last night I attended and spoke at the First Sheffield Geekup held at the Fat Cat in Sheffield. My talk was entitled “Deploying Web Projects with Subversion” and you can see the slides for that at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/deploying-web-projects-with-svn/.

Overall I think the event was well-organised, there were certainly plenty of people there and we had a projector, speakers and a room so it pretty much ticked all the boxes. The Fat Cat is a nice pub, with good beer, but for those of us coming from further afield it was a bit tricky to get to as its not exactly handy for the station. The evening was good however I felt that the timings slipped badly – I was the first speaker and although there was somthing else happening earlier on, the talks aimed for 7:30 were actually nearer 9pm … so a couple of pints later than I was expecting my audience to be and I think my talk came across as rather dry as a result! Also since one of the speakers ran over his time completely (now I understand why other geekups sit with a stopwatch and click the slides through for you!), I had about ten minutes after the talks to hand out a couple of business cards and answer a few quick questions before I had to dash off for my train. All of these though are only teething problems and I think everyone had a pretty good time, so well done to Jag for getting it off the ground … here’s to next month!

30 Apr
2008

Geekup Sheffield

I was very pleased to hear that Sheffield is getting its own Geekup event, and that it starts next week on 7th May and will run on the first Wednesday of every month. I was even more pleased to be asked to speak at it – I’ll be giving a 20:20 format (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide = 6 and a half minutes) on “Deploying Web Projects with Subversion”. Come along to The Fat Cat on Alma Street at 6pm for lots of fun, beer, and chatter!
28 Apr
2008

OpenOffice Custom Quotes

I have been driven mad for the last week or so by the silly slanty quote marks that OpenOffice insists on using instead of the normal ones. It is especially annoying when adding code snippets to presentations!

To turn these off go to:
Tools > Autocorrect > Custom Quotes tab
And until the “Replace” boxes.

Hope this saves someone else the annoyances I had.

21 Apr
2008

Installing VMWare Tools

I recently did some work with Debian Etch virtual machines which I downloaded from the good people at thoughtpolice. Here are my notes on getting the VMWare tools added to that machine.

To be able to do anything interesting with a virtual machine, you need to install the VMWare tools onto the virtual machine. With the virtual machine, choose to “Install the VMWare tools” – this does a virtual equivalent of putting the right CD into the machine and you can then mount the CD and run the install program (follow the instructions on the VMWare site, they probably update theirs). I found that under Debian Etch I needed to first use aptitude to install some additional things that the tools needed to get themselves set up. These were:

  • gcc
  • psmisc
  • binutils
  • make
  • the kernel sources for the relevant version – do linux-headers-$(uname -r) to get the right version.

Then run the VMWare tools installation and everything should go through smoothly. If you installed VMWare tools but didn’t get all the setup completed because libraries were missing, you can just re-run the vmware-config-tools.pl script ( in /usr/bin/ for me).

17 Apr
2008

VMWare Virtual Machines on NTFS

I keep having a problem with my virtual machines. I’m running kubuntu but the virtual machines are on an NTFS partition (because I use them from windows occasionally). The error message appears at startup and goes like this:


VMware Player unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!
A log file is available in "/path/to/VM/vmware.log". A core file is available in "/path/to/VM/core". Please request support and include the contents of the log file and core file.
To collect data to submit to VMware support, run "vm-support".
We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.

I looked in the log file and saw that immediately before the “Failed to allocate page” bit it said:


Could not mmap paging file : No such device

Apparently this is a known problem with VMs on an NTFS parition, but luckily the solution is very simple. I found a post which recommended editing the .vmx file and adding the following line:


mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

This worked perfectly for me, I hope it helps someone else too. See also my post about installing vmware tools

17 Apr
2008

Geekup Talk

I did mention recently that I had arranged to speak at the local GeekUp group. Well, the event itself was last night and although I did have speaking nerves I think it went OK.

I’ve uploaded the slides I used to Slideshare, so you can find them here. The talk was entirely based on a talk Ivo Jansch gave at the PHP London conference in February.

I’m trying to work on my speaking skills as I’ve been asked to speak at the Dutch PHP Conference this summer, if you were there and have any comments then let me know! Thanks also to everyone who did come and say hi and give me feedback on the night :)

Edit: I see there is photographic evidence – thanks Deb and Nigel!

14 Apr
2008

GeekSpeakr

I saw this article on linuxchix about the new register of women speakers that has been set up by Brenda Wallace of linuxchix. The site is called geekspeakr and although it claims to be “very alpha” they are currently registering female speakers. I don’t have a lot of speaking experience but it looks interesting and I figure it takes all sorts, so I’m registered … are you?
13 Apr
2008

Speaking at GeekUp in Leeds

This week I will be giving a 20:20 talk at the GeekUp event in Leeds, entitled “Enterprise Web Development”. The 20:20 talk format allows talks with 20 slides, with 20 seconds allowed for each slide. Wish me luck :)

If you’re local to Leeds, I’d love to see you there.

25 Mar
2008

Ubuntu/Kubuntu and mod_rewrite

I just spent a couple of days, on and off, fiddling with my apache setup on a kubuntu box. I had a site with some very weird and scary rewrite rules which I needed to do some development work with and I just could not get the site to work!

The solution was very simple and I found the answer in this post about ubuntu and apache. Basically, AllowOverride is set to None for both / and /var/www/ by default on ubuntu, which is nice and secure but it caught me out on this occasion. Change the settings to AllowOverride All and create a symlink in mods-enabled to mods-available/rewrite.conf and restart apache – everything should then start playing nicely.