Blog entries tagged with "osdclub"

Last Thursday I went to the OSDClub meeting that was hosted by PHPMelb.

Up first was Alec on Twitter and the Social Web. Here he talked a bit about Twitter and Identi.ca, but mostly about other services that could integrate with it, and make it easier to use and also track other people on various services, such as FriendFeed.

This made me realise that I really should start tracking things on Twitter and/or Identi.ca because a lot of information is now being put through these services instead of on blogs or other services. But the signal to noise ratio still concerns me. I don’t think I could handle an unprocessed feed, even of just the people I want to follow.

I could also start posting myself, especially small ideas or updates that wouldn’t necessarily warrant a blog post. But I don’t want to dilute my blog. Thinking about it: I don’t want to dilute my online presence. One option for this is to use something like FriendFeed as my primary presence.

However, I would prefer to keep it all together (and more under my control) on popcorn.cx. Something like Lifestream for WordPress could be an option. Further investigation is required, but it looks like it would also give me an easy way to bring in updates I am already making to other sites such as Flickr and Delicous.

After Alec’s talk, Ben was supposed to talk about OpenID: What it Ain’t. Instead of this Ben talked about what he had been working on at work for the previous few days: bushfirehousing.org, a site to connect people offering temporary housing with people needing temporary housing. It was quite interesting hearing about what they had achieved in a couple of days, including the issues (mainly non-technical) they had encountered.

Last night’s perl mongers meeting (actually an OSDClub meeting) featured two examples of less than ideal organisation.

Paul was up first with a walkthrough of how an online todo list (specifically Hiveminder, but also Remember The Milk). It was then ironic that Paul had not actually finished preparing his presentation. A while ago I had looked at Hiveminder (when Paul sent me a task) and I didn’t get far. Now that I have seen more of what it can do I should give it another look.

The second talk was supposed to have been from Rick about integrating with Jaiku. However, since he was planning an online walkthrough of what he has done instead of an actual presentation he neglected a crucial step: checking ahead of time that he would have an internet connection. Fortunately he did give a brief overview of how he is using microblogging, including as a means of documenting projects, which was then a topic of discussion at the pub.

Speaking of the pub… Last month they messed up our orders so this time we went down the street to a different one, the Redback Brewery Hotel. Overall it was good, not as crowded, not as loud, and not as dark. They did mess up one of the orders, the brought out a pie instead of a steak sandwich, but they noticed it straight away. More importantly they apologised and brought the correct meal out as soon as they could. Approved.

Four years ago I wanted to know how to write tests for online applications. Tonights OSDClub meeting featured a talk that reminded me about Selenium, a test tool for web applications.

Although I had heard of it before, Simon’s simple demonstration made that light go off in my head. Now to work out how it could be used…

Tonights Open Source Developer’s Club meeting was very interesting. Up first was Paul with his talk on mind control which was excellent.

However the second talk by Jon Oxer was more interersing as it reminded me of the plans I had for various projects. Much of Jon’s talk was about how simple it is to control other devices from the parallel port. One example he gave was how he could recieve an SMS on his phone whenever mail was put in his mailbox at home…

Some of the hardware projects that I have been thinking about for a while now are:

• Getting a barcode scanner to make it easy to inventory all my books, dvds and even computers. (and if they don’t have barcodes then I could possibly print some out…)
• Finish wiring up the LCD displays I bought about five years ago to the parallel port.
• Then use the LCD displays for something useful
• SMS gateway. This could be done by interfacing with an actual mobile phone and one possible use to to query my book database to see if I already have a particular book.
• Temperature monitoring using the 1-wire sensors I have had for about 2 years now

However these are unlikely to move until the following move:

• Sort out my computer collection. (this could actually benefit from the barcode scanner)
• Consolidate my linux boxes which includes using an off the shelf router for the routing.

I just have to find the time…