Palegoldenrod

Hi guys! Let me fill you in (quickly) on what has been happening in the last week:

• I experienced my first tremor in the wee hours of the morning last week. It measured 3 on the Richter scale. I woke up to a bit of shaking, then went “cool” and went back to sleep. It was all good.
• I went on a small bus tour of Santiago (solo) and found some other cool places that I want to see (that I didn’t reach on foot in my last expedition). I’ll go back there soon and get some photos for you – after the photos of the poorer neighbourhoods your head will spin when I show you Providencia.
• I enrolled in a Spanish school in nearby Bellavista. I start my beginner’s course tomorrow
• I finally got bootcamp up and running on my laptop with WinXP Pro SP2 and Parallels (Parallels can mount a bootcamp drive, which is pretty handy)
• I went out for dinner to a nearby Chilean restaurant with Dane and ate a traditional Chilean dish: Pastel de Choclo. Sort of Chile’s version of a shepard’s pie, but still very different. It had more spices, the mince was more like finely chopped steak rather than fatty mince, and the top was some floury meal rather than potatoe. Oh, and the meaty part had vegetables and olives in there too. It was really nice.

I also just got back from an overnight stay at nearby Viñya del Mar – Dane and I caught a bus out to Viñya and then went for a wander around Viñya, Valparaiso and Con Cón. This area is where a lot of city-siders go to holiday (Dane likened it to New South Wales’ Coffs Harbour). Its about 2 hours bus ride from Santiago (a return bus ticket cost me about AU$15 if I got the worst exchange rate in the world) and the bus was a really nice coach with reclining seats, tvs etc.

We went through wine country and over to the coast where we had a nice reasonably warm Saturday. Valparaiso was one of the first cities settled by Spanish colonists and had a lot of historical buildings and museums relating to the first settlement and initial growth. It is also very arty – many young people sitting around drawing or painting, and the ascensors (lifts up the side of a steep hill) were tiny old wooden beasties which are pretty cool too. The architecture continues to astound me – the buildings here are so beautiful and apparently almost everything is a national monument, hahaha.

I bought 2 spanish books at a local market so I can get used to reading spanish – George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and a book of Chilean folktales for children. Nice combo, eh? Hahaha, well they should both be interesting reading!

We took a bus around to Con Cón to have what Dane declared as “the best empanadas in the world” only to find the cafe closed. We resorted to the shop next door which was cheap and very full of locals. Empanadas are fried pastries, usually with cheese inside but you can get all sorts of interesting fillings. I think they’re awesome, but I’m sure my arteries think otherwise!

Anyway, its raining now and getting very cold. We think there might be snow on the mountains in the morning – the first snow of the winter. And tomorrow I go to my first Spanish class (yay!).

I added some pictures to my flickr account. Tomorrow I’ll try to get a worpress plugin working so I can easily add Flickr photos into my posts.

Catch you later, n00bs.

On the first afternoon I arrived in Chile, while my cousin Dane and I were walking the dog, we passed two young men putting up a sign in Spanish. I tried to read it – “The freedom to decide. Protest against the dictatorship of the Constitutional Tribunal”. Dane started telling me about how common protests were in the city and that if I stayed I would almost certainly have an experience with tear gas. I thought that was interesting, especially given that Chile is improving month by month and when compared with the country under Pinochet’s rule I would have thought they’d have little to complain about such that it required a protest, let alone tear gas.

So off I went today, on my own, for a walk. I wandered from Recoleta down through Barrio Bellavista and into the city to Santa Lucia by lunch time, where I happened upon a large group of people preparing to protest. And the media. And a whole swarm of police. And some riot vans. And some armored water cannon vehicles. Not that they were required, it was very peaceful.

The story is this – more than a year ago, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet (a paediatrician and single mother) noted that the morning-after pill was expensive and was effectively unavailable to poor women (who incidentally are in most need of assistance with contraception). She authorised a move to make the morning-after pill available for free to all women over 14 years.

Since that time, the president’s right-wing opponents (read: Catholic conservatives and wealthy male business owners) have taken the matter to the tribunal declaring that the morning-after pill was not a contraceptive but an abortive, and that as such was illegal (abortion for any reason has been illegal under Chilean law since around the end of Pinochet’s rule).

The tribunal agreed and the directive from the president was overturned. Apparently there is no way to appeal a tribunal decision. This didn’t make the morning-after pill illegal, it just overturned the decision for public clinics to provide it. Which is weird… if they decided it was illegal to use it to abort, why not enforce this across the board rather than allowing those that can afford to pay for the drug (or for a doctor to prescribe it in a private clinic) to step around the law?

So a lot of women (and not a few men) gathered together to show their displeasure, as expressing oneself seems to be something highly encouraged in Chile (maybe after such restrictions as Pinochet?) and the protest, while serious, appeared to be in good spirits and peaceful.

I had a bit of a sticky beek at Santa Lucia and then went about my walk through the rest of the city, and eventually found my way to Plaza de Armas, the main plaza in the centre of the CBD. I was standing just in front of the church when a group of police (complete with helmets and bullet-proof jackets) appeared, and their favourite little riot van. Not long after this the protesters arrived as well. Just before they entered the plaza the police closed the gates to the church (kindly informed those inside that no, they would not open the gates) and then blocked off some side roads with other police.

At first I thought they were moving through the plaza on the way to the tribunal, but when they stopped it appeared that they were specifically protesting against the church on this one. As I found myself sandwiched between the church wall, a bunch of armoured cops and a large group of protesters – none of whom I could understand – as well as a few dodgey (cough – pickpocket) looking young men, I thought it prudent to promptly move on from the plaza so I am not sure if they did continue to the Tribunal building. It was only a block or two away so I’m guessing they got there unless the police stopped them.

I did see a single man with a sign standing in front of the Tribunal, but I couldn’t quite make out the message on his billboard, let alone translate it into English.

Anyway, so ends my first experience walking alone in the CBD, and my first Chilean protest. No tear gas this time, but Dane tells me that the May Day protests usually get a bit heated and occasionally end with people interfering with cables for power supply among other things, which of course pretty much guarantees a response from the police. I might stay home for that one

Other info on the protest and the reason for it (all in English):

• Reuters – Court blocks Chile move on morning-after pill
• International Herald Tribune – Dueling protests support, oppose ban on free morning-after pill in Chile
• Catholic News Agency – Bishop Goic calls for end to attempts to distribute abortion pill

Hi all.

Here is a very groggy Carly making her first video blog post evar, from Chile. Please forgive me for the badness… its just… bad. And if you’re wondering about my eyes, they are a touch irritated by the combination of dry heat and pollution

Also, my concept of distance was a bit skewed at time of recording – we are very close to Santiago the suburb, but a bit more than 10 minutes walk from the CBD itself. It took about 10-15 minutes on the metro to get there (underground train). Apologies.

Hi guys.

I have made it safely to Santiago de Chile – I arrived at lunch time today (an hour ahead of schedule) after a 15 hour flight via Auckland. The flight was easier than I expected, though my chair didn’t recline at all which made for a fun and somewhat uncomfortable night.

But here I am after having spent the afternoon with my cousin Dane, who I have discovered all over again as being all types of awesome (and in addition we like a lot of the same foods, music genres and music artists, have similar political views, etc).

We’ve been for a bit of a walk through the blocks near his place and it is still hard to feel like I am really here. It is really weird to hear the kids calling out Spanish as they play in the street tonight.

There is very, very little English is spoken here, lol. Dane has arranged for a friend to help teach me Spanish (Thanks, Dane!) and then we are going to go shopping tomorrow and probably hanging out with his partner Marcelo which should be cool.

Anyway, I’m pretty tired (read: brain is more retarded than usual) so I’ll finish up there and post again in a few days.

I heart you guys!

Carly

I’ve been working at a pretty cool little web development company called Izilla for about the last 2 years, and today is my last day here for a while. The guys have graciously allowed me to take a six month sabbatical to travel, starting this weekend, and tonight we will all head out for some food and drinks.

I’d like to take the opportunity to do something I haven’t done before – plug Izilla and maybe more importantly, the guys who work there.

At Izilla my position is officially Senior Developer / Analyst but I have been wearing a few hats:

• project manager of a portfolio of web projects – usually new developments or significant enhancements to existing sites, and also long term management of a few maintenance projects
• process review manager – responsible for review of the software development process and for recommending and implementing improvements to the process; reviewing internal development standards and skills;
• managing developer meetings – implement and run regular developer meetings aimed at covering interesting events within the company as well as sharing technical knowledge on solutions implemented, techniques used, advances or improvements in technology, development standards and best practice, training sessions etc
• a few other bits and pieces such as business analysis mentoring, assistance with other projects, product and tool evaluation, input on business service offerings etc

As such I’ve had the opportunity to work with almost everyone at Izilla in some way or other. While I have enjoyed most of my work at Izilla and the various projects I have worked on, I’d like to touch on the most recent site development I have managed since early last year –

SecureNSW – NSW Counter Terrorism Website

The SecureNSW Working Group, made up of members of the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet and the NSW Police Force engaged Izilla to develop the SecureNSW website – branding / logo design, page design, implement Izilla’s Cognition ECM for content management as well as carry out custom development as required.

I managed the website development project on Izilla’s side, from running the initial workshops in the requirements gathering phase, developing the functional specification, co-ordinating the development, QA and UAT phases and Izilla teams involved as well as the deployment live and ongoing maintenance and enhancements. My core team included:

• Ilona Leibbrandt – account manager
• Matt Thompson – lead developer and deployment manager
• Chris Good – developer
• Llewellyn Robinson – developer
• Amos Robinson – developer
• Mark Davies – site branding and concept designs
• Matt Stow – front end development and design implementation
• Elena Yermakova – quality assurance
• Dean Thompson – content preparation and entry

My team worked well together and produced a sweet final product. I’m proud of what they have done, and in case you stumbled here looking for info on one of these guys, would wholeheartedly recommend any of them!

I’d like to thank the secureNSW working group from the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet and the NSW Police Force for the opportunity to work on such an interesting project and see it evolve from concept into reality. It was a pleasure working with you, and I hope to see the site grow further in the future! Also thanks to Holly Robertson of the Department of Premier and Cabinet for all her hard work managing the project on DPC’s side.

Izilla – The Team

What can I say? They are cool people, and work well as a team. For those of you who may not know, I can tell you the following about the group at Izilla, especially in the Newcastle Development HQ:

• They care about quality. They take pride in their work.
• They actually develop to web standards and good design principles. I’ve come across some web development shops that don’t seem to care about web standards, accessibility or compatibility with browsers other than Internet Explorer – or they charge more for the “luxury”. Izilla produces accessible, semantic (no table-based layouts here), compliant markup and CSS as a standard. The team wouldn’t want to send anything less out the door – its a matter of pride.
• They have revived the age-old tradition of high-fives. (Nice work, Amos, hahaha)
• They play a wicked Mario Kart during breaks Who has the trophy at the moment guys? Elena? lol
• They get along well together and have a sense of humour. Lunch and a beer at the pub on Thursday is a ritual.
• They know their stuff. Both our design and development department excel at their specialties and are continually improving their skills with enthusiasm. The vibe is good in the office

And if you’re thinking it, no this is not a sales pitch. This is me high-fiving the guys I work with, because they do their job well. And I want everyone to know

I had fun working with you all – thanks for the good times, and Izilla – thanks for the opportunity to pursue my dream of travel. I’ll keep you posted of my adventures and see you in six months!

Carly Lyddiard

In keeping with my plans to keep PGR as useless information only I have decided to shift all my tech and dev related posts over to KleeneCode. All future tech or dev posts will be posted there (I’ll prolly add a list of my recent KC posts to PGR at some point).

This should make you all happy. The sensible people among you will probably want to go and read KleeneCode and not be distracted by my rants. Those who are more interested in entertainment than information can stay here at PGR and enjoy my usual hodgepodge of stuph.

KleeneCode is a collaborative project, founded by Amos and I, aimed at pooling our technical knowledge and maybe the knowledge of a few others in the process. It should be interesting. Well, actually Amos‘ stuph will probably be more interesting because he is far more advanced than I. My posts are more likely to be either at a beginner’s level technically, or dealing with such boring things as business analysis and team management techniques among other things.

I am planning to use PGR as my main travel blog when I leave for South America (yes, three weeks away) and hopefully I can even post regularly for once! So enjoy both KleeneCode and Palegoldenrod as I will endeavour to keep both active.

I bought my ticket last night. I finally forked out for it, and I have my little e-Ticket in my little e-Hands. At 11am on Saturday April 19, I will be leaving Australia bound for the perils and adventures of Santiago de Chile. high five!

Things I have learnt so far, and I haven’t even left yet:

• 3 months is not much time to plan a long trip
• there may be significant savings if you buy straight from the airline rather than via a travel agent (in my case, around a AU$1000 difference for the same flight on the same airline)
• round the world tickets can be a pain in the butt. I was planning on buying one of OneWorld’s 5 continent tickets, and even checked my itinerary on both of their online tools (one checks the number of legs in the right areas and the other checks that a OneWorld carrier can make a flight between those two points). This is not enough – you see, the carrier checker doesn’t tell you if the flight that is available for an airline that is available for your type of ticket. I went through 3 or 4 itineraries before I got sick of it and just bought a simple ticket straight to Santiago.
• vaccinations hurt. I think the Typhoid one was the fun one. d’oh.
• rabies vaccinations are expensive in Australia – 3 needles at about $120 a pop. And if you get bitten, all it does is buy you an extra 24 hours to get to a hospital to get a bunch more injections anyway. hmmm
• the current value of the Australian dollar (against the US dollar) makes it a great time to buy flights! Much of the travel industry is based on US dollar value, so you get more travel for your money at times like these.
• even if you get rid of clutter regularly, you will always, always have too much stuff when it comes time to get rid of it.
• I am terrible at learning languages. errr. Soy no hablo espanol muy bien.

Catch you later, you crazy cats.

I am attempting to reduce the amount of junk I am taking with me when I go, and also dump anything of value that might increase my security risk any higher than it will already be for a white female travelling solo in developing nations and poverty stricken areas. My laptop was the first problem on my list… I want to take a machine with me so I can get a bit of work done on the road – I may be away from internet cafes for periods at a time, or might even take a short lease and want to tinker from there. But my 17″ Macbook Pro was a problem – the size, the weight, the value (about AU$4400 when I bought it a year ago) and the shiny “look at me” (read:”steal from me”) factor.

After doing some research, I bought me a most awesome little black EeePC to take with me when I go. At AU$460 from JB Hifi, it’s about 8″ across and is currently running its native Xandros, and eeeXubuntu from a USB stick, and will shortly have an nLitened version of WinXP available to it on a 16 GB high speed SD card. My only need for Windows is to have a .NET development platform, but as much as possible I’ll be using probably Ubuntu and tinkering either with Ruby on Rails development or Mono.

I was anticipating great things from Apple at the MacWorld Expo earlier this year, especially in the ultraportable / subnotebook area. I am disappointed with the result. While technologically the Macbook Air is cool, it achieves very little for most people – its not that much thinner than other laptops, but admittedly is probably lighter for business users to carry. I don’t think it is revolutionary. For me, the thinness wouldn’t make me want to buy it either for travel or for work – and I tote my MacBook pro to work every day!

I see forum posts everywhere wistfully referring to the 12″ powerbooks and wondering where they went, when Apple will once again provide a smaller, more portable model of laptop. If one had been released I would have bought it, even though it may have set me back a few thousand. But instead I surveyed the current market – a few obscure models from Fujitsu; the incredibly expensive and ugly Toshiba portable series; one or two others; or the Asus EEE PC for under AU$500.

Although I was disappointed with only having the 4GB available in Australia (I was hoping to get the 8GB at least), it was still too good an opportunity to pass up. I am looking forward to the next set of models from Asus, as well as the competition which is already creeping out in this market – the Cloudbook was released recently and others are rumoured to be on their way.

Hardware

My model has a CPU of 900MHz, 2GB of RAM (upgraded by me, 2GB of SO-DIMM cost me about $70 from the local computer fair) and 4GB of disk space on a solid state hard drive. The machine has an SD card slot which I filled with a 16GB A-Data Class 6 SD Card (via eBay, about AU$100 last check).

The screen display is small, but clear. The first thing I noticed was how many web sites are fixed width and require horizontal scrolling. There are even some sites which try to be helpful but fail miserably – I went to one flight-planning website where the flash flight planner resized itself to fit in the browser window. Very nice – but impossible to use on such a small screen as it also downsized the text and toolbars to make them unreadable. I’d probably prefer to use the VGA-out and work from a larger screen if I were doing solid work for a time, but for most things it is fine.

I don’t like the mouse button at all – it feels cheap and tacky. Its a single physical piece, but actually represents two mouse buttons – clicking on the left end is a left click, and clicking on the right end is a right click. There is no discernible line to divide the two, and the click itself is… cludgy? I’m not sure how to explain it. It requires a fair bit of pressure in the right place to carry out the click, and feels like it will be the first thing to go.

I’m also not a huge fan of the touch pad, but I’ve yet to play too much with the sensitivity settings so perhaps I can get it to feel more natural. Amos tells me that I may have been spoilt by my Mac touchpad, hehehe.

With a mouse attached, the only thing left to play with is the keyboard. Now this is really weird – it feels tiny when you start using it. I had a lot of trouble typing solid chunks of text when I first started. But after using it for an hour, I was fine. You may not appreciate how cool that is unless you see how chubby my fingers are and how clumsy I am . Returning to a full sized machine and a full sized keyboard is a really shocking experience. You may feel like a tiny Alice in a giant wonderland, gaping in astonishment at such a large screen. You’ll probably even have trouble typing on that normal sized keyboard for a little while until your fingers adjust.

It is very light, feels solid and sturdy and if you have decent sized cargo pants it will probably fit in a pocket.

You can find full tech specs at the Asus EeePC site.

Xandros

The EeePC comes with the Xandros operating system by default. This is a variant of Linux, and the out-of-the-box setup has the OS running in basic mode. Big icons, applications named by function rather than by product name (e.g. the music player is called music player). I was surprised to see that upon initial inspection the graphic skin of the OS is very similar to Windows. Enough so that even after my father played with one on store display for a while, he took it to be running Windows. This may go a long way to helping encourage those users that are traditionally ma and pa Windows users over to Linux, without even really knowing that they have been coaxed away. And it is such a simple system that they can’t really go wrong (although more on that below).

Since having the system I have installed a small module that allows me to get to advanced mode for Xandros – I actually have a desktop and menu access to all the tools one would require, and then of course synaptics to install other fun things. There are a few weird things – if you do a full update in synaptics (or apt) you may find Firefox will crash on you until you apply a specific fix (d’oh); until you do a bios update you may also find that the system runs at about 630MHz instead of its 900MHz claimed.

Xandros in its provided form also doesn’t recognise any more than 1GB of RAM, which is a little disappointing. Not being confident with compiling kernels, I am likely to just switch OSs to get something that will recognise it and will require less effort and frustration on my part.

It appears that EeePCs will soon be available with Windows pre-installed, if they aren’t already.

Capabilities

I’ve yet to push it fully, but it looks impressive. There are plenty of people using EeePCs to run World of Warcraft (come on now, even if you don’t like WoW you have to admit that its cool that this little thing can run it), using Visual Studio, running OS X, you name it.

For Travel

There are already a bunch of people producing travel power adapter kits for the EeePC, depending on your operating system and device of choice you can use 3G or other networks for almost global wireless internet connectivity. Asus announced that a future version of the EeePC will come with Wimax built in.

Conclusion

For general travellers I’m sure it will be a hit, and I think it will suit the needs of many a roaming developer as well. Graphic designers or media artists will be out of luck – the hardware is not yet up to the task of heavy multimedia work (audio, video or heavy graphics processing) but there are all sorts of rumours out there about new small and powerful chips being produced by Intel for MSI. It will be interesting to see what hardware advancements and competition will bring to the market in 2008.

I support the OpenSource movement. I think its a great ideal with good intentions and I’d like to see more businesses include OS projects in their activities – either use them, contribute to them, supply them or support them. As a developer I’d love more time to contribute to OS projects – its a way to use my skill to give to the community.

But I am well over of the elitist whiners I seem to keep hearing lately. I’m talking about the developers who are in commercial closed-source (or source-provided) development houses, whinging about how much they wish their company and others (read: the entire world) would just “go open source”.

Well, here’s a dose of reality guys. The business was around before you. It is not owned or run by you. You might not even have much of an interest in the actual product itself. If you haven’t managed to convince your managers to “go open source” then shut up. Seriously.

Either go and work for a company that suits your values, or start your own company, or go on the dole and contribute to OS all day long (so you can convince yourself that you really aren’t bludging off the taxpayer). Just quit bitching while you are earning damn good money from closed-source applications and go enjoy your OS ideals and self satisfaction.

If you go and find a way to supply an equivalent open source product and make a living, you can come back and rub my nose in it. I might even make a contribution. But at least I’d have had some peace while you are working.

Maybe I’m being unreasonable – I do have a headache and am tired from making travel plans and longer commutes to work. All I know is that right now I am sick of the whinging. Show me action, not words.

Having my last few New Years experiences degrade from a good night with good company to just downright depressing, I decided to see this year in a little differently.

I thought about what I wanted to do this year, and didn’t really feel right about bringing the year in with intoxication – noise, poison and escape from reality. It felt like the opposite of what I wanted for myself. And I wasn’t particularly excited or feeling anything about the coming year. It just… was.

I decided to enjoy the last night of the year alone.

I showered and dressed in clean clothes, and stood in my room with the lights off and the glass doors out onto my balcony thrown open to the quiet, cool night air. I bowed to Buddha – Gautama for being compassionate enough to teach others and to the inner buddha (or potential) in all of us, I bow to the Dharma for offering me an opportunity to escape from suffering, and I bow to the Sangha for bringing that Dharma teaching from the Gautama to me through 2500 years.

Then I bowed 365 times. Each time I touched my forehead to the ground I reflected that the bow represented a day past in the last year, a day I probably did not utilise or appreciate fully. Was I happy that day? Did I help others or hurt them? Most likely this was a day where I could have done better. I also thought of the day in the coming year, and what I hoped to achieve, how I should use it well.

I bowed slowly and gently, remembering the words of a nun who once told me that my hands should to open gently like a beautiful lotus, like my heart. Each bow made me feel lighter, cleaner. My bowing brought forth my earnest wish for a mindful, peaceful and fulfilling year to come, and a resolve to improve myself and shed those things in myself that are negative.

When I finished I stood for a while, then sat for a while longer to follow and appreciate breath. I practiced metta for a while – first I feel love for a close friend or family member, then for someone I don’t know so well, then for someone I don’t like, and finally for all beings. It’s a very nice practice.

Then I bowed for a little longer, firstly to universe, then in gratefulness for health, shelter, employment, food and water, education, living in a peaceful nation, etc. I bowed for each of the 5 mindfulness trainings. Finally I bowed once again to the Triple Gem and went to bed feeling wonderful (even if my knees and arches of my feet were a bit sore, hehehe).

I determined to avoid alcohol for a while this year (or for good, who knows?) and to take better care of myself and those around me.

I hope you have had a wonderful start to the year, and wish you good health, good luck and good times for the year to come. Let us not waste a day.