Step 3 - check!

After considerable negotiating, arguing, pain (by me) and hard work (by James and Michael) my day-job project finally gets to tick off the Step 3 of the Joel Test - Do you make daily builds?.

If our platform had a GNU build system this would have been easy - make, xunit, cron, mail - but this is on Windows, so we have a solution held together by duct-tape and chewing gum (with more and more python getting added :-) But it is holding together.

The good news is that I now get an automated command-line daily build on a controlled build-box, straight out of source control, followed by xunit tests run automagically, with the result emailed to me every day (including logs so that failures can be analysed without returning to the build box).

Yay!

tech/code | 28 Mar 2007 | #

Planet LinuxSA - minus the weather

Due to popular request, Planet LinuxSA no longer includes Adelaide's weather.

tech/LinuxSA | 24 Mar 2007 | #

OpenMoko (Neo1973) - the world's first integrated open source mobile communications platform

  Hi all,
  
  Time for the March meeting announcement (it's 12 days away)...
  
  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 20th March, 2007
   Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
           of South Australia (SSABSA)
           Boardroom (1st floor)
           60 Greenhill Road
           Wayville SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Rod Whitby will be giving a talk on the OpenMoko (Neo 1973) phone.
   OpenMoko is "the world's first integrated open source mobile
   communications platform", and Rod is the proud owner of a very early
   engineering sample (it doesn't place calls yet, but maybe by the
   time the meeting comes around...).

   Rod is currently CTO at the Australian Semiconductor Technology
   Company (ASTC), and was previously the Chief Architect at Freescale
   Australia, and the founding Chief Engineer at the Motorola Australia
   Software Center.

  Finding the Venue and Parking:

   You can park either beneath or next to the SSABSA building.  If you
   are driving west along Greenhill road, you can turn left into the
   driveway if you are going slow enough to notice the sign and turn in
   time :-), or you can turn left at the next road, and left again to
   go along the street behind the building to access the carpark that
   way.

   If you try to enter the building from street level but the doors are
   locked, walk down the stairs and use the lift in the below-ground
   carpark.

  Pizza:

   After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
   Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

   For more information:

   Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
   Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
   Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
   IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

tech/LinuxSA | 08 Mar 2007 | #

linux.conf.au 2008 Ghosts

This weekend was Ghosts Of Conference Past for linux.conf.au 2008 (otherwise known as http://mel8ourne.org/). Friday night after I flew in I had the chance to catch up with a remote team member for my day job - James Cormack. Over dinner at a nice restaurant with James and Kristy, I was well prepared for the hard slog of Ghosts 2007. Saturday morning was meet up with some of the Linux Australia committee, a couple of ghosts, and some of the Melbourne team met together to debrief LCA2007 and to talk about the wonderful things Melbourne has planned for next year! Ghosts went remarkably well, lots of great discussion - seeing the things that LCA2007 learnt, seeing they things they didn't :-( and hearing about a bunch of stuff that I didn't know happened. Well done Seven, you put on a rockin' conference!

The Mel8 team are well advanced, and certainly look on track to again raise the bar. Donna is going to be a good conference organiser. I always enjoy seeing the transition between Ghosts and the conference proper - the organising team just continue to come up great stuff! Except for the long days (and nights) stuck in a office, ghosts is fun because of the people you get to talk to. BTW, thanks to Red Hat for providing the office facility.

Why is there a photo of Sydney and not Melbourne here? Because for the first time we held ghosts in the city of the last conference, rather than in the city of the next conference. We did this to save on travel costs - so that all of the Seven didn't have to travel.

Ghosts ended with flying out back home on the last flight of the night to Adelaide. Goes without saying I was pretty exhausted.

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 04 Mar 2007 | #