OSDC trip

This last week I flew off to Melbourne for the Open Source Developers Conference. I spoke to many people about a wonderful range of topics. The main things that I was aiming to be across was large or enterprise installations of any CMS that folks have experience with. There are a surprising number of options. Drupal came up many, many times. Varnish with one of Apache + mod_php or Nginx + FastCGI seem to be a common platform.

Although there were a couple of good Perl talks too; Schwern's Perl5i and Damian Conway's talk on Quantum Mechanics + General Relativity + Perl. Reading several of Richard Feynman's books in the last year certainly helped to keep on the same page as Damian as he galloped along with some complex ideas. The talk "git for age 4 and up" was great, certainly cleared up my misconceptions of labels in git =)

73, Kim

Monthly update, November

Well its been a little while since the last update and I've been busy. AHARS has been quite active, the good weather has brought about many good events.

The AHARS Symposium. Was a great day, its amazing that as I keep reading and tinkering that little nuggets from the talks start to fall into place. Little bits of wisdom finally making themselves understood. There was just so much to take in on the day... Note the microwave gear on the right hand table, along with the VK5TR loop, and HPSDR rig at the lower right corner.








We had the National Field Day. So I helped out at the AHARS tent. To aid publicity AHARS got a foot in the door of the Eden Hills Primary School Strawberry Fete. Its your usual spring fair; food, plants, books, cloths, stuff, junk, treasure, etc etc...








The great resistor packing day for AHARS. Folks in the club thought it wise to do a bulk purchase of resistors so that all the constructors, repair and homebrew folks had adequate parts in their respective junk boxes. I decided that I needed to stock up too, so I ordered a box. The bulk order was made, around 1.2 million resistors in all. The day finally came, we assembled and sorted out each 'decade', cut 100 of each value, then assembled a bundle of each of the 12 values into a roll, then each roll into a box. Thankfully many extra volunteers participated for a good day. Lots of radio talk. I learned a thing or two about boat anchors. Went home with a box of resistors =)








The AHARS Buy and Sell. I was up very early to help setup for the Buy'n'Sell. There was an amazing array of stuff. Old radio gear, new radio gear, test gear, computer stuff ... I picked up a few things.








With the holidays coming up, I hope to get more done...

73, Kim