Canllaith.org

Today is the well renowned international holiday, Sysadmin Appreciation Day.

Remember to take some time out to thank your sysadmin - or possibly even buy her a beer. Or a nice glass of pinot noir.

System administrators do a lot of hard work that doesn’t often get recognised. We’re the people who keep the websites and email running. We’re the people who get called out at 3am to go and find out why the database server has just fallen on it’s face. We’re the people who have to be on the leading edge of every technology, to exploit the newest features of the kernel and drivers to get the kind of solutions we’re asked for. We’re the people who take the chaos that is computing and poke it into some kind of shape for you, the user.

That’s what I do for my day job with a team of awesome people for somewhere close to 500 systems. I get paid pretty well for it too, even though I was still working at 10pm last night…

KDE’s sysadmins on the other hand, do it for the love of the project. KDE is a large project and it’s infrastructure needs to be extremely robust to deal with all of the SVN accounts, email addresses, mailing lists and websites that the sysadmin team maintains. It’s a professional quality solution built by experts for the love of KDE.

Our KDE sysadmins Dirk Mueller, David Faure, Stephan Binner & Stephan Kulow deserve our thanks and appreciation today.

The first SHDH NZ is over. I had a great time hacking on KDE related projects in such a buzzing environment. Thank you so much to the organisers, and of course the sponsors - Google, Microsoft, Mindscape, Actrix, Catalyst IT and Cafenet.

I did a bit of work on some KDE website content that I’m going to run past some other contributers - hopefully they’ll like it, and I’ll be able to commit some changes soon.

Now, it’s home in bed with a cup of chicken soup. Goodnight!

I’m currently sitting at a pub in Wellington at the inaugural SHDH Aotearoa. which is inspired by SuperHappyDevHouse in the US. Essentially, it’s a hackathon bringing geeks together in the same place with a lot of free as in free-as-in-beer beer. The environment is buzzing and it’s great to have so many geeks together to bounce ideas around. It feels like aKademy, just with more Gnome.

It’s been organised by some extremely awesome people, among whom two I used to work with at my previous employer, Penny Leach and Brenda Wallace. I have ended up sitting next to a representative from Microsoft. This amuses me.

Today, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a bit of work on trying to come up with some improved content for KDE.org, to then go over with the Marketing & Promotional groups afterwards, as well as a little bit of sysadmin work (Dirk, I apologise in advance if I stuff anything up). If I end up running out of ideas before I’m finished here I’ll be ripping a lot of KDE3 content out of the FAQ and restructuring things a bit getting ready for KDE4 content.

Right now, hacking and a cool drink calls.

Although it’s advertising a dating site, I do find this little geek quiz kinda amusing =)

98% Geek

In other news, I would like my Dell M1330 I ordered to arrive Right Now.