thinkMoult » sydney

SLUG Feb monthly meeting

Dion Moult — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:42:52 +0000

Being completely new to Australia and since Malaysia doesn’t have any sort of open-source community whatsoever I searched around for a linux/blender/open-source group when arriving. I found SLUG, or the Sydney Linux User Group. They hold monthly meetings, and though I was unavailable to join their January meeting, I did manage to join the February meeting on Friday. It was my first meeting of this nature so I must say it was very interesting regardless of the actual content of the meeting.

The meeting was kindly hosted by the folks over at the Google Sydney office, which was an experience in itself. It was certainly the most open and personalised set of offices that I had ever seen. I’ll let a picture speak for itself. (Why yes, that is a tire swing there)

The talk was given by Dr Silvia Pfeiffer about HTML 5′s video and audio capabilities – which are, needless to say, extremely powerful. The talk inspired me to implement HTML 5 video support in WIPUP, and for those that are interested in the talk, she gave at LCA too and is available here.

But what was more interesting was the people. They were your usual ragtag group of geeks.

How unexciting to meet such regular people.

G’day, mate!

G’day, mate!

Dion Moult — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:36:04 +0000

As some might be aware, I’ve recently moved from my nest in Malaysia to the charming country of Australia to begin university. I’m officially a university student now. Well, classes haven’t started yet and won’t for the next 2 weeks, and I haven’t even been to orientation yet, but according to the university’s crappy intranet system I’m enrolled in all my courses for Architecture.

I haven’t posted anything in a while. Normally I’d be able to blame it on my being busy on other things but truth be told I’ve actually just been plain lazy and have taken a liking towards twiddling my thumbs in bed. I still dabble in my projects here and there but there isn’t a sense of over-caffinated hysteria over finishing whatever task I’m currently working on. This means that the KDE-www war is still on hold, my ThoughtScore script is progressing reaaaly slowly, and I haven’t done any composition for the past month. However things are still getting done (yes, live.WIPUP has been updated with a much improved UI!) and will pick up soon as I start settling into a brand new and improved routine. Meanwhile, you can see my work trickle into WIPUP, and despite the horrendous simplicity of my blog design I’ve brought myself together to add a somewhat borked navigation at the top which references my work, hosted on – as it should be – WIPUP.

On the other hand, Australia is excellent. There are weekly $2 barbeques and I’m walking distance away from the harbour, the rocks (where touristy stuff like the Opera house and their iconic bridge are), the SLUG (Sydney Linux User Group) meeting place as well as the central station, which can pretty much bring you anywhere else in Sydney. I’ve also got this wicked view out my window of Darling Harbour which means pretty much unobstructed fireworks displays (so far I’ve experienced two, one during CNY and another during – believe it or not – Valentine’s day.) No, I haven’t yet been to the beach, but plan to in the coming week, and I’m still working on my Aussie accent.

As for open-source stuff, though I haven’t contributed anything in a while I have really been enjoying activites in KDE 4.6 and can’t see how I managed to survive without it in the past. I’ve also been using Diaspora as a sort of “entry hub” when posting social status updates. Now that the newsfeed is starting to see a little bit more activity with people using Diaspora I’ve found their aspects system really awesome, and allows me to share exactly what I want with exactly who I want. I also got myself an Android phone (yes, reflashed with a custom rom) and that’s actually really helped my productivity.

In social news, I’ve met my long-time server sponsor and webhost Tarik from OpticEmpire and talks on new projects have begun (start more than I finish eh?), and somehow formed a weird troupe of acquaintances involving a chilean, italian, hong konger, indian, and miscellaneous.

No, I’m not dead.

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Toronto’s “mini-sprint”, and Sydney’s KDE/FOSS Community

Dion Moult — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:58:36 +0000

During the holidays I met up with Eugene Trounev, (aka it-s), one of KDE’s awesome artists to discuss our reorganisation of KDE.org and the design aspects of it (which is coming soon in the series). It was a 2-day meeting and it was my first time meeting another KDE enthusiast face-to-face, as given my inconvenient geographical location in Malaysia I don’t know anybody else here. I won’t post the outcome of the sprint here but it will be released periodically with the rest of my kde-www war series. It was extremely useful and awesome of course (and yes, lots did get done), and since no photos were taken, here is one of a random conifer tree to make up for it:

I’ve just arrived in Sydney, Australia to get ready for my upcoming year of university, and so I wanted to quickly throw out the question to see if anybody in the KDE / Blender / FOSS crowd lives there. If you do, throw me an email/comment and if there isn’t an existing community, let’s start one :D

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Back from Australia

Dion Moult — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:49:40 +0000

I’m back from my trip to Australia and greeted with the Deepavali holiday. It was a great trip – visiting Sydney and Melbourne, my cousin’s wedding and checking out 6 universities. I met a lot of relatives I didn’t know before, didn’t know when I met them, still don’t know, and don’t plan to know. I close to perfected my mobile experience when limited to my phone and my cousin’s wifi, I learned what you could only learn about universities if you visit them, and of course the wedding dinner was (really) delicious.

I also got a Google Wave account to play with (from Marvin, whose shared interests are in the downfall of TMNet, our ISP – or an optimistic person would say the upgrading of TMNet), and will update you on my impressions later (no, I don’t have the send-invite ability yet, see the explanation, but if you do send me a kind request when I do I’ll send you an invite).

This is somewhat of a filler post as I’m quite tired and also have a lot of catching-up work to do. thinkMoult posts will resume its usual 2-day schedule. Of course WIPUP will continue development once I’ve catched up a sufficient amount. But to keep this post friendly here’s a paranoramic shot I shotted with my phone camera (hence the tiny size).

If you look closely you can spot Sydney Opera House.

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