Pretoria Jaunty release party - Cake war continued

Inspired by Jonathan Carter's Cake War and Let Them Eat Cake in 2006 and as a token of appreciation to the Ubuntu community (which is also part of the larger Linux community), I asked my wife to bake us a Ubuntu cake for the Jaunty release party in Pretoria, Karoo Cattle and Land at Irene Village Mall on Saturday, 25 April. Jaunty Jackalope is the code name for Ubuntu 9.04, which was released on 23 April 2009 by Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu.

I didn't plan on writing much about the event but being prompted about it on IRC at #ubuntu-za, reading drubin's blog and being asked in the comments to provide the recipe I decided to go ahead and write my own entry, even if a bit late.

So here goes.

The nice thing about recipes is that they are very much like Open Source Software. You don't have to re-invent the wheel but you can cut and paste, learn from other recipes and adapt to your own liking as you go along to fit your own needs.

For our Ubuntu cake my wife used a recipe from her school days which she thought was very much unique because her teacher had written it down and adapted it from her days as a child. The recipe was written in Afrikaans, "nogal". But the sub-title gave it away somewhat, CHIFFONKOEK, "Love-light two-egg chiffon cake". Turns out, not a lot of things in life are unique.

So in stead of retyping the recipe I decided to go search for it on the web and found an interesting page about Chiffon cakes on Wikipedia and I also found a recipe of a very similar Lovelight Chiffon Cake.

For the icing my wife used Fondant and for the Ubuntu logo we simply used a large image of the logo which we printed and used as a template.

Suffice to say, based on the turnout at the release party and comments from others and the organiser Ross Addis (chairman of the GLUG) who was very happy, it was a huge success. Definitely something we (Ubuntu-ZA) can be proud of and build on. Thank you Ross and others for organising it.

For me it was very interesting to meet some of the faces that I have only known through the interwebs on the mailing lists and on IRC.

And for those who left early. Yes it was a real cake and we did eat it in the end.

Let the cake war continue.

Focused discussions on what makes Sun tick in video format

Reading Jonathan Schwarz's Blog is always fun and enlightening. Seeing him deliver his message in video format is even more fun.

Here's my attempt at embedding the videos on this site. Enjoy.

Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)


Technology Adoption (2 of 4)

Mozilla Calendaring with Lightning 0.9

I've been following the development of Sunbird, part of the Mozilla Calendar Project for a long time, perhaps even as far back as it's very beginning in 2003 when the announcement was made "Mozilla Sunbird Standalone Calendar Project Launches".

Knowing Mozilla and the great successes that we've seen with Firefox and Thunderbird I've always been hoping that Sunbird would be the next calendaring project of the future. But for some or other odd reason it seems that there are not enough developers willing or able to spend time on this project. This was made clear by Simon Paquet on Wednesday, 18 February when he posted "Calendar Project at a critical juncture".

That announcement was kind of disappointing to me when having seen progress in the last number of years even if progress has been slow. But, thinking about it again, perhaps the decision was not so bad after all and I agree that perhaps the right decision has now been made. See also a follow up posting "More on the Sunbird/Lightning decision" on Thursday.

Thus, it is time that we focus all our energy on the Lightning project. Let's help Mozilla fulfill the mssion of the project.

I have now added, installed and tested the latest version of Lightning 0.9 to my version of Thunderbird on Kubuntu Hardy 8.04.2 as well as on Intrepid and can now for the first time interact smoothly with colleagues and friends who are still stuck in the MS Outlook world.

What is Mozilla?
The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet.

The site with no purpose or goal?

As can be seen in the number of posts to this site it may very well be true that there is no purpose for it's very existence. Perhaps one day it will all change. Let's hope the day will come sooner rather than later.

In the mean time I've made some changes to the layout, my profile and have also included my twitter feeds in the sidebar.

Feedback is welcome in whatever shape, form or technology where you can find me.

Time to wake up again

Like so many others that have started their own blog spot on the web with great energy, I have slipped into a mode of not updating the spot on a regular basis.

Time to change all that.

Watch this space...

A lot has happened since my last post. Amongst others I now have a nice Nokia n95 8GB with which I can take photos and videos for sharing. Unfortunately time is still an issue.

My next mission will be to setup the phone so I can post photos online. But, it might not be tonight.

Wishing you a prosperous 2007

And you thought I was gone for ever. I should remember to post more often.

Anyway I hope that you had a good festive season and wish you all the best for the new year. It will be an exciting year on the technology front.

Here's another interesting post that I found recently:
Mount Remote Directories Securely with SSH : Ubuntu (6.06.1 / 6.10)

See also other articles at http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/.

Creating your own RSS feeds

Creating you own RSS feed for your site is fairly easy and there's a lot of resources out there however, finding the solution for your own site may be a bit intimidating. Herewith some starting points:

• How to Create Your Own RSS Feed
• Create an RSS web feed automatically
• How to Create RSS feeds with Dreamweaver
• Howto Create an RSS 2.0 Feed
• Create RSS
  

Remember to keep it simple! Enjoy.