I won’t go into detail about what was said and done because the website has a good Wiki where you can read-up on what went down. I hope all the scribes put up what they have. There should also be some audio tracks up there soon. This post is mainly about me posting some rough & dirty pics. AND of course to rave about how AMAZINGLY GREAT this unconference was. Lots to take home and brilliant people in attendance!

Thanks again to PJ and Jeff for helping us do our own conference! Great stuff!

Starting us all off To CITCON (speak KITKON!!!! VERY IMPORTANT!)

So…..what’s on the menu

Lively discussion

Now this is what I call OFF TOPIC

CI tools and the pro’s and con’s

What had happened was that I had tried an apt update/upgrade (something like automatic updates on Windows) on my Ubuntu 8.10 server. It didn’t go quite swimmingly. Nothing new because my installation was a little wonky anyway. But as I restarted the machine it would not let me boot anymore. I was getting an immediate kernel panic. *shock*

So I did what I wanted to do a long time ago anyway (and was now forced to do) – upgrade my system. From a good friend I got an old 2.5″ 20GB HDD to replace my USB stick with that was running my web server. Not that the USB stick was a bad idea or anything but there’s the odd thing that is made easier by having a hard drive. I chose a 2.5″ model as I still am quite stingy when it comes to power use.

So I tried installing Ubuntu server 9.04. That failed due to whatever reason. So I installed Ubuntu server 9.10 Alpha 6. Very courageous here! …which went all fine.

It was nice to see that the USB stick was not all lost and could be read by the OS. So after installing some needed packages it was necessary to install my WordPress site (i.e. this site). Now that would be a challenge I thought. Not quite so….

1. Copied the WordPress directory,
2. changed the mySQL password in the wp-config.php file,
3. copied the apache2 site config files,
4. created the WordPress database I used for my site,
5. imported the database from my weekly backup file via phpmyadmin
6. and restarted apache2.

Voila, here is the site! Easy as. *phew* …. *PHEW*

So after the initial shock it took me less than 24hrs to recover my site. There’s still quite a bit of detail work left but that I can tackle at a slower pace. Impressed by both, Ubuntu and WordPress here. And of course my lucky stars that I could still read that USB stick. I think now it’s time for regular full backups of my web server!

Ubuntu 9.04 is just around the corner. The official Beta was launched today. Lots of new stuff. One thing fascinates me very much and that is the Amazon EC2 compatible cloud computing option (Eucalyptus). That has the potential of revolutionising the datacentre. Can’t wait to migrate one of our old 19″ boxes…

Other cool features are the new messaging mode for the desktop and the inclusion of the Ext4 file system.

So 9.04 is something definitely worth looking out for. Oh and also have a look at the Amazon EC2 beta program. There’s still people wanted for that (http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/features/ec2).

java.net.SocketException: Unconnected sockets not implemented

After a lot of searching I discovered that this seems to be an HTTPS change in the Java 1.6.0 implementation. Sockets are created in a different way than under 1.5.0. So if you run into this issue just go back to Java 1.5.0. This problem surfaced with JMeter 2.3.2 but I guess it is true for earlier versions too.

Under Ubuntu do the following:

apt-get install sun-java5-bin
update-alternatives --config java

And select Java 1.5.0 when prompted.

For me that was always the critical issue with VirtualBox. At work I use VMwae for most of my stuff and on my Ubuntu box I use VirtualBox. So I could never use the same VMs. Now I can! How cool ist that?! So for all those not happy with VMware Player or the VMware Server 2.x here’s your answer. I’d probably also say now that VirtualBox does snaphots too there’s no big reason for going VMware Fusion or Parallels.

• 64-bit support on 32-bit guest OSes (not so hot for me)
• 3D support (getting warmer)
• Better Windows (who cares?!) and Linux networking support doing away with the manual TAP drivers (***YAY***!!!!!)
• Snapshots (***YAY***!!!!!)
• More speed (was it ever slow?! Ok, if they want to go even faster I won’t complain)
• Much, much more….

So go along and update. I’m sure it’s worth it. I’ll be trying it on my Ubuntu box once I get back to work….

They use Apple‘s WebKit as a base rendering engine and put some -admittedly good- fluff around it. But what I don’t get is why they make another one. They would have been much more effective teaming up with Apple and Safari or the FireFox guys. It would have left the browser landscape untouched. This now adds yet again another thing you need to test when developing web applications. The cost alone worldwide to web development projects will be in the hundreds of millions. Just because Google thought it would be cool to have their own browser. I wonder if they ever thought of the follow-on-effect of their actions.

The only hope I have is that the WebKit engine they use remains unchanged. That would mean testing Chrome would test Safari and the other way round. That remains to be seen once the browser is out in the wild.

The ideas Google have and what they are trying to do is great but it’s just the wrong way. This smacks of a Microsoft stratagem and I also believe it will have a Microsoftish feel to it aka somewhat stale and big monopoly like.

As a tester I hope they will still come to their senses. We have enough browsers to have healthy competition and we have more than enough browsers to give testers a royal headache. So please not another cool browser!!!