Category: Uncategorized

Merging from dev_week to HEAD

Joshua and I started merging in the changes we made in the dev_week branch
into the main trunk(HEAD) of the koha cvs this weekend. I didnt get as much
done as I wanted to as I got distracted by the fact I turned 33 yesterday,
so spent the day eating yum cha and watching movies and only doing some cvs
work.
The reason we have a dev_week branch is because at dev_week we wanted to
work on the rel_2_2 branch as this has had a number of fixes made to it that
hadnt been made on the HEAD also. So instead of busting things in the
rel_2_2 which would have made our host Paul (the 2.2 release maintainer)
annoyed we branched rel_2_2 and called it dev_week. We are now in the
process of merging all the changes into head so nothing is lost.

Dev Week

Laurel and I arrived in Marseille at 6am on Monday, the Dev week was set to
kick off at 10am that morning, so we checked in, I had a quick shower and
then Laurel went to sleep and Russ and I headed off in cars to CMI which is
where the Developers week was to take place.
We started off with introductions so everyone got to know who everyone else
is, it was great to put faces to names. We then had a group meeting to
divide up tasks and split up into groups to tackle the tasks. I was in the
Zebra group along with Joshua, Henri Damien, Tumer, Bruno, Antoine and Arnaud for the
first day. We decided to branch the rel_2_2 branch of cvs into a dev_week
branch and work in there, Tumer committed a bunch of useful stuff and we got
to work testing.
We broke for lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant which
was about all that was open as it was VE Day, and thus a public holiday.

Day 2
Joshua, Henri Damien, Tumer, Bruno and I worked on zebra integration again
on day 2. We got it to a point where add/modify/delete plus searches was all
working, a very positive result. The cafeteria was open, so we had lunch
there and I must say it was absolutely fantastic and great value for money.

Day 3
On day 3 I started off working with Pierrick doing some bug fixing for the
morning, the rest of the day was taken up with some really fruitful
discussions. Which are written up on the wiki (which is the process of being
reorganised (started at the dev week)).
In the evening we went to Cassis
we arrived just in time for sunset which afforded some great
photo opportunities for a great
meal of which Bouillabaisse was the
star.

Day 4
Some more bugfixing and lots more discussions this day. With a slightly
later start, 10am instead of 9am, due to mainly the fact that we didnt get
home from Cassis until pretty late or night (early morning even) and a fair
amount of wine was consumed.
That evening we want to Ouest Provence to visit the library there, they are
in the process of converting to Koha at the moment. Their library is great,
I really liked the layout and the vibe of the place.

Day 5
The last day.
This was mostly a reporting back day, all of the groups reporting on what
they worked on over the week, and handing out some tasks for people to do in
the next few weeks. It was sad that the week had to end, but I think it was
a really valuable exercise, if all that came out of it was the developers
meeting each other, that would have been enough. But lots of productive
work, and great ideas resulted as well.

Switzerland part 2

On the last day we had in Switzerland, we spent it in Luzern with Daniela’s
family seeing the sights. It was a fantastic day, we went out on the lake on
paddle steamer and to some of the I guess you would call them resort towns.
It was really beautiful, when Laurel gets back ill put up the photos.
We then had a fantastic dinner and with some sorrow (we didnt want to leave)
we caught the train back to Basel. After that we caught the overnight train
to Marseille, which was pretty cool actually, I managed to sleep the whole
way and the people in our carriage were nice even though we couldnt
communicate with each other.

The summary of the story is Switzerland is a lovely place, things are clean,
everything works and everything is on time. And the people are friendly and
helpful. Its a great place to visit, and if I were to choose somewhere else
to live it would be high on the list of possibilities

Cows, chocolate and great hospitality

We had a fantastic time
in Switzerland, we arrived in Basel at around 3pm on Thursday and Daniela met us at the train station
We went to her house for a few hours, she has a really nice little apartment near to the town center and her university. We went from there to
her parents house (and her house still) in Luzern by the train.
We had a nice dinner then headed to bed, the next day we caught the train to
Zurich for a look around. We spent a good chunk of time in the art museum
there and watched some beach volleyball and then caught the train back to
Luzern.

The next day we headed off to Bern, which is a really really beautiful city.
We had a great day there walking around and visiting another art museum. We
went back to Luzern for the night and had a great dinner.

More to come.

KohaCon Day 1

Discover Koha
This day was for people interested in learning more about Koha. There was a
really big turnout I estimate about 80 people. My talk went well, Russel did
the slides, it was a little tricky as we couldnt use my laptop as the
refresh rate on the graphics card was too high for the projecter to handle.
So we ended up using Pauls, which meant we had to copy the files over …
but we had no network, USB memory sticks to the rescue. Some of the other
talks were interesting, and there was no shortage of questions and
enthusiasm so that was all good. It is really really tiring try to listen
and pick up what you can understand with people talking french all the time.
So we were pretty shattered by the end of the day, but we are only in Paris
for a few days so we went with Paul, Joshua, Irma and Pascale to the
Bastille to eat dinner. It was a lot of fun.

48 hours of travel with about 10 hours of sleep!

So Russel and I left Wellington
at 6am on the 30th of April, NZ time. Which meant we had to be at the
airport by about 4am to check in. So we got to Australia at around 7.15am
NSW time. Now this is where things started to get tricky. Qantas delayed our
flight out to London, originally it was
leaving at 5pm which meant we could check our bags through all the way to
Paris. But they changed it to leaving at 8pm … which meant we couldnt so
we had to get our bags, clear customs and immigration and find somewhere to
store the bags. We found a storage place that only cost 2 kidneys and 1
right arm so that wasnt too bad, stored the bags, and headed out to meet a
client.
We had a very productive meeting and then headed in the central city
to kill some time before our flight. We headed back out to the airport only
to find Qantas had delayed the flight again. But they did give us a meal
voucher for $15 aus, and we had a fantastic meal at an asian noodle place.
Finally after a few more delays we boarded the plane and started on our
flight to Bangkok. The plane was completely full, but we got seat to a nice
and more importantly small german girl which meant I wasnt completely
squished in the middle. That was all good I think both of us got a
reasonable amount of sleep on that flight. Then at Bangkok Qantas for some
reason decided to move the german girl (Caroline) and replaced her with a
great big lardy english bastard, who didnt even acknowledge my hello. He
also broke the cardinal rule of economy class air travel which is, only one
armrest person, you cant take both. So he sat there unmoving except to jam
me in my side with his elbow every so often for the whole 14 hour flight
from Bangkok to London. Consequently I got far less sleep on that flight
than the other one.
After we landed at heathrow we taxied around on the runway for quite a while
until they offloaded us onto buses to take us to the terminal. We only had
about an hour there until our flight left for Paris, just enough time to buy
some water and find our gate.
Once we landed in Paris we spent a bunch of time walking around trying to
find where the train left to get us into town. Only to realise after about
15 minutes there was a map on the trolley we were pushing around. Once we
found the train and boarded it was all good. The RER and Metro in Paris are
fantastic, well sign posted with logical layouts and a simple ticketing
system.
So we made it safe and sound.