Do believe the hype

Unsung Koha Heroes – Part one : Olwen Williams

When I was working on the Koha history doc leading up to the presentation at Kohacon I noticed that there were some contributions that I would like to make special mention of. This of course is not to try and rank anyones contribution over anyone else’s or to detract from the already well recognised contributors. But there are some people who made significant contributions to Koha and I would like to recognise that.

Olwen Williams is a huge reason why Koha exists, without her and her knowledge of pick based systems we might still be struggling to get the data out of the old library system 🙂 She enabled Horowhenua Library Trust to feel confident, by getting the data out of their old system and getting it into the new relational database. Not content to stop there, she also wrote a significant amount of the code that was to become Koha 1.0.  She was the second person ever to commit code to Koha and occasionally still answers a question on the mailing list.

Olwen if you read this, hats off to you and thank you very much for all the hard work you put in.

Only a month to go

The due date is June 6, and going on our experience with Kahurangi that means anytime from now.  We still don’t know if a boy or a girl will be arriving, we have one more scan but have decided if we haven’t known this long we might as well wait.

This time around Laurel has her bag packed already and a birth plan written out, so there should be less of me running around like a mentalhead throwing random things into a bag.

Wellington Hospital has a bunch of brand new birthing suites, well a few months old now, which is good because they will have discovered and fixed all the little glitches (just like a software project) that crept in during the build.

Heading Home

I’m currently sitting in the airport waiting to begin my flights home, got here early as 4 of us were leaving Dallas today and it didn’t make sense to all take seperate taxis. Instead David gave us all a ride and Thomas and I watched as Paul and Nahuel checked in and cleared security. Thomas and I then had lunch and talked for a few more hours before his flight, and now I’m waiting for mine.

I just wanted to note down some things I am taking away from Kohacon 09. Apart from the things I briefly mentioned in my previous post there were a lot of other good things that happened.

Users helping users.  There was not a single session I was in where users weren’t answering questions that other users had, with the occasional help from a developer or two.

The community feel. It was to the credit of everyone involved that there was no us and them feel to the conference. Vendors, Developers and Users (sometimes all 3 being the same person :)) mixed and interacted in a way that you would not find at a proprietary software conference.

The Development Weekend. Galen Charlton deserves huge praise for the way he ran this weekend, maximising the time we had available and directing the discussions in a way such that we didn’t get bogged down. By the end of the weekend (well it was really 3 days) we had patches from 3 new developers, and Nicole was sending some of her first code patches. Bugs that had been annoying people for a while were fixed and lots of interesting discussion was had.

So a big thanks to the organisers, and to all the attendees. Videos were taken and are in the process of being converted to a format suitable of being hosted online and all the slides are planned to be linked from the wiki. So anyone who missed out on being able to be there will be able to read the slides and/or watch and listen to the presentations. The dev weekend discussions were summarised on the koha wiki also.

I’m looking forward to getting home and being with my family again, but I’m a little sad to be leaving also. A lot was achieved, mainly in building relationships, I now feel I am going home having made a lot of new friends. Our challenges are to keep the lines of communication open and public and to continue to grow our community.

Librarians, Developers, Steaks, Baseball and good friends

Kohacon 2009 is nearly over, just one day left of the developers conference tomorrow, then just Paul, Nahuel and I will be left.

As far as I’m concerned it has been a resounding success, lots of faces put to names, tons of interesting presentations, and to date a very productive development weekend.

The highlights for me

  • The enthusiasm and excitement of all the participants
  • Galen’s sense of humour.
  • Staying up late chatting with people in the Holiday Inn dining room
  • Baseball!!!!
  • Meeting people I talk to on irc almost daily
  • Catching up with Paul again and meeting Nahuel

A lot of the other attendees have done great write up’s on the individual sessions so I encourage you do check them out.

There are a ton of photos on flickr here.

Kohacon 2009 next week

I’m busy trying to tidy everything up, and to forget there is a small possibility my wife will give birth while I’m away, before I head off to Kohacon on Tuesday.

Today Kahurangi and I went out to upper hutt to Nan and Koro’s house to bake hot cross buns with Donna and Manaia. Kahu and Manaia rolled the buns and helped to put the crosses on the top, they turned out suprisingly edible.

Tomorrow is Dad’s 65th birthday party at Le Marche Francais which should be fun, then I have to go into work to grab all the things I forgot. Like my cellphone charger, headphones etc, yes I am a goober. Then I have to finish off my presentation, get an adapter for the video out on my netbook, and copy it to a usb stick just in case.

Laurel is writing me a shopping list, and I have a baseball game and numerous lunches and dinners to go to, so I’ll be pretty busy, but I’m sure it will be fun.

It’s not OK … but what do you do about it?

So this is going to be a blogpost a bit different from what I normally post about.

This morning I was waiting for the bus on the parade in Island Bay in Wellington. A mother was walking her kids to St Francis De Sales school (the local catholic primary school). The kids were riding bikes, an older boy and a girl I’d say was bout 6 or 7. The boy rode up to the corner and waited, but for some reason the girl was crying and not going very fast. The mother was clearly frustrated (and believe me Ive only been a parent for just over 2 years but I can totally understand that happening).What I didn’t expect to happen was the mother to haul off and slap the kid in the face and yell ‘shut up’

It made me feel physically ill, and all I could think of to do was to yell from the other side of the road “I saw that, you need to cut that out”.

I honestly didn’t and I still don’t know what to do in that situation. I still feel bad about not doing something more.

One of the best movie going experiences yet

If you ever get the chance to watch a movie when you are the youngest, by at least 20 years of anyone in the audience, take it. I saw Gran Torino today at the fabulous empire cinema with about 20 people, all of whom would be at least 55. There was none of the giggling and talking about what you are going to do after, no cell phones beeping, no people walking in and out to get more popcorn. Just people there to watch and enjoy every minute of the movie.

Oh and by the way the movie was damn good too.