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I’ve just registered to attend BarCamp Sydney 3, which is taking place at UNSW in a couple of weekends’ time.

I’ve said that I’ll be presenting on “recreating old-school demo effects in Processing“, which is what I was doing last weekend. If anything, it’ll give me the impetus to develop something a bit more concrete in Processing before I present. I’ll probably go back and look at some of my favourite older demos, and see which effects can be comfortably reimplemented in the 5-10 minute timeslot provided. (At the moment, I’m thinking of something from Second Reality by the Future Crew or, possibly, Bill G Force by Complex.)

I’ll also take some photos while I’m there, and post details on some of the discussions here.

Do come along if you’re in Sydney. It should be good fun!

For those of you who’ve listened to Zappa’s Overnite Sensation and been mystified by his references to “Zircon Encrusted Tweezers”, wonder no more:

“…by placing a pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers in the hands of his dental-floss-farmer-to-be in `Montana’, Zappa is displaying an intimate awareness of the culture of the Wild West, now vanishing under a carpet of fast-food joints and auto dealers.”

Read the full explanation in this Usenet post by Dan Rabin.

My server suffered a complete hard drive failure, and I didn’t have a backup of the SQL database, which included all my blog posts. Oh well.

I hadn’t backed up my dpkg list, either, so reinstallation of all the services was a bit of a nightmare. (mysql and postfix somehow ended up switching uid’s, which played mayhem on the existing config files.)

Everything seems to be back to normal now, though. I have now implemented MySQL backups and performing a “dpkg –get-selections” to a remote site, nightly. This should shorten the recovery time should a failure like this occur again.