A visit to Ballarat this week

This week saw me head to the Victorian regional city of Ballarat for a few days to undertake some RHEL5 x86_64 builds for work.

Whilst it's not as exotic a destination as an unnamed colleague visited nor did it see me returning without my pants or shoes ( sorry Jon, I couldn't resist! ), it was a productive visit.

Traditionally we undertake builds remotely, however these servers are likely not to appear on our network or even administered by ourselves, so it made sense to go onsite to undertake the work.

I stayed in the Doherty Ballarat Hotel and Convention Centre which literally is on the opposite side of the road to Sovereign Hill (and no I didn't have time to go there!)

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Whilst I spent most of my time in the office battling with hardware that had been incorrectly ordered (ie: missing hardware and/or non-compatible hardware (ie: 3.5" SATA drives ordered instead of 2.5" SAS drives for the internal enclosure)), I did venture back to the hotel in the evenings for some R&R.

     

The hotel room was quite pleasant, and what something a corporate traveller expects. There was no surprises out of the ordinary (which you really don't need when travelling), though I did have two strange nights of sleep due to external factors:

1. 1^st night: Apparantly it's Koala mating season. Staying in a hotel room surrounded by forest is lovely to look at during the day, but it's also the playground for randy koalas of a night. So thumbs up to the 'big boy' who kept me up for several hours in the early hours whilst he ravaged the local female population. Koalas aren't dying out in this region whilst this bloke is still kicking! Seriously, I thought those types of noises I may have heard from other hotel rooms, not above my hotel room.


2. 2^nd night: Local Football season must have finished. Seems some of the local players didn't head over to Bali to celebrate but decided our hotel was a great place to party.
   
   In depth conversations at yelling level could be heard at around 3am. Answers to lifes biggest questions such as "Can you scull beer or bourbon faster?" were asked repeatedly. Finally after about an hour when it took that long for the gorillas to realise that they couldn't order a pizza to their room (and yes their was going to be surcharge for anything delivered to their room), the group of 6 decided that bundling into a car and heading down to the local McDonalds whilst tanked was the sensible thing to do.
   
   I passed out after that, though it appears they were successful (if not foolish) as their car was there in the morning without any visible signs of damage. It seems the drink and driving campaigns don't apply to footballers.
   
   I made sure I made enough noise as I passed their room at 7am heading off for breakfast, however in their drunken state the night previously, I doubt I would of woken them. It did bring me mild relief to my simmering frustration/anger from the previous nights interruption however.

The crazy and overpriced Internet costs in the room ($0.20/1MB with both uploads/downloads charged or $0.15/min) ensured I had a relatively Internet free week night. I really didn't miss being connected, though it did remind me how often I relied on just 'quickly looking up something'. Items like news, weather and even a TV guide via the Internet seems to have become the 'standard' method of information retrieval for me. It became more of an inconvenience than anything. I realised then that there was indeed a TV guide in the room. I gathered a quick round-up of news/weather using local radio. So this is what life was like prior to the Internet? (It seems so long ago now!)

Traditionally I use Google Reader to keep abreast of my feeds (as it allows me to bookmark, tag and share feeds easily), but being disconnected from the Internet was going to make that impossible.
I did however utilise a RSS reader, and was pleasantly surprised how easily it actually integrated into my Gnome desktop (particularly as it's a KDE app). The tray-icon and minimize/restore from tray all worked flawlessly (mostly due to the fact it's probably coded using FreeDesktop specs). I went with Akregator over Liferea after hearing reports that recent versions were prone to 100% CPU usage.

One thing I did notice, is that current RSS readers do allow for 'offline' mode - though it would be nice if it gave you the option of a 'full download' of certain feeds. Offline mode that only sucks down text is quite frustrating at times, as the associated image (being discussed in the article) isn't available. It feels like over-hearing a discussion you weren't meant to hear!

Whilst it's probably prudent allowing it to be set as a 'per feed' setting as I suspect many people may not want to download a full page for every article on every feed. (Particularly those feeds you only 'scan', and read a small amount of, or those that are overly heavy with graphics/flash, and embedded video.)

Since returning I did notice that Gnome also has the Straw Reader. Hopefully that comes along nicely as it appears to be in early development.
Ideally I would love to see an RSS reader that integrated WebKit with a good OPML import/export feature, as well as good support for RSS (0.91, 1.0 and 2.0), RDF as well as ATOM formats. Having a feature that allowed you to selectively do a full download of certain feeds for offline mode would be fantastic. I'll whack that down on my ever growing todo list (I think I'll need to live to 800 to ever complete it!)

One nice feature I discovered is the room had direct dial-in, and due to poor mobile reception in the room it was much more cost effective to have Pauline call me direct over VOIP. It also meant we could speak for much longer.

The staff I met at the Ballarat office were extremely friendly and actually quite enjoyable to be around. ( Sorry MrPointy, they were more cheery then you! ) They appreciated the effort I put in whilst down there (it's always nice to get some recognition) and appreciated the attention to detail. It was quite good timing as I will relocate offices to this one once I move into our new home (probably 4-6 weeks away). Heading into the Ballarat office is much closer than the Melbourne offices from Bannockburn. I've already made some good inroads into getting to know people there. I'll be the only member from my team at this office location, so it makes sense to build some bridges.

I did add two things to my 'travel-list' when travelling for work:

• A cheap mini 10/100 switch.
  This is invaluable when you're stuck in a room with one Ethernet port attempting multiple server builds, and also wishing to have your laptop online at the same time. I headed out the first day a picked up a cheapie TP-Link 5-port 10/100 Switch. Cost me $20 from a local computer store, but saved hours of frustration.


• A decent power board with surge protection
  In hindsight I should have also taken/purchased a decent power board. The room only had 4 power outlets which meant I could only have one server up at a time. It would have been nice that I could have multiple machines up at the same time, as these were identical builds (besides their hostnames), I could have used something like clusterssh to undertake the same tasks across all the machines at the same time -- ensuring I could have finished the job in a fraction of the time.

We live and learn.