Me and Dan went White water rafting during our Camper van tour around the New Zealand’s North Island. This is apparently the worlds largest commercially rafted Water fall. Was epic Funs.

Yeah! Went to see Alestorm lastnight at the manning bar! Was all kinds of Awesome!

Moshpit was Epic… totally battered and bruised! Met the band and invited them aboard the Ship.. maybe next time. Jacko passed out on the sofa and Dan seemed enjoy a bit of Bush surfing on the way home…

Here’s the obligatory singing and blowing out the candles video:

Garr! I ‘ve such a lovely singin’ voice!

In a reasonably cronological order (as memory serves):

*singing* “’cause I’m not a loser!! not a looooser! … “
“OMG… We are really going to do this!”
“No Mum, I hope I do feel that way one day… Because then I’ll know that I’ve rasied my son to follow his dreams no matter what!”
“Hunny… I just realised that we are now living out of the back of our car!”
*Walks out of the pub* “Have we forgotten anything ?.. o.. wait.. EVERYTHING WE OWN is in this car!”
“We’ve just upgraded to living out of my Mum and Dad’s garage!”
“goodbye.”
“If you miss somebody, you have to let them go” — Ruben
“OK… lets go and burn some memories”
“I knew atleast one of our bags would go missing!”
“No!!!! That’s gross! I don’t want a scorpion on a stick! “
“These undies are NOT desinged for a westerners undercarriage!”
“No… we didn’t come halfway across the world to go to McDonalds!”
“Now we are living in my brothers back bedroom!”
“Burger rings!!! nom nom nom”
Ruben: *Shouting* “I just did a great big poo!!!”
“Can you beleive we are actually here ???”
*!!!SMASH!!!* “Dude! you should just not come into people’s new houses anymore OK !?”
“She reminds me of an asian version of your mum!”
“I am soooo happy”
“Living the dream”
“WTF is Yum Cha?!”
*thinking* “Yeah… I could live around here.. Oh.. wait.. I do !! yay!”
“Will I ever get tired of this view?”
“Lets go home!”

And the single sentence that started it all 8 months ago:
Ruben: “My heart feels like it’s falling out”

Thanks to everyone who helped us out (even if it was just listening to me whining)
Thanks to everyone who came to get drunk with us before we left.
Thanks to all my nay sayers for giving me the strength to want to turn around and say “Screw you!”

Mike, thanks for putting up with us for so long (and for so much longer neigbourino!!)
Dan, thanks for buying all my crap and throwing it in the tip!! Come see us soon!

Dad. You are amazing! I couldn’t have made my dream come true with out your support. You rock. I love you!
Mum. I know you hate me for leaving. I miss you so much it hurts! Please know that I am happy. I love you!

Sadly neither my Manager or my Boss were available to accept the resignation so I had to hand it into a senior memeber of management (with hilarious consequences).

Yes: I drew the T-rex myself as a tribute to spider guy.

Date: 20th of October 2009

Dear Sirs,

Under the watchful eye of his Noodlyness, Her Majesty’s Royal Service has condemned me to deportation to the colonies. Due in part to several recent acts of piracy, heresy, excessive web browsing and a recent attempt at regicide (those damn Corgi’s should keep the hell of my lawn). Fortunately, I have been granted one month to get my affairs in order.

I hereby give notice of my termination of employment with your company as of today, leaving my final date of employment as the 20th of November 2009.

As a token of my appreciation for all the enjoyment and excitement I’ve had working with you over the last few years, please accept this picture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex which I have drawn for you.

May the sauce be with you!

Capn’ Ian Bissett

Ramen.

Wondering how to setup KDE with your favourite google PIM data ?

The following howto is based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala but you can tailor it to your distro.

1. Install the required packages for building

   $apt-get install build-essential libgcal-dev libgcal0 kdelibs5-dev kdepimlibs5-dev akonadi-kde

2. Get the googledata Akonadi resource from KDE’s svn

   $ svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/pim/googledata

3. Build the module:

   $ cd googledata$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr$ make$ sudo make install

If you hit problems with the initial cmake then make sure you have all the required packages it is asking for.

Once you’ve got the library installed you need to configure Akonadi:

System Settings -> Advanced -> Akonadi Configuration

Click Add and choose one of the new Google resources listed. Enter your login details and it will automatically sync.

Congrats, all your KDE PIM Apps now have access to your Google contacts and calendar.

Feel free to post a comment if you need any help / advice.

Happy Hacking!

Under Linux this job is very simple (use the ‘-p’ option to useradd) but for Solaris I found ridiculous posts about admins using multi-line PERL scripts or even expect scripts to change a password. Expect?! EXPECT? I didn’t even realise people still used such things ?!

Any how… here is a simple PERL one liner for updating the shadow file:

perl -pe ‘s/^USERNAME:.*?\:/USERNAME:NEWPASS\:/’ /etc/shadow > /tmp/shadow.tmp && mv /tmp/shadow.tmp /etc/shadow

Note: This oneliner requires the password to be crypt()‘d first. This can be done easily as a one liner in PERL:

[bisscuitt@asimov ~]$ perl -e “print crypt($ARGV[0], substr(rand(date),2));” PLAINTEXTPASSWORD
50kq0KhJnHwU2

Hope this helps someone.

Have Fun,
BiSScuiTT