I attended the first BarCamp Milwaukee yesterday, and I think I had the same reaction as many people walking in there: "I can't believe this tech community exists in Milwaukee", which is just silly. I know some people came from other cities and even states, but I think that it speaks to the weird mismatch between perception and reality in terms of the tech community here. I'm hoping that one thing that can come out of this is an ongoing set of meet-ups, possibly continuing at Bucketworks, rather than having this one-time (although fabulous) event, to keep and build momentum.

I attended 2 sessions and led a third. The first session, about Ruby on Rails was great for me (I was the guy asking way too many questions) since it was something that I'd heard a ton of great things about but hadn't had time to really investigate. The second session was about gadgets, and I really liked the discussion regarding the open-source vs. proprietary software model in the work of small devices, as well as looking at why certain devices failed or succeeded. I led a session about Linux in everyday devices, focusing on how things become hackable with Linux inside, and whether that is a good or bad thing for consumers and for businesses. It was actually an interesting follow on to the discussion that started in the Gadgets session.

Anyway, kudos to the organizer and I hope this is the start of something bigger here in Milwaukee.

I moved recently, and my Linux server started having trouble when I set it up at my new place. Specifically, yum and firefox kept crashing out oddly where I never had any previous errors. I assumed it was a memory problem, so I ran memtest86 on it for a while, and I got a whole slew of errors on Test 7 where it reads and writes random values. I also tried memtest86+, which would just hang when it got to a certain set of operations. I tried removing each memory stick separately and rerunning, but the errors persisted. At that point, I had to assume that something had gone wrong either on the CPU or the motherboard somewhere.

Long story short, the machine was 2 years old so I figured I was due for an upgrade anyway and purchased the components for a new Pentium D-based system, which I figured was the best performing thing in my price range. I could assemble an ABIT AW8D mobo-based system including 1GB RAM for about $400, which is nice. I threw in a new video card since the mobo was PCI Express. It all arrived last week, but I got this funny feeling when I assembled it that it wasn't going to work, and my "this-ain't-right" detector is usual pretty accurate. I don't know what it was, but sure enough, I apply power and the thing gives me a series of beeps (1 long, 3 short) which indicate a keyboard error, apparently. 2 PS/2 keyboards and a USB later, still no change.

Oddly, the POST code readout shows 8.7. which could be a CPU voltage problem, so I don't know who to believe. I thought maybe my old 350W power supply couldn't handle the load, despite the manual's claim that 300 was sufficient, so I swapped in a 500W Seasonic S12 which is rated one of the best by Tom's hardware. Still no change. I've appealed to the distance debuggers out there on the Abit forums but haven't gotten any responses. Might just be RMA for me...

If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments.