We had 13 come along (including myself) from varied backgrounds: a human interface technology student, some web developers, an embedded hardware developer, an electrical engineer and various other python developers (I'm sure I've missed someone out here).

I started off proceedings with my Introduction to Repoze presentation. Following this Marek Kuziel presented his Password and Registration-free Authentication for Django presentation. The videos and slides are now available online.

Congratulations to Charles Han for winning the door prize. Can't wait till June's NZPUG meetup!

We've been back from Taiwan about 4 months now, and the trip was well worth it. I met some fellow FOSSers, bought a geek toy, and did some Plone promoting. On that note, I finally got around to posting a video of the presentation I gave at the TOSSUG meetup on plone.tv.
Interestingly, Taiwan has had a Python User Group (PUG) around for quite some time and this has been the rallying point for Python developers in Taiwan. They don't currently have enough Zope/Plone developers to start a user group specifically targeted at this developer segment but one idea we discussed was to promote Zope/Plone by way of the PUG.
Here in New Zealand, as far as I'm aware, the first official Python-related user group to start up was NZZUG. In recent times, Danny Adair has started up the New Zealand Python User Group (NZPUG) and they have already had their first meetup. This is great to see and I hope to be able to give a presentation at one of their upcoming meetups.

Initially, a bit of background - about 2.5 years ago, myself and another Plone consultancy took the initiative to begin translating Plone into Maori, Samoan, and some other Pacific Island languages. Unfortunately we were denied funding for translating Plone into Maori (apparently Microsoft New Zealand had already created a bilingual CMS for the Maori Language Commission on the then pre-release MS CMS 2002) and as none of us were native Maori or Pacific Island language speakers and therefore not able to translate Plone ourselves the project stalled.
Recently, though, I've made a decision to start translating Plone 3.x into Samoan myself. It's a little slow going as I am not a native Samoan speaker (though I have Samoan heritage :)), but I am making good use of a Samoan dictionary and some online resources. I thought particularly with the end of year approaching and the inevitable slow down in work that happens over the holiday period I would ask the community if they would pledge any money towards my translation efforts over the holiday period (and therefore also contribute to my continuing to eat over the holiday break :)), so we can have another 'shiny translation' in Plone!
If you'd like to pledge any funds towards my translation efforts, click on this chipin for a Samoan Plone link. Thanks!

Recently I had to setup Enfold Server on Windows XP and as I run Kubuntu on my notebook, the virtual environment I've chosen to run Windows under is QEMU. I've been running QEMU for some time now and it provides all the features I need in a virtual machine, especially with kqemu installed. When I was in the process of setting up Enfold Server, though, I accidentally loaded the same QEMU image twice and the 2nd instance started running a CHKDSK on the drive and writing to it. After closing the 2nd instance down and restarting the already running Windows XP QEMU instance, Windows XP would get as far as the loading Windows XP screen and then cyclicly boot. I then attempted to mount the QEMU image (as it was in the RAW format) but when I did, I got the following error message: "primary boot sector is invalid". This was when alarm bells really started to ring as I'd put quite a lot of time and effort into this Windows XP QEMU image (including setting up all the Internet Explorer browsers and Safari for Windows), and unfortunately due to a file size error I was getting when attempting to backup the QEMU image, I didn't have a backup! After fruitlessly googling around for a resolution, I decided I'd attempt to boot off the Windows XP cdrom and attempt to recover the image that way. The following are the steps I took to restore my QEMU Windows XP Environment:

1. Booted off the Windows XP cdrom by typing the following at the command prompt:
   qemu winxp.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d
2. When the "Welcome to Setup" screen appeared, pressed R to start the Recovery Console.
3. Executed the FIXMBR command from the Recovery Console.
4. Ran a CHKDSK to fixup any other problems that may have existed.