Sun, 29 Aug 2004
Pragmatic Investment Plan
I recently re-read the very interesting slides from the How To
Keep Your Job presentation, if you've never seen them and you work in a
technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they
might just save your salary in years to come.
I spent a good few years working in an investment bank so this approach sits well with my view of the world, the whole investment and portfolio analogy seems very apt. Why am i mentioning this on my site (which I've tried not to turn into a link blog)? Because I set myself some goals at the start of the year and I've failed to meet more than a third of them in the last (almost) nine months.
Never let it be said I give up easily. After some consideration I've decided to have another go but this time I'm putting my basic Pragmatic Investment Plan online where the thought of other people looking at it will hopefully keep me honest. It's only a first draft and will probably undergo some changes but it should be enough to keep me busy. I've decided to start from 2004/09/01 and see how long it takes me to meet my goals.
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Posted: 2004/08/29 14:22 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 28 Aug 2004
Just Don't (2 of ?)
Just don't expect to get new customers when your registration process makes
US immegration look open and friendly.
I was recently looking for a piece of software to handle WSDL generation from Java source code, I had no current long term need for the software, I just needed to see how well the technology worked these days and have a look at a real world example. Now put your business hat on, I'm not currently a sales prospect but if the product does what I want then there is a pretty good chance I'll come back to you if I ever need it. Well I would if the eval / trial downloads were a hell of a lot easier to get.
In order to download a 15 day evaluation copy I had to sign up on the site, enter a number of details about my employer and then let them send me a license key via email. Firstly I'll ignore the fact that a key generator for the product exists and is reachable with a quick google. Assuming that a cracker isn.t going to pirate your software because it requires a .registered user. is too ridiculous to consider. It was pretty amusing to look back upon the steps I had to take and realise it would have been faster to pirate the software than request an eval license.
My quick registration, with the value foo in most fields, took about twenty seconds; then all I had to do was wait for an email. And wait I did, ten minutes for the eval key to come in to my shiny Mailinator inbox. I'd like to reiterate that point, I had to wait ten minutes to receive a key that I could generate myself in under two minutes.
Once I received the key and tried the software I was quite impressed, if I need to actually work on the project then it would have made a nice solution, the problem is I vote with my wallet (and my employers purchasing budget) and I won.t give money to stupid people that try and discourage new business.
As a closing argument i'd like to point to a semi-related article, When Search Engines Become Answer Engines, this whole article covers the fact that people dip into websites, you have maybe half a page to hook a potential lead and pull them in, when you require personal details to even look at the merchandise don't count on a record quarter.
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Posted: 2004/08/28 22:46 | /justdont | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 27 Aug 2004
WebDAV -- With a silent V?
I've spent the last few days looking at document management systems,
versioning and work-flow applications, while I'm happy enough putting my own
scribbles under CVS
(I've not yet drunk from the Subversion Koolaid) a number of my less techy
co-workers need a solution that fits them better.
After some digging around I started to eval WebDAV, it's used by Apple for shared calendaring, MS Word has WebDAV support and there was an Apache module; very promising. For those unfamiliar with the acronym it expands to "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning"; except it doesn't have versioning.
I'll repeat that for the audience, which I noticed hit 23 last week, the Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol doesn't cover versioning. A separate protocol, DeltaV is required to sit on top of WebDAV to get any kind of versioning. So if you find yourself in the same boat as me stop wondering how you get Word to increment a version number on the server, it doesn't.
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Posted: 2004/08/27 21:26 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 25 Aug 2004
Is Sendmail on a suicide run? OH PLEASE YES!
There are rumblings about Sendmail and it's future distribution, both it's
involvement in the IETF and Microsoft circus known as Sender-ID and it's
own new license are topics worthy of discussion and attention, a brief
collection of useful links can be found at the OpenBSD Journal.
I normally don't get involved in subjects like this until it's community rallying time (such as European Patents) but I have a vested interest in this one, I'd like to see Sendmail make itself expensive, propriety and (even more) difficult to distribute. You may consider that an odd view but look at it from a different perspective, everyone who still (*cough* Redhat *cough*) packages it in the base system would have to join the rest of the twenty first century and bundles something that actually works, like Postfix or Exim.
Before I get hate mail from the people who have spent years of their lives in caves and on mountain tops learning the arcane syntax and pointlessly complex options let me state for the record, I understand that for certain near-unique and highly powered tasks you need Sendmail and nothing else will do. If you are in that area then you can damn well build your own version. For the rest of the people that get it by default it's time to step in and give them a better baseline; anything that's not Sendmail.
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Posted: 2004/08/25 22:03 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Lovers of good SciFi Rejoice
My name is Dean, and I'm a Farscape fan. I have just one thing to say: W00T!
Why am I making gamer noises of joy? The FARSCAPE Trailer has been released.
For those of you that don't know the back story the best place to start is the Save FARSCAPE site. The short version is that the TV execs meddled in the show and then shut it down. The fans rebelled and, considering that it's back, I'd say we won. The Net is a wonderful thing. The long version can be found at the site itself.
It's been a bad year for stupid mistakes at the big TV companies, FarScape goes off the air, Wonderfalls is culled before it even had a chance and the premature retirement of Angel to make room for yet more reality TV rubbish is enough to make even casual fans of genre TV curse. But the return of FarScape, while an isolated incident is an important one, the tech savvy fanbase are starting to understand how to have their voices heard. And we just won round one.
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Posted: 2004/08/25 21:45 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Loading the mod_perl Module
Today I hit an issue with mod_perl that had me going around in circles for
about an hour, my mod_perl handler wasn't being invoked, and I was getting
a directory listing instead. With the able assistance of a co-worker the
problem was found and solved pretty quickly.
If you add the "LoadModule perl_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_perl.so" line into the config file yourself ensure it's the last line otherwise something else such as mod_dir or mod_index will execute instead and you'll go insane trying to work it out.
I'm hoping Google will pick this post up and help the next poor soul.
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Posted: 2004/08/25 21:10 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 14 Aug 2004
Conference Audio Highlights
I manage to attend a decent number of conferences each year (despite my
employers lack of interest) but while the UK ones are pretty cheap and
amazingly good at securing top notch speakers (UKUUG is
brilliant at this) there are a lot of conferences I don't get to
experience beyond the odd blog post and mailing list summary due to
geographical location or cost (OSCON wins on both counts!)
In a recent post by Jon Udell he pointed to some clips hosted by IT Conversations, after a quick rummage around their site I now have plenty to keep me busy on those long train commutes. The site has streaming and downloadable versions of a number of technical talks, keynotes and interviews. I've listened to a couple of them already and have to say I'm impressed at the quality of the recordings. If you want to catch up with some of the better speakers in the IT industry this site may be THE best way to do it.
One other aspect of the site that warrants mentioning is the 'clipping service', with nothing more than the clip ID (easy to get) and a start and end time you can create URL's that point to the exact section you want and listen with a single click. Here is an example from Paul Grahams talk at OSCON.
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Posted: 2004/08/14 13:02 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
