Thu, 28 Oct 2004
Joel Spolsky and the Best Essays of 2003/2004
Joel
Spolsky is working on a new book, rather than spread more of his own
wisdoms, if you don't read his site then you should!, he is compiling
and editing a list of the best software essays published either online
or on dead tree.
While it is probably going to be quite a while before the book becomes available you can currently view the list of nominations and, in most cases, read them online.
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Posted: 2004/10/28 17:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Foxlicious - FireFox and del.icio.us Integration
I'm a big fan of the del.icio.us social bookmarking site but
it's lack of browser integration has always been slightly annoying. Luckily
someone else must have thought along similar lines as we now have the
excellent Foxylicious
This FireFox extension adds a folder to the bookmarks menu that contains your del.icio.us bookmarks making them available without going to a separate website. The only downside is that it seems to be a one way trip, adding a local bookmark to the menu and choosing "update bookmarks" (you can reach this via tools->Foxylicious) doesn't seem to update the bookmarks on the server.
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Posted: 2004/10/28 10:57 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 27 Oct 2004
Startup Skills Blog and AdGooroo eBook
I've been a subscriber to the
RSS feed over at Startup Skills
for quite a while now, the authors insights on creating a start up and
online advertising in general and Google Adwords in particular have
always made interesting reading; but one day they stopped.
Instead of just pontificating about what you could do he's been busy actually creating and running a company. AdGooroo, "an advertising intelligence service that tracks competitors' online advertising" and helps you get the most from your own Google Adwords certainly warrants a close eye if you use Google for ads and a perfect starting place to find out what it's all about if you don't.
For those interested you can currently download a free Adgooroo eBook that covers all the basics and the benefits you can expect along with some very interesting tactics on how to improve your lot in the Google adwords world.
Disclaimer: I have no dealings of any kind with Startup Skills beyond reading the content they put up. I would however seriously consider recommending the AdGooroo service at the next startup I work for.
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Posted: 2004/10/27 19:29 | /sites | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
FireFox adbar - It's a Joke Dammit!
I've been doing some research on the available FireFox extensions for a
very small side project that may or may not appear. During my travels I
spent some time investigating the quite excellent Adblock. I bet you can all guess what it
does.
What was slightly more amusing was the Adbar extension, this adds text ads that no one gets paid for, to FireFox; it is very similar to the unregistered Opera browser. While the idea behind the extension is worth a smile the Adbar user comments page helps to prove that some people don't pay any attention to what they are reading and will swallow anything. Always a good thing to know if you plan on starting your own business ;)
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Posted: 2004/10/27 17:32 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
WebmailCompose -- FireFox Extension
Over the last couple of days I've become quite taken with a FireFox
extension called WebmailCompose (
WebmailCompose XPI)
This addin for FireFox (although it has an issue installing on 0.9.3) and
Mozilla overrides the default behaviour of mailto: links and instead calls
your webmail application of choice.
By default support is provided for, among others, Gmail (WOO!), Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and you can even add your own service of choice with a little knowledge of URL formats.
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Posted: 2004/10/27 00:30 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 24 Oct 2004
Going Postal - No not me, the book
I've been a Terry Pratchett fan ever since I bought a copy of "The colour
of magic", he was a master of constant jokes, diverse and interesting
characters mixed together in a fantasy world which had enough commonalities
with our own to add an extra twist to the tale.
If one thing stands out from that sentence it should be the word 'was', while the quality of the recent stories (Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch) is, if anything, better than the earlier books the newer books including Going Postal are very quiet on the humour front.
The last comment I'll make on this reasonable read is the inclusion of the clacks 'hackers'. I'm sorry but this part of the story is way over played in every review I've read and, IMHO reads like an unimaginative stereotype hastily added.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 20:42 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Consoles, Binary files and Funny Characters (Unix)
Occasionly you will pipe or cat a file to the screen or a program will die and the
screen will begin to show gibberish when ever you type anything (I don't
mean the usual gibberish that most people type on a command line :)) If you
use putty then you will see the word 'PuTTy' appear contantly.
The quick way around this is to type 'reset' and the screen will begin to work as expected again.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 17:36 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Recovering a Frozen Terminal
After you've been using a Unix (or logging into one via putty) for a while
you'll probably encounter a key combination that locks the term and leaves
you unable to do anything. You'll hunt around the keyboard pressing
combinations until you sigh in despair and try Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D to kill the
current command or the current shell respectively; and they won't work.
After some more key-bashing you'll get lucky and the term will bomb out.
This entry is an attempt to explain what's happening and how to get around
it in the hope that google will send other unwary Unix users to this page
for a solution.
The key combination you've hit is Ctrl-S, this sends a stop signal to the terminal process that gives it the appearance of freezing. Anything you type here is still being queued up and will be actioned; this is why when you do hit resume the term dies if you've Ctrl-D'd. The correct way out of this is to hit Ctrl-Q, which sends a signal to resume and everything carries on working perfectly.
Occasionally this comes up on a mailing list and after the poster finds out the answer the typical reply is 'that's stupid behaviour'. While this trick is a lot less useful than it used to be it can still be useful to know, if you have a process writing to the screen at a high rate (and the scroll-back buffer isn't set very high) the ability to stop and start what you see independent of the process itself can be very handy.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 17:30 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Ubuntu Dropped Desktop Themes
For those of you that don't know it, and even for those that do, Ubuntu is a
Linux distribution that is based upon Debian but with up-to-date desktop
packages such as a modern Gnome. The distro itself has received a lot of
good press and looks very promising.
But that's dull. No one cares if it's technically excellent or it meets the needs of a large number of people (I may soon be running this on my Linux laptop so my views on this are pretty transparent :)) What is more interesting is controversy and differing opinions. Ubuntu had a theme named Human that was added as the default in the testing cycle. This theme had scantily clad people people on it. A number of people took offence at this, you can read the thread for yourself here.
Unfortunately for this story the Ubuntu people had an open IRC session with the users where this issue was discussed calmly and openly. They then took the concerns of the users in to consideration and changed the default theme. The rational bastards!
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Posted: 2004/10/24 17:25 | /operatingsystems/linux | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
2004 Shows -- Short(ish) Summary
This is going to be my last TV post for a while now, I promise! While in
general I don't watch more than four or so hours a week of TV (mostly
comedy shows like Have I got News For You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks)
the magical combination of an always on ADSL connection, Torrentcasting,
a new 250GB harddrive and two monitors (one for work and one for playing
TV shows) has rekindled an interest that was almost destroyed by the
ending of Angel, FarScape and Wonderfalls.
After hours of pain staking research (oh the hardship!) I present below my views on the season so far of what all genre geeks have probably already made up their minds on.
Starting off with the pilots we have Darklight and HEX. I'd heard nothing about Darklight before watching it so I had no expectations. And it failed to meet even that. With a number of genre actors, Shiri Appleby from Roswell, John de Lancie (Q) from Startrek the Next Generation and Stargate and David Hewlett, a Brit(!) who has become the most interesting thing on Stargate Atlantis this show has helped hammer a nail in their collective careers. Bland, bad CGI and no cohesion. It's actually lucky for Darklight that HEX, from Sky and constantly billed as the next Buffy, came along. Because it's worse; slow, badly written and with dialogue that feels forced (and a heroine that goes from "what's happening" to abusing her powers in about thirty seconds) this program makes me wants the ability to forever ban things from my downloader.
Now we're over the complete rubbish lets look at the programs that failed to meet expectations; Andromeda and CSI:NY. Andromeda had a lack luster start and after the first couple of seasons was handed to Robert Engels, a man I suspect was paid by the Enterprise Team to make their program look passable. I only watched a handful of episodes from all the seasons combined but while the original couple of series were cliched and quite dull, except for Lexa Doig who can do no wrong, the last couple have been full of new age 'theories' taken to a whole new level of insanity and plot holes wide enough to drive DS9 through. This program defies logic with its very existence. PS The new ships avatar looks like a badly aged barbie doll.
For my next trick I'm going to group the CSI shows together, I was a big fan of the early CSI, it had a blend of pop science, humour and characters that made it great fun to watch, trying to solve the cases before they did made a nice change from the usual dumbed down shows in this category. While the original CSI is still watchable, William Peterson is a master of his craft, the newer series seem to have become more like a soap opera and have lost the earlier novelty factor. I blame part of this on CSI: Miami, if David Caruso (Horatio Caine) ever cracks more than two expressions half the watching audience will die of heart attacks. As for the rest of the cast I can't really find anything to comment about, they are just so forgettable. CSI NY seems to suffer from the same problems; both the new teams are just dull. While CSI could afford a little bit of under characterisation, which has been mostly fixed with Greg and Dr Robbins, the other two don't have any thing to differentiate them.
Now on to Stargate and Stargate Atlantis, I don't really have much to say on these, Stargate has just plodded along happily as ever, and lets be honest it's formula is above average if no longer excellent, but with more cliched story lines and less of what made Richard Dean Anderson great as Jack O'Neill as his screen time gradually drops season by season. Stargate Atlantis on the other hand is, in essence, Stargate season 1 and 2. The plots are very similar, the characters fit the SG1 mould, Sheppard is O'Neill and Teyla is Teal'c, and nothing exciting ever happens. Except for David Hewlett who plays Dr. Rodney McKay. Ever since he called Carter blonde on Stargate this mostly anti-hero has been left to bring some originality to the series on his own. And unfortunately he's losing.
Enterprise. The first two seasons were rubbish and wasted an excellent opportunity. They also had rubbish credits and a very grating opening song. Season three (the Xindi storyline) lead to some great episodes among the chaff. Season four has started out a lot more promising and I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now. However I don't think this'll be reaching series 7 like all the other treks have. On the upside it doesn't have Janeway.
Now the positive, Lost is the best of the crop this year, I've already whittled on about Lost in a previous Lost blog entry but lets just say that it's the only thing keeping those of us missing Joss Whedon on TV sane. The last surprise is Veronica Mars, I like this show but I'm not sure why. The characters are mostly stereotypes and the stories are far from ground breaking but as a package it does seem to work. And anything that includes the Streets in the sound track is worth a watch.
This post has become a little longer than I planned but now it's off my chest I can get back to posting tech stuff only the google spider and twelve techies care about :)
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Posted: 2004/10/24 16:51 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Network Executives Get Lost
While I'm on the subject of genre TV (One more post after this one I
promise :)) I'll mention a program that is actually well worth setting your
TiVo / Torrent downloader for; Lost.
With J.J. Abrams of Alias fame on the creative team this show might actually get past the first dozen episodes (unlike the tragicly killed Wonderfalls) and have a chance to tell its story. The basic idea is very simple, the survivors of a plane crash are forced to live with each other on a remote island, but the execution is excellent.
Each episode is well paced and slowly reveals more about both the island and the characters themselves. While the constant flashbacks might become annoying enough of the characters personalities are shown through interactions with each other that hopefully the use of them will die off as the series progress. How long the show will last I'm not sure, people stuck on an island like this only works as long as the characters are fresh and the island holds some subtle twists and surprises, I suspect this might be a one or two series show and if it carries on like it began then it's one I'll be following.
Hell it must be good if the Penny Arcade guys like it!
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Posted: 2004/10/24 12:00 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
FarScape Mini-series -- Lowering Filters
I finally had a chance to sit down and watch this over the weekend and
while I wasn't as blown away as I thought I'd be (I had stupidly high
expectations) it was still very good TV and tied up a lot of loose ends
that the series never got to close.
While four hours may have seemed like a long time in which to have one last outing, when you look back at the series and examine the three episode arcs such as "Kiss the princess", "Liars, guns and money" and "We're so screwed" they gave any Sci-fi film a run for its money and, for me, were defining achievements for FarScape.
Even now that I've seen what is possibly the end of FarScape, this feels a lot more definite than the end of the series did, I can't help but think back to the end of the last episode when the people behind the series put the "To be continued" on screen despite having no contract and no home for the series. They believed in what they were doing, the fans agreed with them and thus it was fated to come back. To everyone who helped get it back even for just four hours I'd like to say thank you.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 10:44 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 23 Oct 2004
KT Tunstall - Best Live Performance This Year
For those of you that don't know it the BBC has a program called
Later with Jools Holland. The
show is a exhibition of great musicians, from all time greats like Desmond
Decker, Aretha Franklin and the late Ray Charles to modern singers like
Shola Ama and Beverly Knight each week has at least one act that makes you
sit up and take note.
And thats just the weekly shows! The New Years Specials are well worth recording for when you get in the next day and have some of the best live performances you could hope for, not just great singers but very unlikely duets and group songs. The shows time slot, as proven tonight, is perfect; you get home from a Friday night with friends and catch the second half before hitting the sack.
I clicked the TV on when I got in and was suddenly enthralled. A woman, who's name I later found out, called KT Tunstall was standing on stage on her own singing (with a great voice) but also playing the guitar, recording her own voice on a pair of foot activated recorders and playing it back to form her own backing as she sang. A quick Google shows she's not made any huge inroads to the main stream but it was a nice feeling to see someone very talented enjoying that they do. And I bet you'll be hearing more about her.
Update: An official KT Tunstall site exists!
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Posted: 2004/10/23 00:51 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 19 Oct 2004
The FarScape Mini-series -- Not seen it yet
And people seem to want to talk to me about it. While I'm waiting for it to
download, yes I own all the DVDs and I will buy this when it comes out so
no I don't feel guilty, I've had to add another rule to my mail filtering.
If you so much as mention FarScape in any way shape or form then your mail
gets filed away till later.
Now to change my web-proxy and start filtering my incoming RSS feeds...
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Posted: 2004/10/19 09:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 18 Oct 2004
The Swan on a Lake
There is a quote I've always liked, "It's like a swan on a lake. On the
surface everything is calm but underneath the webbed feet are paddling
furiously!" While this is equally true of many things it's always seems
to be most apt when I think about the start-ups I've been lucky enough to
work at.
The sales team and management doing the VC road-shows make the company appear to be a stable, healthy environment where everything is working fine and nothing un-expected arises on a daily basis. Then you get the actual staff who are beavering away like mad to not only take what they already have and make it ready for closer inspection but also franticly building to bring on board the next big customer.
I let myself get fooled by the apparent calm and control of two companies recently and I'm posting this as a reminder to myself, and hopefully a pointer to others; a small company is very rarely as calm and tranquil as it first appears. It's well worth spending some time talking to the staff to get the macro view; it could stop you making a bad employment decision.
On the upside this means you'll never get bored and if you enjoy a challenge, I personally love new technologies, then these can be among the best places to work. They just ain't the most safe or sane environments for certain types of people.
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Posted: 2004/10/18 22:15 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 16 Oct 2004
Apache Error log to Access log date converter
As part of my daily server housekeeping I keep an eye on the Apache error
logs for each of the servers I'm responsible for. If it's a quiet day I'll
grep through the attempted exploits, attacks and formmail scans for any
useful error messages. While attempting to track some 404's back to the
corresponding access-log entries I got bored of converting the error logs
date format into the default date format of the access log so I wrote a
small bit of shell that I (badly) named
ApacheErrorDate.sh but
without the studly caps, to do it for me.
You invoke the script on the command line with a single argument, the error log date string you want to convert. The script will then return a string in the access log format. If you want to paste the returned string directly into your editor of choice (I tested this with vim) then you can supply the -e option to have the slashes escaped to stop vim treating it as a substitution command.
I've added the short script, with a download link and brief introduction, to the MiniProjects page under the Apache Error log to Access log date converter header.
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Posted: 2004/10/16 17:47 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Stock Photos Considered (Non-)Harmful
As anyone who has ever read this site will have noticed, I have no
artistic ability; and a love of torturing innocent punctuation :). Even
the comet tail / mosaic at the top of almost every page was done for me
by an amazingly talented guy called Pete Jones.
One of my side projects (which typically move at near glacial speed) could do with a splash of colour and some photos. A quick google around led me to iStockPhoto which, in addition to having a great little tag line (The designer's dirty little secret), has some great images, especially some of the business shots by Lisa Gagne.
What's interesting to me is both the cheapness of the images, the fact that the submitters get 20% in royalties and that this may be the closest thing to a working micro-payments system I've seen recently. Oh and the prices are in dollars which rocks for me as a UK denizen.
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Posted: 2004/10/16 13:40 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 14 Oct 2004
Google Desktop Released.
Do you want top notch searching on your local machine? Do you want
lightening fast results on your (non-commercial; read the EULA!)
desktop? Do you want people to stop blogging about the Google Desktop Search?
Well the answer to number three is probably going to be yes pretty soon! I've not had enough time to form any real opinions yet but it does look pretty cool so go and have a play, it'll make the abscense of WinFS easier to bear :)
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Posted: 2004/10/14 22:23 | /tools/gui | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 13 Oct 2004
View In Lynx IE Plugin and other odds and ends
I've actually been receiving a fair bit of mail about my IE plugins recently, a couple of very
nice people sent me thank you mails for the BugMeNot plugin (which is amazingly
popular!), I had a couple of requests to port some of the 'View In XXX'
plugins to an IE based browser
called Maxthon, which I've done, and
I had a request to add one for using the online Lynx viewer.
Assuming no one complains about any bugs in the next week or so I'll try and add the Maxthon ports up on a separate page. For now you can entertain yourself with the View In Lynx IE plugin.
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Posted: 2004/10/13 23:20 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Give Unneeded GMail Invites to a Good Home
Do you have a couple of spare Gmail invites laying around (guvner)? If so
you probably already use FireFox as your web-browser of
choice, and a good choice at that!, but just think of the poor untold
hordes of IE users just
waiting to be saved.
"What can I do to help?" you may ask, well for a start you can donate a couple of GMail invites to the Spread FireFox GMail Project. These invites will be given to people proudly displaying FireFox buttons on their own web-sites. FireFox gets more PR, the site owner gets a Gmail account, you get the warm glow of giving back to the FireFox team and the web gets a better client base.
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Posted: 2004/10/13 00:12 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 12 Oct 2004
Rojo.com RSS Aggregator
Like most geeks I'm an information junkie, I have news sites, developer
blogs, security alerts and even a couple of system logs piped to me
via the bandwidth eating medium of
RSS. I started off using
FeedReader but soon felt the need for something a little more powerful and
swapped to the excellent, if quite memory intensive and slow to start, SharpReader.
After six months of happy usage the restriction of only accessing my subscriptions from a single machine began to get to me. After a brief stint using Bloglines, a webbased aggregator that solves the synchronisation problem by storing state on an Internet server, the UI began to annoy me so I switched back to SharpReader; and then I saw Jeremy Zawodny's Rojo coverage.
To be honest the fact it's a web based aggregator would have been enough for me to bookmark the company name for consideration the next time I tried to swap but the social networking aspect was enough of a pull to encourage me to send an invite begging^Wrequesting a beta account. And they gave me access.
I've now been using Rojo for two days and I'm very happy with it so far, although I've not yet dived into the social aspects it is well worth a look on basic features and UI alone. I have about 108 feeds in SharpReader and the OPML importer was 97%(ish) successful, it picked up I had some dead feeds in my list, and after submitting some feedback on the four it kicked out I received a response from Rojo within about 10 minutes so I'm impressed. How long will the honeymoon period last? I don't know but I do have a funny feeling I'll be blogging some of it's other distinct features in the not so distant future.
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Posted: 2004/10/12 23:41 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 11 Oct 2004
If it's Worth Logging it's Worth Time-stamping
I know this is old ground but it seems to come up a lot and annoy the arse
off me, if you are going to log something then please ensure it has:
- A date and time...
- ...that is easy to sort
- The name of the application that spawned the something you are logging
- The fully qualified name of the machine it is from
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Posted: 2004/10/11 23:20 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 09 Oct 2004
Searching the Contents of Torrents
And I don't mean the .torrent file, I'm more focused on the file
containing the actual content. For a personal project I'd like to be
able to search for information stored in text/DOC format or in
compressed archives but short of scripting a down-loader to get each file
I find, pulling it apart and searching manually I don't see
any options. As far as I can tell the main search engines stop at the
.torrent file.
Anyone know of any that actually download and index the content?
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Posted: 2004/10/09 17:54 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
WS-Management, an SNMP Replacement?
I hate to jump on any bandwagon that starts at Slashdot, although even a
broken clock is right twice a day, but I find myself agreeing with a
number of the
Slashdot comments
made about the new WS-Management spec. Firstly, and most importantly,
SNMP is
still the most widely used management protocol in production. Secondly
it has survived the invention of a number of replacements, WBEM and CIM
spring to mind as standards chosen to replace a lot of the functionality it
provides; oddly enough those specs were also backed by Microsoft and
Sun.
I'd be among the first to agree that SNMP isn't a perfect solution, it has a bad security model, version 3 has never been widely adopted and it can be immensely confusing to set up and run in an enterprise due to the poor documentation and propriety OID layouts. It isn't however going to be easily replaced by an XML/SOAP protocol, even if they get SOAP over UDP working correctly.
SNMP is used in a number of small embedded devices that are limited in memory, CPU and bandwidth. Adding enough of a webservices stack to allow these machines to communicate like this is going to require a pretty serious beefing up of the hardware used in these tasks. As an aside it is quite interesting to note that Cisco, Nortel and Juniper are all absent from that spec, I find it hard to consider any replacement to SNMP that lacks their backing.
I'm all for innovation and progress but lets not try and shoehorn XML and webservices into everything; please.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 15:45 | /specifications | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
DTrace Perl bindings? Yes Please!
While looking through the blogs of both the DTrace engineers at Sun I
stumbled upon this little gem (taken from Adam Leventhal's
Weblog):
"And speaking of perl, a lot of people asked about DTrace's visibility into perl. Right now the only non-natively executed language DTrace lets you observe is Java, but now that we realize how much need there is for visibility into perl, we're going to be working aggressively on making DTrace work well with perl. We've got some neat ideas, but if there are things you'd like to see with DTrace and perl, we'd love to hear about it as we think about what sorts of problems we need to solve."
This is excellent news, being able to interact with DTrace without needing to learn Java will make a lot of System admins happy. It's also a good first step into getting other ports working as any work needed to make this work with dynamic languages (like Perl) rather than statically typed ones (like Java) will have been done by the experts and then OpenSourced with the rest of Solaris 10.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 15:11 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Web2.0 via Jeremy Zawodny -- Nearly as good as being there?
I'd never heard of the
Web 2.0 conference
(an O'Reilly event) until Jeremy Zawodny
started to blog his attendance but now I wish I'd have gone along (let us
ignore the very high attendance cost and the fact I'm in the wrong country
:).) His full
Web2.0
archive is well worth digging through if you have any interest in where the
commercial interest in the web is pointing.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 15:01 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Just Don't (4 of ?) - Install More Than the Customer Wants
Over the last few weeks I've been involved with arranging evaluations
and purchasing of a number of 'enterprise' products. Among the rogues
gallery have been IBM (OK but nothing special considering they had near
a dozen people in the room), Oracle (Actually very good) and my new
favourite, Business Objects (BO), providers of Crystal Reports.
The day started off quite nicely, the BO technical gent came in and did an install of the product we were evaluating on our test server with me watching over his shoulder. The install was hitch free and took maybe an hour. He then took me through some of the administration features (on the OS level) including the logging and auditing support.
He then went to converse with the lady who will be doing the actual report writing, during the course of the afternoon he made a number of subtle hints as to the other powerful Crystal addons we might like to spend money one. One of these caught my attention, logging and auditing, I innocently asked what this got me beyond what I'd already seen; and then I was told what I'd already seen was the optional software. Which we had no intension of buying at the start of the day but that'd been installed for us just in case.
Never install more than people ask for in an evaluation, it leads to mismanaged expectations and distrust of the vendor.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 14:45 | /justdont | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
UKUUG DTrace Talk
After their 2004 AGM UKUUG arranged for
Jon Haslam, a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, to give a presentation
on DTrace. While
I missed the first thirty minutes of slides I did get to see the ninety
minutes of practical demonstrations.
The official DTrace spiel, "Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is one of the hot, new technologies in the next revision of Sun's Operating System, Solaris 10. DTrace provides the ability to generate concise answers to almost arbitrary questions about the behaviour of your systems, from the top of the application through to the bottom of the kernel." sounds quite impressive. What surprised me is that it seemed to work perfectly.
Jon Haslam stood in front of the audience and wrote small four to ten line scripts, while keeping everyone amused with anecdotes, that drilled down on information such as what thread (or process) was writing to which disk blocks (which you can't do in Linux at all), what was actually causing the most interrupts (which top doesn't actually catch as it's granularity is too large) and other similar feats. For a full example of how simple the tool is to use have a look at TCP by process
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Posted: 2004/10/09 14:33 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Larry Lessig on Creative Commons
I was lucky enough to take a long lunch and amble down to see Larry
Lessig's presentation at UCL on the Creative Commons Licenses last week,
firstly it's worth noting that Mr Lessig is a very slick speaker, he
obviously invests a lot of time in his presentations and it shows. The
slides were very shiny and incorporated a lot of multimedia, video clips
ranged from a mash-up of a Charley Brown cartoon with an Outkast sound-track
(the song was Hey Ya) to Blair and Bush singing love-songs; the latter was
interesting as the whole video was created from public footage.
The multimedia fascination of the slides was something i wasn't expecting from a lawyer, I've never seen Lessig speak before except at a FOSDEM, but they served two excellent purposes. Firstly they helped break the talk up into small digestible chunks, most people don't really have the ability or desire to memorise details of licenses and copyright directives. These clips suited the audiences attention span and stopped people getting bogged down in the details.
The second more insidious tactic (IMHO) is mind-share, software isn't that interesting to most people but music and video are. The more people that are aware of alternatives to the established monopoly players the better and while the FSF are well known in the tech world they have pretty much no real influence on the unwashed masses who buy most of the DVDs and CDs. Hopefully the Creative Commons will make more progress here.
The second part of the talk, which wasn't performed by Larry Lessig, was an introduction to the UK version of the Creative Commons license. The short version is that we will soon have one, the long version can be found at the following links which I stole^Wborrowed from the newsletter that came out afterwards.
Thanks to Mark Simpkins, audio of the presentation is at:
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/I.Brown/cc/lessig-ucl.wav (80MB)
To discuss the UK licences, you can join the cc-uk mailing list:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-uk
The UK project pages are at:
http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/uk/
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Posted: 2004/10/09 14:08 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Attending Events and Blogging from the back row
It's been pointed out to me that while I'm willing to endlessly type
about such thrilling subjects as "Incomplete Ideas -- Knoppix, UML and
CDs in books" and Apache Logging directives I'm very lax about covering
events, talks and workshops; or as it's known, things people actually care
about :)
Two good examples over the last few months have been EuroFoo and the UKUUG Linux Techcon in Leeds. I started out intending to blog at least some of the sessions at each conference but two things stopped me, the talks were too interesting and I felt rude.
Both UKUUG and EuroFoo (which I am immensely thankful to have been invited to) were full of interesting people and sessions, I don't think I spent more than five minutes on my own at either event, there was always someone interesting to chat to about what they are working on or the contents of the last session. This constant activity stopped me taking any real notes or actually typing up the little I did write down while there and once I got back I decided to catch up on that pesky sleep.
The second reason is something I've mentioned on mailing lists before, if you are going to a session to listen to someone talk then shut up until the question session and TURN THE BLOODY LAPTOP OFF. I don't want to hear you picking away at the keyboard and I really don't want to hear you getting beeps from bash tab completion. If you NEED to use the laptop, and lets be honest you don't, then either sit at the back not the front row, and turn off the speaker or sit in the main areas of the room. Politeness costs nothing.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 13:45 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Never confuse an Asset and a Liability
I've recently re-read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I was
actually looking for a different finance book and this one fell on me so I
considered it an omen :) The book is pretty straight forward read which
gives you a peek at the perspective of a business man who is trying to
educate his son and sons friend in how to treat money.
While the book isn't exactly life changing it is a worthwhile read and contains a number of well explained nuggets, the best example and the one that stayed with me from my first reading about four years ago is the comparison between a "rich" and "poor" mans balance sheet.
While a poor man gets his money and spends it on bills, car costs, home costs etc, which the author considers to be liabilities, a rich man will try and purchase assets, things that will bring in some return these assets can then be added to a list of incomes and the extra money allows you to then purchase more assets; creating a virtuous circle.
While this may sound simple you'd be surprised to know how few people actually think about this. The other interesting part of this example is how the author defies conventional wisdom and lists a house as a liability rather than an asset. For the full story of why pick a copy of the book up, it's worth the investment of a couple of evenings reading.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 13:20 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Welcome to the Marie Celeste
I've been to every Linux World Expo at Olympia in London and each year
it gets a little bit more depressing. Earlier events have had such
marvels as a giant ice penguin (provided by SGI) that had vodka flowing
though its veins and Jon Maddog Hall pointing out how insane it is to refuse
entrance to students to a Linux focused event (watching the management
squirm was great fun) this year we had... well nothing of any real
note.
A slow stroll through the conference hall took about twenty minutes and was more than enough to take in all the sights, from Novells horde of booth girls and desperate looking sales people to the marauding Java people wearing monitors on their backs and looking very confused the day was pretty much a washout. The only highlight of the day was the .Org section which was actually quite busy considering the low visitor turnout on the 6th of October; the day I attended.
It's worth noting that this year we've had two Linux World Expos in the same place, from what I heard on the day it seems like the new owners of the show didn't want to wait until next year and pushed this one through, was it a mistake? In my mind yes but then again I've never organised a show like this so what do I know :)
After spending an hour speaking to some of the .Org stall workers who work their arses off for a couple of days as volunteers it was time to honour the second tradition of the expo and head down the pub. Here's to a better show next year.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 13:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
