Thu, 29 Sep 2005
Short Planet Outage
In what is just another in a long line of things that have been sent to test
me over the last couple of weeks, today one of my sites got hit by a group
of machines trying to do not nice things. The result? A load of 56 and a
very slow machine. I stopped apache for a while, put some "measures" in
place and we're back up running.
I've never bothered to make blosxom cache or anything to keep the load low, not having that much traffic always achieved the same goal, but I'll try and pencil some time in to take a look. Learn from your mistakes and all that.
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Posted: 2005/09/29 18:56 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 25 Sep 2005
Running Planet With RSS 0.9 Feeds
One of the little bits of trivia I learned while setting up PlanetGLLUG
was how the planet software deals with RSS 0.9 feeds. The original "specification" for this
version didn't require each entry/post to have a date associated with it;
although a lot of feeds work around this by either using the later revisions
or including the Dublin Core name-space and dates.
This causes the planet software to add every item in the RSS feed to the planet with the same date, the one on which it first pulls in the entries. This came as a bit of a shock to me and I was worried that it'd do this every time the feed was updated. Fortunately as long as your planet "cache" directory is usable it's smart enough to only add the new entries with the date set to when it encounters them.
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Posted: 2005/09/25 14:46 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
UKUUG 2005 Annual General Meeting
A busy Thursday night began with the UKUUG AGM. With just over twenty people present Ray Miller,
council chairman, went through the details for the last year. While the
full information will be available in the minutes (which should be in the
next UKUUG news letter) there are a couple of points that I feel warrant a
mention.
Firstly was some great news. Alasdair Kergon, who pretty much singlehandedly organises the Linux conference each year, was made an honourary UKUUG member. I think it's a life time thing but I'm not sure. What I am sure of it that it's well deserved and couldn't happen to a nicer man. Alasdair has always been friendly, approachable and willing to give advice and feedback on a number of user groups and events for a lot of people. He's served the maximum sentence on the council so he gets some time off but I'm hoping we'll still be seeing him at all the events.
Secondly is the membership turnover. UKUUG has a membership working group, who managed to increase the membership numbers by 25% over a single year! Unfortunately UKUUG also lost 25% of it's members over the same time. Now is this just people that wanted to go to one event cheaply and then let the membership lapse? Did something change that made the group more attractive to new members while putting off the old ones? At the moment it doesn't seem to be that known. That's one of the things I want to work on. Also did people leave because it was a pain to renew? Would a direct debit make it easier for people to stay involved? It's not like the UKUUG costs a lot. If you're a lapsed member and wouldn't mind giving me your reasons please feel free to contact me.
Oh yeah! I'm now on the UKUUG council for a year; I actually got voted in. W00T!
Disclaimer: This is my take on what was said. I may be wrong, have misunderstood or just have been confused. Again.
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Posted: 2005/09/25 13:34 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 24 Sep 2005
Organising A Meeting with PledgeBank
One of the great things about sites like PledgeBank is that they provide a
single service and they they do it well enough that it can be bent slightly
to serve another purpose. I organise the occasional meeting for techies and
one of the few major worries is "what happens if no one turns up?". It's
not a complex fear but it can result in some sleepless nights.
It's not even just a case of "will I look like an idiot if this goes wrong?". If you've snagged non-local speakers it can become a major worry. They've given their time, often for free, to come down, pay their own travel and deliver a talk. The worst thing that could happen is no one turns up!
This is where pledgebank comes in. I've been considering holding some evening meets in London for different tech crowds. They would be short, two talks (45 minutes each with a ten minute break) and then to the pub for food, drink and conversation. Getting the first one off the ground will be difficult because people don't know if anyone else will go.
I'm thinking of putting up a pledge containing the speakers, topics and location. Put it up two-three months in advance and close it two weeks to a month before the night. If it's got 20 people do it. If not drop it and try and come up with different topics. It might also be worth setting up some kind of alternate date with a "I'd come to this if it was at the second choice date." option. The idea's got some kinks to work out but it seems like a good idea. To me...
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Posted: 2005/09/24 10:43 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
KProbes -- I Finally Get It!
Back in April of 2001 GLLUG had a meeting, in the CFC preview cinema, which
featured a talk by Richard Moore of IBM. Now the speaker obviously knew his
stuff, he was a little dry but obviously passionate and enthusiastic about
his material. The topic was a new way of debugging the Linux Kernel; it was
called DProbes.
Now while I understood most of the talk, I'm not a kernel guy so bits were over my head, the idea seemed like a good, if quite ambitious one. DProbes would allow kernel developers to pull out what was actually going on when things were executing by creating instrumentation points in the code. Like watch points in a normal debugger. And while the idea was sound it was only really useful to kernel developers. A niche in a niche so to speak.
Over the years since, I've been fortunate enough to see Richard present updated versions of the talk as work's progressed on the software. This year, at the UKUUG Linux con in Swansea, I saw him present what are now called KProbes. And I finally "got it". Solaris has something called DTrace. It's a way of pulling out low level details from pretty much anything in the system. Metrics and information that's never been available in the past can now be pulled out. And Linux can do it as well; just not from as many places.
Now I don't know whether DTrace has opened my eyes to the potential of KProbes or the KProbes people have seen what DTrace can do and adjusted their presentation but I think KProbes is one of the more important Linux projects happening at the moment. The ability to pull out real data, to such an incredibly fine grained level, is something every admin should want and every developer should be aware of.
It's weird how a talk I sat through four years ago is now one of the topics I'm most interesting in.
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Posted: 2005/09/24 10:00 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Updates to PlanetGLLUG and IIS-Resources GM Script
Well Planet GLLUG has been running
for a couple of days without any glitches, except for some, er,
interesting, HTML running from one persons postings to another. I've also
replaced some of the images with much better versions contributed from
Simon Morris. Now some (maybe) interesting tidbits:
43.8% of the visitors to PlanetGLLUG are using Linux vs the 42.1% that are running Windows; it's always nice to see people dogfooding. Even more surprising is that the most popular web browser used by the Windows viewers is... FireFox! We're also the top hit in Google for 'planet gllug' which might help spread the word a bit.
The other, much smaller, update is that the IIS-Resources Printer Redirect Script no longer has the printer dialog pop up. A small code snippet from Gunnar Hansson helped fix this for me.
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Posted: 2005/09/24 09:45 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 20 Sep 2005
IIS-Resources -- Printer Friendly GreaseMonkey Script
I've got the first version of the
IIS-Resources Printer Friendly Articles GreaseMonkey script written and
uploaded. It takes you to the correct print page, minus the adverts, but
it's currently got a problem in that the onload handler kicks up a print
dialogue (on Windows at least). If anyone has any ideas how to stop it
doing this please let me know.
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Posted: 2005/09/20 23:29 | /tools/online/greasemonkey | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
TheRegister Printer Friendly Articles -- Fixed
I noticed a bug in my
TheRegister Printer Friendly Articles Greasemonkey plugin a couple of
days ago. The odd thing was the bug was a major one that I never saw based
upon my browsing habits.
I no longer read TheReg, I'm subscribed to its RSS feed instead. I only bother opening the stories I'm interested in. While this saves me time it also means I never go to its front page. Which was the problem. The old version of the plugin tried to convert the very front page in to a printer friendly version as well. Which broke. I've put a fix in now to avoid it doing that to the top level but the odd thing was, due to the amount of pages I read via RSS I never noticed it...
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Posted: 2005/09/20 22:52 | /tools/online/greasemonkey | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Kim Polese on SpikeSource
Over at IT Conversations is a recording of Kim Polese's
OSCON 2005 keynote. Better known to many people as the public face of
Marimba, the push technology that was shoved away, her new employers seem a
lot more interesting. The basic idea is to test and certify stacks of
software, seemingly from the kernel up, and then presumably get paid to add
desired items to the testing.
It might just be me but this sounds fascinating. Pulling together and integrating all the layers in each stack, and making the whole thing measurable, reproducible and automated is one of those technical challenges that just seems too much fun to get paid to do. It also requires a blend of sysadmin and developer skills that'd keep things interesting.
The recording's a short one and Polese is a great speaker so if you've got twenty minutes it's worth listening to what she's got to say. The business model might not make them millionaires but the work is interesting and could be very beneficial to OpenSource in general. If only they had more useful information on their site...
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Posted: 2005/09/20 20:48 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Planet GLLUG - Sort of Working
I'm involved in the GLLUG user group. One of the
ideas that came up recently (it was actually discussed on a non-
GLLUG list!) was about starting a "Planet". A Planet is a collection of
posts from different blogs (pulled together from different feeds) and put
on a single page (also available via different feed formats...). And now we
have one; behold Planet GLLUG.
The initial release is a trial in a number of ways. Firstly I don't know much about the software. Secondly I don't know if people will want to read it, and if so do they want everything or just the tech content?
Some of the things I have noticed from the initial play is that it doesn't seem to deal with certain values (I think it hates "smart quotes"), it brings a whole RSS 0.91 feed in at once, putting each entry as 'now' and it has a very strange release structure where you have to pull versions out of arch. A program that has some of the worst, and most verbose, command line options I've ever seen! While the planet is now up expect it to undergo changes for the next couple of days until I like the way it's working.
If you're involved in GLLUG, and by that I mean you post on the lists or attend the meetings, and want to get added drop me a note to my gmail account or the one I post to GLLUG with.
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Posted: 2005/09/20 20:36 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Colds -- I'm Against Them
Over the last week or so I've been suffering from a cold that just won't
shake loose. It started with headaches, which stopped me from reading or
using a monitor, and has reduced back to the point where I sound funny
(yes, more than usual...) and have a sore throat. The weird thing is that
it seems to have screwed up my sleep patterns. I'm going to bed early,
waking up for a couple of hours and then drifting back off. And then
panicing to get to work on time.
One of the side effects of this is the mass of unread emails and blogs that have been steadily piling up. Today I did something very relaxing and nuked almost all of them. All my mailing lists and a chunk of the less important conversations, any blog entry over three hours old and my gmail accounts are now all (almost) clear. It's nice to be back at the starting post every now and again.
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Posted: 2005/09/20 20:23 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 18 Sep 2005
House - My C.S.I Replacement
I used to be a big fan of C.S.I, the original, not the spin-offs, but as
the series continued to come it moved away from the science and quirks
and more in to the weekly "soap opera" I lost my interest in it. Fortunately
there's now a new contender for it's place in my very limited TV schedule.
House, M.D.
The title character, Dr. Gregory House, is played damn well by Hugh Laurie, a British actor best known in the UK for his comedy work. House is an anti-social doctor who specialises in both infectious diseases and annoying the people around him with his smugness and attitude. The character reminds me of Grissom but a lot more extroverted and willing to get involved. The whole series seems to be C.S.I inspired, but in a good way, and is a worthwhile waste of 45 minutes.
Channel 5 is currently about 15 episodes in and it's turning in to great escapism. Now when can we get a cross-over with C.S.I? ;)
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Posted: 2005/09/18 23:08 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Stargate Atlantis Series 2 - Flat McKay
I've been a Stargate fan since the first series (the ninth series is a
'little' flat but that's a different post) and I dutifully watched Atlantis
when it started, and was pretty much disappointed. The plots are mostly from
the early Stargate episodes and the characters are too similar to the
old SG1 team. Except McKay, who I really liked.
Arrogant, cowardly, selfish, brilliant and with a dry, sarcastic wit he was the reason I managed to hang on for half a series. But then I got bored. I recently had a chance to watch the second series, up to about a week ago, and saw a couple of brilliant McKay episodes. In one he gets "bonded" with a sharp female military operative, in another his arrogance kills one co-worker and almost kills himself and in a third he's completely understood by a brutal prisoner. What do they have in common? They all explore and challenge the way McKay is and functions. And the long term effect on the character? It seems like none.
While the other leads are all changing and growing, except Shepherd who seems destined to be O'Neil light, McKay doesn't seem to be adapting, growing or even responding to be handed pretty blatant life changing events. And that's a damn waste.
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Posted: 2005/09/18 23:08 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
The Butterfly Effect -- Surprisingly Watchable.
I've just watched The
Butterfly Effect - Directors Cut and I have to say it's not as bad as I
was expecting. The plot outline, from IMDB, is pretty snappy: "A
young man (Ashton Kutcher) blacks out harmful memories of significant
events of his life. As he grows up he finds a way to remember these lost
memories and a supernatural way to alter his life."
What made the film interesting was its pretty bleak view of changing the past. Each time he tried to be smart and have another go it got worse; the idea of leaving things well alone is pretty well advocated. What made watching it strange is that the directors cut, the version I saw, is a lot nastier than the ending from the cinema. Allegedly. And this is where it gets weird as the DVD I've got has the directors ending, an alternate happyish ending, a second alternate ending - this one happy - and no sign of the ending that pretty much everyone who saw the film got... very odd.
Still, even with the multiple endings it's not a bad film, it's got some genuinely nasty scenes (the prison ones are cringe-worthy) and the idea isn't a bad one. Worth a couple of hours: 6/10.
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Posted: 2005/09/18 01:35 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 17 Sep 2005
Applying for the UKUUG Council
I've been a member of the UKUUG for a couple of years know and I'm a great
fan of their conferences. They always manage to get a good venue, a decent
crowd and a lot of top notch speakers. I, on the other hand, have just about
managed to get two GLLUGs up and running and almost had a coronary
at each one. In an attempt to learn more about how the big boys plan and
organise these kinds of events I've applied for a seat on the UKUUG
council. A couple of the longer running members are stepping down this
year and so there are some seats available.
I've already got someone to nominate me, which is oddly fitting as John was the first person I spoke to at my first Linux meeting, and I should know by the end of next week if I've been accepted. So what do I expect to get out of it? Primarily learning how to make technical events a success and how to create a good quality news letter every quarter. The experience of how they run an organisation of distributed people and how to go about getting sponsorship and funding will be bonuses. And what do I expect to contribute? Hunting down speakers, talking to attendees and working out what they want, recommending speakers from other events, spreading the brand, evangelizing the group and just being open to help where I can.
Fingers crossed.
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Posted: 2005/09/17 16:52 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
The Personal MBA
Traditionally there has always been two easily identifiable people in a
tech start-up, the beard and the suit. I'm a beard, well a shaven one...
which I guess makes me a chin... But I'm digressing. One of the great
things about the 'net is that it's so easy to stroll in to someone else's
world. With people like Seth Godin and Hugh Macleod posting their
thoughts (and a decent RSS aggregator) I can get an insight in to the
marketing world. I can even drill down in to certain markets with sites
like the Lip-Sticking blog.
One of the more interesting topics to come from these blogs (and a huge number of others) this year has been the personal MBA. The basic idea is that you can get as much information from 40 (well, 42 at the moment) top of their field books as you could from an actual MBA. While a real MBA has other values, good on the CV, social networking etc. the ability to learn all the important things without leaving your job for two years and spending huge amounts of money is one I more than welcome.
For a short summary of the books have a look at the ChangeThis Personal MBA Manifesto.
Update: It's just popped in to my head that this is a good opportunity to get some free PR for a book seller. Put the whole set in to a bundle and offer a discount. I'm sure it'd generate some good buzz among people who buy a lot of business books...
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Posted: 2005/09/17 15:37 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
FireFox - Making PDFs Easier to Swallow
When it comes to presenting information on the 'Net PDF files do little but
annoy me, fortunately I'm not alone in thinking PDFs in websites
suck. I understand that you might need to have a very controlled
form that people can print off. Fine, but take me to a HTML page
with a link explaining what the PDF is for. And don't even think about
giving me important information in PDF format by default; HTML with a
link to a higher quality version maybe. PDF on its own? No way!
Fortunately FireFox has two extensions that make dealing with PDF files much more pleasurable. First up is TargetAlert, an extension that provides clues as to what's at the other end of a link. If the far end of the link is anything but a webpage TargetAlert will attempt to warn you with an icon. I can't even imagine how many times it's saved me the long wait of loading a Word, Excel or PDF document by accident.
Secondly we have the PDF Download extension. This one intercepts any PDF links you click on and allows you to either download it, open it in a new (background) tab, convert it to HTML and show it in another tab or abort the load. I like this extension a lot.
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Posted: 2005/09/17 14:31 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Techie Events
I try to get to a lot of technical conferences, you meet cool people, you
learn lots and (this is going to sound bad...) it gives you a chance to
measure yourself against your peers who actually care about what they
do. Not just the 9-5 people that don't even own a home PC. In the next
couple of months there's a small torrent of events coming up and I'm going
to see how many I can get to. In no real order we have:
EuroOSCON: I know I said I wasn't going to be attending. But things changed, it's the first one, I can apply for a discount (check the EuroOSCON page if you're a LUG member/Perl Monger) and I'm staying in a really bad (but very cheap :)) hotel. And Damian Conway is doing a tutorial on how to give presentations.
FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) 2005 will be held in London at Olympia at the same time as the LinuxWorld Expo (which I normally end up manning stalls at...) and looks like it could be great. Alasdair Kergon is speaking on LVM, Mark Cox is talking about security and Daniel Veillard is covering XEN and Virtualization. And registration is free!
After EuroOSCON is the Nordic Perl Workshop. I didn't get to YAPC this year and I've never been to Sweden so this is looking damn tempting... And it's on a weekend which means I don't have to beg for more time off :)
Geeks in London on Thursday 22nd September can look forward to a busy night. Starting with the UKUUG AGM (if you're not a UKUUG member then why not?) and followed immediately after by a free entry talk on LDAP Schema Design the night begins with tech before moving to the IBM OpenPower kick off event at the London Planetarium. I should be at all three so come and say "Hi".
Last but not least we have the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures. It's in the Limehouse Townhall (which has held many a Consume meeting), which has a great Chinese nearby, and covers, among many other topics, free wireless networking and free of copyright mapping.
There's a lot going on over the next couple of months and hopefully I'll be able to get to most (if not all) of the above and post anything cool.
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Posted: 2005/09/17 13:35 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Reading List - 2005/09/17
I always seem to have a huge pile of books to read and an inability to
actually read them in any order. This months pile includes:
Behind
Closed Doors.
I'm a big fan of the Pragmatic Programmers books and this
one is no different. It covers the things that we're thankful good managers
already know and gives us something to throw at^Wto the bad ones. I'm most
of the way through it and it's a 7/10.
My
Job Went to India.
Another PragProg book, this one's interesting both because of the topic (I
have my own Pragmatic Improvement plan so I'm already quite in to this) and
because Chad Fowlers blog
is a great read. The IT market is changing and this book seems to be one of
the few out that helps you prepare for the "New World Order."
The Art of
Project Management.
An O'Reilly book that had me hooked on a brief flick through, it seems to
cover a lot of valuable experience from the IT industry and how to avoid
making a lot of the comment mistakes in projects.
Using Moodle.
This is both the odd one of the bunch and the weakest. It's a guide to
using moodle but it's very focused on basic users. It walks you through
using the different parts of the interface and doesn't seem to really bring
you anything that the docs don't. Just with better editing. I'm half way
through and I'll put a review up when I've finished but for now have a
careful look before you buy.
Now the real question is how many other books will I read in between finishing these?
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Posted: 2005/09/17 13:02 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
PledgeBank Adds Comment RSS Feed
I like the PledgeBank site, it's a
great idea and it's promoting some good causes (UK Digital Rights is one of
them) but it was a pain to keep going back and reading the comments... If
only we had a way of subscribing to the comments... maybe using a form of
XML that has a number of specs... ;)
After sending in a single email asking for RSS feeds of the comments and waiting no more then seven of our earth days they've added them. This is how sites should work, good ideas, friendly people and a good service.
I spend a lot of time dealing with un-helpful people so it's always nice to have something like this to post. Thanks to everyone behind PledgeBank.
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Posted: 2005/09/17 12:40 | /sites | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Google Ads and IE Plugins
Back in August I added Google adwords to the IE Plugins page. If at
all possible I plan to keep the site advert free but the IE Plugins, with
the possible exception of my blogs atom feed, are the biggest bandwidth
consumers by a fair way.
This was my first foray in to the world of Google ads and I've picked up some very useful information. Firstly adding adverts, and viewing the reports, is incredibly easy. Google has made the process both quick and simple. So 10/10 for that. Secondly the JavaScript code you use kicks up a number of warnings when you use FireFox in strict mode. Not so good. Thirdly the adverts it shows are actually dull as heck (who wants to click on an advert that says "Download Internet Explorer"?). That's a combination of my content and Googles matching software so I can half fix that.
All-in-all it's been a pretty painless process that's not really netted me any cash. You're not allowed to discuss how much you've made under the terms and conditions (as I understand them) but in my case it doesn't pay for the bandwidth the plugins require; IE users don't like clicking on adverts :) On the up side my plugins have been downloaded almost 680,000 times over the last two and half years. Which means at least a handful of people have found them useful!
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Posted: 2005/09/17 11:52 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 03 Sep 2005
The Badger Badger Badger Tour! (2005)
Ubuntu's Jeff Waugh is going to be a very busy man. Before he even gets
to the first O'Reilly EuroOSCON, which is being held in Amsterdam in
October, he's stopping off at a Gnome convention, LUG meetings and we're hoping to get him out for an
evening in London.
Details are a bit slim at the moment, I don't have a venue or a confirmed plan for the evening, but with a little luck we'll get Jeff to talk about Ubuntu, Linux on the desktop and what it's like being Debians agile sibling and then go for food and drink. I'll post an update, with some actual details, as soon as I've got them.
A more detailed version of Jeff's itinerary can be found on the Ubuntu wiki on the Badger Badger Badger Tour page.
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Posted: 2005/09/03 17:24 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
BBC Backstage Competition Extended
While sitting in the BBC backstage session at OpenTech I had an idea for an
entry to the competition. Which I then forgot about. After an email from a
friend recently asking if I'd done anything for it and pointing out I only
had three days left I decided to have a coding day on Saturday and try and
get a prototype working and submitted. And then the
BBC Backstage competition deadline is extended! So now I can go back
to what I'd already planned to do today and procrastinate some more. Thank
you BBC. I think ;)
One of the few bits of code I have written for the competition is a short script to automatically download TV-Anytime data and extract it ready for manipulation. It seems to work fine and it does what I want so I thought I'd share it to lower the amount of work anyone else attempting the competition needs to do.
Update: Thanks to a small code snippet for getting the current date, from Dave Cross, the script is now half the size and just as readable.
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Posted: 2005/09/03 10:30 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 02 Sep 2005
Playing with Perl Backstage
As most of you 'net savvy people know, the BBC has put a number of
feeds online under the banner of BBC
Backstage. While it's nice to see organisations like the BBC
offering this kind of data (and the front man, Ben Metcalfe seems a nice,
and interesting guy) the initial release of one of the more interesting bits
of data, the TV Anytime TV and radio data, only had a Java API available for
using it.
But no more! Leon (Lord of the Orange) Brocard has written and released a TV Anytime Perl module suitable for reading the format. And it works very nicely! A simple example, that mostly works :), is my show films script that attempts to pull out all the films on the BBC channels. My verdict? The BBC service is great to play with and the TV::Anytime module makes it a hell of a lot easier to get started.
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Posted: 2005/09/02 23:29 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 01 Sep 2005
Redirect The Register Articles to Print Version
I'm a big fan of The Register
but I can't stand multi-page articles. I've put a little Greasemonkey script together to
make sure I don't have to deal with them. The
The Register Printer Friendly Articles script is now online and ready
for use. I hope someone else finds it useful.
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Posted: 2005/09/01 21:53 | /tools/online/greasemonkey | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
