Thu, 27 Oct 2005
London Web Frameworks Night
Update: the venue has changed! Please see the London
Frameworks Night Update page.
I'm delighted to announce that the London Web Frameworks night will actually be happening! It's due to happen on the 17th of November and starts at 19:00. Thanks to Ben Evans we've got a venue (Morgan Stanley at Cabot Square) and we've got three damn fine speakers.
Presenting Django we've got Simon Willison. Showcasing Rails is Matt Biddulph and to cover Catalyst we've got Matt Trout, one of its developers.
Each of the speakers will present their respective technology and show what makes it worth your time and attention. And none of them will build a blog live on stage! The event is, as always, free but you'll need to register to attend. We'll be putting up a sign up form over the next couple of days, I'll post a link to it, and the full announcement, as soon as it's ready.
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Posted: 2005/10/27 22:55 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 20 Oct 2005
Dr Conway: Best EuroOSCON Keynote so far
Damian Conway, who had a number of happy customers in his "Presentation
Akido" tutorial, has just managed to raise the ante for all other keynote
speakers. His keynote, an amazingly coherent group of geek jokes and
parodies of keynotes we've seen so far, was the funniest thing at
the the conference. And they've got Jeff Waugh here!
I don't know if it's been recorded but if it has someone needs to leak it now. Damn funny and a very good guide to how not to present. 10/10.
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Posted: 2005/10/20 09:58 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 16 Oct 2005
EuroOSCON Here I Come!
I head off to Amsterdam today for EuroOSCON, I'm booked in to the tutorials
so there is no way I can make it in time tomorrow morning. This is my first
O'Reilly conference (Euro FOO Camp wasn't a normal con) and I'm a little
nervous. I've got no idea what to expect. Still half the "fun" is
wandering around lost trying to spot friendly faces among the sea of
ThinkGeek T-Shirts.
I'm not expecting to spend much time online over the next seven days so don't expect a reply to anything for about ten days while I try and catch up. And if you're at EuroOSCON come and say "Hi".
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Posted: 2005/10/16 09:02 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 15 Oct 2005
Jeff Waugh - Great Speaker, Better Guy
Last night was the first ever week night GLLUG. We were lucky enough to have Jeff
Waugh come and speak to us as part of his BadgerBadgerBadger tour (although
he didn't do the dance :)). He presented some of the recent innovations and newer
projects in the Gnome ecosphere before moving on to an overview of Ubuntu
and its infrastructure.
I only know the basics about Ubuntu (I had a play with the warthog release) but from the presentation last night it was easy to see that it's not just the software which is important. Shuttleworth knows business and you can see this in the distros polish and features. A good example is the OEM installer stuff. This shows Ubuntu isn't an old style distro, it's an attempt to scale the enterprise and get Linux everywhere.
After the talk we headed down to a local pub to meet up with some more Ubuntu (and some Debian people) to become the Ubuntu London release party.
I don't usually get much feedback from people after GLLUGs (hint hint) but the few emails I've had from the usual people have all been very positive about the talk, which I was expecting as it was pretty interesting and very entertaining, and about the speaker. I'd never met Jeff before last night so I wasn't sure what to expect. He was friendly, affable, and really active in meeting people and getting them involved. One of the feedback emails summed it up best, "Jeff's very charismatic. If he's doing ISV relations I can see Ubuntu appearing in a lot more places."
We had about thirty-forty people in the room for the talk, and considering it was both a Friday night and I'd only advertised a week ago, it went really well. The biggest difference in recent GLLUGs has been the makeup of the audience. I'm not as dedicated a Linux user as the people who organised the older meetings, which means I can advertise the event in other locations and, hopefully, pull in a more diverse crowd.
As the host you end up running around a lot and not getting to speak to many people, event hosting's still new and shiny to me so I might be doing a little too much panicing, and the limited time with each person is always a shame. The audience last night was every bit as interesting as any speaker line up I've seen. In addition to the speaker we had Matthew Garrett, Phil Hands, Simon Willison, Gervase Markham and Mark Shuttleworth in a room. And I bet some of the other people I didn't get to meet were every bit as interesting.
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Posted: 2005/10/15 11:02 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 13 Oct 2005
ASCII Art Matrix
Just WOW.
And get a life dammit ;)
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Posted: 2005/10/13 00:28 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Where (In the UK) is That Number?
After a pretty much technology free day at work I wanted to actually do
something hands on before the day was over. After a flurry of reading
and deleting of of blog posts it looked like the buzz word of the day was
(still) Google Maps. So off I went.
With the aid of the excellent Number::Phone and the not too bad Geo::Google, which can't seem to handle Scottish towns, I put together a small script which displays the town a phone number is from using Google Maps. To try it out enter a phone number in the field below. You can skip the leading +, and/or the country code (44). It's also mostly OK with hyphens, spaces and other bits of cruft.
Disclaimer: I'm not logging the numbers entered anywhere.
Now for some caveats. It only works for Britain and Wales. Geo::Google doesn't do Scotland. It doesn't have support for the US yet. It only shows things on a town level. It has ugly error messages. But it does mostly work if none of those restrictions apply :)
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Posted: 2005/10/13 00:23 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 11 Oct 2005
Windows Ethernet Bonding
I spent a while today trying to get my head around Ethernet bonding, under
Windows 2000 Server, on an IBM machine. Firstly a tangent, IBM has a great
site with a lot of good content. And a bloody rubbish search engine and no
overview on how anything fits together. I know organising that much data
must take a lot of clue but hey, this is IBM! One of the few places that
still actually does research.
I'll take a moment to explain what Ethernet bonding is. Most servers have two or more network interfaces in them. If you assign them both different IP's then when one goes down the other isn't much use. If you assign them both the same IP then you get conflicts. Don't do that.
If you care about availability (or performance) you can make the two of them work together to give you added redundancy (or throughput) by making them both listen to a given address. If one stops working then the other carries on functioning and service isn't interrupted. If you're smart you'll put each interface on different switches to remove another single point of failure.
Back to my point, I'm posting this in the hope that the next poor Linux sod who needs to do this sees this post and saves themselves a lot of faffing around. Firstly most Windows people, and vendors, call Ethernet bonding Network Teaming. You'll get more results if you search for that term. Secondly, and this may be an IBM using Intel pro card thing but even after you've installed the software the settings tabs WILL NOT BE VISIBLE WHEN LOGGED IN USING TERMINAL SERVICES. I assume this is to stop you shooting yourself in the foot. Just think of: "What happens if I make this TEAM invalid? Oh. Call me a cab to the colo..."
Lastly if you get errors about multiple gateways when you try and assign the IP address to the "TEAM" interface then you should give up and cry. Sorry, you need to get both nics set up on the same range before trying again. If you don't run DHCP just make them both "Assign by DHCP" and when they have addresses in the 169 range configure the "TEAM" interface with the desired IP.
The odd thing about all this was the enjoyment of pulling a cable out at the end and saying "Look! It still pings!" and being given that "That's a good boy. Put the weapon down now" look.
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Posted: 2005/10/11 21:08 | /tools/network | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 10 Oct 2005
Frameworks Evening - Will It Happen?
I normally think of a topic, gather a list of potential speakers, send out
some emails and then keep my fingers crossed. This time I'm attempting
to put together an evening of talks on the topic of web frameworks in
dynamic languages. I'm hoping to get someone to speak on Django, Rails and
either Maypole or Catalyst (I don't know much about either) and a then put
them in a room with a crowd of Perl, Python and Ruby developers and see if
we can start some conversations.
I've started the ball rolling by emailing potential speakers so now comes the awkward part, waiting to see what happens. I'll post an update in a week or so when I know if it's got even a chance of happening.
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Posted: 2005/10/10 22:42 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 08 Oct 2005
Jeff Waugh - In London October 14th!
In the past I posted about the possibility of Jeff
Waugh coming to GLLUG and I can now happily confirm he will be joining
us on October 14th for the evening. This is a day after the next Ubuntu
release so we might get the first talk on the shiny new features before we
go for food and drink at the near by Greenman pub.
This GLLUG will be a lot shorter than the usual and will be more socially focused as it's on a Friday evening. The venue is the usual New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University (here's a Streetmap to the location. It's also not a huge amount of notice so we're not expecting the usual huge turn out but if you're free then join us for either the talk or the people.
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Posted: 2005/10/08 14:52 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Pragmatic Investment Plan 2005/2006 -- Restart
After a rubbish first start (just two entries in four months) I decided to
scrap my 2005/2006
Pragmatic Investment Plan and start again. Between insanity both
professionally, I changed jobs, and in my personal life nothing seemed to be
moving. And sometimes you just need to wipe the slate clean and start
again.
I kicked back off with the Linux Expo and FUDCon, both of which were excellent and will be covered in another post and by buying some more books. Which always makes me feel better :)
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Posted: 2005/10/08 14:34 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Identity 2.0 OSCON Presentation
I finally got around to watching the entertaining and very well rehearsed OSCON 2005 Identity
2.0 Keynote by Dick Hardt. The presentation itself is very catchy; a
large number of very short slides that stop you getting bored (very
Lessig). I hate to think how long he spent getting them together. My
favourite was the MS Passport slide, which, slide-by-slide, summarises
the whole story of Passport in a single element.
Sxip itself is an interesting idea and the move from businesscentric silos to user centric ones is well over due but I'm curios as to how you boot strap something like this. If you go to a company like Amazon and ask them to accept login details from you then a benefit needs to be offered. But what is it? Lowering the customers cost of entry by not making them enter all their details is nice but you need a big customer base to make this fly. And how do you get them?
If the topic's of interests it's also worth listening to Dick Hardt talking to IT Conversations. It's not as pithy but provides more information.
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Posted: 2005/10/08 10:09 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 07 Oct 2005
Serenity - Damn Good Film
After the Linux expo at Olympia (more to come on this later) I made a manic
dash across London to the only cinema I knew of that was showing early
previews of Joss Whedons
Serenity. I managed to get there just as the adverts finished and
settled in for a *very* long awaited couple of hours. And I wasn't
disappointed.
I'm not going to give anything away but the film is very good, not mind blowing like some of the early reviews have claimed but it's the best written Sci-Fi I've seen in a long time. The one liners were typical Whedon, the emotional scenes are both incredibly strong in some cases and in others great examples of how people focus and carry on.
Things I didn't like (no spoilers! Honest!) included a change in the back story to make the film flow better, not enough Inara and not enough Book. Although with an ensemble this big not everyone was going to get enough screen time. Chiwetel Ejiofor (an East London lad) made a good bad guy, although not up to Juble Early standards, and the pacing felt right.
My score? Well it's been a while since I've been this pulled in by a film. 8/10 and this won't be the last time I see it.
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Posted: 2005/10/07 00:15 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 05 Oct 2005
Anachronism in the Office - Writing Procedures
Today I was taken through a couple of system tasks that were both in-depth
and pretty time consuming. And like a good lad I wrote down instructions
fine grained enough to go through the task on my own. Now firstly this
means if I missed anything I have to go through it again and make
corrections. Secondly I wrote them by hand. Which was a mistake.
After I'd finished the oddness of what I'd just done came to me. I spent 45 minutes making a, probably imperfect, and has to be tested anyway, set of steps for things that you do on a computer. Wouldn't it make more sense to fire up a screen capture tool, plugin in a mike, record the "teacher" and then archive the footage somewhere for future use? That way you get the exact step by step footage while retaining any spoken details.
And it gets us a little closer to this ever promised paper-less office!
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Posted: 2005/10/05 23:21 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Smart Co-workers Considered Non-harmful
At the last couple of places I've worked I've ended up being the only
real sysadmin in the company. While this gives you a fair amount of control
over what you're doing from hour to hour, it also means you don't have
any one with the same professional interests to bounce ideas off or
sanity check you; caveat: most Perl developers I've worked with have a
pretty comprehensive knowledge of UNIX.
At each place I've been lucky enough to have some incredibly talented developers nearby to talk tech too but I've missed dealing with people that live and breath systems. It might sound weird but I've missed being out of my depth.
Today I got involved in a project that's put me right back in to the middle of it. Managing hundreds of systems without going insane. What's made it odd is we're using some ideas I came up with a couple of companies ago but never got time to implement. The guy I'm working with has got involved and in under a day understands it better than I do, has found a number of parts that need attention and has already got a small prototype up and running. And it was damn scary to watch.
The point of the post? If you're not working for people that are better at your job than you are either change jobs or charge a fortune to make up for missed opportunities. And be thankful for clued co-workers. They make those eight hours a day go so much faster.
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Posted: 2005/10/05 23:13 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 04 Oct 2005
Serenity is out Friday!
I've been waiting for this one for a while and it's almost on us. The weird
thing is it's starting to become difficult to not found out what happens in
the film. When it was only the occasional geek seeing an early screener or
preview I could spot the posts and ignore them. now it's on general release
in the US the sheer quantity of reviews, spoilers and discussions on the
film is becoming ridiculous.
The last time I had this problem was Farscape: Peacekeeper War, I even had to resort to scanning my mail for certain keywords before I read it. Now I'm not there yet with Serenity but it's getting closer...
While I may always say "Roll on Friday" this time I have a second reason :)
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Posted: 2005/10/04 20:18 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
The GPL Doesn't Impede Linux
Over at ZDNet Paul Murphy has a rather annoying post about whether the GPL impedes Linux
more than it helps. The short answer is: No. The slightly longer
version is "who cares?"
Linux has become an incredible phenomenon, it's used in some of the biggest companies on the planet (Google, Oracle, Novell), it runs large chunks of the net and has an amazing community of very smart people moving it forward. The GPL is what's allowed us to get here. Big commercial companies like HP and IBM don't give their source code to competitors. With the GPL they can help improve a common system and still ensure that it can't be abused and locked in to another proprietary product.
Now to the points about the adoption slowing. There was a very good book published called "Crossing the Chasm". It explains the four phases of technical adoption, starting with visionaries and moving on to laggards. I think we're seeing a slow down as the more cautious companies allow other people to be their testers. All the easily swayed people, whether it be the very smart, dynamic or Microsoft hating crowds, have already moved over and in a lot of cases are saving bundles from it. The other companies will move as time goes by. Hell, look at the number of people still using Windows 95 if you want to see laggards in action!
As I get older I get ever more cranky when people start whining about the GPL. If you don't like it don't use it. If you do use it then play by the damn rules. It's pretty simple. A side effect of this is I have an ever greater respect for RMS and the work he's done to get us here. He might be an uncompromising bastard who pisses people off but he's determined, full of integrity and is someone who gives us what we need, not always what we want. And then we have the Free software song...
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Posted: 2005/10/04 19:59 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Friendships Should be Equal
In any friendship, hell any relationship, the most important thing is
equality. Each party has certain expectations, if they don't match those of
the other person then things will eventually come to a head.
In a relationship the same principles apply, but what they each offer may be very different and appear unbalanced on first glance. This is often the deal with "old rich guy" with "young attractive women" relationships. As long as they both understand what they're going to put in (no pun intended) and get out then they can work. Any time you see two people and think "what's he/she doing with him/her?" take another look. In most cases there's something that makes them consider each other as equals.
Every now and again you get in to a friendship or relationship where things start out as equal and gradually change. Sometimes you can even spot this happening and get an early warning that you either have to change the deal or get out of the way before it goes sour. Good luck.
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Posted: 2005/10/04 09:45 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 02 Oct 2005
Toorcon 2005 Slides Available
I've never been able to get to a Toorcon but from reading the Toorcon 2005 slides it
seems they have a number of quality speakers. The three highlights from
this years sessions seem to be Introducing the Bastille
Hardening Assessment Tool by Jay Beale, How Big is that Foot
in the Door by Foofus and Simple Nomads How Hackers Get
Caught.
The intro to Bastille does both a good job of explaining why you should care about hardening, which includes some great quotes: The NSA's Information Assurance Directorate evaluated a system locked-down following CIS's Windows 2000 guide. 90 percent of all the vulnerabilities in this platform were mitigated by the guide. It also introduces some of the knowledge required to add your own Bastille checks.
Foofus's talk is an ideas spring board and well worth a read. His slides show mapping out relationships between machines and how a single compromised password can bring down a large chunk of your infrastructure. I can't wait for a canned tool, sysadmin friendly, that I can use for this.
Simple Nomads talk is less technically focused but more entertaining. He covers some of the back and forth of attacking and the stupid thing skiddies do. It's worth a read and serves as an amusing refresher.
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Posted: 2005/10/02 10:39 | /security | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Rollyo - Nice UI But Nothing New
I've spent a couple of minutes (yep, very in-depth :)) playing with Rollyo, a way to run searches over
multiple sites. The site's pretty slick (and looks quite
Basecamp/37signals inspired) but I can't help but think I've been here
before...
Mozilla, and FireFox with a plugin, have something called the search sidebar. This little piece of magic allows you to run a search over multiple sites at the same time and integrates the results; each site search is implemented using a mycroft search plugin. Except that those are text files and easier to customise if you know a little about HTML.
One thing that did bother me though was the lack of meaningful page titles. Look at the front page and the title says "ROLLYO". Look at a profile and the title says "ROLLYO". Spot a pattern?
Now don't get me wrong, Rollyo looks a lot prettier and makes this functionality available to a lot more people but it's not quite the power-tool the Mozilla version can be.
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Posted: 2005/10/02 09:37 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
