Fri, 29 Sep 2006
Clerks 2 - Short Review
I'm a big Kevin Smith fan and Clerks 2 more than met my
expectations. Great dialogue, some top-notch one liners, inside jokes (for
both comic and View Askew fans) and more story than he's usually given
credit for. A couple of things stood out in a bad way though, the choice
of music seemed very slapdash, some of it really hit but a lot of it
seemed to detract from the scenes. I was also a little surprised by
the big dance number. Although watching Rosario Dawson get her grove on
wasn't exactly hard to sit through.
Score: 7/10 if you've seen Clerks, 5/10 if not - the less than dynamic duo of Randall and Dante make a return, leave a mark and end on a high. Well written and great fun.
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Posted: 2006/09/29 08:42 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fight or Flee: TO THS HILLS!
When you meet someone you click with things are good. As things start
to progress you learn about each other, become more involved in each
others life and you discover what makes you both tick. In some cases
this is a wonderful thing and can bring you closer, in other cases this
is the last exit ramp off the road that leads to the boiling of cute
bunnies (no one ever boiled an ugly bunny - there's no point).
What I recently discovered (I'm not very quick when it comes to things like this - I have a domain name with the word Unix in it so no one should be surprised with this confession) is that sometimes you discover something else, that the person, no matter how much you like them, isn't going to work out and that if you keep getting closer they will be able to seriously rip you apart. And that they will because they have a streak they may not even consciously realise. This leaves you with a couple of options, either go along for the ride and then engage in some mutually assumed destruction or get the hell out, go to the cinema a lot and post a lot of short reviews on your sadly named blog ;)
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Posted: 2006/09/29 08:40 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Children of Men - Short Review
I ended my sudden bout of cinema going with Children of Men, a very
British Sci-fi films about a world that has no children. No screaming on
buses, running riot in restaurants or being herded along the street in
an annoying and impossible to pass snake of tiny, whiny voices. But the
film paints it as more of a bad thing.
Includes Spoilers: As you'd expect this changes during the course of the film and it turns in to a woman (and unborn baby) hunt through a Britain that's known terrorism, treats immigrants a scant few steps above how the Nazis treated Jewish people and has some freedom fighters / terrorists that don't know where their line is anymore.
The story's good, the cast all turn in solid performances (including a great appearance by Michael Caine) and the film is incredibly well shot. It feels gritty and I really enjoyed watching it, but I didn't come away with much once I got away from the slick visuals and editing. I was also disappointed with the end, it was tied up a little too neatly and wasted a chance to screw with peoples heads.
Score: 6/10. A good 90(ish) minutes but I won't be buying it on DVD.
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Posted: 2006/09/29 08:24 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
ps Problems
ps is an incredibly flexible command but it also has a
checkered maintenance history in the Linux world. Yesterday I needed to
output just the username, the command and any arguments passed to it. And
it was hell. After reading through the man page a couple of times I settled
on the following: ps -e -o user,args. But this doesn't
work.
It shows the command and the full arguments but it trunks the username
at 8 characters (which doesn't help with things like exim on Debian - which
has a username of Debian-exim). I then tried switching the order around to
see what happens, and was surprised when ps decided to
truncate the command and argument details at a seemingly arbitrary (but
consistant) point. GAH!
In the end I was pointed at a more correct, but ugly and not obvious
from the man page, answer; supply a width to the arguments. So to show
multiple fields in ps and not have one of them truncated you need a command
like this: ps -e -o user:20,args. And a smart friend like
Paul.
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Posted: 2006/09/29 08:03 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 24 Sep 2006
Building Scalable Web Sites - Short Review
I really liked Building
Scalable Web Sites, its topic coverage is impressive - the author
obviously knows what he's doing - it's written in a practical, easy to
follow style and the text explains the theory while remaining pragmatic.
There are few books on the market that contain this much useful
information in what has always been an under-documented "niche" and it's
sure to save every admin at least a few scalability related headaches.
If you manage publicly facing web sites, web applications or even an internal site for a large corporation this book is well worth the time. Score: 8/10
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Posted: 2006/09/24 18:35 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 23 Sep 2006
Time Management for System Administrators - Short Review
"What do you think of the Getting Things Done book?"
"I'll worry about time management when a tech publisher has a book on it."
"Have you seen Time Management for System Administrators?"
Queue the sound of Amazon.co.uk being loading in FireFox
I'm happiest when I'm bouncing between lots of different tasks - whether they're all independent or part of a larger project. This is great in an emergency or when I'm working in a small team with a decent workload but not so good when it comes to simultaneously juggling small, quick turn around requests with longer, concentration demanding projects. I need a certain amount of time to pick up where I was - not just to ensure I don't skip a step or make a mistake. Time Management for System Administrators understands why many sysadmins suffer from this and how to remedy (no pun intended) it and some related topics.
The book can be broken up in to three parts, the first, consisting of chapters 1-3, introduces the why of time management, how interruptions play merry hell with our workload and why we devise and stick to routines.
The second chunk of the book, chapters 4-8, explains "The Cycle System" (the capital letters just feel right). This is the authors technique for balancing and controlling your tasks, calendar, priorities and progressing towards your life goals; the last of these is less hokey than it sounds. These chapters were the most interesting part of the book for me and include the topics I'm most likely to dip back in to as I integrate sections of it with my own daily routines.
The closing chapters are a grab-bag of goodies, they cover stress and email management - which may be closely related, eliminating time wasters (unfortunately not a guide to 'removing' your less able co-workers) and the benefits of documentation and automation. This selection of material was the least interesting to me, not just because I'm familiar with the subjects but because they felt a little bolted on. As an example, the sections on using make and processing shell arguments in the automation chapter go on too long in an otherwise technology agnostic book.
Although the title mentions System Administrators there is a lot of useful information in here for other technical staff, developers and QA workers should be able to take a lot away from the book. I found the authors style to be easy going (although I'm not too keen on teaching through repetition in books - if I'm not sure of something I'll reread the paragraph) and the advice seems to make sense. I'm adopting some of the techniques from the book and I'll have to see how they hold up in the field. But that's my part of the deal.
Score: 7/10 - contains some useful techniques, pointers and explanations on why our role has different requirements when it comes to longer term project work and the daily tasks list.
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Posted: 2006/09/23 17:56 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 21 Sep 2006
UK Subversion User Group Meeting - September 2006
Today I was fortunate enough to head down to the JP Morgan building in John
Winter street for, my first and, the second UK Subversion User
Group Meeting.
First up the audience, it was in the high twenties, which surprised me, and included a lot of people in suits; only a handful of us were casually dressed in jeans, untucked shirts or trainers. I didn't get to stay too long afterwards to chat, although my employer was gracious enough to allow a couple of hours in the middle of the day to attend and I didn't want to push my luck too far. The few people I did speak to seemed pretty friendly and knowledgeable though.
There were only two familiar faces, CL Kao, SVK author, brilliant perl developer and generally top guy (and ex-coworker) and Nik Clayton, who I've only briefly met in person a couple of times but I've seen him present and he knows his stuff. Both of them presented today and their style was very different to the first speaker.
The opening presentation was what I consider as more traditional, it had lots of information on each slide, a couple of minutes of presenting per click, and would be readable on it's own. It feels quite dry and stilted these days - it also covered a product that isn't useful to me, and to be honest felt very out of place. The relevance to subversion seemed a little stretched.
CL followed with his SVK talk (which I've seen three times now - it doesn't get boring) and he bought his trademark energy to the show. Lots of short, sharp slides, more of a story telling approach in his verbal presentation and some well placed humour helped his presentation go down well. And SVKs incremental commits look very cool. Nik was the last of the technical presentations and he wove a tail of setting up subversion so that it met his employers auditing teams directives. It was pithy, had the right amount of why as well as how and forced me to take a page of notes. He also gave me a quick peek at the SVN::Web timeline functionality, which is neat and may prompt me to install it for a little play.
The sessions were wrapped up with a few words from the sponsors, CollabNet and Clearvision, and the next meeting was announced for January; which I hope to get along to. It was very different to the usual user group meetings I attend and I did enjoy it.
Tangent: the meeting was held in the JP Morgan building I worked in about six years ago, nothing seems to have changed. My feet remembered the correct exit from Blackfriars station, the people hanging around outside smoking used the same spots as before and the area just felt the same. I realised I actually miss some of the big company feel. I'm just not sure it's enough to get me back there yet.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 22:05 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Javascript Developer Room at FOSDEM 2007?
If I was a bad man I'd suggest it might be time for a separate
Javascript developers room at FOSDEM
2007 (looks like the 24-25th February 2007). They had a couple of talks
on JS related subjects last year (Dojo and Selenium) and they seemed to go
well. dConstruct and the London Javascript nights have proved the interest
is there... And you'd have a bundle of the Mozilla people at the same
conference as potential speakers.
But that'd lead to chasing people, organising stuff and PAIN. Much pain.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 09:03 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Run Security Scans from Visio
I'm not a huge fan of Visio but
the ability to connect the MBSA to
individual hosts and trigger scans is very neat. I'm also assuming that you
can use the Visio scripting interface to mark machines that fail as a
different colour. Full details over at the Visio
Connector for MBSA article.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 08:38 | /security/tools | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Twenty Four Hour Office
Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers
essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your
office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home.
-- Philip Greenspun
Although the idea of working more hours is currently on the wane this remains one of my favourite quotes, it nicely summarises my start up experiences. One of the weird things about my current job is that it's the first technology company I've ever worked that actually closes its offices. All of my previous ones were happy to have people sat on site through the night and on weekends.
Not every one stayed around to work on actual work, some people would be learning some new tech without other distractions, some would be prototyping new ideas, tidying up existing work (we've all got that little list of 'on a quiet day I will do...') or trying to get ahead so they can skive on the next Friday. It also had the sneaky benefit of having some sys admins and developers on site if things went wrong. When the technology (and the idea behind it is new) nothing beats having the guy who wrote it sitting a couple of desks away. To be honest, I miss both the chance to catch up on my technology interests in a quiet environment with big desks (I live in London - home desk space isn't cheap ;)) and working with people that care enough to give up their Tuesday night to get that next task done.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 08:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 18 Sep 2006
Perl Testing Developers Notebook - Short Review
The Perl
Testing Developers Notebook (PTDN) is the first of the O'Reilly
Developers Notebook series I've read. The format's good, a mix of the
cookbook and hacks series, but does the substance match the style?
At nine short chapters this book packs a fair amount in. It starts with how to write, run and read tests in chapters 1 and 2. Moving on to using Devel::Cover (a chunk of chapter 3) and, in chapter 4, introducing Test modules that'll help you cover your bases before releasing a module (or depending on your perspective make you jump through cargo coding hoops.) These early chapters provide a well written, nicely paced, introduction to Perl testing. If this is your first exposure to the Test:: Modules then this section will make your day, otherwise you'll probably skim read it and won't come back to this section, and chapter 4 in particular, after your first time through. The points it makes are sound but it lacks re-read value.
Chapters 5 and 6 cover replacing built-ins, mocking functions and objects and testing databases, both your interactions and the datasets. This is one of the best written examples of mocking using Perl that I've seen (although there isn't exactly a surplus of decent perl mocking documentation, there is a lot of documentation mocking perl but that's slightly different :)) and was the highlight of the book for me.
The book closes with chapters on testing websites (which gives some nice pointers to modules) and Apache modules, using Test::Class and using perl to wrap and test 'other things'. I didn't get a huge amount out of this section, beyond some pointers to modules I wasn't aware of, and it felt like the coverage was quite shallow; it shows you what you can do but seems to stop too early.
In general, the books short size and lots of concise labs fit the "this module does this testing task" format nicely, it's got quite a wide coverage for its page count and gives a number of pointers to modules that can make your testing life a lot easier.
Score: 7/10 if you're just starting out in perl testing. 5/10 if you're not (and most of that is for the mocking chapters).
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Posted: 2006/09/18 21:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Del.icio.us Stalking
A couple of months ago a friend of mine changed jobs and went to work with
some mutual techie acquaintances. What made this job interesting to me was
the confidential nature of the project and how little he was allowed to
say about it. In one of my flippant comments I mentioned that if I REALLY
wanted to know I could find out what he was working on. And the bet was
made.
I had a little bit of an advantage, I knew him, I knew a couple of his co-workers (all close-lipped buggers when it came to their projects) and I knew their email addresses and del.icio.us handles - and from this I went on a little trip. Watching what they posted to del.icio.us during the day (people feel a little less guilty about tagging stuff for work during work hours), looking at where their email addresses appeared (I got lucky and found a logwatch filter one of them had wrote for an application server - which was a nice pointer) and, by complete fluke, spotting two of them in a conference photo a mate forwarded to me. I had a number of areas they all seemed to be interested in.
After applying a little bit of filtering, anything hitting the front page of del.icio.us was was ignored, dropping anything relating to their CPAN modules, freshmeat projects and, in one case, published articles, I was left with what looked like an application stack. And some pointers to the vertical industry they were working in.
So where am I heading with this? Well first of all, curry bought by someone else always tastes nicer than curry you've had to pay for! Secondly, I was surprised by how little effort it took to see what they were interested in with regards to both work and personal projects - even without them writing blogs.
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Posted: 2006/09/18 20:36 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 17 Sep 2006
DOA - Short Review
I was completely unprepared for DOA, I'd heard nothing
about it, seen no trailers and didn't know it was based on a game (which
I've never played) - if I'd have known anything about it I'd have stayed
well clear. Which would have been a shame.
I missed the first five minutes or so of this film so I'm not sure if they actually explained the, um, plot? In essence there is a fighting competition where "the best representatives of each style" come together and kick the shite out of each other. With lots of wire work and some very attractive actresses in skimpy outfits. And one scene, featuring Holly Valance and Sarah Carter, which is essentially a wet t-shirt competition pretending to be a fight.
It's well paced, there are actually a couple of plot threads woven in and most of the cast perform above and beyond the call of duty; these all combine to make the film more enjoyable than it sounds, doubly so if you leave your brain at the door and you're male.
One of the best scenes in the film is a staircase fight featuring Kane Kosugi, it was actually spoiled by some of the wire work, the actor seemed to be able to hold his own without it. Score: 7/10 - because any film featuring Holly Valance in a bikini, wrestling, deserves some extra points.
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Posted: 2006/09/17 14:34 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Dungeons and Dragons 2: Wrath of the Dragon God - Short Review
When I was at school I was an avid Dungeons and Dragons player, over the
years I've lost contact with most of it (the occasional novel, issue of
Dragon or, very rarely, a source book is as close as I get these days)
but one of the few things I did see was the first Dungeons and
Dragons film. Which was BAD. But I'd waited so long that I watched
it. And I own a copy on DVD that I one day plan to watch again. Honest.
Tangent: how the hell did they get Jeremy Irons in the film? That's
magic!
I didn't even know they'd done a sequel until a friend of mine came back from the US recently, and I'll be honest, the idea of another one didn't fill me with joy. Fortunately, this time none of the behind the scenes crew survived from the first one and only one of the cast (Bruce Payne as Damodar) carried over. And to be honest his character is completely different so they might as well have recast and renamed it.
So is it better than the first film? Yes! Do you need to have seen the first film to follow this one? Nope, it's completely stand alone. Is it worth watching? Yes. It's a pretty enjoyable adventure that will feel familiar to anyone who's played the game (the characters are all class stereotypes) and will tick enough of the fantasy film boxes for most moviegoers to tolerate it. The cast are pretty solid (although nothing special) and the story has enough depth to carry it through some not very special effects.
Score: 7/10 - best of the films I've seen this weekend (it's been a long weekend!) and the best D&D film I've seen. Although I'm an un-ashamed fan boy. I'm still waiting for a really cool on-screen dragon though.
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Posted: 2006/09/17 14:33 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Crank - Short Review
Jason Statham has found himself a Hollywood niche, action films that don't
set the box office on fire but provide a decent level of "leave your brain
at home" entertainment. The Transporter movies and now Crank are shining examples.
Despite the trailers (and my expectations) Crank isn't as action packed as I'd expected, in between a number of fight scenes there is a surprising amount of plot and amusing dialogue. While the plot itself isn't exactly original the films constant changing from one scene to another and some decent dialogue makes it a lot less painful than it could have been. It's worth pointing out the visuals; a lot of the film looks like it was shot by someone with ADD, a background in short music videos and on a decent amount of drugs. From CISesque internal body shots, head banging in the back of cabs and some "medical assistance" from Amy Smart. This'll drive some people nuts. I liked it here but hope it's not copied in too many other places.
Chev Chelios: "I'm looking for something.. begins with E..."
Pharmacist: "England?"
Score: 6/10 - unchallenging with some decent action, a couple of smart one-liners and some nice set pieces.
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Posted: 2006/09/17 14:33 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Severance - Short Review
Severance had a lot of
potential, it could have been Dog Solders meets The Office, but this
time with The Office actually being funny. Instead, it's an OK paced
generic slasher film with a lot of attempted humour - only a handful of
which hits the mark.
Laura Harris puts in a decent performance, Tim McInnerny is completely wasted (if you've seen him in Spooks or Blackadder you know he can act when given decent material) and Danny Dyer does an acceptable job as the very two dimensional everyman. I'd give it 4/10 for a couple of nail-biting moments and a few cheap (but funny) gags.
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Posted: 2006/09/17 11:05 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
The Ten Career Commandments - Short Review
The Ten
Career Commandments isn't my usual kind of book, I got stuck in a
friends office waiting for him to finish up for the day and ended up
reading it because it was the only thing on the desk, and they only had
a 2Mb office 'net connection - the barbarians ;)
The Ten Career Commandments is an easy read that will best serve people just starting out in the world of work. I found that it did prompt me to think about bits of my career wants but it's so generic that it can't really provide any useful push or insights. And if I knew what I wanted I wouldn't be reading this kind of book. If you're new to working it might help you know what the questions are though.
If you do want to read it I'd suggest reading it in an in-store coffee house, the book itself took me no more than 30 minutes to read and if I'd have paid full price then it'd get a much lower score. Score: 4/10
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Posted: 2006/09/17 10:52 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 14 Sep 2006
Failover Pairs - A short Rant
Let's cover the basics, if you've got two machines working as an
identical failover pair then THEY SHOULD BE IDENTICAL. Adding services,
hell, adding nearly anything, to only one of them is a mistake. You've
now created a bias on which one you need running and you can no longer
assume they'll both do the same thing in the same situation. Which
defeats the whole point of having them. This might seem obvious, but the
number of people who break this simple rule never fail to make that
pretty little vein in my neck dance.
Now we'll discuss testing the failover. You should do regular, scheduled and signed off, failover tests. It might be difficult to get permission for a test when everything is working. This is typically because people don't have enough confidence in the technology, people and process - often accompanied by uncertainty about the length and impact of the outage. In a very chicken and egg style you can only get confidence by (successfully) performing the test and measuring the impact. You should have a staging setup that'll let you perform the test as many times as you need to get it down pat. And then a couple more times just to be certain before you perform it in production.
This is also solves one of the related problems, things that happen rarely don't get tested or explained and the documentation drifts out of sync with reality. You should have a set of machines in staging that the new guys can play with, these should be tested (with the documentation) on a set schedule.
An untested failover pair are a working machine and a hope - nothing more.
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Posted: 2006/09/14 00:33 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 13 Sep 2006
Provisioning a Fresh Server Install
Once a machine has settled in to a rack how long does it take you to
turn it in to a working server?
How many of these steps are automated? The longer you can go without making manual changes the more comfortable you can be that the machine's running as it's supposed to be.
What little tweaks do people make once the machine is up? How do you know they've been done correctly on each machine? Do you have a small bundle of configuration checks for local modifications? What happens if they get nuked? Do you notice or do they just drift further out of sync with the baseline deployment (and each other)? Do you use an integrity checker on all machines looking for unauthorised changes?
How long does the complete process take from start to finish? How does this fit in with your MTTR numbers? If it takes an hour to build a server and you've got a MTTR of 30 minutes on a critical mail server then you've got problems.
Do you need to manually add new machines to other, external, systems and/or processes? Nagios for monitoring? DNS? Documentation on your intranet? How do you keep these in sync and how often are they audited?
Why is it not as easy as just plugging the thing in anymore :)
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Posted: 2006/09/13 08:45 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 11 Sep 2006
Visible Ops - Short Review
When it comes to system administration, the system part can refer to the
paperwork, processes and procedures as much as actual machines. Among
the modern admins worries are such evil beasties as section 404 of
Sarbanes Oxley, the data protection act, log retention for the lovely
police state powers of our government and, in some industries, ISO17799,
BS15000 and other similar standards. One of the topics I've been interested
in recently is the ITIL approach.
The initial hurdle was actually finding out where to start, and so for my first step I picked up (well, my employer bought) Visible Ops. This slim volume (98 pages) packs a lot of common sense. Most of the points it raises, including - the need for change control, inventory management, measuring and that your staff should look at what happened recently before they start tweaking things in an attempt to stumble across a fix - are all insights that most admins pick up over time. But to have them written down in one place, and in such an accessible style, is a great asset.
Although I'm not sure how useful this book will be on my ITIL road trip (I've got the BS15000 standards to read next) I can happily recommend it to everyone running an IT department who feels that things are slipping or that too much time is spent fighting fires. And let's be honest, 98 pages is about all we've got time to read these days :)
Score: 4/5
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Posted: 2006/09/11 21:23 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Dynamic Languages and the Big Players
Over the last week both Ruby and Python have had moments in the sunshine,
between Jim Hugunins (now of Microsoft)
IronPython 1.0 release and
Sun hiring JRuby developers it's nice to see the bigger players notice
how far dynamic languages have come.
So what do the little languages that can get from this? It's a decent sized list - a huge range of well written libraries (both .NET and Java have a ton of supporting code available and a lot of it is damn good), a large potential user base (especially for IronPython) and enterprise recognition; while more forward thinking developers know all about the benefits of dynamic languages there are a lot of late adopters that are about to see the shiny things for the first time. And hopefully some of them will stick with it.
So what does this mean for perl, my scripting language of choice? Well, IMHO the advantage CPAN gave is reduced somewhat (and destroyed in certain areas, like XML support and webservices) thanks to the volume of libraries both virtual machines can access. As for Parrot, I've never been a huge fan. I'm not an expert on VMs (and I've never contributed anything to any of them so I've got no right to bitch :) but it always seemed a bad idea to try and build your own when the market had two powerful ones available. On a non-technical level we've just lost a huge potential market, Python has always had nicer feeling Windows integration and I've got a feeling it won't be long until we start seeing it popping up in the MSDN code samples.
Update: I forgot to mention how cool IronPython and XAML are together. Have a look at the August 2006: IronPython screen cast.
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Posted: 2006/09/11 21:03 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 09 Sep 2006
Ask Later #1 (Not a Techa Kucha Night. Honest)
I've been very remiss about blogging the July Ask Later evening,
organised by Steve Coast
and Tom Carden. The format was
different to any presentations I've seen before, each speaker had 20
seconds to present each of their 20 slides, and no way of altering the
timing. BWHAHAHA.
The first speaker had me worried, without trying to sound harsh, his timing was off and my fears about sudden rushing as a slide changed before he was finished and awkward silences in between came flooding back to me. His material was good but he didn't hit his flow and in an enforced slide schedule it was a lot more visible than a "normal" presentation. I was mentally hunkering down for a painful evening. But then something clicked.
The gaps started to vanish and the over running started to reduce, I don't know how much time the speakers spent practising and timing but it paid off big time. Paul Hammond, who I've commented about before, hit every prompt in his Constraints talk, which felt very 37signals, (hopefully he'll give it again elsewhere). The only person with better timing was Jon Crowcroft who presented 9 levels of indirection (and got a lot of laughs) and only looked around at his slides a couple of times. And his timing was near bang on. Oh, and football jokes - which were actually well placed.
Other highlights were Simon Willison, who reached a new speed of vibration, as he dived in to Javascript closures (the most tech talk of the night and a nice intermission among the other, softer, talks), Muki Haklay on why mapping sites suck (it's all about screen size) and one of the best usability talks I've seen, presented by Natalie Downe. I know I've missed some of the dozen or so speakers but I stopped taking notes through most of the sessions, I was enjoying them too much. So take me missing your name as praise, not me being slack ;)
The only downside of the evening is that was criminally under-attended. A combination of the school holidays, night of the week and unbearable heat seemed to keep the crowds away, and that's a shame as it was a great evening, from the presenters to the pub chat afterwards. The best one evening event of the year so far, and yes I'm jealous as hell it wasn't one of mine!
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Posted: 2006/09/09 14:25 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Three Basic Release Rules
Here are three nice, simple, general rules regarding releases that you
should try and stick to. If you don't then you're running on luck and
eventually you'll get called while doing something way more fun than
deploying yet another bug fixing release.
- No releases on the day before a weekend / national holiday.
- No releases within two hours of the official end of your work day.
- No releases before you go away on holiday.
These should all be common sense (and to be ignored on the *RARE* occasions when something needs to happen right now) but I'm constantly surprised by the number of people that ignore them, make the release and then earn the enmity of their team as people start getting SMS and email alerts from their monitoring systems.
And a bonus trick, if you want sensible release times (none of this six AM insanity) ensure you've got developer and management support in case something goes wrong and you need either guidance or roll back assistance. It's weird how the available windows change when it's other peoples time (and sleep) on the block.
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Posted: 2006/09/09 13:40 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Best Advert of 2006 - Sky
I know the title of this post might seem a little premature but it's going
to take something amazing to beat Skys skateboarding advert.
The last couple of times I've been to the cinema I've seen an advert for Sky that features some stunning skateboarding by Danny Way, the adverts footage was taken from a documentary on him, with Regina Spektor - US providing the music. Mute the skateboarding clip, hide the US window and watch along, it's very cool.
While looking for a copy of the advert to show a friend I discovered that no one seems to a copy of the full ad online. The skateboarding clip originally had a different soundtrack, which I don't like, and the music video for US is dull, but when put together (for me at least) they just work. I don't know who came up with the idea but it's stuck in my head.
And to be honest, the advert was better than the film.
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Posted: 2006/09/09 13:10 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 06 Sep 2006
Own a SQL Server 2000 Machine and get ALL Passwords
Watch it be done in under five minutes in the MS SQL Preauth
Attack, Pwdump and John the Ripper video. Surprising? No. Fun to
watch? Yes! Every now and again it's nice to be reminded our systems are
not as secure as we'd like to think.
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Posted: 2006/09/06 23:59 | /security | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
September/October 2006 Event Shot
Here's a link shot to some of the events I want to try and get to over
the next two months, they've mostly not been very well advertised:
Steve Coast on Geospatial Open Source Activity - hosted by the BCS on September 9th. I've not kept up with Steves bundle of projects (OpenStreetmap and OpenPostcodes among a scary number of others) so I want to get along and see what he's been up to. He's a confident, passionate speaker and I've not yet been disappointed by any of his talks. And I've seen a fair few of them! I've also never been to a BCS meeting so this could be interesting - if I can duck along.
The Storage Expo in Olympia - 18-19th October. It's not exactly the most exciting of events but the vendors often have shiny new toys and they have the occasional gem of a talk. I'm going to try and cram an afternoon in around a couple of decent talks.
Linux World 2006 - Olympia on the 25th, 26th of October. The last couple of years have left me cold so I won't be spending as much time there this year (I'm heading down on the afternoon of which ever day has the big Lonix pub crawl). I'm not working on any stalls this year so I can wander around for a couple of hours, say hello to some people I don't see enough of and look at where the commercial market is pushing. I imagine I'll be spending most of the afternoon in the .Org village chatting. I also won't be paying for any of the (overly expensive) sessions.
And lastly d.Construct 2006, thanks to some help from a very cool friend (hi Tom) and the fact that my employers are one of the sponsors I'll be able to attend this on Friday. W00T!
I'll also note I missed another London 2.0 meetup. I've managed to be tied up for every one of them so far and I've still not managed to say hello to Sam.
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Posted: 2006/09/06 23:27 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Startup Success 2006 Recording
Guy Kawasaki has a link to the Startup
Success 2006 Recording on his blog. From the good humoured and funny
snipes at LinkedIns Reid Hoffman to some great tidbits of information
("Expensable not approvable" and "Convince the fewest number of people
possible to buy it") from Joe Kraus it's well worth watching, even at over
an hour long.
I was also impressed with Guy in his role as moderator, I've been to a lot of conferences over the years and he's one of the smoothest moderators I've seen. And yes, I did go back and take a lot of notes :)
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Posted: 2006/09/06 00:38 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 05 Sep 2006
Perl Debugger Pocket Reference - Short Review
A book about a debugging program is never going to be that exciting. At
best it'll be both comprehensive and concise, two things that don't have
to be mutually exclusive, at worst it'll be a dull rehash of the perldoc.
Which type is this one?
The Perl Debugger
Pocket Reference (PDRB) starts with some basic practises to help you avoid
debugging (the usual use strict and use warnings)
before walking through two very basic debugger sessions and then on to
the bulk of the book, the command reference.
It's hard to judge this section of the book, most people will only read through it once (if that) and will probably just dip in when they need to look something up. The commands are broken up by function, not listed alphabetically, which can be annoying but does let you look for better ways to do tasks. The explanations are clear and the examples are mostly useful so it's functional if dull.
PDRB then finishes up with a short introduction to the DB and Devel namespaces, what they do and how you can use them to write your own debugging modules. The coverage of this last bit is well written but very light weight - it shows you what's there, not how to make the most of it.
Down-sides? The biggest example in the book (the linecounter.pl script) is off by two lines in all the examples I tried; which is annoying when you're trying something for the first time and have no idea why it isn't working. I'd also like to see a couple of longer debugging sessions, a couple of pages each, with some of the more advanced functions illustrated.
Score: 6/10. Nicer than the docs but an occasional dip in to rather than an actual read.
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Posted: 2006/09/05 21:11 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 04 Sep 2006
WWW::Shorten::Smallr on CPAN - Initial Release
I've just uploaded the initial release of WWW::Shorten::Smallr
to CPAN and it should be making its way through the mirrors right about
now.
The module itself is simple, it shrinks the given URL using the http://smallr.com/ web site. I wrote this for two reasons, firstly smallr is the official link shortener of one of the mailing lists I frequent and I wanted it available from the Vim Shortener I wrote. Secondly I wanted to have another play around with Module::Build. Which I understand slightly better now.
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Posted: 2006/09/04 00:16 | /perl | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 03 Sep 2006
Open Ports Nagios Check
A machine should run a defined set of ports, if any of them are not
listening you've got a problem. If any others are open then you've
potentially got an even bigger problem. The Check Open
Ports Nagios Check accepts a list of IPv4 TCP and UDP ports and
reports if any of the expected ones go away or any others are detected
as listening.
This also partially scratches one of my own itches, I've had a couple of daemons (MySQL in particular) start after a package upgrade without my knowing it. With this script and a little cron it won't happen again. It's probably worth mentioning that while this script is built to run within Nagios it will work stand-alone.
Note: this script is more for detecting misconfigurations than for
security. Most root kits mask the ports they've opened so they won't appear
through netstat, which this command uses.
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Posted: 2006/09/03 12:56 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 02 Sep 2006
Bugzilla Tag Blosxom plugin
One of the small developer blogs I host has a number of people linking
to, and complaining about, the bugs present in different Free Software
projects. After watching one of them open a text file, dig through the
links, pull out the wrong one and eventually get the right URL I decided to write a
small Blosxom plugin to make the process easier.
The Bugzilla Tag Blosxom plugin lets you define shortcuts to a number of Bugzilla servers, and a default one, which you can then link to using the following syntax in your blosxom posts:
<bug "redhat">117894</bug>
<bug "mozilla">84752</bug>
And the links look like this:
Red Hat bug ID 117894
Mozilla.org bug ID 84752
For full details have a look at the Bugzilla Tag Blosxom plugin source.
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Posted: 2006/09/02 16:22 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 01 Sep 2006
Debian Packages Requiring Updates - Via Nagios
I've recently needed a way to see, via the Nagios web front end, which
Debian machines need their packages updating. So I wrote the
check_debian_updates.sh Nagios plugin. This is the initial release
(which hasn't been hit too hard yet) so be careful about deploying it
anywhere but your testing environment for now. I've played with it in my
small test environment and it seems to work so feel free to have a look
at it. I'll be stressing it, and possibly tidying the code up a little,
next week.
In its basic operation, the script just reports how many packages (if any)
need updating and returns a CRIT or a WARN to Nagios based upon your
thresholds. If you call the script with a -v it will also
output the name of all packages that need updating. Which may consume a
lot of Nagios front end screen real estate. Due to it running
apt-get update it needs some root privileges. I'll be
setting up sudo to let the Nagios user run this as root with no password
for both the apt-get update and apt-get upgrade
-s (note the '-s' for simulation.) And only for those!
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Posted: 2006/09/01 23:57 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
