Fri, 19 Jan 2007
Black FireFox Baseball cap - Lost at LCA
And it's probably missing me by now, a beer will be purchased for the
finder.
This is what blogs are really for ;)
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Posted: 2007/01/19 00:02 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 18 Jan 2007
Five things - the meme that would not die.
I've been tagged by Dave Cross so
here are some things that you probably don't know about me but I'm not too
worried about sharing. Although they ain't very juicy.
- I simultaneously broke both my wrists while playing football in secondary school - it involved a concrete pitch and a diving goal keeper. In addition to hurting like hell for what seemed like forever it was also the last time I actually played football. Being unable to use my hands for weeks is an experience I never want to repeat.
- My um... interest(?), in blond haired, blue eyed girls can be tracked back to a girl named Naomi. Who's also one of my very few regrets.
- Up until the age of 21 I was an only child. I now have two much younger half-siblings. I've also been exposed to the hellish wasteland that is childrens television, which seems to be half disturbingly cute characters and half dad bait.
- This one's known by some people I worked with at OT - in the company hiring procedure they did a personality test. I scored none out of ten on trusting people. I consider this a feature.
- I hate travelling with a fiery passion but I love tech conferences.
I'll play pass the meme with Will, The Rev, Simon Stewart, Mr Goodwin and Bob Walker (who needs to blog more anyway). That'll cover a couple of continents.
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Posted: 2007/01/18 23:56 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
The OzDMCA: what it means for FOSS - Kimberlee Weatherall
My first session of the day (I was lucky enough to spend a big chunk of the
real first one talking to Richard Weideman, the Education Programme Manager
at Canonical) was recommended to me by all the local people I know at the
conference - and it was as good as they said.
Unlike most people who speak on these topics at Linux / OpenSource / Free Software conferences, Kimberlee Weatherall IS a lawyer (IP) and was actively involved in the amendments to the Australian laws. The often awkward topic was presented damn clearly, with an audience pleasing touch of humour, and was both an excellent talk and depressing as hell. Short version: in order to gain a free trade agreement (FTA) with America, Australia was required to change some of its laws, especially those concerning copyright.
I'm not going to go in to details, I wouldn't do the speaker justice, but it's well worth reading the slides (the Rusty test alone is worth the time) and watching the video once it's up; especially if you're from one of the countries that'll be signing up for a FTA in the future. This was one of the best sessions I've seen here.
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Posted: 2007/01/18 00:16 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 17 Jan 2007
LCA Day 2 Sessions - Afternoon
I was back in the LinuxChix room for the next (two separate half)
session. Jacinta Richardson gave a short, pragmatic and quite practical,
primer on social networking. The material was solid if basic - although
from looking around while she spoke it seemed to be perfectly targeted
to the majority of the people in the room - much note taking was going
on. Val Henson then presented on salary negotiation and how to close the
pay gap. The sessions title was a little misleading (and unfairly
limiting) as the talk itself was applicable to any one who gets paid and
would like more. Although the material was well presented (I'm looking
forward to her file system talk on Friday) almost none of it was new to
me, but I did agree with most of it, so if you've not encountered it
before then you should send her a present when you get that first bumped
up cheque!
My last talk of the day was Pete Ryland, an Aussie that we're lucky enough to have based in London most of the time. He covered a new PyGTK wrapper he's working on (temporarily called EGG) that aims to make the more common tasks a lot easier (and concise in code). From inferring tooltips, about boxes and the contents of other related widgets from docstrings to making assumptions about the most sensible defaults (and letting you slip under to the raw PyGTK when you need it) it looks like it'll make a lot of the common drudge for less complex applications vanish. If I was a Python guy it'd be on my shortlist of things to look at, for his meta-programming tricks if nothing else.
After this most of the conference headed over to the Google sponsored party. Which I'm not blogging about.
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Posted: 2007/01/17 22:28 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
LCA Day 2 Sessions - Morning
My second day of talks began with the ever enjoyable Jono Bacon (a
fellow Brit and all round top guy) introducing Jokosher, a new sound
editing project for GNOME. He covered how it came to be (a mobilising of
some of the LUG Radio audience) and took the audience through some of
its features (with some very Slayeresque backing music). The session
went well and the audience soon feel in to a rapport with him.
I spent the second session, and lunch time, chatting with some of the Ubuntu crowd; very smart people. After some decent ramen I went to a chunk of "Getting More out of PostgresSQL", which was very SQL heavy (not my favourite type of talk).
I followed this with the LinuxChix lightening talks, it might be a perl monger thing but I can't resist a set of lightning talks. Val Henson covered a "Am I more famous than SPAM" metric script she'd written, Lucy (possibly Lee - her name isn't in the program) gave a brief but very easy to follow introduction on how to write Clam AV matchers (both the technical details and some useful heuristics), this may be the most immediately useful of the lightning talks for me. Donna did some post mortem on the number of women present at the conference (I'll blog about this separately) and then Alice mentioned some Google tools, what they're doing in this location and then some HR, my notes on her talk are seriously thin - I was a little distracted by her "emoter". I've no idea who she was but the emoting was funny (both verbally and when doing hand gestures that had no bearing on what the speaker was saying), articulate and seemingly able to speak without taking a breath; it'll be a shame if she's not speaking at the conference.
The last of the lightning talks was Pia Waugh on the school talks she'd previously done. Although the slides irked me - the background graphic made the text seriously hard to read - the subject matter was fascinating. Pia has spoken to all-girl and mixed-gender classes about the IT industry and what makes it an exciting career. I'm not really doing it justice but there were a handful of quotes that would have justified a full length talk, let alone a lightning one. Such as - the shortage of women in IT is a Western thing. Many of the more eastern Muslim countries are much more gender balanced. If you get a chance to watch the sessions video and you're interested in Women in IT watch it.
And the word of the conference seems to be "ROCKING"
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Posted: 2007/01/17 22:22 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Watch Them: They're Organised Out Here
Over and above the actual attending and enjoying of talks I've got
another reason to be here, to see how they organise events on this side
of the planet and to see how the wider communities seem to be doing.
I've been chatting to a number of locals who are involved in different groups and the level of cooperation is embarrassingly good compared to what we've got at home. I sat in on the Linux Australia AGM last night and I've now got a short list of people to hassle about how they've managed to get certain projects off the ground; so if you're an LA board member watch out for the sunburnt pom with a list of "How'd ya..." questions.
I'll throw in a congrats to Janet Hawtin, who's just been voted on to the LA board. She'll be a great asset to them.
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Posted: 2007/01/17 03:57 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Morning Wake Up Alarms: Yes, ALARMS
I've been running on an ever diminishing amount of battery since yesterday
morning, which was when my VAIO power adaptor decided to go boom. And it
did go boom. If you've heard stories about a strange foreign man setting
off the smoke alarms in one of Sydneys highest regarded hotels then they
may
be true. I'm not going to comment. EVER.
So this morning I made an unplanned trip to the Sydney Sony Centre and spent 200AUD on a new transformer. The staff were helpful (they even undid it and tested it with my laptop) but it's still a cost I'd rather not incur. Still, not having wireless at the conference is a PITA and it was hindering my ability to find my way around the town.
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Posted: 2007/01/17 03:10 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 15 Jan 2007
Public Transport and Getting Lost at the Beach
I was about ten minutes late for the start of the Tuesday opening talk,
although I'm finding it hard to feel guilty about it. I got on the wrong
bus and ended up on a sunny beach where I had a nice bacon roll and a
cold diet coke while I waited for the right bus. I've been commuting
pretty much every work day for my entire adult life and I've got to say
this is the first time I've ended up on a beach. Doesn't suck.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:57 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
LCA Sessions: Day 1 - Afternoon
Getting back from lunch with more time to spare than I expected I continued hunting Jon Oxer. His Self Healing MySQL Schema talk was interesting but I'm not sure we'd ever use it. In essence he keeps a copy of his schema with the relevant application module (as a reference) and, using error trapping, any time a query hits certain error conditions, such as a table not existing, it looks up the reference schema and if it knows about it then it creates it on the fly. This tact gets rid of upgrade scripts and a lot of schema / code versioning hassle but it has some down sides such as temp tables when doing ALTER TABLES and requiring schema manipulation privileges in your scripts.
I then went to see Russel Coker present on "Security Improvements needed in Debian". I've never seen him present before but I've read a fair amount with his name on it so I knew the material would be good - and I wasn't disappointed. He covered some of the Linux kernel capabilities and how they're too coarsely grained, the benefits gained by using polyinstantiated directories (which I'd never heard of before) and some of the attack use cases they prevent and how they live with PAM and how to exec a program as another user; both interactively and when running as a daemon. He mentioned an exploit I'd never heard of before and I'm going to be re-writing a couple of init scripts when I get home. Oh, and SELinux came up ;) Although Russel wasn't an exciting speaker, he was well paced, had some great material and really knows his field. Great talk.
I then went to my second talk of the day on MySQL schema changes, this one focused on using VIEWS and TRIGGERS. The speaker did a good job of getting his ideas across but they left me cold, the examples had a lot of caveats (and what looked like a data corruption race condition) and so while it was nice to see some real world examples of MySQL VIEWS and TRIGGERS I didn't get much from the talk.
The first days sessions ended with Laura Thomsons session on MySQL Trouble shooting. Which was a good mix of case studies and war stories. I really enjoyed the session, it had a good pace, the speaker was enthusiastic and I took almost no notes - which is always a good sign. It's worth noting that her slides stand alone and are worth a look when they hit the LCA site.
After everything had finished I started the long walk back to a bus stop that'd get me back to my room, I'm feeling a bit sore and very sunburnt at the moment; ironicly I got sunburn looking for a chemist that sold decent sun block. So I was a little antisocial and cut out for an early night in my nicely air-conned hotel room.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:55 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
LCA Sessions: Day 1 - Morning
The first session on my list was Pia Waugh on Open Source in Australian
Education, I wasn't that interested in the topic (Aus is a long way from
home) but I was looking forward to seeing her present, I've been told
she's a great speaker (nothing like raising the audiences expectations
;)) but I've never been able to pin people down on any details on her
style; so I thought I'd have a look-see. Only the session didn't happen.
I arrived a little late (this was pre the signs going up) and she wasn't
presenting so I slid off to the other session I wanted to see, Jonathan
Oxer on XEN image management.
I seem to be stalking Jon, I went through and marked the sessions I want to see and I seem to be going to three or so of his. If nothing else the man knows how to name his talks. I enjoyed the talk (the virtulisation room was packed and I ended up sitting on the stairs) and it gave me some things to think about even if I don't think we'll be using his approach. The audience also gave a lot to this session, their questions pulled a lot of the speakers knowledge out and some of the suggestions have gone in to my "have a look at" list. His cunning plan, which is very google file system in its approach, seems to work best for machines without a lot of local state, which isn't that close to the use case we have at work.
On my way to the second session I bumped into a couple of Kiwis that used to be based in London so I did some catching up with them, and then sat out half a session in the open air, which made a pleasant break.
I then went to Coogee beach for lunch with Richard Cohen, a guy I know from GLLUG in London who's been living in Hong-Kong for a while, and I've not seen for too long (he'll be looking for a contract soon - hire him while you can!) Eating near the water was great, the views certainly helped and I had a lamb kebab (called a yeeros by the heathens over here) that you could actually tell was lamb. Weird.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:52 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Australia: Not so Big on Bandwidth
My hotel has two connectivity options, I can either sit in the lounge
and pay by the minute to use a machine any one could have installed
anything on or I can pay silly money to get wireless for a couple of
hours - and to add insult to injury if you buy a days worth you get a
cap on how much you can download. Starbucks has never looked so
appealing! (and no, it's not just the waitresses accent). I also heard
today that they're rolling out 24Mb ADSL2 to certain parts of Sydney and
yet they've got a 10Gb a month download cap. Gah!
On the plus side the Uni is supposed to have a connection of firehose power, so I know what I'll be doing when I get there tomorrow morning.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:48 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
And so it Begins: LCA 2007
After trying to get out here for an LCA over the last three years I finally made it for Sydney
2007, and so far so good.
The venue is huge, the University of New South Wales is full of big, open airy spaces between buildings and it's lovely to walk around. The rooms themselves were a little hard to find at first (the LCA team put a lot of signs up in the first break which really helped) but they're functional and have people presenting in them so what more can I ask for? The attendees are really friendly and easy to talk to, I get the impression that some people have been looking forward to this since the last one, I've also bumped in to half-a-dozen people I know from London, which is cool and occasionally surprising. I'm feeling very sunburnt (ironically I got sunburn looking for a chemist that sold decent sun screen) so I slipped off early and I've been a little quiet and anti-social, which I'm hoping will fade with the bright redness.
The opening session was great, Jeff Waugh's a great presenter and he had a well chosen selection of jokes, including the great Debian couch, "It has no support but if you all lean back a bit you can support each other."
Fortunately I had a local nearby to explain some of the less obvious terms used and some of the previous LCA referencing jokes. It's also the first opening speech I've heard that included mentions of "slip, slop slap" (not as bad as it sounds), a slide on sexual health, the LCA gods of fertility, advice to not be creepy and a mention of the confs "Aura of sexual potency."; and to check your badge has the right number of fishes. Which lead to some seriously confused expressions.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:46 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 14 Jan 2007
The worlds most optimistic smuggler?
I'm starting to realise that the custom agencies of the world take one look
at me as I pass through and assume that I'm possibly the worlds most naive
and optimistic smuggler. It seems to be the combination of being (sorta)
young, travelling light, and alone, to a country for only a couple of days
that triggers every flag they've got. I can imagine the conversation "He's
only got one bag." "Come on, he's too obvious..." "It's as if he tempting
us... Sod it, get the gloves."
I travel light because I travel a lot, and I've learned exactly what I do and don't need. Most people over estimate how much clothing they need (it might be hot, take the T-shirt and shorts. Although that's a cloud... grab the jacket and wellington boots as well.) and misjudge how much time they'll have to spend reading etc. I'll only take the essentials (plus a day or two) and use either the hotel or local dry cleaners if anything goes wrong.
Over the course of the many stop and searches (the Australian customs official was possibly the friendliest I've met. Although he did mention the cricket...) one of the things I've noticed they like is hard copy proof of what you're doing in the country. A printed confirmation of the hotel booking, conference registration (with address) and a schedule seems to go a long way to alleviating their fears that you're there for some nefarious purpose. Especially if they "discover" it without being directed by you.
So here's to FOSDEM in Brussels and the next customs agent that takes a shine to me.
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Posted: 2007/01/14 20:34 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 08 Jan 2007
Change Control and Version Control are NOT THE SAME THING
And now to one of my pet annoyances...
Change Control is a formal process used to ensure a product, service
or process is only modified in line with the identified necessary
change.
-- Wikipedia - change
control
Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source)
code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same
unit of information.
-- Wikipedia - revision
control
As you can tell from the *different* definitions these two terms do not mean the same thing. They are not interchangeable and, ideally, both should be present. If you're maintaining multiple versions of source code or config files then you have version control. Not change control.
This rant was bought to you by over half the places I've worked. Ggggggrrrrrrrrhhhhhhh!
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Posted: 2007/01/08 22:22 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 07 Jan 2007
The del.icio.us de.dup.er
I like del.icio.us and I've been using it
for a long while now, but what used to be one of the more handy features,
the ability to subscribe to a tag, like 'ruby' or 'linux', has gradually
become less useful as more and more people find old links or repost the
same link. Again. And again. And, well, you get the idea.
So I wrote the del.icio.us de.dup.er script, a small perl cgi that sits between you and del.icio.us and weeds out any duplicate links. I don't know how useful it'll be for other people but I installed it and when comparing the amount of posts it returns to those in the unfiltered tag I'm already seeing a lot less traffic. This is only the first draft (it needs a little love and a chunk of re-writing) but it works. So I thought I'd post it. To run it you'll need a webserver capable of running perl cgi script, a couple of non-core perl modules and an area on disk where it can write its state; it maintains a single state file for each tag. I considered making it run as a hosted service to remove these preqs but that was more than I need right now.
Notes: Anyone who hits the cgi can force it to update and potentially stop you seeing certain links, I get around this by putting in in a secure (HTTP Auth protected) part of my site. It's also got a timeout built in, a defined number of days after it first logs a site (30 days by default) it'll let it through again. And store it for another 30 days.
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Posted: 2007/01/07 20:40 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mail Box Stress and Joe Jobbing
If you've tried to email me recently then you may have noticed that my
mail server has been down a lot (or just that I've not responded). Over
the last 10 days Unixdaemon.net was used as the reply-to and bounce
addresses in a LOT of spam, not an uncommon form of a Joe Job but an annoying one
one the less.
The last couple of weeks have been manic and so, while it was a little drastic, the easiest way to prevent my inbox from flooding (and I mean flooding) was to turn my SMTP server off. And add some countermeasures that'll stop this biting me quite so hard in the future. It's back up and running now (and I'm not getting any more bounces) - so overkill can work.
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Posted: 2007/01/07 20:17 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Open Source Questions and the Karma of Answers
I answer a couple of emails that contained questions about code I've
written and in return I get a shiny new release of
WebService::YouTube which fixes a bug I hit. Gotta love the 'net.
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Posted: 2007/01/07 20:09 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 04 Jan 2007
Extending PkgWatcher to work with Other Operating Systems
So now I've Announced
PkgWatcher people are actually starting to use it, the optimistic curs!
The first question's already come in and it's one I can actually answer:
how do you extend it to work on other operating systems?
It's actually pretty easy, first you need to make an addition in
installed_packages. This function works out which OS you're
running on and returns the respective subroutine that understands your
package manager. Which brings us on to step 2.
You now need to add that sub, the two existing examples are pretty simple and show two possible approaches. The goal is to have the function return an array of all the packages installed; how you get this is up to you. But please don't shell out and use awk, pkgwatcher is a perl program after all. And that's it, two small bits of code and you should be up and running.
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Posted: 2007/01/04 20:44 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 02 Jan 2007
PkgWatcher - Initial Release
When it comes to servers, some packages should be everywhere, some should
be
banned and there are always the edge cases - be it a build host that
requires GCC or a webserver that needs a full complement of packaged perl
modules. While a decent system imaging or ad-hoc change system will help
keep the discrepancies down nothing beats a system level check that
verifies your assumptions. And PgkWatcher is that
check.
The script's easy to use, copy it to the machine, install
Parse::Debian::Packages (via CPAN or apt-get) if you're on a
Debian system and then populate any (or all of) a required packages,
prohibited packages and local packages list. And then run the command with
the files, each line of which should contain a single package name, passed
as options (pkgwatcher -h will show you some examples) and see
what it outputs. The script will tell you about anything that should be
installed and isn't, shouldn't be installed and is, and any packages that
are listed in both files. Which I consider a configuration error. And now to
an added feature, the local package list. This is the last list checked and
allows you to do host specific overrides. If, for example, you banned GCC
on all your servers you'd add it to the prohibited package list. And if you
had a build host that required GCC you'd have to either leave the check off
or customise the file for that one machine. By adding GCC to a local
packages file you can override that one package on that single host.
PkgWatcher was designed to run under Nagios but works just as well as an ad-hoc command line tool. Although without centralised management, keeping the required and prohibited lists up-to-date and in sync could become a hassle. And now some notes, it understands the RPM and DPKG packaging systems (and it's pretty easy to add additional ones), it's written in pure-perl (so it's easy to move around) and it's quite forgiving. If a package isn't on its required or prohibited lists then it does nothing about it. This is both because I'm pragmatic (a good deployment strategy is a better solution to keeping hundreds of machines in check) and because the environment I've written it for has a lot of legacy systems. And being overly strict means you never gain any ground.
What's next for it? It'll soon be plugged in to the configuration templating system we use to get automatic package checking based upon the services defined for that type of host (with package list generation based on the declared OS type).
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Posted: 2007/01/02 22:42 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 01 Jan 2007
Why Don't we Have a .bank?
Why don't we have a .bank or .bank.country_code TLD that's regulated by the same people that regulate the
banks themselves? Most countries, with the notable exception of the US
(which has multiple National regulators and a second tier of State
ones), have a single body regulating all the banks so why not use their
established trust metrics (you must be at least this tall to be a
bank) to determine who can have a .bank domain?
In additional to helping people find their bank online (although if they can't find it should they be doing online account management?) it'd help prevent a lot of phishing. I like the idea of a decentralised model (which would have the benefit of local knowledge) rather than a single globe spanning group but decentralisation does seem more likely to end up having a very weak link in some small, "legally interesting" country.
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Posted: 2007/01/01 11:32 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Short Reviews: Cisco Routers for the Desperate and Using Moodle
Cisco Routers for the Desperate (No Starch Press): If you've tech savvy but Cisco
challenged then this books for you. It's not a one stop shop but it covers
almost everything you need to get started. We've just bought an office copy
so I can have mine back. 8/10
-- Cisco Routers for the
Desperate book review
Using Moodle (O'Reilly): Don't bother, read the online docs or the application help pages instead, they contain pretty much the same amount of information.
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Posted: 2007/01/01 11:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
