Thu, 22 Feb 2007
FOSDEM 2007 - 1 sleep to go!
Tomorrow sees the unofficial start of FOSDEM 2007. A ride on Eurostar,
meet up with some of the London techs, food and then to the usual pub in
the evening - it's the only way for a Linux geek to spend a Friday night
in February.
This year we don't have RMS (no song! Oh YES!) and I've now (twice) seen the talk I was most looking forward to (Puppet - good talk) so I think I'll be spending more time in the dev rooms and less in the main tracks. Still, there are enough interesting sessions to prevent me from having a late morning lay in; JBJ, Miguel on Mono (who I owe a free cab ride to from the first OSDEM), Dag on Enterprise packaging and there is even a whole Gentoo track to ignore. It's going to be a busy weekend.
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Posted: 2007/02/22 23:18 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 20 Feb 2007
Another Year and the Closing of a Decade
So, another full year of my life is over and done. As years go it's not
been the best one. Family troubles, time (and money, lots of money)
spent dealing with lawyers and the passing of my grandfather, someone I
saw nearly daily and often find myself thinking about, have all
conspired to stop that annoying smile I often get. This post is a little
more indulgent than usual but it's my birthday and I'm full of cold caffine
and napalmesque curry - so tough!
This year isn't just another birthday though, it also marks the end of my first decade as a dutifully employed member of the public. From my start as an engineering apprentice (which I never finished) at age 16 to senior sysadmin at 27 - by way of financial data provider, trade support, software developer and sysadmin - I've racked up the companies (and to a lesser extent the industries) and learned more than I ever wanted to about how businesses work - and just as often don't.
Looking back, the last ten years have been a great ride. I've written for magazines, tech reviewed books by the publishers who fill my shelves, tried public speaking (we're all allowed mistakes :)), organised the kind of events I want to go to, met the people behind the Free and Open Source movements (if you ever get the chance to have dinner with Maddog Hall take it! He's amazing to talk with), coded on snowy beaches, hacked while squinting from sun shine as far from home as I can physically get without falling off the planet, and most of all conversed, met and worked with some of the nicest, funniest and most talented people I could ever hope to meet. It's a cliche but a true one, if you do what you love you never have to work a day.
I'm not actually thirty yet; although my lack of hair growth would seem to disagree. So, what's next on the list of things to try? I have no idea at the moment but you know it's going to be fun ambeling down which ever path draws me in.
To the future. Thanks for reading.
-- Dean Wilson
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Posted: 2007/02/20 04:53 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 01 Feb 2007
Ping The Host Table - UGU Tip
I'm not too keen on yesterdays
UGU tip of the day
and it doesn't take much to make it work a chunk better, so I thought I'd
whine about it on my blog.
Here's the original snippet:
grep -v "#" /etc/hosts | awk '{print $1}' | while read host
do
ping -c 1 $host
done
But this has some very fixable caveats. It doesn't deal with blank lines, it'll try and ping IPv6 addresses (and too many distros put IPv6 entries in the host table these days - even if you disable the IPv6 options) and it will ignore any lines that have a comment, even if the comment is after the field we want. So I wrote my own version (which I can't see me ever using)
for host in `awk '! /^#|^$|::/ { print $1 }' /etc/hosts`
do
ping -c 1 $host
done
Mine does deal with blank lines (^$), only drops a comment if it's at the start of the line (^#) and skips all IPv6 addresses (::). If you want to golf it down some more you can even kill both the loop and iterator variable and use xargs instead. But I'm not that bored.
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Posted: 2007/02/01 07:01 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
