Wed, 16 Jan 2008
Neward, chromatic and External Perspectives
Ted Neward is the latest person to get linked to in the ongoing campaign to
prove that parrot isn't dead,
sleeping or pining for the fjords (sorry, couldn't resist). While
chromatic rebuffs some of Teds points I can't help but think something is
missing - a little outside perspective.
chromatic rightfully points out that the project isn't dead (and has actually been pretty visible in the perl sphere since the start of the year) but look at it from more of an outsiders angle - unless you are already in the perl community it's not obviously moving. A release every month is lovely and all but the announcements are apparently not hitting all the right places if people like Ted (who seems to at least keep an eye on a number of different projects and technologies) haven't noticed. And if he's not seen them then the unwashed masses of other developers won't have either. Is this a problem? Depends on what you want from the project. Mindshare is a wonderful thing but introducing people to a technology before it's ready can destroy its chances of success.
PS I wanted to be glib and just say "motion != progress" but that seems unfair considering the amount of time people are investing.
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Posted: 2008/01/16 11:36 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 15 Jan 2008
Three Things - 1 of many
This weeks three things are -
- MySQL 5.1(.20+) can log errors via syslog (finally)
- IBM Blades run quite well despite being very wet. (don't ask)
- Amazon Prime is too helpful. (Wooo individual book orders)
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Posted: 2008/01/15 19:48 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Proof of Ownership and Third Party Escrow
I own a lot of old comics, piles of DVDs and a somewhat smaller (but
still decent size stack) of audio CDs. These take up a lot of physical
space, the comics decrease in quality, they all attract dust and are a
pain to dig through when I want to find that one song on a compilation
CD from 2002. Or was it 2001?
I have a lot of data - iso images and virtual machines are among the biggest disk eaters. A large percentage of it sits on a number of small external hard drives that are cheap, easy to upgrade (buy a bigger one, run an rsync and done) and simple to take offsite.
I'd love to use the latter to solve the former - I'd happily buy two 500GB drives (dirt cheap) rip redundant FLAC and MP3 copies of a number of my CDs (and scan / rip everything else) and then dispose of them to get a shelf back but how do I then prove everything is legit when something crops up and I have to display the fact I paid for them? Amazon orders? Credit card receipts? With the grossly inflated fines being levelled in the US I'd be bankrupted if I couldn't prove I did buy the soundtrack to Finding Nemo (although the fine might be less painful than having it in the public record that I did - it was a present, honest!)
So where are the companies offering indemnity, escrow and proof of legitimate ownership? Why can't I tick a "remember I bought this" button on Amazon and know that they've got my back? (as well as my VMs, online storage and book purchasing history?) Is this impossible to do? Is there no market for it? Where am I going to put that next order from Play when it turns up...
It could even be a way to recover things you've lost, they'd have the proof that you owned it and it'd cost them practically nothing to issue you another copy. As much as I love CSI, Buffy and Stargate I want my floor space back.
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Posted: 2008/01/15 19:28 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 08 Jan 2008
O'Reilly Books and Odd Password Requirements
It's not that widely known but O'Reilly offer a user group discount -
it's 35% off the cover price and free delivery so it's often cheaper than
you can get the books new from anywhere else.
A few days ago I wanted to order a couple of books and because there are no conferences this month (and so no lovely Josette) I signed up online. The process itself was quick, easy and painless but one step stuck out in my mind - "Password cannot contain special characters or spaces". To me this is a weird limitation and one that seems to harken back to the days of old.
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Posted: 2008/01/08 23:12 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 02 Jan 2008
Linux Journal - Offensive Adverts and the real Problem
Linux Journal is getting some coverage again, last time was an
advert, this time it's a headline about Perl that Andy Lester didn't like
and caused him to post that "The Linux Journal owes the open source community, especially the Perl
community, a big apology." You can read the full
complaint yourself over at use.perl 2.0 - sorry - Perl Buzz ;)
I like his post, despite the fact he's got a valid point the delivery irks me more than the underlying issue. It's a great example of person being indignant on behalf of a whole lot of people who don't care, and in many cases have no clue who he is or why he's claiming to speak for them. For some reason I keep wanting to type 'ESR' now... He could have posted in his own (actually very good) use.perl journal and stated that he found it unpleasant/disgusting and people would have nodded or disagreed with him. But no. Instead it has to be a big sweeping thing. I don't mean to pick on Andy but as a member of the Perl, Linux and open source communities I wanted to voice my counter opinion and say - LJ please publish what you want. I have a credit card and the ability to cancel my subscription if I don't like it. Oh, hang on, I did that over two years ago - which leads me to my other point.
Right - ignoring the whole moral outrage thing can we focus on the real issue please? Why does Linux Journal seem to be such a waste of paper these days? From 2000 to 2005 I used to be a devoted reader but over the last couple of years it's just not worth the time or money. I don't know if it's just the explosion of blogs and other decent technical content or just my reading habits changing but I find it hard to justify the cost (and actually finding a copy) just to get the hidden gems that are Reuven Lerner and Mick Bauer. To avoid sounding overly harsh I should probably point out that the articles haven't taken a huge dive in quality so much as so many clued, interesting people are now posting daily in indirect competition. Oh and the new editor was annoying as hell.
Going back to the original Perl headline incident the possible highlight of this for me (which I realise I probably shouldn't find childishly amusing) is that LJ just pulled the original story. No negotiation or endless discussion, they just pulled the whole thing.
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Posted: 2008/01/02 16:40 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 02 Jun 2007
Little Bits of Code
When I worked as a developer I played around with servers and
infrastructure in my spare time, now I get paid to worry about that kind
of stuff I quite enjoy writing the occasional useless piece of code.
This weeks were a patch (well it started as a patch) to Statistics::Lite
to make it pass its tests. And then I got distracted in to re-writing its
test script from Test.pm to Test::More.
Educational and slightly useful. Then I was sent to LOLCODE
where I whiled away a lunch hour trying to add support for I HAZ
A BUKKIT(arrays) and better file handling to one of the perl
implementations. (for the record I'm not a fan of lolcats, but the lolrus is
amusing.)
While the results are far from useful the implementation I looked at did
it's parsing with reads and regex substitutions; which I'd
never seen done before. So I did learn a new (although less than ideal)
trick or two from playing with it.
It's the learning that's important, not the seriousness of the examples or outcome.
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Posted: 2007/06/02 10:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 17 May 2007
Project Blackbox - London Dates
Project
Blackbox is in London for a single day. And I didn't get a place.
Gah.
It looks so shiny...
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Posted: 2007/05/17 20:09 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 08 May 2007
Budgeting - how not to do it
The topic of budgets came up in the office today (the team I work in wants
to spend more than we have - of course - but SUN
thumpers are so shiny...) and I was reminded of a tactic used by one
of my previous bosses in a VC backed company.
The systems team were assigned an amount for the year that was too low for the planned upgrades (which had been signed off) and was a suspiciously round number. We took it and spent the lot in about three weeks. We bought as much of what we needed as the money allowed and then had a meeting where it was explained that we wouldn't be allocated anymore cash. Under any circumstances
Over the next six months we had the usual amount of hardware failures. Which we couldn't afford to fix. The service started to get slow and we needed to horizontally scale. But we couldn't afford any new machines. Then the email server died. My boss had meetings with the VCs and board where he explained how to fix it but that we had no money. After nearly a month of them fuming and things gradually getting worse (we were quite a popular site at the time) we got the same amount of money again (bringing us back up to what had originally been asked for out of some magic corner no one dared ask about.
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Posted: 2007/05/08 21:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 03 May 2007
SciFi Selection
In one of those serenity^Wserendipitous moments I seem to have an
abundance of Science Fiction close to hand. Thanks to Richard I've got
tickets to see Spider-man 3, Amazon DVD rental have sent me
Metropolis, A Scanner Darkly and Triangle. Paul grabbed tickets for the
London SciFi weekend showing of Quatermass and I'm now the
proud owner of the whole Deep Space Nine run.
Sometimes it's good to be a geek. Now I just have to find time to actually watch the things.
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Posted: 2007/05/03 19:12 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 21 Apr 2007
Automated Database Provisioning Papers
It's been a week of databases, replication, provisioning and planning for
automation. While winding down (it's an on-call weekend) I found some links
I'd marked for future reading. If you're interested in database
provisioning (especially read only replicated slaves), practical
autonomics and how they could potentially be useful in a real environment
then these papers make for an interesting ten minutes
It doesn't take a massive leap in imagination to see how a similar approach could be used in to horizontally scale web servers in conjunction with an intelligent monitoring system or load balancer. Mix in some thin provisioning and centralised logging and it's something I should really schedule some time to play with. Now, to the papers!
Database Replication Policies for Dynamic Content Applications(pdf)
Autonomic
Provisioning of Backend Databases in Dynamic Content Web
Servers(pdf)
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Posted: 2007/04/21 16:57 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 17 Apr 2007
The Great IPv6 Experiment
I don't normally write short posts with a single link but the The Great IPv6 Experiment amused
me. In an attempt to crack the chicken and the egg adoption problem they have put up
an IPv6 only website full of porn.
They say porn pushes technical innovation. We'll see. Although probably not until the videos are over.
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Posted: 2007/04/17 22:11 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 31 Mar 2007
Release the Kittens - Chris Blizzard
Yes, I'm completely behind with this one but it's Linux geek funny (the
images are CC licensed by Chris
Blizzard). It is also a sneaky test of the planet.gllug.org image handeling.
And then to the Debian and Ubuntu versions.
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Posted: 2007/03/31 16:34 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 26 Mar 2007
Top $FOO Of All Time Lists
Digg People: Please note that "Top $FOO of all time lists" should not be
completely comprised of $FOO's from the last two years. You
should also dock points for all uppercase words, txtsp3k, leet speak and
every use of 'AMAZING!!111' and its ilk.
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Posted: 2007/03/26 22:04 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 11 Mar 2007
Twitter + Bash == Bad Idea
I'm not sure about the basic idea behind Twitter but after signing up, having a
little look and noticing the Net::Twitter CPAN
module I decided to implement a really bad idea...
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::Twitter;
my $bot = Net::Twitter->new(
username => "username",
password => "password"
);
chomp(my $doing = <>);
$doing =~ s/^\s+\d+\s+//;
$bot->update($doing);
To make it 'useful' you'll need to run the following in your bash shell:
PROMPT_COMMAND='history | tail -n 1 |
/path/to/twitter_post.pl' and tada! People really will know what
you're doing RIGHT NOW. Ahem, sorry.
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Posted: 2007/03/11 13:55 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Busy February
I was more than a little slack in my online activities in February.
Between getting back from LCA and preparing for FOSDEM (tip: sleep a lot
before you go) I also managed to have curry with both David Cantrells, see Luke Kanies present Puppet
at GLLUG, attend a London PM Heretics, a Lonix and two other meetings
that don't have real names yet. And reach another birthday.
I'm not going to UKUUG in Manchester (I need some time at home) but I've been prodded in to potentially organising another GLLUG evening and a London PM tech meet, Brummie.pm are willing to come down and speak so it's a perfect time to put one together. All I need is to get enough hours in front of my email to plan it. I'm also attending the second Google OpenSource Jam in London so come and say "Hi" if you're there.
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Posted: 2007/03/11 12:34 | /geekstuff | 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
Wed, 17 Jan 2007
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
Thu, 21 Sep 2006
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
Wed, 23 Aug 2006
Eric Cartman^WRaymond Strikes Again
The Register is one of the sites covering ESRs
Linux / iPod-compatibility rant and he's managed to confuse himself,
other people and the issues. Once again.
Firstly we have this request that the "community", most of whom cringe when he starts talking, start compromising on closed source platforms and formats. Apparently the OpenSource movement hasn't given up enough rights yet and he'd like us to back down and hand over a couple more.
He then tangents off about 64bit architectures and the desktop... Which is an odd mix to start with, all the early 64bit action will happen in the datacentre and the server room. But anyway, Linux has had better AMD64 support than Windows for years now. SuSE led the crowd (Bo Thorsen gave a couple of great 64 bit porting talks at GLLUG years ago) and his "the end of the transition to 64-bit computing by the close of 2008." is insane. The sheer number of people still running Windows 95 is a testament to how slow the conversion process happens.
As for binary kernel drivers being a necessary compromise what can I say, I'll side with people like Theo De Raat and RMS any day. They've done the legwork, written the code and actually stick to their principles. Unlike the guy who's now most famous for a kernel build system that the kernel builders wouldn't touch and altering the Hackers Dictionary to suit his own ego.
Bonus link: The Everybody loves Eric Raymond Cartoon.
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Posted: 2006/08/23 01:22 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 15 Jul 2006
Webcomics and Deadtrees
Another day, another Amazon package... This time it had both the laugh out
loud funny Penny Arcade - attack
of the Bacon Robots and the ever impressive Megatokyo: Volume
4.
In addition to the comics the Penny Arcade book has a short paragraph of commentary for each cartoon and, fortunately, they're as funny as the cartoons themselves. While Volume 4 of Megatokyo isn't as amusing as the first couple of volumes, and no where near as funny as PA, it's evolving in to a great story full of impressive art. The highlight for me (I've already read all the comics online) is the expanded Circuity, which is a much easier and enjoyable read than the original online version.
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Posted: 2006/07/15 09:14 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
