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
Sun, 07 Jan 2007
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
Mon, 20 Nov 2006
Small Redesign
I've re-written bits of the category and
archive Blosxom plugins to output CSS friendly markup. Which I've added
some CSS to. The changes are mostly non-intrusive (and most of my traffic
comes through RSS readers anyway) but if I've painfully broken anything for
your browser of choice drop me a note.
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Posted: 2006/11/20 20:05 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 02 Oct 2006
Closing the 2005/2006 PiP
Each year I put a small todo list up on Unixdaemon and see how many of the
goals I can meet. The 2005/2006
Pragmatic Investment Plan is now closed so it's time for a quick look
back.
First up we have the writing of articles. I'll come to this in a separate post as I'm still not happy with what I want to say. Training courses are an easy one. I did two main courses and I can't remember much from either of them. The mistake is a common one, I didn't actually implement any of the things I'd learned when I got back to the office so a lot of it didn't stick. I've stored enough that I can find my way around both Exim and PostgreSQL but I can't help thinking they could have been more useful to me if I'd have got my hands dirty when I got back from them. Still, I meet the numbers.
Conferences are always fun and this years is no exception, apart from EuroOSCON which I thought was a way too expensive let down. I didn't go to this years (and I won't be going to any in the near future) so I spent the money on a house instead.
It wasn't quite that bad but it's not on my list of recommended conferences and its pricing is... interesting. I missed LUGRadio (ill), the UKUUG events (personal commitments) and the 2005 London Perl Workshop (on-call) but I did get to my first YAPC in years, and Birmingham PM did a great job, a d.construct, which had a great audience and corridor track, and the highlight of the conferences (again) FOSDEM. Which was great. I'll be booking next years tickets RSN. Honest. Not a day before like this years.
And on to the books, I've discovered while completing this list that the number of books I read from start to finish has dropped significantly. I now either buy a book for the last half-a-dozen advanced chapters, borrow an introduction to a topic from a friend or just sub to a planet or two and a lot of blogs. I've reached the tipping point where most of my technical information comes directly from my peers blogs rather than via printed paper. And with the exception of the Pragmatic Programmers line most tech publishers are less than interesting these days. I want one with some system admin topics that are actually worth reading. Not yet another command reference.
Lastly we have events. I dove in at the start of the year and ended up involved in organising nine different tech events (five were me working alone) in the first six months of the year. And then a change in my personal circumstances ate all my time and I've done pretty much nothing since. I've learned that I do enjoy organising them but I don't like being a wingman. It's too much like work when I have to organise with someone else. I do have plans for a London Linux Workshop next year. But I said that this year.
So do I pass? Sorta, a lot of last minute pushing and a number of mostly done tasks gets me a C+ this year. I'm not starting another PiP just yet. I need to think about possibly doing two things at once instead, one for longer term goals (of which I don't really have any) and one for more iterative tasks, which'll give better feedback with shorter delays.
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Posted: 2006/10/02 23:32 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 19 Jul 2006
FireFox2 UnixDaemon.net MozSearch Plugin
I ended up writing a number of Unofficial Mycroft
Searches for FireFox1 and Mozilla and now I've started to have a
play with FireFox 2 Beta 1, one of the FireFox features I thought I'd
investigate first is the new MozSearch
search plugins.
I've not dug too deeply yet (I'm on training so I'm playing in the breaks) but I have pulled a basic search together for UnixDaemon. If you're running a FireFox2 Beta head over to either the UnixDaemon blog or the UnixDaemon.net main site and then click the downwards pointing arrow on the search box on the top right. Click 'Add "Search UnixDaemon.net"' and it should then be a valid search option. And unlike mycroft in FireFox 1 this time you can actually delete search plugins without editing your profile directories!
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Posted: 2006/07/19 13:35 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 14 May 2006
Event Signup Emails - What I do with them
I've had a couple of people ask what I do with peoples emails addresses
once they've sent me a request to sign-up/register. In an attempt to
prove I'm not making millions with them (but if you know a way, I'm
open... :)) I thought I'd document the reasons I ask for email addresses
and what I do with them afterwards.
The reasons I ask for them are pretty simple: so I can adjust the venue if we need somewhere with a bigger capacity. The original Frameworks night venue held 40 people. We ended up with 207 people in the audience. Without knowing how many people were going to turn up I'd have turned a lot of unhappy people away.
Secondly, some venues require a list of attendees before they'll let anyone in. If we go somewhere that does this I give them names but not email addresses. This way they can check you off their list but they can't spam you.
The last real reason is so that I can send interested people last minute updates/amendments. If Murphy bites I'd like to let as many people know as early as possible. Most people read their personal mail before mailing lists so having your address available may make the difference between a cold night on your own outside a locked building and sitting indoors watching Firefly.
After the event I nuke the mailbox I stored the sign up emails mails in, and the sent mails about the event. I keep a tally of how many people registered, for future planning, but I don't keep any specific details on individuals. Hopefully, making the why more transparent with ease suspicions. Yeah, right.
PS: The most amusing one so far was a man complaining (via email) that he didn't want me having his email address...
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Posted: 2006/05/14 15:10 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 14 Mar 2006
Hiatus!
I'm not going to be about much until May. The site'll be pretty quiet and
don't expect much in the way of email or phone replies.
Dean
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Posted: 2006/03/14 12:21 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 31 Dec 2005
Looking Back at 2005
2005 was a very mixed year for me, it had some memorable high spots and a
couple of tear jerking moments.
The year started off with me moving all my sites, email and everything else I put online from a shared machine to my own bytemark box after the shared host I was using got cracked through someones broken web app install. Digging through my backups and verifying nothing had been tampered with was a fun way to spend my hols.
February bought a small traffic spike when I got a book review on the front page of Slashdot. All the comments were actually pretty friendly. After this triggered my "love" of nearly getting heckled (and John Southerns ability to blindside me) I "volunteered" to organise a GLLUG meeting in March. It was the first meeting I've ever organised and it went pretty well in the end. It also saw GLLUG go back to the big crowds we used to get.
April wasn't as much fun. A small event I liked the idea of, a London CodeBrew never happened due to a complete lack of interest. From them and me. I then got sent to the middle of nowhere on a very painful training course in the middle of nowhere. After being deflated enough to not post at all in May I managed to one up myself and put on a June GLLUG.
July was a tragic month for a lot of people in London. I thought long and hard about whether I should post on the London bombings and in the end I did. This city is very much a part of who I am and I couldn't not say something.
The rest of a subdued July included the excellent one day OpenTech and me changing jobs. I picked up a lot about medical companies and how they like to do things in that role. It was an interesting job with nice people but it wasn't for me anymore. In August I spent way too much time playing with the ever cool Greasemonkey, went to a UKUUG event in Swansea and then screwed up a potential relationship. This was my most off-topic ever post and it generated a fair amount of email from people who knew me; and almost all of them guessed the wrong person which was amusing. It also proved too many of my friends don't have lives :)
September saw me get voted on to the UKUUG council (which I've been very lax in getting involved with) and the set up of PlanetGLLUG. I missed the Nordic Perl Workshop (in Sweden) after I made last minute plans to attend EuroOSCON. The highlight of which involved a funny as hell "tourist trip" around the back-streets of Amsterdam at gone midnight with a group of nearly professional piss-takers. And an advertising pitch from the owner of Orgasmatones...
The merry month of October bought the Linux World Expo in London, the first UK FUDCon and my third GLLUG, with the incredible Jeff Waugh speaking at GLLUG as part of his BadgerBadgerBadger tour. The initial Web frameworks night post went out. And nothing visible really happened. I also got to see an advanced screening (one day early!) of Serenity. Which was memorable for both the film and the fact that a large number of the audience seemed to be Browncoats who wanted a sing-song.
November was my month of stress, the Web Frameworks Night was a roaring success (after nearly not happening at all) and was my accomplishment of the year. It's the community aspect of events like this, the speakers, the contacts at the venue and the audience, that makes me love working in the OpenSource and Free Software worlds.
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Posted: 2005/12/31 18:38 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 13 Oct 2005
Where (In the UK) is That Number?
After a pretty much technology free day at work I wanted to actually do
something hands on before the day was over. After a flurry of reading
and deleting of of blog posts it looked like the buzz word of the day was
(still) Google Maps. So off I went.
With the aid of the excellent Number::Phone and the not too bad Geo::Google, which can't seem to handle Scottish towns, I put together a small script which displays the town a phone number is from using Google Maps. To try it out enter a phone number in the field below. You can skip the leading +, and/or the country code (44). It's also mostly OK with hyphens, spaces and other bits of cruft.
Disclaimer: I'm not logging the numbers entered anywhere.
Now for some caveats. It only works for Britain and Wales. Geo::Google doesn't do Scotland. It doesn't have support for the US yet. It only shows things on a town level. It has ugly error messages. But it does mostly work if none of those restrictions apply :)
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Posted: 2005/10/13 00:23 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 08 Oct 2005
Pragmatic Investment Plan 2005/2006 -- Restart
After a rubbish first start (just two entries in four months) I decided to
scrap my 2005/2006
Pragmatic Investment Plan and start again. Between insanity both
professionally, I changed jobs, and in my personal life nothing seemed to be
moving. And sometimes you just need to wipe the slate clean and start
again.
I kicked back off with the Linux Expo and FUDCon, both of which were excellent and will be covered in another post and by buying some more books. Which always makes me feel better :)
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Posted: 2005/10/08 14:34 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 24 Sep 2005
Updates to PlanetGLLUG and IIS-Resources GM Script
Well Planet GLLUG has been running
for a couple of days without any glitches, except for some, er,
interesting, HTML running from one persons postings to another. I've also
replaced some of the images with much better versions contributed from
Simon Morris. Now some (maybe) interesting tidbits:
43.8% of the visitors to PlanetGLLUG are using Linux vs the 42.1% that are running Windows; it's always nice to see people dogfooding. Even more surprising is that the most popular web browser used by the Windows viewers is... FireFox! We're also the top hit in Google for 'planet gllug' which might help spread the word a bit.
The other, much smaller, update is that the IIS-Resources Printer Redirect Script no longer has the printer dialog pop up. A small code snippet from Gunnar Hansson helped fix this for me.
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Posted: 2005/09/24 09:45 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 17 Sep 2005
Google Ads and IE Plugins
Back in August I added Google adwords to the IE Plugins page. If at
all possible I plan to keep the site advert free but the IE Plugins, with
the possible exception of my blogs atom feed, are the biggest bandwidth
consumers by a fair way.
This was my first foray in to the world of Google ads and I've picked up some very useful information. Firstly adding adverts, and viewing the reports, is incredibly easy. Google has made the process both quick and simple. So 10/10 for that. Secondly the JavaScript code you use kicks up a number of warnings when you use FireFox in strict mode. Not so good. Thirdly the adverts it shows are actually dull as heck (who wants to click on an advert that says "Download Internet Explorer"?). That's a combination of my content and Googles matching software so I can half fix that.
All-in-all it's been a pretty painless process that's not really netted me any cash. You're not allowed to discuss how much you've made under the terms and conditions (as I understand them) but in my case it doesn't pay for the bandwidth the plugins require; IE users don't like clicking on adverts :) On the up side my plugins have been downloaded almost 680,000 times over the last two and half years. Which means at least a handful of people have found them useful!
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Posted: 2005/09/17 11:52 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 01 Aug 2005
AJAX Blogpost Title Search
As an experiment I've put together a simple AJAX(ish, it uses '|' separated
values) based search tool for finding words I've used in the title of my
Blogpost. The beta version can be found on the Blog Title AJAX Search
page.
If you type in a couple of letters, such as ope, then it should (it's case-insensitive) match anything with the word open in it for example. The results will then be shown as hyperlinks on the same page without forcing a refresh. If you add or remove letters then it'll update the matches as appropriate. Please note it's a little slow as it's doing a lot of look ups at the back-end. That's a known problem with my example. Still it does what I wanted and it introduced me to AJAX so I'm pretty happy with it.
If you don't run JavaScript or you press return then it just runs the query through google, limiting the results to unixdaemon.net, as usual. That should guaranty that older browsers can still use the page, just in a limited fashion.
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Posted: 2005/08/01 10:35 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 30 Apr 2005
2004 - 2005 Pragmatic Investment Plan Closed
Last September I decided to put a basic 2004-2005
Pragmatic Investment Plan together
to give me some goals and tasks to accomplish over the following 12 months.
Eight months in (and after considering
shorter PiPs) I've decided to mark last years as finished. While I've not
completed every item on the list I've made a pretty good showing and I'm
pretty happy that I could have finished on time.
Halfway through the period covered by that PiP I changed job and my interests and areas of responsibility changed significantly; that's why I ended up taking so long to finish some of the easier ones such as the book reviews. I just lost interest in doing them.
I've not thought too much about what the next bunch of goals are but I suspect they'll be quite different. Anyway, heres to change, progress and advancement!
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Posted: 2005/04/30 18:04 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 21 Apr 2005
Mycroft Searches: Google Maps UK Semi and Ireland Phone Numbers
I've added two more semi searches to my Mozilla/FireFox
search page. First up we have a simple Google
Maps (UK) search, I like Google maps and this puts it closer to my
reach. Next up we have another phone number lookup from Dave Cantrell, this
time for
Ireland
Phone Info.
Note: both of these use existing images as I'm not really the arty type.
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Posted: 2005/04/21 22:31 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 17 Apr 2005
Google Search Phrase Highlighting
I've added another blosxom plugin to
the site, this one is called google_highlight
and does what you'd expect. It highlights any Google search terms that lead
you here. I've had a play and it seems to work fine so I've added it to the
live site. If you have any problems with it please let me know.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 14:40 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 02 Apr 2005
Whois.sc and Koders Mycroft Searches
I've added a whois.sc
search to the Mozilla Searches
page. It works fine in FireFox or Mozilla but doesn't work in the sidebar
as it will typically return a single result.
I've also added some Koder.com searches. The Koders.com website crawls and indexes source code from a number of different sites and projects. It then lets you run queries based upon keywords, specific languages and/or licenses, returning the code that matches.
The koders searches are unofficial, work in the Mozilla sidebar or with plain FireFox and have two small quirks, firstly they all use the same logo as I'm rubbish at design. Secondly (in the Mozilla sidebar) they will show the link to the second page of results in the returned results. I did this so the results include the "Project Matches" results at the cost of one link that just says "2".
If you want a specific language search that I've not created, download either the Perl or Ruby examples and do a find and replace all occurrences of perl or ruby with your language of choice. Assuming you get the correct language from the www.koders.com site it shouldn't take more than thirty seconds. The searches I've created search through all licenses, it's pretty easy to limit by license but I didn't need that.
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Posted: 2005/04/02 11:50 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 27 Mar 2005
Vanity, PiP and Screenshotting
Over in my Pragmatic
Investment Plan I have two items under the topic of vanity. To put
something on my site worth reading and to get my site into the first 100
results returned by google.
Once my traffic hit a 100,000 unique (not obviously bots) visitors in under three months I considered the first one fulfilled. I'm now, and I realise how sad this is going to sound, very happy to report that at least for this very moment unixdaemon.net is in the top hundred results for the search phrase Dean; 99th to be exact. And yes I did take a screen-shot.
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Posted: 2005/03/27 02:11 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 18 Mar 2005
Which package owns this file?
Filepkg.sh is another one of those scripts borne
of a personal itch. I'm spending a fair amount of time cleaning up both
Redhat and Debian boxes which have custom software installed, some of it
by hand and some via the package management system (we build the
packages ourselves).
One of the annoyances I've come across while determining which files are managed and which were left by us is that while both dpkg and rpm will tell you the package that owns a file, you need to provide the full path of the file you're asking about to get the information out. Well no more!
filepkg.sh takes a file name as an argument and tries to do a 'which' command on it. If this works then the full path is passed to the native package manager (filepkg.sh currently supports Redhat and Debian) and the owning package, if there is one, is returned. If filepkg.sh is called with a '-l' as the first argument or 'which' doesn't find a file with that name ('which' doesn't deal with config files for example) then the file is passed to 'locate'; it then looks up the file and passes it to the package manager to get a package name back.
The idea is simple, the code's easy to read and it works how I want it so feel free to do what you want with this little chunk of GPL'd code.
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Posted: 2005/03/18 00:22 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Updating my Pragmatic Investment Plan -- 2005/03
I've finally found the time to do make some updates to my 2004 - 2005 Pragmatic Investment
Plan. I've posted links to some books reviews, added two technical
conferences and listed some scripts that have been down-loaded a fair few
times from my site (over 50 downloads was my requirement).
While I'm not even half way through the PiP yet (and time's a ticking!) I've started to think about the 2005-2006 version. I think I might include a challenge to build and provide content for a website that pays for itself (including hosting). That seems to be a more solid target than get X page impressions. I'll also up the number of people that have to use a piece of software before I consider it useful; raising it from 50 to 250 might be a challenge.
One thing I won't be including next year is the language of the year. My employment circumstances have changed a fair bit since I wrote the current version of the PiP and I'm doing a lot less development now. This makes spending enough time to get really comfortable with a language extremely hard.
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Posted: 2005/03/18 00:06 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
