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 19:09 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mon, 14 May 2007
So why no posts?
I went to the Nordic Perl
Workshop. I had a great time. I also got sunburn.
The legal issues surrounding my grandfathers estate are heating up again. Which takes a lot of my time and energy (and money).
Builders have been in and redone the kitchen in the flat. It flooded a couple of months ago and now looks shiny and new again. Which means I've not been able to move about in here much for the last week or so. Should be finished tomorrow.
I've started writing blog entries for work. I'm not used to watching my published words quite so carefully. I also can't make the same assumptions about my audience.
We're starting to feel some time pressure at work (we've got a number of big announcements at a large tech conference in a couple of months) so I did my first weekend in a long time. It was all new software to me (FAI and Puppet). We're re-doing our provisioning so I quite enjoyed it. Note to future employers - give me interesting things to do and I'll work seven day weeks. Even on salary.
An old friend of mine broke up with his long term girlfriend and has needed equal parts sympathy and nights out. Which has eaten most of my social life. They're now back together.
I'd like my life back now. Please?
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Posted: 2007/05/14 21:02 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and 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 20:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 06 May 2007
df Output Ordering
Sometimes questions come up that you know you should know the answer to but
you just don't. My recent one was "how does df choose the
output order?" The man page doesn't mention the logic behind it and a quick
strace shows it pulls its data from /proc/mounts
(which you'd expect) and returns the output in the same order. So logically
the question becomes how does /proc/mounts order things?
It's not exactly an important question but I can see how this ends - and it involves source code.
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Posted: 2007/05/06 11:46 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
WOOT 2007
The Workshop On
Offensive Technologies (WOOT 07) might be the
most interesting new conference this year. If it plays its cards right
it'll be a good mix of the more underground groups, infosec professionals
and security think tanks. We need more events like this in the UK.
Don't know how nice I'll have to be to management to try and get a ticket but it'll probably be worth it.
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Posted: 2007/05/06 11:39 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and 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 18:12 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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