After the Linux expo at Olympia (more to come on this later) I made a manic dash across London to the only cinema I knew of that was showing early previews of Joss Whedons Serenity. I managed to get there just as the adverts finished and settled in for a very long awaited couple of hours. And I wasn’t disappointed. I’m not going to give anything away but the film is very good, not mind blowing like some of the early reviews have claimed but it’s the best written Sci-Fi I’ve seen in a long time. Read on →

The aim is to, at the least, achieve all these goals. The time allocated is from October 6th 2005 to midnight October 5th 2006. I’ve archived my 2004/2005 PiP and it can now be found on the 2004/2005 Pragmatic Investment Plan page. Note: This page is actually getting a surprisingly high amount of traffic so I thought I should add some comments and an attribution. The original idea for a Pragmatic Investment Plan comes from Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers, to be specific the very interesting slides from the How To Keep Your Job presentation, if you’ve never seen them and you work in a technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they might just save your salary in years to come. Read on →

Today I was taken through a couple of system tasks that were both in-depth and pretty time consuming. And like a good lad I wrote down instructions fine grained enough to go through the task on my own. Now firstly this means if I missed anything I have to go through it again and make corrections. Secondly I wrote them by hand. Which was a mistake. After I’d finished the oddness of what I’d just done came to me. Read on →

At the last couple of places I’ve worked I’ve ended up being the only real sysadmin in the company. While this gives you a fair amount of control over what you’re doing from hour to hour, it also means you don’t have any one with the same professional interests to bounce ideas off or sanity check you; caveat: most Perl developers I’ve worked with have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Read on →

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while and it’s almost on us. The weird thing is it’s starting to become difficult to not found out what happens in the film. When it was only the occasional geek seeing an early screener or preview I could spot the posts and ignore them. now it’s on general release in the US the sheer quantity of reviews, spoilers and discussions on the film is becoming ridiculous. Read on →

Over at ZDNet Paul Murphy has a rather annoying post about whether the GPL impedes Linux more than it helps. The short answer is: No. The slightly longer version is “who cares?” Linux has become an incredible phenomenon, it’s used in some of the biggest companies on the planet (Google, Oracle, Novell), it runs large chunks of the net and has an amazing community of very smart people moving it forward. Read on →

In any friendship, hell any relationship, the most important thing is equality. Each party has certain expectations, if they don’t match those of the other person then things will eventually come to a head. In a relationship the same principles apply, but what they each offer may be very different and appear unbalanced on first glance. This is often the deal with “old rich guy” with “young attractive women” relationships. As long as they both understand what they’re going to put in (no pun intended) and get out then they can work. Read on →

I’ve never been able to get to a Toorcon but from reading the Toorcon 2005 slides it seems they have a number of quality speakers. The three highlights from this years sessions seem to be Introducing the Bastille Hardening Assessment Tool by Jay Beale, How Big is that Foot in the Door by Foofus and Simple Nomads How Hackers Get Caught. The intro to Bastille does both a good job of explaining why you should care about hardening, which includes some great quotes: The NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate evaluated a system locked-down following CIS’s Windows 2000 guide. Read on →

I’ve spent a couple of minutes (yep, very in-depth :)) playing with Rollyo, a way to run searches over multiple sites. The site’s pretty slick (and looks quite Basecamp/37signals inspired) but I can’t help but think I’ve been here before… Mozilla, and FireFox with a plugin, have something called the search sidebar. This little piece of magic allows you to run a search over multiple sites at the same time and integrates the results; each site search is implemented using a mycroft search plugin. Read on →

In what is just another in a long line of things that have been sent to test me over the last couple of weeks, today one of my sites got hit by a group of machines trying to do not nice things. The result? A load of 56 and a very slow machine. I stopped apache for a while, put some “measures” in place and we’re back up running. I’ve never bothered to make blosxom cache or anything to keep the load low, not having that much traffic always achieved the same goal, but I’ll try and pencil some time in to take a look. Read on →