How many books for beginners exist for your programming language /technology of choice? I’m assuming that if you are reading this site you are a tech of some description and so have some exposure to coding, if not stay with me ;) How many times, and in slightly different ways, has the same basic introduction to Perl, Python, TCP, Linux or Java been written? Now include the how-tos, on-line articles and tutorials. Read on →

While I’m in this navel gazing mood (which shouldn’t last very long) I thought I’d say a little bit about the oddness of being a system admin in a corporate environment; it might be the same in academia but I’ve never done that. Firstly you have the contradictions, in most companies, and heavily so in a small team/company, you are supposed to be open and approachable. But you also have to manage your time, their requests and the sanctity of the live environment. Read on →

"You described them as teenagers." "But I don't think teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It's because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives." Quote: Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon This is an odd thing to post about online, especially considering that this is a public blog and that I know at least two of my co-workers read this site on a semi-regular basis, but I need to get this off my chest and see where it leads me; and it’s my site dammit! Read on →

What do VMWare Workstation, Windows Media Player and the Windows Volume Control have in common? They each annoy me on a daily basis. I use VMWare on a daily basis, it’s a top notch product that saves me a lot of grief whether I’m writing applications, testing programs for release or playing with services/daemons such as Apache or Postfix and conducting what-ifs but I’ve recently noticed a small glitch that is driving me nuts. Read on →

The NetBSD project has recently adopted a new logo, the new NetBSD logos are decent enough if a little uninspiring and ‘safe’. I’ve always been a fan of the old NetBSD logo.

Way back on the second of September I wrote a blog entry informing everyone that I’d be turning off Unixdaemon Packetstorm Security feeds in favour of people using the Official Feeds. Well the time has come. The HTML on their site has changed again, breaking my script, so now is as good a time as any to stop the feeds. I’ll be putting up a 301 at some point today. Thank you for using the feeds and I hope they proved useful. Read on →

Joel Spolsky is working on a new book, rather than spread more of his own wisdoms, if you don’t read his site then you should!, he is compiling and editing a list of the best software essays published either online or on dead tree. While it is probably going to be quite a while before the book becomes available you can currently view the list of nominations and, in most cases, read them online. Read on →

I’m a big fan of the del.icio.us social bookmarking site but it’s lack of browser integration has always been slightly annoying. Luckily someone else must have thought along similar lines as we now have the excellent Foxylicious This FireFox extension adds a folder to the bookmarks menu that contains your del.icio.us bookmarks making them available without going to a separate website. The only downside is that it seems to be a one way trip, adding a local bookmark to the menu and choosing “update bookmarks” (you can reach this via tools->Foxylicious) doesn’t seem to update the bookmarks on the server. Read on →

I’ve been a subscriber to the RSS feed over at Startup Skills for quite a while now, the authors insights on creating a start up and online advertising in general and Google Adwords in particular have always made interesting reading; but one day they stopped. Instead of just pontificating about what you could do he’s been busy actually creating and running a company. AdGooroo, “an advertising intelligence service that tracks competitors’ online advertising” and helps you get the most from your own Google Adwords certainly warrants a close eye if you use Google for ads and a perfect starting place to find out what it’s all about if you don’t. Read on →

I’ve been doing some research on the available FireFox extensions for a very small side project that may or may not appear. During my travels I spent some time investigating the quite excellent Adblock. I bet you can all guess what it does. What was slightly more amusing was the Adbar extension, this adds text ads that no one gets paid for, to FireFox; it is very similar to the unregistered Opera browser. Read on →