Pither.com: Tag work

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex released today

Simon — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:13:00 +0000

Ubuntu released Intrepid Ibex earlier this afternoon, just as scheduled. It comes with lots of new features. While new versions of all the key software is certainly good, a convenient encrypted directory is handy and the VM builder is very convenient, it's actually a couple of very small additions that I'm enjoying the most.

Hamster

Until I switched to Intrepid and discovered this excellent application about a month ago I had been tracking my time with GnoTime. This worked, but it has lots of options that I really don't need, the interface is clunky and the provided reports just don't provide what I want.

So for the last month I've been tracking my time with Hamster, and it's been a very welcome change. It lives quietly in a panel at the side of my desktop, I can jump to it with a hot key and quickly type a new description and there I am, tracked. Hamster has a lovely report screen with plenty of information and even graphs. Which aren't actually very useful! However there is also a "Generate Report" button which creates a simple HTML table document with all the viewed data in it. Nice and easy to copy/paste/convert to a spreadsheet and process.

Tasque

This is following the same theme of a small, dedicated application that just does one thing in a very simple way. In this case it's managing to-do lists.

Tasque in Intrepid does install and does work and provides a number of storage locations for your to-do data. However the one that I chose to use - Evolution (due to a vaguely recent to-do listing attempt already being based there), is not currently working!

Thankfully it didn't take much to rebuild evolution-sharp with a later version and then update the requirements in tasque and rebuild that too.

So now I'm happily tracking the time I'm spending filling up my to-do list!

Supajam competition launch

Simon — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:29:00 +0000

One of my customers today launches their latest competition. This contest is looking for unsigned bands to upload their best track and after a few rounds and filtering and a public vote the winner will get to perform live in Spain in front of thousands of people!

Certainly not my idea of fun, but I'm sure many will disagree with me there! As for my fun, I shall be making another post about the development of their site. For now though, feel free to spread the word about the contest and good luck to anyone entering.

Not a week to plan

Simon — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:29:00 +0000

This week really hasn't gone to plan, in any way for any one.

Monday started out innocently enough. I had some out of hours work to get done during the evening, but it wasn't anything major.

When I went to bed at 4am on Tuesday morning, I was of a different opinion. Monday was a disaster! The work was at least all done and finally working but had taken far, far longer than expected (I personally blame the syncrepl system in OpenLDAP 2.3.27).

Tuesday started at the normal early time and progressed in a generally normal and pleasant way. I even managed to get today's out of hours work done early in the evening, leaving time for a little dancing.

However it was again all a terrible trick! This time it was Edward's turn to break. This was his worst night ever (so far) for sleeplessness. After an initial series of 30-60 minute naps up until around 1am, he just wouldn't go to sleep at all. In fact he spent most of the night not only awake but screaming about it.

On any night this would be rather unpleasant for us all. But on this night I had just packed a bag ready for a two day business trip to Guernsey. For which I had to leave at 6am to drive to Southampton for a flight.

I eventually took myself downstairs, removed the gate from the lounge doorway, closed the door, curled up on the sofa (it's not long enough to do anything else) and tried my best to ignore the screams from upstairs.

Edward eventually settled for another short nap about an hour before I had to get up and I managed to doze off fairly soon after the screams stopped. Then my alarm went.

The trip to Guernsey was pleasant enough, I quite like flying on such a small plane (9 passenger seats). The work was busy, with a slightly late finish on the Wednesday but at least there was a nice hotel afterwards.

Liz and Edward had a significantly worse day of it though. After a morning of Edward mainly screaming and not seeming to want to do anything else, Liz took him to the doctors. He was diagnosed with an ear and throat infection and prescribed antibiotics (which came with the added excitement that he might be allergic as Liz is). Liz was warned not to expect any sleep that night!

As expected neither of them got much sleep.

Thursday I worked while Edward developed a rash and returned to the doctors. They couldn't identify or find a cause for the rash though so just told Liz to keep an eye on it.

I left Guernsey on time and caught my flight back (descending from 6,000 feet to 1,000 feet completely surrounded by thick clouds is really quite strange).

Sadly there was still a strange PHP/OpenLDAP problem outstanding that was causing PHP to segfault on exit if a referral rebind callback had been setup. But hopefully it's just a PHP/OpenLDAP version mismatch that can be easily fixed (I shall post again when I know the answer).

Anyway, I got home to a very tired family. Edward did seem to be quite significantly on the mend though. He was actually smiling occasionally and starting to try and crawl and play around again.

He even managed to go to sleep (admittedly very late at around 11pm) and slept most of the night with only a couple of fairly short disturbances.

With Edward's rash spreading from his bottom and legs up his back and stomach we returned to the doctors on Friday afternoon. He got another check and it was confirmed that his ear/throat infection was getting better, although the cause of the rash was still unknown. The doctor didn't seem too concerned though and said that if it's still there Wednesday next week to bring him back again.

Saturday and Sunday have been gradually returning to normal and while we haven't managed a good night of sleep, they have certainly been better than earlier in the week.

We sadly had to miss a party on Saturday night, but it really wouldn't have been fair on anybody to leave Edward with babysitters. While he was clearly getting better, he was still very tired, rather grumpy and had to be manhandled to practically force feed him his antibiotics!

While still tired, today he has certainly been showing us that he's feeling better. He has been playing, walking and most notably climbing (pulling himself half way up the side of his play pen).

As for my biphasic sleeping plan, let's just start again from tomorrow.

PNG compression

Simon — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:28:40 +0000

Having failed to find the option in the GIMP to create colour mapped PNG files, I have just had to discover a couple of handy commands...

pngnq - tool for optimizing PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images pngcrush - optimizes PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files

The first of these takes a RGB PNG and gives back a colour mapped (by default, 256 colours) image.

The second takes those images (or RGB format ones too) and crushes them by about 20% (on the images I have been using today).

So the 22k file that GIMP created is now about 9k!

Freelance

Simon — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 10:00:00 +0000

I am now officially trying the freelance approach to employment (complete with my first project, thanks to Tim Small)

I have my own limited company, lots of highly marketable skills (Linux (high availability and clustering), Java, Perl, etc) and lots of real life experience making a large web application work better, faster and stay alive longer.

Things I am particularly interested in (and have strong experience of) working on at the moment are:-

large web application deployments
Java debugging, profiling and optimization
Server automation, eg Puppet
Shibboleth consultancy and support

I am happy to provide advice, consultancy and planning services as well as to get involved in parts of or complete larger projects. Tim and I also have a strong working relationship and we are able to offer joint services where extra man power or speed of delivery are required.

Please let me know if you're interested or would like further information.

Digitalbrain departure

Simon — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:00:00 +0000

Last week I officially (and finally, having stayed on from my initial leaving date in August) parted from Digitalbrain, where I have been working for over five years.

I decided to leave partly due to having been there five years and it being time for a change and partly due to the fact that my life is changing, with the imminent arrival of my first child.

Now away from Digitalbrain I have a little over a month before the baby is due. I intend to use this time for a mixture of relaxing and my own projects.

Since it's creation approximately six years ago, All Secure Domains has gone from being a three strong partnership that offered consultancy as well as Domain/Web hosting to now being a sole tradership supported only by myself. The website needs modernising, a few bugs fixing and the customer services sorting out.

Myself and some of my past colleagues are in the process of releasing a curses based keepalived configuration manager and monitor lvsadmin. This was originally written by Chris before being hacked on by Huw, Simon and myself. I intend to have the source code tidy enough for it's initial SF commit soon.

I will also be looking for consultancy and freelance work, both in small doses now and in larger ones a month or two after the baby has arrived. Please check my CV and contact me if you wish to discuss any possibilities.

How to not get a sysadmin job

Simon — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:44:00 +0000

Following on from the last post, here is my favourite failing answer (so far)...

Details of how I formatted test.csv

Highlight I1 -> Insert Function -> Proper -> Text A1 -> Highlight Col I -> filldown
Highlight J1 -> Insert Function -> Proper -> Text B1 -> Highlight Col J ->filldown
Copy and Paste Special Col I into I using values
Copy and Paste Special Col I into J using values
Sanitise manually and then provided with an empty Col H
Copy and paste Col D into H
Copy and paste Col E,F and G to Col L & M
Delete columns D-G

Don't know how to do the last comparison

Apart from the "fixed" CSV they attached that was the complete response!

What's wrong with this answer...

it doesn't tell us what application to start clicking around
it (by self confession) doesn't answer the entire question
"sanitise manually" may work wonderfully for our small sample file, but we sepecifically state it's a sample from a larger file - I'd like to see someone manually sanitise a 6 million line logfile
we don't specifically ask, but do hint at wanting a script to solve this task (that is infact it's entire point, to test the candidates scripting abilities), even if we hadn't though, surely the fact that you're applying for a Linux sysadmin role should strongly suggest a scripted answer over a point and click one?

Recruitment homework question

Simon — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:00:00 +0000

This is one of the homework questions that Digitalbrain has recently been giving out to prospective candidates for a Linux system administrator role.

Working with a large, complex application with many thousands of users, we very often have to manipulate significant amounts of textual data. Perhaps as part of a process to create new student accounts within a school, or to feed to one of our management tools to delete or relocate a collection of user files, or maybe to collate data from one of the many log files.

So this question is based on the kind of work that is a core (if not very interesting) part of the role. I would have expected it to be a core part of any Linux sysadmins knowledge too.

The question:

Attached is a CSV file (a sample from a much larger file). This file needs cleaning and altering in the following ways:-

capitalise the first letter of the two name fields
sanitise the formatting
move the username column to the beginning of each line
the phone number is missing the area code - look up the city in the following table, and add it to the beginning of the phone number column

City	Area Code
London	5
Brighton	6
Manchester	7

Please detail what you did, how, any scripts involved and provide the corrected CSV.

The CSV file

Our recent experience seems to suggest that being able to answer this is a rare skill, even for people who advertise themselves as experienced Linux system administrators (and are applying for such a job)!

Are we being unfair?

Are we expecting too much?

Where are all the SysAdmins?

Simon — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 21:46:00 +0000

Digitalbrain has been looking for new systems administrators for it's main platform services (Linux based) since the first of the old team resigned in April. During this time we've hired two new people. Ie it seems to take over two months to find each sysadmin!

Digitalbrain is still looking at least one more systems administrator.

So where are all the Linux sysadmins?

Digitalbrain is based in the lovely city of Brighton, commutable from London and anywhere in between. The salary being offerred is reasonable and we have enlisted the help of several recruitment agencies.

Yet we get few CVs. Fewer still get to start our interviewing process (which is initially two simple 'homework' questions). Practically no one seems to make it beyond that, only about 5 in the last four months.

I can't see that we're doing anything wrong. So perhaps the IT skills shortage that I keep reading about is real?

Or are our standards too high?

I shall be publishing one of our 'homework' questions in my next post and will then also publish a few (nameless) submissions that we've had, so you can judge for yourselves.

One other result of this recruiting difficulty is that I will now be staying on at Digitalbrain until Christmas!

For a new job

Simon — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 21:36:00 +0000

August will be the fifth anniversary of my employment with Digitalbrain. While I have enjoyed much of my time there a great deal and learnt a lot, it is now time for me to move to a new challenge.

Along with this change I am wanting to move from systems administration into development (probably perl or java, although ruby is also fun) and from permanent employment to contracting.

So ideally, I am looking for a programming contract that will start around the end of August. For anyone who would like to help me with this, I have an online CV.