Change of location

Just a quick note for those of you who are using RSS aggregation and will therefore see this even though this URL will no longer be working. My blog will move from this current address to this one. Please find all future updates at that url.

Listening

I'm in a fairly bellicose mood this morning so I thought I get a few rants out. Let me give a snippet of a recent phone conversation:
Phone rings
I pick up the phone and say "Shamsuls phone, Ben speaking, How can I help you?"
voice "Is this Shamsul?"

This phonecall is completely typical when I answer the phone for someone else. Now I accept that perhaps I am not always the most clear speaking person, so after it happened a few times I made a concious effort to enunciate and yet still the problem persisted. Then I realised that either the person calling was either unable to think fast enough to deal with the fact that someone else was answering the phone rather then the person they intended on speaking with and they needed the gap in the conversation by getting me to repeat information that they already knew OR that they just didn't listen. Given that its really not THAT challenging to adapt to someone else answering the phone I assume its people not listening. This I must admit I found a little bizare, that was until I went into the local sandwich shop.
Sandwich person "Hi sir, what would you like?"
Ben "Could I have a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwitch please"
Sandwich person "Would you like white bread sir?"
Ben "Yes, thats fine"
Sandwich person "Would you like butter on that sir?"
Ben "Yes"
Sandwich person "What would you like on that sir?"
Ben "Ham, cheese and tomato please"
Sandwich person "Salt and pepper sir?"
Ben "no thanks"
Sandwich person "With crusts sir"
Ben " yes please"
Sandwich person "How would you like that cut sir?"

Now if you examine the above conversation you will notice that although they actually ASKED me at the start of the exchange what I wanted, they didn't actually listen to my reply and consequently I had to tell them again. I have noticed that it seems to be the norm in our society to ask questions but not listen to the answer. Why has this come about? Of course another amusing side note is that even when I go back into the same sandwitch shop and ask for "a ham, cheese and tomato sandwitch on white bread with butter and no salt and pepper" I not only get a strange look but I get asked the same questions anyway.

Magnetism

One of my colleagues is a mad gadget freak. Eachan seems to spend an infinite amount of money on bizare and largely useless gadgets, but the other day an amazing thing happened, he found one that was genuinely kewl, magnets. Of course there is nothing new about magnets but in the hands of geeks much fun can be had. For starters we immediately tried to degauss various media and were successful with floppies. Later I was randomly poking a magnetised stick at a bunch of coins and noticed something strange, some of the coins were able to be picked up but others weren't. I started to collect some penny coins and soon found that any coins older then 1991 were not able to be picked up, shortly thereafter google came up with the explanation in the form of this page. I have of course added them to my wishlist.

Windows and temp files

As anyone that knows me can appreciate I am not a fan of windows. For some time now there has been only ONE thing that windows can do that I can't really do properly in Linux and that is play games. In particular Linux is rarely capable of playing any of the MMORPGs that I like to play, so to that end on my desktop machine I keep a couple of partitions free and install windows on them. Generally I install windows on its own partition, one that I can just blow away and reinstall every few months when the seemingly inevitable corruption sets in, and another which just stores things like the games themselves. I recently had cause to burn a dvd from an image I had stored on another machine, but given I was playing a game at the time I thought I would simply copy it across to my storage partition and burn it. Unfortunately upon examination I discovered I only had 1.5 GB of space free on my storage partition and the dvd image was 4.5gb. I started to look at data I had stored on the partition under the hopes that I could find something to delete and thus make enough room to copy the image over. Now here I will digress a little and point out that I HATE how by default windows won't let you do anything irrevocable, by that I mean, in a default windows install its a 4 step operation to really delete a file. You start off saying, delete that, then it says are you sure, then it puts it in the trashbin and then you have to delete the trashbin, then there is the automatic system snapshots and other things that go on. The long and short of it is that windows very effectively protects from the normal user making a fuck up and thus from that perspective I guess its a good thing, the problem starts when the user isn't the normal user. In my case when I ask the OS to delete something I expect it to be delete, right then right there, I don't want to have to go through hoops to get it to do that. Why not have this inbuilt protection? We all make mistakes I hear some of you say, well thats true we do but this protection comes at a cost, space. You see by making sure that you arn't really deleting the files windows has to store copies of the things that you delete everywhere, in our typical example there is the copy of the file in the trashbin and in the system snapshot. Now while thats fine if you have a HEAP of space, in my case I actively USE the 1.5tb of space i have on my network and I am not keen on windows wasting a significant portion of the space I make available to it on protecting me from mistakes (in reality I can restore things that I accidently delete even with all these things turned off, its just a pain). Theres the background now to continue with my main story. Anyway there I was poring through the partition trying to find something to delete and I noticed an option in the properties section that starts a windows cleanup wizard and I thought "its been years since I tried a util like that maybe its actually decent by now", so I started it up. Immediately I was presented with some choices about what kind of files it should look for / delete and being very cautious I only ticked the option I thought to be the least important, the one called "temporary files". After marking it I clicked the wonderful "Next" button and the system started to whir. I waited for about 10 seconds and then I started to think it was a little odd, it shouldn't take that long to find and list the temporary files for me, I waited another 20 seconds and then it proudly finished. It was about then that i noticed the terrible truth, windows in all its wisdom had decided that a "temporary file" was rather then the generally accepted use of the term meaning "a file that is generated during the course of normal use by an application and deleted at the end of the applications running" was actually in fact "any file that wasn't registered as belonging to a program as registered by the master install application list. This meant that because the majority of information was things like backups of my cd collection, games that were installed before the latest reinstall of windows (which resides on another partition for this very reason) were considered "temporary" and the result? All of them were deleted. Thanks a fucking bunch windows.

Frustration

A friend of mine recently had an experience with his bank. I find it interesting peoples responses to such incidents, personally I would have had the bank manager explaining to me why I can't access my own money and, if nothing further happened, I would have had the bank in court. Not that I would expect to actually achieve anything but because that kind of behaviour pisses me off SO much that I am happy to lose some time and money just to make a point.

Blogs and OSS

I just read some interesting articles. The first one was a discussion about OSS and its model in terms of what business could learn from it. It was very derrogatory about current businesses and in particular. The second article, if you can call a small blog that, was a lot more condemning, in particular it attacked professionals. Here is where I have a problem. I fully agree with what I suspect was the sentiment behind the blog, that is that you lose a lot more then you gain with conservative, politically correct views and restrictions, but what I have a problem with is the use of the word "professional". I would be interested to hear from others, but to me professional does NOT have the connotations that the author of the blog and Paul Graham seem to have. To me a professional is someone that gets the job done, when and how he says. He is first and foremost a man of his word, he is reliable. That does not imply that he is conservative, stuffy or overly dignified, rather, that he is someone you can rely on to get something done in the manner which you would want it done yourself. Is that so different from what everyone else thinks of as professional?

Happy!

Just read an interesting article over at timesonline. I found it interesting because it largely gels with things that I have discovered about my own psyche, ie that the drive to achieve is larger then the satisfaction of the achievement.

Playing catchup

Well its been some time since I blogged, and playing catchup on that much missed information closely resembles other aspects of my life right now. Lets see where to begin.

I guess the main impact right now is work. Work has been going mental as we have auditors over from Canada on behalf of the Tasmanian government making sure that we are compliant with their regulations in order to issue Betfair with a gambling license down there. That means that my team is frantically running around trying to pre-empt any questions that might arise and ensure that all the projects we had planned on finishing in the next 6 months are actually done this week (while the auditors are here!). Combine that with Sham doing his CISSP prep, Adrian with a bunch of commitments limiting his time at work and my scheduled appearence at Linux World expo on the gentoo booth and you have 3 very busy people. On the plus side I have been getting on top of ESM, well as much as you can given their general lack of Unix experience, but more interestingly I have been spending a lot of time getting to play around with the various sourcefire kit that has arrived. Big toys for big boys :) Actually it was fairly amusing for a while as I have been doing a lot of Gentoo work on Snort which is what lies at the heart of the Sourcefire kit. That has in turn meant that I was spending a lot of time on IRC (not like I don't anyway) chatting to the devs of both snort and sguil (I might as well add a shameless plug for sguil here as I think it is probably THE best security tool I have played with for a long time. Imagine being able to see attacks as they come in, stop them, replay them, even pull exploit code out of the traffic stream on the fly!) and of course that meant chatting to a few Sourcefire employees. What they didn't realise was that I was also a serious customer of theirs so they got quite confused when I started asking questions on IRC about their high end kit and various problems I was having with it. In the end it worked out well, I managed to get their tech guys in the states hassle their reps in the UK and I think my level of service might even get a boost because of it, certainly my updates are coming quicker ;) In summary the incredible pace at work has been dominating my life for the last month or two.

What makes my lack of time even worse right now is all the interesting things happening outside of work. I mean 4 months ago I was starting to get bored, work was a bit trivial and there was not a lot of interesting things happening outside of work so I was spending my time gaming. Now I don't have enough hours in the day. One of the things that is taking up more and more time is my Gentoo work. I have just finished a whole bunch of ebuilds which will result in me adding sguil to the tree very shortly (read in the next day or two) as well as doing a lot of crypto based stuff that should see a lot more automation and ease of use for the full harddrive encryption stuff that I have been working on.

The Linux world expo wasn't really as good as I had hoped (I will be writing an entry on it over on my gentoo blog which can be found here). There was nothing really remarkable on display and while the show was free, to hear the talks cost something like 80 pounds which I thought wasn't worth it. I ended up spending most of my time at the Gentoo booth chatting to people about the pro's of Gentoo and hopefully getting quite a few people to at least try it out. I also enjoyed the chance to meet some of the other devs and talk tech, though that was a little limited as I managed to miss the after show drinks due to other commitments. Anyway more on the show on my other blog.

I bought the smee.id.au domain two years ago, and like clock work APNIC (the company responsible for registering domain names in Australia) is now informing me that I have to fork out more cash to keep it. The main reason that I bought the domain was as a christmas gift to my father / step mother / half sister, but I have failed in my mission to get them to use it. Its an interesting tale of it own actually, as my father uses MS windows ME and it seems that the version of outlook / outlook express that come with it can't properly talk IMAPS/POPS/ and as a result he has been unable to use his MUA of choice to see his smee.id.au mails. Of course I have a webmail interface setup and running, but while everyone I know seems happy to use gmx/yahoo and hotmail for some reason they don't like my webmail setup ( which is even more powerful and less complicated with no ads!). So I think I will let the domain expire on the 25th December and move this blog back under the disciplina.net domain and be done with it.

One final note, as a favour for a friend I have setup two sites, one relating to politics the other economics. If you ever had an interest in either of those subjects have a look and see if you are interested in contributing something to what he is trying to build.

Holidays and visitors

Well I have been slacker then usual and havn't really updated my blog for sometime. The main problem has been that I have been incredibly busy with social commitments and had a string of visitors, that while great having them over, have been in my computer room and consequently its been hard to get much geek related work done. Actually let me rephrase that, its been impossible to get any geek related stuff done.

I went down to Devon and Cornwall last week with Astrid which was a great trip. The English weather continued to be "perfect" (I use the quotes as I think hot sunny weather is fucking atrocious but I recognise that I am in the minority) and we were able to do a lot of walking around the most rugged of the coastlines I have yet seen in England, which is not to say that its actually that bad but rather the rest of England doesn't strike me as being that rugged ;) It was a very pleasant trip with some amusing incidents like trying to eat out in Clovelly where we found out that we had to book as the restaurants only have food for the first 10 people through the door! Ah the country :) The highlight of the trip for me was Tintagel which is the remains of a (supposedly King Arthurs) medieval Castle perched on a tiny island jutting out into the sea linked by a narrow land bridge that the proverbial 6 old ladies with broomsticks could defend. The view, combined with the weather rolling in off the Atlantic made for a magical setting.

Generation gaps and blogging gaps

Well I have been a bit slack and havn't made any posts for some time. I guess it is partially due to having had a string of social commitments. Firstly my girlfriend, Astrid, moved back in with me which has been great but meant less time for the computer. Since then we have had a string of visitors ranging from Astrids friends from Germany and my family, all have gone now, but I still have my half sister, Fiona, staying with me.

I have been hitting the gym fairly hard, changed from doing aerobics to weight training and now going to throw in some boxing (just for fitness not for actually practising the sport) and see how that goes. My weight hasn't really changed but I am putting on a lot of muscle, which I guess I can use to justify any weight gains if they do arise ;)

I have been out of geek mode for a while now, instead I have been playing a lot of DAOC instead which has been fun. On that note I read an interesting article today on gaming. Seems to suggest that my own thoughts, that gaming is no different from any other medium and is not intrinsically bad, are correct. Though as the article suggests more real research remains to be done.

I bought a new monitor (dell 2005FPW) which is a really nice 21 inch wide screen. It is actually smaller then I thought in terms of height (it is an identical height to the 17 inch lcd next to it) but the width is amazing, actually its quite offputting at first but soon it seems the natural width and the normal 4:3 aspect ratio monitors look somehow squashed. I also picked up a new mouse, and finally went with the option of a cordless one. I ended up choosing the logitech mx1000, a so called "laser" mouse. Whatever it is, I quite like it and have no problems with it, though its battery life is closer to 2 days rather then the stated "Weeks". Then again it could be because I use it for 36 hours in 2 days ;)

I should also mention that I passed my CISSP. It was quite amusing really as I did about 2 hours worth of study, left 2.5 hours into a 6 hour exam and was hung over :) Still I don't imagine that my mark was anything to write home about, that said I won't know because they don't actually give you the mark in case you can use that to work out what the right answers to the questions are and then onsell that information to someone making a Study guide to the CISSP, like there isn't already a trillion out there.

Safe and sound

Just a quick blog to let you all know I am safe and sound. The phone networks are pretty jammed at the moment so getting in touch with me is hard unless you do it virtually. The bombs didn't get me, at least, not yet ;)

More on RSS

Well I just finished reading a very interesting article over at particletree.com. Keeping abreast of the latest developments relating to RSS feeds and how they are being leveraged to track and supply information has been a weak point of mine but this article has once again got me looking at searching and information retrieval in a new light. I had already noticed the power of blogs and RSS though as I was recently playing around with some web stat generation tools and I ran the tools against a set of data that included all the logs for all of the sites that Disciplina Networks hosts for the last 9 months. What was really interesting to note was that initially the sites were basic static sites but that nonetheless contained some interesting material. Almost immediately google and the other robots came along and start indexing it but still the overall traffic and hits on the various sites remained quite low. A few months into the data set and I started putting up some blogs and immediately you could see the average amount of hits and overall profile of the sites started to change. Of course the coup de grace in this respect was the moment I had a link from my planet gentoo blog back to here with my average traffic now spiking about ten times higher then what it was before that point.
Despite all of this though I wonder to what extent technical people are driving RSS at this point. All of my friends that I would consider tech savvy are using RSS, to differing extents but still they are using it, but outside of that circle of people almost no one else I know is using it. This makes me wonder, are all technologies like this? Driven almost exclusively by a (comparatively) small crowd of technologically savvy people and only making it into mainstream after a certain event / level of popularity pushes it there? Or all of this really just helping those who spend their time on the web surfing in the first place? Will RSS really change how we use the net or will it just be another tool that helps a small amount of people regain some lost time?

Technologies - directions and failures

Well caught up with Greg Ferro today and went for a walk around London while having a chat. It was very enjoyable actually and one of the topic of conversations was Wifi and its impact. Greg was of the opinion that it was completely overrated whereas I think that it could be the thing that really changes the face of technology so long as they get over a few current obstacles, like speed and standards. In particular I think that if you can access a network, of any description, it doesn't even have to be the Internet, from anywhere in the world that a LOT of things will change. In particular it seems to me that the abililty to search and lookup information on the move will radically change things like street directories and mapping services, but thats just the tip of the iceberg.
Imagine for a moment what things you would be able to do if you had no bandwidth limitations (or perhaps more accurately limitations that you weren't likely to run into in "normal" usage) and that you could access it anywhere. In my opinion some very fundamental things would change about our society. Increasingly it seems that more and more people rely on computers for their job, now obviously I am biased in this observation because it is all I do for a living, but I think its not unfair to say that as a generalisation the prevalence of computers is increasing. If you agree to that then in almost all cases the ability to do that from anywhere challenges our current conceptions of the "workplace" and what it means to be at work. Already I would argue that I can do my entire job remotely, gone are the days of not having full, secure remote access, not only to the computers themselves but to their powersupplies and every little function of their environment (air conditioning, lighting, electricity phases etc). Given that kind of access I could work from anywhere provided I had the ability to connect. Now my own belief as to why that is not already the case for many people, in particular for people in positions like me, is that the mindset of everyone involved is not ready for it. Think about it, not only is management still very wary of people "working from home" but even the people involved actually quite enjoy working with other people on the whole, we are after all social creatures. Still, at least personally, I find I am more productive at home in my own environment then I am at work and there would be direct benefits for any employer of me to allow me to work away from the office and I don't think I am alone in this matter. All of this is just one way in which I think real, effective ubiquitous communication would change our society. The changes go a lot deeper then just the technology. In that line of thinking I saw an interesting article that seems to suggest we are heading down that road already. Of course with our current technology I don't think it will change things that much, but give the technology an iteration or two and I think it will be a very different story. Poor telco's will have to rethink how they are doing business, already there are skype phones available, fairly soon phone numbers will be a thing of the past and instead everyone will be using IPs to address each other (of course these will be made presentable by some nice username interface).
Another thing that caught my attention recently was TOR. This is something that I think is incredibly interesting and from a security standpoint could seriously challenge the established paradigms. I pick this concept, maybe not this implementation, but the concept, to be the biggest thing in security for some time to come. Not only does it enable truely anonymous Internet usage but its secure! Finally to add insult to injury to various governement agencies around the world you can now anonymously host services. Of course the media will focus on the bad uses for such technology, and don't get me wrong as a powerful tool it can be used for both good and bad, still the obvious benefits of what it can do for everyone should ensure its survival.

On a different note I am getting really sick of so called professional, IT savvy companies fucking up basics. I have this week off work to study and sit the CISSP exam. You would think that a certification system that targets security professionals and is trying to establish a worldwide repurtation as leading the field would make sure that their web presence and its functionality is flawless. I just sat the "practise exam" (with no studying, was curious as to just how much study I had ahead of me) and it seemed to work ok, though it was a tad slow, but when I got to the end and went to submit my final answers it broke with some stupid IIS error and asp warning. The reason it would seem is that it didn't like firefox. How can you possibly take anyone seriously at this point in time who doesn't deal with Firefox sanely (I won't even start about them running an ASP site or using IIS as the webserver). I look forward to having the opportunity to tell one of their staff personally what I think of their site :)

humour and correctness

I just spent some time cruising around ESRs site. I always find it interesting to read older hackers thoughts and opinions, they seem somewhat more clear then so many activists these days. One page that caught my eye in particular and completely cracked me up was this. Truely empassioned and, imo, absolutely hysterical.
On a different note I find it quite intimidating reading through sites like ESRs and Stallmans if for no other reason then the amount of things that they have done and continue to do. Their productivity seems so incredibly high that I really don't know where they get the time to do it all. Then I started thinking perhaps the reality is with a lot of these people is that they don't have jobs like I define them. For me my job, by that I mean the job I do to make money as opposed to anything else, takes up an unavoidable 10 hours a day (9 hour working day + travel time which if I was truthful would be closer to 1.75 hours). Then I have to eat on top of that and I end up with about ~5-8 hours to do things depending on how demanding I want to be of my body. Now I realise that the majority of people have similar time demands, but I think, and I could well be wrong, people like ESR and other people don't actually spend as much of their time working for cash as the rest of us. At least thats what I want to believe, otherwise wtf have I been doing with my time ? oh and don't say the obvious like wasting time reading weird geek sites ;)

Nice machines

Well things have continued to be busy, but I stumbled on to some interesting things since I last blogged. The first thing that caught my eye was the Z machine. Not only does it look kewl but it might be the answer to our power problems!

I also stumbled across this article. Basically it describes what happens when you have a bunch of geeks taking over your local neighbourhood. Of course in their case it is a neighbourhood in the most technological place on the planet so it makes it particularly geeky. Don't know that I would like to live there, but I will definitely visit it next time I am in Japan.

On a personal note its looking like I am going to have a busy June, Astrid is moving back in with me for the school holidays and I have my Father and step mother coming to visit me as well. The scary part about that is that I need to find someway of making my spare bedroom aka the computer room, quiet enough for people to actually sleep in, right now it sounds like a jumbo jet idling for take off.

"discussions"

I saw an interesting essay today that made me think about how I discuss things with people. I have always enjoyed discussing things. In fact, as many people know, I sometimes err on the side of over analysing, especially when something is a little complex, but, even so, I reject being labelled as "too serious" or the claim "you think too much". For me there is little other point to life then thinking..
It is this that makes it hard at times interacting with other people. Very often something someone says or does provokes me to consider something that I havn't thought about and consequently I become very interested in the topic at hand, equally unfortunately it seems is that the person that might have instigated this thought process is not really interested or ready to have a discussion at the level I wish to. Of course my habit of playing devils advocate to new ideas (I do this to challenge the person who brought the idea up so that I can better get an understanding of how it works / fully fleshed out it is) tends to set people in apposition to me fairly quickly, and unless they come from a kind of "free discussion" background, normally found at uni's or philosophical type arena's, then they get angry pretty quickly. Being a geek I always fail to fully heed the warning signs and often push people over the edge from having a discussion to something that becomes quickly heated and very emotional. I guess this is the key difference, for me almost no topic I ever "discuss" ever evokes emotions, and even if they do, then I make sure to quash them so as to be able to be objective about the subject being discussed. The result is that I am happy to talk about almost anything that comes to mind or seems vaguely relevant to the conversation which includes many taboo areas (a few discussions about abortion and handicapped people come to mind).
What is interesting in relation to the original essay I referred to is that I often have conversations with friends that the entire point of which is to out manouvre the other person with quick logical points, there is an implicit recognition and understanding of the other persons view (this only comes when you know someone well), but the point of the immediate conversation is the mental sparring. I enjoy this a lot, but again I have problems translating that back into normal discussions where people think you are not taking them seriously, or become threatened by the tone, which invariably, becomes brusque, logical and perhaps slightly arrogant. All that said, please feel free to discuss this with me :)

time time time see whats become of me..

Well things have been very busy for me recently. I have been doing a fair amount of work for Gentoo, and you can see a blog of activities here. I ended up deciding to have a different blog for gentoo related things so that I didn't overlap interest realms and incurr the wrath of people short on time reading my various wandering thoughts. If you are interested in running linux on a laptop or some more sophisticated suspend2 options then you might want to check out the HOWTO's I have written that are up at Disciplina Networks. Feedback is welcome.
Geek stuff aside work has been periodically frantic and then relaxed, which works out alright as I am able to focus on some other things now and again, but also get some work accomplished during the periods of frenetic activity.

An article caught my attention late last night. The reason being that it echo's my thoughts / discussions I've been having for some time, namerly that in order for a really revolutionary new bit of technology to come along in the mobile market, more power is required.

Gentoo Developer

Well part of the reason I have been so busy recently is that I have been working on becoming a Gentoo developer. It finally became official tonight and I have now joined the ranks of the dev crowd. Its going to be a big learning curve for me and I am eagerly awaiting what it will bring and hopefully contributing a lot back as well.

Aside from that I came across an interesting article the other day relating to a space weather warning. I had never heard of one before and was quite interested to read about the effects of what the highest level of a space storm can actually do. Ofcourse maybe it was just the pretty pictures that got my attention :)

INTP

Just did a quick personality test over at similar minds. While I don't really put a lot of credit in such things it was something interesting to do while I was eating dinner. The result was not exactly surprising, and the favoured careers at this page definitely brought a smile to my face.

Work has been fairly busy and I am working hard on a lot of tech things right now so I will keep this entry short :)

Python

Just read this article which enthused me to keep at Python. Well keep at it is something of a misnomer as I have barely (read spent 3 hours on it) looked at it due to severe time constraints. On a different note it looks like I am coming to an end to my mentoring period for Gentoo one way or another ....
While I was reading up on some of ESR's articles I stumbled upon this proposal. It strikes me as a good idea so I think I will link it off the sites that I maintain shortly.

Ultra portable!

Well it is finally here! My new fujitsu has arrived and I am very happy with it to date. I am have been playing around with it and am looking at windows stuff for the first time in about 4 years which is not exactly a thrilling experience I have to say but still its interesting to see how things have changed since I last looked at windows. Ofcourse I have gentoo running on it now with no problems, though I havn't had the chance to set it up just as I would like to due to work being very busy and me resurrecting a few older boxen of mine.
Aside from playing with new toys (much fun) I have been getting on top of some interesting technologies at work. In particular I have been designing and testing our IDS implementation. I have also managed to start to find a little bit more time to do some gentoo work but really at this point in time I am still not getting enough done and am going to have to make a concerted effort to catch up to where I should be at this point in the mentoring process. Bad Ben.
My weight bet has hit a snag as well. I have been reliably going to the gym at least 4 times a week, but of all weird things to happen I somehow developed a life and have been averaging about 3 social commitments a week for the last few months which has made it harder then I thought to achieve serious levels of gym going. A further, and more immediate complication, is that my scales I recently discovered a completely unreliable. I discovered this by accident as when I was standing checking my weight I moved a little bit and watched the measured weight vary by 5kg and STAY that way. Further tests showed that basically all my previous results were probably invalid and its entirely possible that I have gained weight. That said I am fairly sure I have actually lost significant amount of weight (2-4 kg) as cloths are starting to fit a lot looser and going to the gym for an hour every other day for a month or two is having SOME effect :)

The dentists

I have to say after todays experience I am rapidly shedding any lingering childhood fears of that most dreaded of institutions, the dentists chair. Today I went to get my "broken" tooth looked at and much to my (pleasant) surprise was told that a filling had merely fallen out and that for 35 pounds I could have it replaced. In under 10 minutes there I was being bustled out of the chair and back down to reception to pay! Needless to say both I and my bank manager are very happy about this :)
On a slightly different note I had an amusing experience in the reception as I tried to pay with my brand new credit card from First Direct. I was asked for my pin (in the UK they have a new tech called "chip and pin" which is meant to do away with signing for things) and the transaction was declined. That in itself was odd as I had only openned the PIN this morning and I was almost certain that I had it right (after all its my job to keep memorised a large amount of psuedo random numbers / words). I asked them, somewhat sheepishly (why is it I feel like a criminal when asking them to do this?) to put it through so that I could sign for it instead. The lady did that but it was declined again. Now this was surprising as I have used the card already with no problems, anyway I paid with another card and called First Direct on my walk home to find out what was going on, and to get rid of that nagging feeling that I was again about to be taken for a ride to the tune of 5k pounds like I was with my first bank account over here. After some conversations it turns out that first direct were having a problem with their "systems" and that all credit cards they had were being declined, the ETA on the fix was a "few hours sir". I hung up chuckling to myself. Can you imagine a bank anywhere else in the world where a system could fall over and NO credit card transaction were able to be processed for HOURS? Rule Brittania, Brittania rules .... something I am sure.

UWB

I consider myself fairly uptodate with technology, given I am a geek after all. So its always surprising to find something that sneaks under my radar and that seems to be as important / big as UWB. I was alerted to it in the last few days via some of the more obscure RSS feeds that I read and tonight actually sat down to start reading some of the articles. This stuff could be amazing! If you don't know what I am talking about then go and have a look at this article and to get more background info check out this one.

Toothy views

Well I had a nice long weekend with my girlfriend and some of her friends, we ended up driving down to eastbourne and then on to Beachy Head. I thoroughly recommend the spot if you crave decent views (something that I particularly miss about Sydney) as I have found it really hard to get the feeling that you are up at a decent height in England. I managed to yet again get sunburnt in mildly sunny weather, I figure that if you give me another 10 years here I will completely destroy any reputation Australians have as sun faring people!
On an unpleasant note I have somehow managed to lose 1/4 of a tooth. It seems that my neglect of not regularly going to the dentist has paid off in the negative sense and I have a strong suspicion that I will be paying out a lot for the pleasure of letting a Brittish dentist fix it. To tell the truth I am actually very nervous about seeing a Brittish dentist (or any practitioner of the medical arts) as all I have heard is horror story after horror story. Still, my manager has assured me that this one is quite good. I sincerly hope he is right.

Fancy a dip?

It's probably my sense of humour, but I found the following story hillarious. Basically the CEO of opera said that he would swim from Norway to America if more then 1 million copies of the new version of Opera were downloaded within a certain timelimit. Ofcourse the smart techies at Opera immediately slashdotted the story and unsurprisingly the CEO was shortly getting ready for a swim. See this link for the story. Damn funny.

Wishlist

Well for all those people that struggle to think of presents for me, I jumped on the growing bandwagon and made a wishlist! Its linked from the top of this page or alternatively you can click here.

Travelling along ...

....to the sound of music. Not to the horrid movie of the same name but once again to classical music. As most of my friends know my music tastes tend to fall into one of two area's, new techno style trance or classical music. For a long time I got carried away with the beat and immediate satisfaction of working to something high powered, but the more I thought about it the more I realised what was happening was that I couldn't really work that effectively as I kept getting distracted by the music I was listening to. That lead me to the stage where I just didn't listen to music at all when I was trying to learn something and while I still believe that is the case for the most absorbing of tasks, I have found the joy of listening to classical music in the background while doing anything less then serious thinking. I find that with classical music it doesn't impose on what I am concentrating on, and keeps me in a pleasant focussed mood. On the note of focussed, there has been a few articles making the normal news rounds claiming that email is bad for your intelligence. Actually the study that they are basing this off doesn't claim that as far as I can tell, but rather it makes the interesting conclusion that they way some people deal with email and other communication channels is that they drop everything that they are currently doing and refocus on the new piece of communication. This in turns causes problems with long term ability to focus and severely impacts whatever it is you were doing before the new communice came along. I found the article interesting simply because at various times I have been guilty of this, though not to a serious level. It also rang a couple of bells as I have heard other people whom I respect, namely Umberto Eco and Donald Knuth who said something very similar (read it here). So given that I currently don't have the ability I had to focus, most notably back when I was studying chess, I am going to make a concious effort to NOT context switch and try to give something I start doing my attention for a reasonable period of time. I have been unconciously trying to do this for a while, but clearly stating will help me achieve this I believe.

On a different note my other tasks are coming along nicely. I have been put forward as a gentoo developer finally, as you can see from this link. It's about time really, I have been loitering around doing dev work and generally being interested and active for a while, but being loath to commit time to something I have always held off. Now, thanks to my two mentors things look good for me to get CVS access shortly and to become accepted as a full developer.

My business idea's are coming along nicely, and my bet with Aaron progresses nicely, since we started Aaron has put on 0.3 of a kg and I have lost 2.5kg. I am going to the gym a minimum of four times a week now and I hope to really start sloughing off some of this fat shortly. My fuji is almost here, and for those that regularly read this blog you might be interested to know that I eventually decided on another Aeron chair rather then the mirra. The mirra is a nice chair, but its definitely not in the same category as the aeron, which I firmly believe is the best computer chair on the market. Both should be arriving in the next couple of weeks, which I have to admit, has me a bit excited :)
Ofcourse as usual to see my latest geek style posts check out my blog on Disciplina Networks.

Motivated

Well I am in fire up mode. Gone is the gaming hang over, the relaxing period and all my other usual procrastinations. I am really fired up and keen to get a lot of things done. The main list looks something like:
* Lose some weight
* Master Python
* Sort out tax / visa /certification
* sort out some business idea's I have
There are a heap of others but these are the main ones right now. Since I stopped training to be a professional table tennis player I basically gave up on my body and concentrated fully on my mind. I am now not happy about the state of my body and have decided to rectify this imbalance and start treating my body with some respect again. To that end I have a bet with a friend as to who can lose 10kg the fastest and keep it off for a period of time. It will be curious to see whose approach will work out best, he is trying all kind of weird diets, whereas I am just going for the burn more calories then I eat and restrict my overall calorie intake from what my current "usual" is at. The rest of the things on the list basically constitute my mental tasks that need to get accomplished.

On a different note I have ordered my new gadget, a fujitsu lifebook 7010D. I am really looking forward to getting this (its currently en route from the states) and playing around with it, hopefully it will solve my mobile data requirements and enable me to start reading ebooks on the train and the like. I highly encourage anyone earning pounds right now to at least consider buying their next item from the states, the exchange rate is SO good right now its hard to imagine that it will not be more worthwhile going via there. The other thing that I am about to buy is a new desk chair. I am currently deciding between the aeron and the mirra although I think I will go with the aeron.

Holidays

Well I am back from my trip to Australia. I had a great time and was really able to just switch off and relax, which all things considered, is not a bad thing to do now and again. I was a little frustrated by not catching up with all of my friends, but taking my girlfriend with me left me with a lot less time then I had initially anticipated. Still I did get to catch up with most of my friends and just relax into the Sydney holiday lifestyle for a couple of weeks. One thing that is clearer now then ever before is how easy it is for the average person in Australia to have a really high standard of living.
On an odd note, since I have got back to the UK I can't help but notice how heavily salted everything is, I mean so heavily salted that I am almost unable to eat anything right now, be it food from a restaurant or from the canteen at work. Weird how I never noticed it before.

Holiday

Well tomorrow I am off to Australia for a few weeks. Looking forward to the trip, but not looking forward to the horrid flight I have to get there, its worse then usual because I have a stop over for 12 hours in Bahrain! Oh well, that will teach me for saving money on the flight.
I have been fairly busy in general recently, getting a lot of things in order like finances, recurring bills, stocks, banks and I finally got my first UK credit card approved ( I am not even going to start on this one) ! All in all its been a fairly productive period, especially when I look at what I managed to get done on the geek side.
I will be checking my email while I am away but don't expect the normal reply speed as I won't be online that much, I am sure Astrid will kill me if I am.

Productivity

Well I have just added a new category, Journal, with the vain hope that I might use this blog a little more if I feel I have a section I can just jot things down in so that people who are interested, can keep track of what I am up to.

Well I have just about made the decision to buy a fuji T70K and hopefully I can get it before I go to Australia which is happening in 10 days. Work is quite crazy right now, its the biggest event on the horse racing calendar which correlates to massive quantities of money and data flying around, most of which falls under my area of responsibility from a security perspective. Still I don't envisage a horrible week, just a busy one.

I have started going to the gym every day and am doing a variety of cardio type excercises in the hope of flattening out my stomach and gaining a bit of definition. We will see how that goes, though if nothing else I do notice it helps my overall concentration when I have done some physical excercise, both in the sense that I can concentrate more and that the loss of time that happened while I was working out acts as a form of encouragement to get me to work harder in order to catch up on my perceived lost productivity.

I am about to start making some commitments to my geekdom in the form of actually signing up for and becoming a Gentoo developer. That should happen over the next few months and it will co-incide with an new initiative of mine to learn / master python. Time will tell how that all goes.

It looks like I might have a friend of mine, Daniel Symmonds, a lawyer from the states, come and crash at my place until he gets setup here in London. It seems he can't stand america but he can't get a job in Japan either, so good ole blighty is the next best bet. Hotel Smee is open once again. At least this time around I have a spare room!

With three blogs in one night, I will call it here and hope that I havn't misused too many apostrophes (I await the inevitable email from waters with the corrections to my blogs :)

Cultures or Personalities?

I love to classify and generalise about things, two traits that are not good to have at once. Still as my friends have noted over the years, I do both a lot and it has lead me today to think whether I can explain an incident, like the one I am about to describe, as an example of cultural differences, or simply a personality difference.

I am currently working with an interesting guy from Canada. I must say I havn't really gotten to know many Canadians before, (with the exception of some online friends) so I was a little surprised at just how like they are to americans in many ways, but yet their colonial origins also show very strongly. They sound like americans but they think like Brits! What was interesting was that he made a comment today that went along the lines of "I hope we don't have to take it in the ass and take one for the team by staying behind today, i have plans for dinner". It was quite amusing at the time as it was in referrence to today being the start of the busiest period at work in the year. I immediately decided to put it up on the quotes page. Later in the day in hushed tones we were told that one of our co-workers recently had his girlfriend up and walk out on him with NO notice. This woman had been going out with him for 5 years and they had plans to go on holidays etc, he said he was going out to the shop, did she want anything and then when he got back she had left and hopped on a plane to New Zealand! No warning nothing, a bizare story and not something I would personally be talking about openly near the person in question. At any rate the person in question came up to myself and two other people (one of whom was the Canadian, Elliott) who were talking about his situation and Elliott, just turned to him and said "we were just talking about your situation". The other person and myself were just flawed, it seemed ... so inappropriate, but Elliott didn't even bat an eyelid. What caused me no end of confusion was shortly after this it came out that I had quoted Elliott on his earlier comment, immediately he was very concerned as to who had seen the quote and would I please take it down immediately. His reasoning it seems was that it was highly inappropriate in the workplace to mention anything that could be construed in any way about being derrogatory to gays and that you couldn't possibly have something like that quoted.

So there it is, at first I thought it was his culture, ie the repressed conservative north American views on sexuality and expression (ie the quote) and the forthrightness and confrontationlism in the form of his interaction with the person who lost his partner. Then I thought maybe it was his personality. Who knows? One thing is for sure, the more I see of different things, the more I belive I CAN accurately classify them, but whether or not that is just my perception, or whether it is reality ... thats a different story :)

books

I have been meaning to put this one up for some time but due to being a lazy sod I am only getting around to it almost 2 years later then I originally intended and only then because I am procrastinating from getting pubcookies working!

I have always had a lot of respect for Umberto Eco, I believe he is one of the more articulate and interesting of modern intellectuals (for those of you who don't know him, he basically invented the field of semiotics, as well as writing some classy books like Foucaults Pendulum, travels in hyperreality but is probably best known in this modern culture as the author of the name of the rose), so it was with some interest that I read an essay of his books at the openning of the new library of Alexandria. The essay can be found here and is an interesting read though at the time somethings he said didn't sit right with me. It was with no great surprise then when I received a rebuttal of eco's essay from a good friend of mine, Benjamin Waters. I intended on writing my own commentary on both of them at one point, but given my current rate of productivity that won't happen for 5 years or so.

the geek returns

A few people have noted that my blogging has taken a decided down turn recently, due to my gamer side taking precedence. I have noted that when I start to game I pretty much stop everything else in my life and game, well I am happy to say that my gaming side has now been satiated and its back to feeding the geek :)

Well I just got back from fosdem which was good fun. It was my first event like that, even though I have been fairly active in the whole free software scene for some years. It was quite interesting, I got see some good presentations from various OSS luminaries including Martin Roesch from snort, Alan Cox of kernel fame (man if my saying of beard = experience was every true, AC is living proof of it!), and Alisdair kergon who wrote the device-mapper. Actually I had an interesting conversation with Alisdair about my pet project of building encryption end to end for a box, I have some more ideas that I will persue further on that front. I also had the chance to meet some people from Disciplina networks, namely Till and m0n, which was actually really enjoyable. As a result of meeting Till, I spent the majority of my time hanging out with the KDE crowd (in particular the german SAP linux lab crowd) which was an interesting insight into how a large project like that actually functions. I finally met some more people like myself who consider their "hobbies" to be the most important things in their lives, I don't know that I would consider ONE thing as important as some of the KDE crowd do, but definitely the concept of learning new things constantly is the most important thing to me. I had an interesting chat with Scott Wheeler, a KDE dev guy who is involved in a concept of desktop searching, which is more then just the typical index everything on the desktop and reference it. The concept he has fleshed out involves relationships about data and categorising them and storing the relationships and then performing a google like search based on that. Some kewl stuff.
One of the bigger dissappointments about FOSDEM was the gentoo stuff. I went there with high hopes about meeting people from the gentoo dev side as there was a LOT of gentoo activity going on. Unfortunately once I was there I realised for the first time why gentoo has such a bad reputation with the rest of the community. Gentoo seems to have attracted ALL the wannabee kiddies and has almost no really respectable people championing it, or at least in Europe. Now that is probably a little unfair, but the presentations that I went to were invariably given by 18-22 year olds, which is fine in itself, but these kids couldn't give decent speeches! One of the main portage devs' gave a speech to a room full of people, about 200, which was meant to go for an hour. It lasted 25 painful minutes, where you couldn't hear him clearly, he mumbled, constantly looked at the door (which naturally had people going in and out constantly, you got the impression he took it as a personal insult everytime someone walked in late) and pitched his whole presentation at the wrong level. It was so bad I came close to telling him to shut up and giving it myself. Still my belief in gentoo remains, but man do we need to do something about our reputation!
Went to another conference yesterday in downtown London for sourcefire which looks like an unreal product. Again it was Martin Roesch who gave most of the presentation, and I really like some of his ideas. Basically what is settin g sourcefire apart from a normal snort setup is that he combines the IDS with a passive device that just gathers information about the network ( and does it remarkably well), by correlating the data we can filter out typical snort alerts like an IIS exploit against an apache server. For the first time the IDS knows more about the network then the attacker AND its updated real time. Combine this with close tie ins to firewalls etc and you have a really amazing setup. I will be looking to persue this further at work.