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.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
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 :)
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 :)
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.
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.
Thursday, March 3, 2005
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.
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.
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