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/
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.
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