Sat, 26 Apr 2008
37signals are Ricardo Semler fans...
On their blog Signal vs Noise, 37signals has a series of articles covering the
work of Ricardo
Semler, a business lecturer at MIT.
I came to the party late with the most recent one on how
to work smarter from an employers and leaders perspective.
The three
previous
articles
(linked in reverse chronological order) cover everything from corporate
structures to so called "lean" companies.
[2008/04/26 / social / business permanent link]
Some helpful addons for Apache and PHP...
Jdub
points out a couple of packages which I'm off to install right now.
I've always redirected to a "one true" FQDN on my websites by using an extra
virtualhost container and a redirect rule. libapache2-redirtoservname to the
rescue!
I don't use as much PHP as a I used to but I'm sure that what little is on
there will find php5-xcache gives it a boost.
[2008/04/26 / tech / software permanent link]
Mon, 14 Apr 2008
Forking for fun(pidgin) and profit!
So we use Jabber a lot at work for internal communication. I've always used
Gaim^WPidgin but with the upgrades flowing through from Ubuntu Hardy I came
across what I thought was a bug
to do with size of (and ability to resize) the text entry window. But no, it's a "feature"!
The Pidgin ticket has comment after comment asking for this feature to be made
optional, or even better for the feature's parameters ("default size" and
"maximum size") to be configurable in the configuration file if not the GUI
interface. I for one would love to set and forget them at "4 lines" and "50%".
The developers of Pidgin don't seem to waver from their original decision, so
welcome to the latest FOSS fork: Funpidgin!
They have a .deb available but I can't be bothered switching just yet. Might
wait and see how this pans out and what path the Ubuntu package maintainer
takes with this issue.
[2008/04/14 / tech / software permanent link]
Fri, 11 Apr 2008
If fibre goes down in a forest, does the twisted pair hear it scream?
So at $work[0] we're trying to bring up a new service for a customer. It's a
2meg service from T, which terminates on our side like so:
fibre -> managed media converter -> twisted pair -> router
We think we're ready to turn it up and a T technician is booked. For 01:30am
due to customer requirements. Sigh.
Technician reports he can't see either the media converter nor the router. He's
on the "basement switch" (a designation which means nothing to yours truly,
especially at that hour of the morning). Eventually my sleep deprived haze
allows me to parse that he is on a switch in the facility and can't connect to
the service.
Except our understanding is that their end of the service doesn't terminate in
the facility. Their switch is in one meet-me-room but it had cable tray / riser
capacity issues. So this service's fibre went to the meet-me-room at the other
end of the building. Where T doesn't have a switch. But they did have some
spare fibre already pulled from an exchange. So a fibre tie later and our
service terminates elsewhere. And in my blubbering state I can't convince the
technician of this. Cutover canceled. Furrfu.
So what does the subject have to do with this saga I hear you ask?
The technician wanted me to pull the twisted pair from the router to check for
link protocol going down on an interface of the switch he was logged into to.
Even presuming he was on the right switch, my original reaction was that it
wouldn't work because the media converters act like bridges, not repeaters, and
the link protocol wouldn't change at his end.
I wanted to confirm / deny this ungodly hour of the morning theory, but my
Google-fu appears to be suffering 5 month old child process lossage. JohnF did the heavy lifting for me and
turned up this
question and answer
which covered a similar scenario. The pertinent
response that address my question is:
Coming in a bit late here, but... Has the OP looked at how the media converter is set up? Many media converters have a test mode where a down link status is not passed from one side to another. Once you take it out of test mode, it will pass status. Usually it's a small push button, or a switch. Sean
So the answer to my question is: it depends!
[2008/04/11 / tech / hardware permanent link]
Reading something into your bash history...
An interesting idea from jimmac via jdub.
At home:
(marty@merboo)-(03:42:46 Fri Apr 11)-(~)
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
106 screen
96 ssh
48 sudo
43 vim
25 ifconfig
25 cd
17 make
12 ls
12 cat
10 iwconfig
...and at work:
marty@boober:~ $ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
142 ssh
82 screen
45 sudo
42 dig
24 pstree
18 offlineimap
14 vim
12 telnet
8 ooffice
8 mutt
[2008/04/11 / tech / linux permanent link]
Thu, 10 Apr 2008
Google doesn't seem to care about your privacy...
SMH is
reporting about Google's imminent launch of "Street View" in Australia.
Richard Chirgwin points
out the spineless journalism that let quotes like the following through to
the keeper:
Still reeling from the backlash by privacy activists after Street View began in the US last year, Ms Mayer said Google was developing technology to blur faces and number plates but she did not know whether it would be ready in time for the Australian launch.
My response to that would be: if the technology is coming you should wait for it and avoid the snafus in the first place.
