Last night was the first ever week night GLLUG. We were lucky enough to have Jeff Waugh come and speak to us as part of his BadgerBadgerBadger tour (although he didn’t do the dance :)). He presented some of the recent innovations and newer projects in the Gnome ecosphere before moving on to an overview of Ubuntu and its infrastructure. I only know the basics about Ubuntu (I had a play with the warthog release) but from the presentation last night it was easy to see that it’s not just the software which is important. Read on →

Update: I no longer run the code required for this to work. I’ve only left the post up as a little reminder to myself. Every been given a number and thought ‘I wonder where that is?’ or seen an area code you didn’t recognise and want to know where it is? No? Oh, OK. If on the other hand the answer was yes to either of those then I’d like to present the “UK number mapper” (yes the name’s bad…). Read on →

Just WOW. And get a life dammit ;)

After a pretty much technology free day at work I wanted to actually do something hands on before the day was over. After a flurry of reading and deleting of of blog posts it looked like the buzz word of the day was (still) Google Maps. So off I went. With the aid of the excellent Number::Phone and the not too bad Geo::Google, which can’t seem to handle Scottish towns, I put together a small script which displays the town a phone number is from using Google Maps. Read on →

I spent a while today trying to get my head around Ethernet bonding, under Windows 2000 Server, on an IBM machine. Firstly a tangent, IBM has a great site with a lot of good content. And a bloody rubbish search engine and no overview on how anything fits together. I know organising that much data must take a lot of clue but hey, this is IBM! One of the few places that still actually does research. Read on →

I normally think of a topic, gather a list of potential speakers, send out some emails and then keep my fingers crossed. This time I’m attempting to put together an evening of talks on the topic of web frameworks in dynamic languages. I’m hoping to get someone to speak on Django, Rails and either Maypole or Catalyst (I don’t know much about either) and a then put them in a room with a crowd of Perl, Python and Ruby developers and see if we can start some conversations. Read on →

I’ve finally gotten around to bringing my book reviews (mostly for London PM) in to my main site. You can now see my reviews on the book reviews page.

In the past I posted about the possibility of Jeff Waugh coming to GLLUG and I can now happily confirm he will be joining us on October 14th for the evening. This is a day after the next Ubuntu release so we might get the first talk on the shiny new features before we go for food and drink at the near by Greenman pub. This GLLUG will be a lot shorter than the usual and will be more socially focused as it’s on a Friday evening. Read on →

After a rubbish first start (just two entries in four months) I decided to scrap my 2005/2006 Pragmatic Investment Plan and start again. Between insanity both professionally, I changed jobs, and in my personal life nothing seemed to be moving. And sometimes you just need to wipe the slate clean and start again. I kicked back off with the Linux Expo and FUDCon, both of which were excellent and will be covered in another post and by buying some more books. Read on →

Author: Geoff Burch ISBN: 1841124702 Publisher: Capstone Publishing Ltd The authors of an unhealthy amount of business books seem to live in a world of external sunshine and abundance. Every sales call results in a gentle hug and every request for money a blank cheque. This book isn’t like that. Although it bills itself as a “guerilla guide to setting up on your own”, it’s more an overview of the practical , often overlooked, aspects of becoming self-employed. Read on →