I’ve been a GLLUG member for a good few years now, I’ve attended meetings, worked on the stall at the London Linux Expos and even given a talk at one of the meetings (I’d like to say sorry for that…) but the March 2005 GLLUG meeting is the first meeting I’ve organised. With the able (and essential) assistance of Bruce “way too deep to have a blog or site for people to link to” Richardson we’ve got a grand total of three speakers and are hosting the meeting at Fotangos offices. Read on →

If you are on some of the more useful security lists like full-disclosure then there is a pretty good chance you’ve seen posts from Billy B. Bilano, a very amusing writer who gets people that should know much better to bite. Have a look at the the Tao of doing it right thread or Possible First Crypto Virus Definitely Discovered!. While both of these emails are tragicly funny some of the responses are every bit as good. Read on →

If you’ve either been waiting on something from me or you’re surprised at the sudden barrage of email’s I’ve sent today (21st Feb) then I have a not very amusing story to tell. I’ve had a mild cold or flu, there are a couple of bugs gong around at the moment so it’s not uncommon. I then spent a day working in a chilled server room. Not my smartest ever plan; and that’s an achievement. Read on →

Over at use.perl there is a short call for funding from TPF to help fund the development of Perl6 and Parrot. I’ve long been a Perl 5 fan, it’s flexible, powerful, CPAN rocks and there are a number of smart, helpful people involved. As much as I like the community the killer feature is letting me get things done quickly and easily. When it comes to Perl6 I’ve just not found anything that really interests me. Read on →

Tonight I was told, "learn to let things go, take a step back and don’t get involved in everything. Not everything has to be fixed by you.“ There is one small problem, in general I’m shite at listening to advice like this. If I see something that’s broken I have to try and fix it. While I’ve gotten damn good at suppressing my urge to do this with live systems (always do a risk analysis first) I’m remarkably bad at applying the same approach to dealing with people; especially at work. Read on →

I was pretty surprised when Slashdot accepted my submission, a Pragmatic Version control Subversion book review. I was even more surprised when it hit th front page and for about twelve minutes my name was one of the first things on slashdot! After this short lapse into geek I logged into my bytemark machine and battened down the hatches. I shut down all unneeded daemons and prepared for the server to go down. Read on →

I heard about a job a couple of days ago that I’d have taken a pretty big pay cut to get, I won’t mention details as the position isn’t formally open yet, but it got me to thinking. While I’ve been pretty lucky with my employment over the years (Hi Boss!) there are a couple of places that I’d pretty much consider my dream job (and that I’d crawl over most peoples bodies to work), anything in the security, Linux or Open Source departments in IBM for example. Read on →

Over at MegaTokyo they have an Evil Leet T-shirt that I think is excellent on a number of levels. I know it’s sad but so what. I’m not really a T-shirt person (plus I’m not really allowed to wear them in the office) but I do have an OpenBSD baseball cap I’ve very fond of… So why not combine the two? I now want an Evil Leet baseball cap and after looking around the custom cap printing companies it doesn’t look that expensive to do. Read on →

David Black is in London and the London Ruby people (both of them :)) are planning a meet-up. It’s happening on Monday, February 28, 7:00 PM at the Holiday Inn near Russell Square

There’s an interesting article over at the Tucows Farm on a series of talks titled php|symphony. It’s a live, payed for, talk that allows two way communication with the speaker on some pretty low end machines with very little bandwidth required. So what’s my interest in this PHP stuff? Over the last couple of months I’ve had a couple of conversations with some friends about doing this kind of thing now that VoIP (Skype for communication) is here, virtual machines (UML for interactive sessions) are pretty easy to use and bandwidth is becoming cheaper. Read on →