I recently re-read the very interesting slides from the How To Keep Your Job presentation, if you’ve never seen them and you work in a technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they might just save your salary in years to come. I spent a good few years working in an investment bank so this approach sits well with my view of the world, the whole investment and portfolio analogy seems very apt. Read on →

The aim is to, at the least, achieve all these goals. The time allocated is from September 1st 2004 to August 31st 2005. Update: I’ve closed my 2004-2005 PiP early and I’m pretty happy with where it is. I’ll put a newer one up soon. Note: This page is actually getting a surprisingly high amount of traffic so I thought I should add some comments and an attribution. The original idea for a Pragmatic Investment Plan comes from Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers, to be specific the very interesting slides from the How To Keep Your Job presentation, if you’ve never seen them and you work in a technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they might just save your salary in years to come. Read on →

Just don’t expect to get new customers when your registration process makes US immegration look open and friendly. I was recently looking for a piece of software to handle WSDL generation from Java source code, I had no current long term need for the software, I just needed to see how well the technology worked these days and have a look at a real world example. Now put your business hat on, I’m not currently a sales prospect but if the product does what I want then there is a pretty good chance I’ll come back to you if I ever need it. Read on →

I’ve spent the last few days looking at document management systems, versioning and work-flow applications, while I’m happy enough putting my own scribbles under CVS (I’ve not yet drunk from the Subversion Koolaid) a number of my less techy co-workers need a solution that fits them better. After some digging around I started to eval WebDAV, it’s used by Apple for shared calendaring, MS Word has WebDAV support and there was an Apache module; very promising. Read on →

There are rumblings about Sendmail and it’s future distribution, both it’s involvement in the IETF and Microsoft circus known as Sender-ID and it’s own new license are topics worthy of discussion and attention, a brief collection of useful links can be found at the OpenBSD Journal. I normally don’t get involved in subjects like this until it’s community rallying time (such as European Patents) but I have a vested interest in this one, I’d like to see Sendmail make itself expensive, propriety and (even more) difficult to distribute. Read on →

My name is Dean, and I’m a Farscape fan. I have just one thing to say: W00T! Why am I making gamer noises of joy? The FARSCAPE Trailer has been released. For those of you that don’t know the back story the best place to start is the Save FARSCAPE site. The short version is that the TV execs meddled in the show and then shut it down. The fans rebelled and, considering that it’s back, I’d say we won. Read on →

Today I hit an issue with mod_perl that had me going around in circles for about an hour, my mod_perl handler wasn’t being invoked, and I was getting a directory listing instead. With the able assistance of a co-worker the problem was found and solved pretty quickly. If you add the “LoadModule perl_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_perl.so” line into the config file yourself ensure it’s the last line otherwise something else such as mod_dir or mod_index will execute instead and you’ll go insane trying to work it out. Read on →

I manage to attend a decent number of conferences each year (despite my employers lack of interest) but while the UK ones are pretty cheap and amazingly good at securing top notch speakers (UKUUG is brilliant at this) there are a lot of conferences I don’t get to experience beyond the odd blog post and mailing list summary due to geographical location or cost (OSCON wins on both counts!) In a recent post by Jon Udell he pointed to some clips hosted by IT Conversations, after a quick rummage around their site I now have plenty to keep me busy on those long train commutes. Read on →

I’ve been busy lately and I’ve not really had a chance to spend more than half-an-hour on any one thing, I thought I should write a brief update entry to help me keep tabs on what I’ve been playing^Wworking on. Pragmatic Guide to Version Control with CVS book review Added DOAP data to two of my Freshmeat projects. Started playing with bash 3.0, more to come on this. Rattled through six-eight mycroft requests using the excellent tools provided at Mindzilla Read Managing RAID with Linux. Read on →

Author: Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt ISBN: 0974514004 Publisher: The Pragmatic Programmers While the presence of a version control system doesn't mean that all is well with a project its absence is often a warning sign of bad practises. Pragmatic Version Control with CVS provides the fundamentals required to ensure your project has a least the basics covered. Firstly let's discuss what this book isn't, comprehensive and for experienced CVS users; unless you want something to hand to your less experienced co-workers. Read on →