In which I explain the many and varied reasons why I decided that my life would be happier not working for Rackspace
In which I explain the many and varied reasons why I decided that my life would be happier outside of the Government Digital Service after 3+ years service.
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I’d come back to 16th November 2013 and as today happens to be the 2-year anniversary, I thought now might be about the right time.
There is nothing like being a new-starter in an organisation when it comes to reinforcing your own weaknesses. My colleague Major spoke recently about Imposter Syndrome which has been something on my mind recently.
I started this post in September 2015, but at the time some events in Paris took over and I didn’t think that the world needed more noise on the internet, so I didn’t hit publish. I’m doing that now.
On Tuesday night, we moved GOV.UK from one set of servers to another - with any luck, nobody noticed.
If like me, you are a child of the internet generation, you’ve probably found that you have multiple types of “chat” or social media on which people regularly interact with you. This article talks about how you may be able to reduce this to manageable number, using ZNC and Bitlbee.
After a talk by Jordan and Tom at the OpenTech 2013 Conference conference recently, I was asked if the number of technologies we use scares us. I thought this was an excellent question which leads to lots of interesting points about diversity which I would like to explore here.
It turns out that while my memory is fading with age (short-term memory at least) I can still remember things I was taught before the age of 18. I recently discovered that I know many many military subjects well enough to teach Cadets, despite not being taught or practised in them for 7 years.
It seems a long while since I’ve posted anything on here as to be honest there hasn’t been much incentive. Things are bimbling along quite nicely and I’ve had a lot to do to keep myself occupied. I’m off-work until the 10th of January, which has given me some time to do some of the things on my todo list. Item 1 was upgrade this blog to Wordpress 2.0 which was suprisingly easy. I was on 1.2 which required a complicated 1.2->1.5->2.0 upgrade path then a conversion of my existing template to the new theme system, but thanks to the guys that wrote this software I got it all done in under 1 hour. Go Me!
On my work desktop I have three machines. “Why three machines” I hear you ask?
Adam has some interesting things to say about keeping config files in synch across multiple hosts. The solution he presents of using a version control repository to keep configs files which can be checked in and checked out across hosts is an interesting one.
Following on from this post on Adam’s weblog (incidently, sort out your line endings man!), where he quotes from Brian Sedgemore MP on the Terrorism Bill currently proposed by the Government:
I was asked by a friend recently about whether it was technically possible to fix an election result, given complete access to the server and database on which the voting system is hosted. I replied that while it was technically possible, no-one would bother. Well, I wouldn’t normally bother.
There’s a big push here at work to maintain central records of all our machines. The fact we have umpteen thousand, mostly purchased individually to a variety of specifications from a variety of grants by a plethora of Academics, makes it very hard indeed
All the twos, twenty two…
One of the major principles of Open Source software is that users are free to suggest modifications and fixes. On particular project I use pretty often is the DarwinPorts collection.
I’m surprised that neither Andy or Adam have got round to posting about Software Patents yet, but what the hell, it is the slow season.
First of all, those of you using Internet Explorer won’t appreciate this, because you browser has appalling support for transparent PNG images and is generally shite anyway. I have two recommendations for you: