07.13.08
Posted in life, tech at 12:44 am by mridley
There’s a fun television show on the Fine Living television network. It’s called I Want That! and it’s probably not a TiVo season pass pick for anti-consumerism activists. The show is pretty much explained by its title - they showcase a lot of “cool stuff”. I thought I’d post some recent items I saw on the show that appealed to me. Enjoy.
GeoChron is a wall map of the world that actually functions as a clock. It updates the view of the world showing current daylight and takes into account the rotation of the Earth on its axis and other factors that impact the “terminator” on the globe. At the top of the map it shows the current time in each time zone across the world. It’s quite pricey and there are free software programs that provide equivalent functionality. But I like the idea of having a “wall map” clock that doesn’t take up screen real estate. I do work and interact with people all over the world and keeping track of global timezones in my head can be a pain, especially with daylight savings time in the Northern and Southern hemispheres being opposite. I don’t see myself buying one any time soon, but if I had an extra $1800 that I had to spend, I’d consider it.
Reversica makes a hardware mount for cabinetry that allows you to have a cabinet rotate 180 degrees on its axis so that you can hide, for example, a plasma television with bookshelves on the opposite side. When I build my super hero hideout I’ll be sure to get one. But since I currently rent I don’t think I’m investing $3,000 in custom cabinetry hardware to hide a plasma TV I don’t have. But once I do finally buy a place I may re-evaluate.
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07.01.08
Posted in life at 6:19 am by mridley
Several months ago I wrote about using my personal Mediawiki as a Document Management System. I am writing to follow up on my experience with that. It’s actually working out wonderfully. I am always tempted to make things more complicated than they need to be, but for my needs using a wiki for document management works perfectly.
I have uploaded various documents of personal interest, such as time sheets, offer letters, tax information, etc. and I have access to these bits of information from any web browser. Much more efficient than trying to look through my filing system at home, consisting of an underused file drawer and a highly used system of “piles of mail spread around”.
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06.30.08
Posted in life at 9:03 pm by mridley
When I started at my current place of employment, we were just transitioning support of a medium sized UNIX environment from another company which had been supporting the installation previously. Unfortunately there was no system automation in place and all changes and updates had to be done manually.
Having been a UNIX systems engineer for a long time, I’m not a fan of manual configuration. It’s time intensive and error prone. So I set about configuring a cfengine installation using Subversion for revision control of the configuration files. My team mates were not familiar with cfengine or Subversion, so I documented their use on our internal wiki.
I’ve had occaision to set up fresh cfengine configurations at several contracting clients now, and it occurs to me that while cfengine is incredibly powerful and useful it can be a bit overwhelming for new users even if they are experienced UNIX administrators.
In my copious free time (yeah, right!) I should start a consulting business around system process automation using cfengine with revision control for more managable and scalable infrastructures.
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06.06.08
Posted in life at 10:51 pm by mridley
Still alive. Still busy. Still no time to make much progress on the super cool projects I want to work on. Story of my life.
The job is going well, although I am completely swamped from the moment I walk in to the moment I go home. Sometimes I have 15 minutes to go to the drive-thru for lunch. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that I’m pretty drained after work and haven’t made much progress on keeping this site updated, my People Keeper, etc.
My friend Nicole and I are working on starting a web design/marketing company which has been taking up whatever minimal free time I might otherwise have had. Hopefully that will get off the ground. I’m hoping she can take the lead on it, as my schedule is just so packed.
I did take break last weekend and went camping with some friends at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, VA. It was a good time. I’m not much for camping, but there’s something to be said for having zero cell phone reception for two days.
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05.09.08
Posted in life, tech at 8:11 pm by mridley
For the past few years I have used speakeasy as an ISP. Although they are pricier than other DSL options, I don’t mind paying a premium for the excellent support and service they provide. A week or two ago my DSL went out. That almost never happens. I called Speakeasy’s 24 hour support line, but it was after hours and so there was a short wait until I could speak with someone.
Instead of making me wait on hold for 10 minutes, their call management system asked if I would like to keep my place in line and receive a call back when they could assist me. I have not had experience with that option before, but it sounded like a great idea so I pressed the button to do that. Sure enough, all I had to do was enter in my phone number and in a few minutes their system called me back and connected me to a support person who resolved my technical issue. For those who are curious, it turned out that some setting in the PVC had become mysteriously mismatched.
While I would rather not have to wait at all when calling customer support numbers, if I have to wait I’d much prefer to have the system call me back than to sit around listening to hold music. I hope many other businesses upgrade their call center telephony applications to support this feature.
On a side note, while I have been a happy speakeasy customer, Verizon FiOS is finally available in my neighborhood so I suspect I will be switching from DSL to fibre in the near future. I’m sure I will miss the speakeasy support, but the faster speed and lower cost of fibre is hard to resist.
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05.05.08
Posted in life at 9:33 pm by mridley
I’ve started my new position doing HP-UX systems engineering for a large defense contract. Normally I shy away from government contracting as it tends to be more politics and less work. But in this case, I’m really enjoying the position. The people are great and there actually is plenty of interesting technical work to do. My background is more with Solaris and Linux so it’s great to have an opportunity to get up to speed on HP-UX. I have used HP UNIX in the past, but it’s been a few years and I’ve never worked in an exclusively HP shop.
In other news, I bought a new car. I had been driving a 1990 Lincoln Town Car, but alas I was driving over to pick up a friend a week ago Saturday, April 26, and a woman driving a PT Cruiser crashed into me and destroyed it. That made me sad. I was thinking of picking up another $500 car on craigslist, but instead I decided to take the plunge and get a car loan.
I have avoided driving new cars for the past number of years, as I got stuck with a high interest new car loan back in 1998 that was an albatross for five years. This time I was a bit savvier and so far am very happy with my decsision. I’m now driving a new 2008 Hyundai Sonata Limited. The 2009 cars were available but much better deals were to be had on the 2008 cars and the difference between the two model years was not sufficient to matter to me.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new car and I’m enjoying it. I went with the 6 cylinder engine which is quite sporty. Much sportier than what I really need, but I didn’t want an underpowered car. Although my gas mileage won’t be as fantastic as it would have been with the 4 cylinder, it’s still a big improvement over the Lincoln.
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04.18.08
Posted in life at 8:30 pm by mridley
I have been an avid Firefox user for the past several years. While I do use Firefox every day, I am not a heavy consumer of Firefox extensions. There are thousands of Firefox extensions available but I find that the browser suits my needs in its stock form. I don’t like getting used to having a lot of extensions installed, as when I use someone else’s computer I will be relying on functionality that is not available.
There is one extension that I do use on a regular basis. FireGPG is a Firefox extension that allows for integration with GnuPG. The extension has a number of features, including allowing the selection of web page text and then encrypting it via a right-click context menu.
The killer feature of this extension, however, is its integration with Gmail. The problem with web based email systems is that they are inherently insecure. Regardless of whether or not the HTTP connection is encrypted with SSL, all of the mail content is being stored on a remote server.
Sending encrypted emails to web email services has always been possible, but it’s painful in practice as the encrypted email must be copied out of the web browser and into a local text file and then decrypted. That is not an efficient workflow, and so very few people with web mail accounts actually use encryption.
FireGPG has support for Google’s Gmail. When you have FireGPG installed, the Gmail interface is subtly modified to include options to sign, encrypt, and decrypt emails. When an encrypted or signed email comes in, the software automatically recognizes it and decrypts or verifies the digital signature. The integration is very subtle and over time I forget I have it. Until I’m on another computer and realize I can’t verify digital signatures.
The downside to encrypting web based mail is that the encrypted version is stored on the mail service provider, which makes the web mail’s search functionality unusable. I find that I still don’t send much encrypted email, but the ability to see verified signatures is very handy and does not prevent my mail from being searchable.
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Posted in life at 6:25 am by mridley
Although Dreamhost gets criticized for occasional service outages, I’ve been very happy with the service provided for the price charged. At around $10/month anyone, at least in the developed world, can afford to have a personal publishing and development platform. That’s incredibly powerful!
If I were running a “mission critical” web application, I may not pick Dreamhost as my hosting platform. But in that case I’d be looking at the offerings from Amazon Web Service or Google’s App Engine. They are inherently more scalable for production commercial sites.
Dreamhost offers a lot of features that make my life easier, but one of their newer features I’ve started to take advantage of is Subversion. Dreamhost’s web panel allows users to create Subversion repositories, manage Subversion users, etc. They support webdav access, although I prefer to do my development on their shell using the svn client with a local path to the repository.
Being able to keep my People Keeper application in a Subversion repository at Dreamhost has been very handy. If you’re a Dreamhost customer who does any sort of development and you weren’t aware of this feature, I suggest checking it out. Revision control is critical in any software or web development project, and Subversion is a very popular package.
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04.14.08
Posted in life at 4:36 pm by mridley
I haven’t written anything here lately so I thought I’d post an update. I have been working on a short term contract position for the Federal government. That is coming to a close this week, but next Monday I start a long term position with another Federal contractor. I’m looking forward to it, as it’s an HPUX systems engineering role and I haven’t done my HPUX in a while. I like opportunities that challenge me and require me to learn a lot in a short period of time.
I’ve been working on a fun side project for myself which I’ll probably write more about later. I’m creating what I’d describe as an inverted social network. Basically a way to keep track of all the personal and business connections in my life. But it’s not a social network in the sense that it’s not multi-user. It’s just for me to keep track of people I know, relationships, birthdays, etc. Almost a CRM system for myself. I have never been all that great at business networking and keeping in touch with past colleagues so I’m hoping this will help me create a workflow for myself around that.
I went to the Eastern Shore of Maryland this weekend to hang out with some friends. That was a blast. It’s nice going there off season as you don’t have to deal with the crowds and the traffic and all that. Would have been nice to stay longer, but alas work and life beckons.
I have been rededicating myself to my personal wiki. A few years ago I had a coworker who was telling me that he had a PHP forum on his web site that he used to keep track of interesting technical tidbits. Every time he had to look something up he would make a note of it in his forum. That seemed like a good idea to me, so I set up a bulletin board for myself several years ago. But I realized that a bulletin board was not the most efficient way to keep track of that kind of information in the wiki age, so I quickly migrated over to a wiki. I’ve had this wiki for ages but I’m horrible about actually updating it. Lately I have been trying to do a better job about that. I keep notes on all sorts of things related to my life, work and otherwise. It’s pretty handy.
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03.09.08
Posted in life at 10:36 pm by mridley
I find myself again in the job market, having been laid off from my super awesome job on the 26th of February. It bums me out, as I liked that job a lot. But it’s business. These things happen.
It didn’t occur to me to post about it here until I was discussing my situation with one of my friends who was saying, “Well I didn’t see anything about it on your web site” which reminded me that this place exists.
It’s an amusing paradox in that when my life is busy and interesting, I never have time to write updates here. But when I do have time, such as now, nothing much is going on. The daily job search isn’t really all that thrilling. I suppose the key is to find time when my life is busy and exciting to also post updates here. We’ll see how that goes. Past experience would imply it will not go all that well.
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