Rob's Blog

Well, here I am on day 3 of my trip to the States. I’m staying in Costa Mesa, not far from Huntington Beach and so far it’s been pretty good here. Unfortunately the first day was the best (since it was a Sunday, and I didn’t have any work to do), which was spent swimming and body surfing at Newport Beach (looks a lot like a Baywatch set).

Today I was invited to a demo of some software – this is the software I am meant to be maintaining and supporting), and it didn’t work. At the headquarters of the company who built it, surrounded by it’s developers, and it didn’t work! I still, after 8 weeks of employment, have not had chance to even see part of the software I am meant to be working on. What is it about demos that manages to instantly break any bit of software? Do any nerves on the part of the presenter somehow influence the compiled code, and cause it to drop database connections, produce unexpected results, or just not work?

Two of the best demonstration failures I have personally seen are:

1. A young man we were interviewing at a previous job brought in his laptop to show some of the work he’d done. Brave man, as very quickly things started to go wrong for him. The reasonably good impression he’d made answering our questions was rapidly eroded as his prized work failed to do anything at all. Undeterred, he kept on trying for a further 10 minutes to make it work, before we were forced to take control and tell him not to worry about the presentation. We didn’t offer him the job.
2. I was asked to demo my new software to the directors, and had spent some time ensuring it was all working correctly the previous day. The morning of the presentation, I went into the board room feeling confident and ready to show the fruits of my labour. Unfortunately, my software would not let me get past the initial stage of logging in, claiming that the server-side part (running on our development server in the next room) could not be contacted, ven though it was clearl available on the network. Eventually I gave up and explained that it wasn’t going to work, and I left the meeting feeling very foolish and embarrassed. My boss later asked me how the presentation went. I told him, and he started looking very sheepish. He told me that he’d deleted all of the server components from that machine after I’d gone home the previous evening. Sabotaged!

Tomorrow afternoon we’re playing golf somewhere around Orange County, and no doubt we’ll be having a few beers after. Wish every day was like that…

OK – so I have a reasonably fast new computer with a fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper Drake on it. When I install a new copy of Windows, the first thing I do is make sure I install all the software updates available (usually about 100 in total, depending on the length of time since the last service pack), and obviously a Linux distro is going to be no different.

The Ubuntu equivalent of Windows Automatic Update appeared in the top right corner of my screen in the taskbar (yes, the taskbar is on the top – takes a little while to get used to, although I suppose I could always install KDE ). Clicking on the icon generated a small window listing all of the available updates (there were a lot), and it was an extremely straight-forward process. A couple of things to note here:

• No Windows Genuine Advantage sending whatever data it likes at whatever frequency it likes to anyone else
• No restarts were required at all. Things just installed seamlessly. Linux sometimes freaks me out a little like that, probably just because I’m not used to it, but things just happen, and often don’t provide you with any feedback.
• The update process seemed to fly through most of it, until it decided to update OpenOffice, which downloaded around 60Mb of data and took ages.
• Back to that lack of feedback thing – I spent ages waiting for the update process to finish, when it had actually finished. The update screen just said in small, unobtrusive letters “All updates installed successfully” (or words to that effect), and didn’t beep, flash or otherwise make itself obvious.

So after about an hour, I had a new computer, with a fresh, updated and complete install of Ubuntu Linux. Next, I had a score to settle.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the past 2 years I have been using an old PC as a firewall running IPCop. It has served me extremely well, but was noticeably slow (especially when I installed CopFilter), and was badly in need of retirement. I managed to source a new P4 2.8Ghz, 500Mb RAM machine for the exorbitant sum of AU$290, and was then in a position to do some playing with my network. I originally had the IPCop machine, and a P4 1.5Ghz machine running Fedora Core 5 to server my website. My plan was to ditch/recycle/donate the old machine (if anyone wants it, please send me an email), install IPCop on the Fedora machine, and move the website to the newly aquired P4.

Here’s how it all went:

Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, I decided it would be a great idea to publish how nerdy I was by joining the Linux Counter

I’m not quite sure what advantages being a “registered Linux user” provides, apart from clearly spelling out to the world that you’ve had the audacity to try an operating system other than MS Windows, therefore you must be a complete geek. I’m quite proud of this fact, however