teknotus

Looking for work

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Tech job applications often want links to blogs, and portfolios. The only time I was ever any good at blogging was back in the days when I used livejournal, and forced myself. Writing is a lot easier for me than it used to be, but not when it’s a job application. I worry so much about it being right that it’s crippling. I’m not good with rejection.

For years I managed to avoid it. The last two jobs came simply from networking. There was only a four hour gap between the two, and I had hoped that it would stay that easy, but it hasn’t and I have to put some direct effort into finding work rather than it magically finding me. Really I put hundreds of hours into networking every year so it wasn’t that magical. It seemed magic when it worked though.

I think I have a lot to talk about right now. Maybe I’ll actually keep up with the blog this time. Hard to say.

Starting a business

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

About a month ago I started working on setting up a new business. I knew it would be a lot of work, but after a month I don’t even have the basic marketing in place to have earned my first $1. I think I’m almost there.

ikiwiki

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I love the idea of it, but unfortunately it looks rather iki by default. I looked into hacking at the templates, but I don’t like the templating system. So I’m going to poke at making it able to use Template Toolkit instead of whatever it is using, and then getting a friend to help create pretty templates. Hopefully a fun process.

GO

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I learned to play go tonight. I expected to be destroyed, and I was. I learned a little bit. Maybe next time I won’t be destroyed as badly.

finally learning a little bit about hacking

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Having been a website admin I often had to deal with the aftermath of someone hacking a server, but my response wasn’t usually all that sophisticated. About a week, and a half ago someone started leading a “expliot workshop” to work on trying to create new exploits as a learning exercise. The book “The art of exploitation 2nd edition” was pointed out as one of the best guides to actually doing this, and I decided to get a copy. Recently I’ve been trying to seek out fun programming tasks, and hacking always felt rather game like.

Hello new blog

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As is common for technical projects I abandoned one solution because it was frustrating to use, and found something else that is new, and shiny, but ends up being more work to setup. I’m using ikiwiki for this blog. It has the misfortune of having one of the most awful default themes I’ve seen in years. I started trying to customize it, but I’m not a designer so I probably just made it look worse. The purple is from a picture of a sunset, and the green is from avocado. If you see this later it might not have these colors any more because I’ll probably change it soon. I picked it because it appeals to my sysadmin tendency to pick whatever creates the least system load. It can theoretically handle slashdot linking to it even with my mediocre hosting resources. I want to write about the tech stuff I’m working on, and have the time to work on it not futz with the website. If people use RSS to read this will they even see the crappy theme?

I'm working on fixing this website

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This website has been broken for a long time, but I wasn’t really motivated to fix it because I wasn’t feeling like writing blog posts very much, and the domain was serving it’s other purposes just fine without the blog working. External forces have motivated me to fix it though, and I’ve been feeling more like blogging lately too. I’ve been poking at getting the old blog working, but it looks like it is broken in a way that is hard to fix, and not giving me much debug output. I’m probably going to switch to joomla as I’ve already spent a lot of time learning how to work with it, and it’s actively being developed. In the mean time you can look at my old entries on archive.org.

Hackers need exercise

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I was at a bike in movie a few weeks ago talking to another local free software guy when I had an epiphany. At OSCON it seemed that the most popular tshirt size was extra large. Sometimes that was the only size they even bothered to make. However at bicycle events the most popular size is small. Bicycle technology has certainly advanced over the years with better materials, computer aided design, and increasingly sophisticated mechanisms. Still though it doesn’t take that much work to master the basics. Why then has the extreamely tech savvy free software community failed to grok a mature technology that can make them sexy? For a lot of people it actually takes less time to get to get places by bike than by car. Even a locally custom made to your measurements, top of the line bike like this one [1] will set you back less than a decent used car. The gas is free. Actually the obvious money you save is just the tip of the iceburg. As you lose weight hunger decreases, and you spend less money on food. You don’t need a gym membership, or to waste time with one as you get all your exercise doing something you already needed to do. Your health gets better, so you spend less money on health realated things. You will also waste less as having to lug something up a hill tends to make you think small, and lite. Sexy is like a refund. You don’t get it right away, and you have to do a bit of work to get it, but when you do you will know you made the right choice.

[1] http://www.sweetpeabicycles.com/blog/2007/07/04/introducing-the-farmers-market/

Catalyst

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I went to a presentation on catalyst. Catalyst is a web MVC framework for perl similar to rails. How similar? spooky similar. I felt like it was a tutorial on rails from a year ago with the names of a few things changed. Config files used YAML. By default it used port 3000 with a built in web server. “HTML::Simple” instead of “WebBrick”, but the concepts were almost identical. It has been said that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I think this may soon go beyond imitation. Perl is an older language than ruby with a more libraries, and a bigger developer base. At the moment it is lagging behind largely because of the sucky object oriented model, but perl6 fixes that. Allison Randal (one of the two OSCON chairs) was sitting in the back of the room working on perl6 object code only half paying attention to the presentation. Randal Schwartz the author (impressively good author) of learning perl was sitting next to me, and commented about how much better catalyst was than the last time he looked at it. Maybe in a year perl6 will be out, and Randal Schwartz will have written a book on catalyst. Then it could be a real contender with rails, but I don’t think it is now.

They didn’t just copy the good things about rails they also copied MOST of the rails deployment headaches. I asked a lot of questions about memory usage, how many requests it could handle at a time, etc. The presenter said that his main app used over 100 megs per process, each process could only handle a single request at at time, and he had three processes running at once. That memory usage is huge even by rails standards. Overall it seemed like the deployment strategy he was using was very similar to techniques used in the early days of rails that I would consider as having been depreciated in the rails community over a year ago.

Catalyst Homepage

My friend's bad day at work

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

(19:52:07) friend: Dude, here's a sucky day
(19:52:17) friend: Lose the keys to the building
(19:52:38) friend: The mail server in the distant Colo goes doen
(19:52:47) friend: And your laptop catc0hes
(19:52:50) friend: Fire
(19:52:58) friend: All before 10am
(19:53:00) me: WTF!
(19:54:26) me: This all happened to you?
(19:54:44) friend: Yes
(19:55:08) friend: The company car was gone, so I had to take the old manual pickup
(19:55:24) friend: It had a flat tire and any empty gas tank
(19:55:49) me: Where were you driving this vehicle?
(19:56:11) friend: I didn't get a meal all day
(19:56:23) friend: Life sucks hard today
(19:56:29) friend: <sad>
(19:56:32) friend: To the Colo
(19:56:34) friend: To fix the server
(19:56:36) friend: The newest server
(19:56:46) friend: With TWO failed PSUs
(19:56:53) friend: BOTH failed
(19:57:40) me: Shit man
(19:58:27) friend: Yeah
(19:58:29) friend: It was just my turn