This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

Overall IT is great and I really can’t see myself doing anything else with as much love and enthusiasm as I have for IT. :-)

Things I love:

• The people! Such a range of interesting and talented people capable of holding interesting discussions, I’ve made amazing friends from working in IT.
• The community – this is someone tied into the above, but there is an amazing community of people in IT, who really do support one another, both in work but also in life, though both the good times and hard.
• Exciting projects, designing the infrastructure that makes modern life and communications possible.
• Being challenged on a daily basis with interesting problems.

Things I hate:

• The dating pool! The guys to ladies ratio is really terrible, particularly for younger guys, considering how many people meet their partners whilst at work, this does pose a dating challenge.
• People having no understand of how complex things in IT can be and expecting miracles.
• People assuming that working in IT means you’re a boring “computer nerd”. IT is one of the best places full of cool and interesting people. Sure, they’re all geeky as fuck, but it’s great. :-)
• People who get into IT because it’s a good career but who have no passion for technology and just do it for the money. Fortunately the companies I’ve always worked for have had passionate staff who really do love what they do.

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

I’m totally against internet censorship, whether that’s full blown censorship (eg china style) or the western so-called “child-porn filtering”.

The fact is, any system capable of censoring the internet can be taken by someone in power and used against the population, to block undesirable websites – that could be alternative political parties, websites discussing legislation of Marijuana, euthanasia websites, sites featuring “immoral” content such as gay/lesbian content, BDSM, atheist or other non-mainstream interest sites.

It’s a dangerous tool to hand over to someone, even if you trust the government that’s currently in power, will you be able to do the same in 10, 20, 50 years?

The role of a government should be to protect it’s citizens from harm, not make moral questions about what we should think or access to suit their own beliefs.

Governments love using the claim of blocking child porn as a way of getting filtering established – after all, who’s going to try and argue against stopping child porn?

However filtering it won’t stop abuse of children or pedofiles from downloading content, much of the illegal content sharing is done via alternative protocols and wouldn’t be impacted in the slightest.

I entirely support governments going after people downloading or producing that content, but we should not be handing over our freedom in order todo so.

I have a more detailed writeup about what’s wrong with filtering and why it won’t work in an older blog post.

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

I’m sure there’s not a lot of doubt about what this post is going to be…. I hate MS windows with a passion – the main reasons being:

• It’s a proprietary platform, that means I can’t get in there and fix issues myself.
• I can’t trust Microsoft or the US government not to put backdoors into it for their own benefit.
• I consider the architecture behind the Windows platform to be vastly inferior to that of *nix systems such as Linux – it’s designed around a single user model and no central repository for application or OS updates.
• I can jump in and get involved with the development and future of my Linux systems, but would have no such ability with Windows – I get whatever Microsoft chooses to spoon-feed me.
• Windows has an appalling reputation for security issues.
• The number of weird ways that MS Windows can fuck itself up is quite unbelievable….

I could rant for several hours about my dislike of windows, but I think I better stop here. :-)

By now many people will have heard about the github service outage triggered by an accidental drop of their database.

(read their blog post on the issue here)

A few people on Twitter started attacking the github people for making such a silly mistake, which is actually quite sad – from my perspective, it was handled professionally and openly.

It’s impossible to work in IT without making some mistakes from time to time, even I’ve done stupid things like deleting the wrong partition or accessing the wrong host. I even once rebooted the bastion server late one evening thinking it was my local workstation shell.

The point is, even professionals make mistakes. The difference however between a professional and an amateur is how the mistake is handled, resolved and communicated.

An amateur will try and hide the issue or panic and run around in chaos trying to recover. However what we’ve seen from github has been:

• Honest mistake happens to an engineer who probably almost died from horror once realising what they did.
• Prompt determination of issue and restoration from a *working* backup system.
• Clearly organised and prepared staff with some form of disaster recovery plan.
• Open and honest communication with users about the issue.
• And most importantly – they detailed how they are going to prevent this from ever occurring again.

Nobody can fault them for this – things happen – SANs can die, a bug can cause incorrect drops, an admin can run the wrong command – hardware, software and people all suffer faults and mistakes from time for time.

We should be congratulating them on such a well handled disaster recovery, if anything this would make me want to use github more after seeing their handling of the issue.

There’s also a few ideas floating around I want to clarify:

• “Clearly they don’t have database replication, this would have stopped it” – No, it wouldn’t – if you replicate a drop query, it’s going to drop from the slaves as well. Even if they’re asynchronous, an async query can still transfer pretty bloody fast, which is really want you want – it’s best to have the slaves as uptodate as possible.
• “A three hour outage is totally unacceptable for a site like github” – A database the size of theirs isn’t a small task – restoring off media and importing back  into the DB may take only seconds for your 5MB blog, but it could takes days for a huge multi GB site. 3 hours is pretty bloody good.