Monthly Archives: November 2010

Day 15 – Earliest geek experience

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

My earliest geek experience would have to be as a kid – my dad worked as a mainframe operator for a couple decades, so I vaguely remember being taken to visit him at work through rooms full of computers, racks and other amazingly awesome equipment, thinking how cool it was.

This was back in the early days of Windows 3.1, I seem to remember flying toaster screensavers and donut tape drives. Cool stuff! :-)

This possibly influenced my subconscious (I want to be cool like dad!) but it certainly wasn’t a decision to try being like dad which pushed me into IT or anything – I took a very different path, going down the PC/*NIX way whilst dad has always remained a mainframe operator.

Other than that, my first hands on geek experience was when a family friend gave me an old i386, dad got me DOS onto it and showed me the three commands he knew. I spent ages playing around on it, reading old manuals and figuring bits out for myself. :-)

(As a side note, Dad recently got made redundant from mainframe operations due to a company shift from Wellington to Auckland, if anyone knows a mainframe position that needs someone, please let me know – my mum *really* doesn’t want him retiring although he seems keen on the idea ;-) )

Day 14 – Favourite computer conference?

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

There are plenty of great conferences around in the NZ & AU scene, however my favourite is clearly going to be linux.conf.au.

It’s a week long IT conference which is held in a different AU or NZ city ever year, focusing on (obviously) Linux, but also open source and software freedom in general.

Probably one of the larger and most well known conferences around, it attracts around 700-1000 people every year (depending on venue size), ranging from web developers, application developers, system administrators and even kernel hackers.

There’s a huge amount of content, typically 5 days, with 5 streams running at any one time, always means that there will be plenty of great talks that will appeal to anyone – often the problem is trying to decide which talks to choose when there’s a clash!

Social communication in the geek herd (LCA 2006)

I’ve attended linux.conf.au every year since 2006, having been to Dunedin, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart (Tasmania) and having it in my home town (Wellington) in 2010. :-)

I’ll be attending again in January when it’s being held in Brisbane, can’t wait! :-D

Day 13 – How did you become such a geek? Career? Personal interest?

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

I’ve been heavily into computers for almost a decade, it was never a case of waking up one day and deciding that I want to be an ubergeek, but rather it’s something that just grew on me more and more.

I started using computers around the age of 10 and by 12 was heavily into them, hacking on simple apps and doing my first Linux experimentation. I would spend hours just breaking the system and messing around digging into options and settings I didn’t understand just for the fun of it to see what happens.

It’s very much a personal interest/challenge that’s driven me, the career side of it was just a natural progression once I left school, but was never the intention of learning what I know.

Day 12 – What area do you want to expand your skills into?

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

My skillset in PHP development and system administration is pretty strong, so whilst I’ll continue to improve and learn new things in this area, it’s not really an area I’m expanding into.

There are three main areas that I do want to expand my skills in:

Network skillset – I’m pretty fluent with IPv4 and various networking concepts and vendors, but I’d like better skills around Cisco IOS devices and JunOS.
Low level languages like C/C++ – currently most of my skills are relating to dynamic languages, such as PHP and Perl.
AI research – want to do some development relating to AI and information processing/handling.

From early 2011 I should be having a lot more personal time available, so will use this to do some more self-learning and skillset improvement. :-)

Day 11 – Favourite hacking environment – music, light, seating, etc

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

This question does lead on from the previous one somewhat, I see that some other fellow bloggers who will remain nameless ended up merging days 10 and 11 together.

My favourite hacking environment is still at my home desk – whilst I’m getting more used to hacking on the go using just the laptop, I still prefer the more immersive experience of my home setup, larger display and good audio.

So my home environment is:

My darling Lenovo X201i laptop on it’s docking station.
22″ 1920×1080 Viewsonic LCDs (one for my laptop, one for guests and another on the floor somewhere plugged into the server).
IBM Model M keyboard
Bluetooh Thinkpad Mouse
NAD 3020i integrated amp (hidden behind laptop/LCD)
JPW “bookshelf” speakers

I tend to hack best in the dark, so I cover up my views of the Wellington city and harbour and sit in the dark with loud music staring into the screen for hours.

My musical tastes vary, but I tend to code to either metal/heavy rock, electronica or techno usually, however pretty much anything in my collection is fine with me :-)

Seating is important for me, I can’t stand substandard chairs, I ended up shelling out for a decent gas lift which was worth every cent.

Day 10 – Picture, screenshot and specifications of your primary computer.

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

This is tricky to answer since I have 40 or so computers, however I’m going to ignore my servers and give the primary computer title to my laptop.

Since early 2010, I’ve been using a Lenovo X201i laptop, it’s a great little ultralight laptop, which I love since I carry it everywhere with me and hate bulky/heavy laptops.

The specifications on mine are:

12″ laptop chassis
Intel Core i5 M430 @ 2.27Ghz
4GB RAM
320GB hard disk
802.11b/g/n & bluetooth
Integrated 3G Modem
9-cell long life battery (standard unit ships with 6-cell, there is also a lightweight 3-cell option). I tend to get around 6 hours life, but if I tweak, I should be getting about 8 hours.

There’s several feature that I really love about this laptop that are hard to find elsewhere:

Stylish industrial business appearance. I know that some people think the Thinkpad series are ugly, but I love their 90s style hard edge shape and all black colouring
Works nicely with Linux – helped by the fact several Red Hat staff and kernel hackers own this model. ;-)
Features a trackpoint pointer – I hate touchpads, so disabled it and just use the trackpoint.
Nice keyboard – whilst never as good as a model M, it does manage to do a very nice job and is very pleasant to type on, with a good key depth and click feel.

It’s not perfect, there are a few annoying limitations/issues that I have with it:

I would have preferred the laptop to have a very ultralight 3cell battery with a clip on bottom battery for long-life roadwarrior situations since it means I could more easily alternate between portability and weight depending on the situation, without needing to plug in to change battery packs.
Lenovo did some weird stuff to the BIOS/firmware, I’ve updated it a couple times now to resolve some issues and used to have to apply a number of kernel patches to get suspend to work nicely.
Not really a fault, but I wish I had brought the tablet variation of this laptop, the ability to rotate the screen and use it as a tablet would be awesome.

Overall, it’s a brilliant little laptop and I will certainly consider the Thinkpad series again when I have to upgrade in 2012/2013.

Isn’t it cute! I love it so! :-D

At work I tend to operate with it purely in laptop mode, whilst at home I dock it to have the larger external screen and keyboard, but I’ll comment more on that with tomorrow’s blog post. :-)

Finally, here’s a screenshot of my desktop:

I cleaned it just last week, the junk folder in the bottom right corner is full of the old contents which was so bad it kept lapping over other files. :-/

The bottom left corner shows my workspaces, I currently use 10 workspaces on my computer, typically for dedicated tasks – I usually have:

Local sysadmin
Project Space
Project Space
Project Space
Project Space
General browsing/Twitter
Instant Messaging & Task List
Evolution (Email)

I have no clue how windows users survive without a decent multi workspace functionality…. so handy being able to jump between then with the CTL+ALT+ LEFT/RIGHT combination.

In the top bar, you’ll see my shortcuts to most commonly used applications and notification icons for backgrounded applications such as Lifera (RSS reader) and Rhythmbox (music player).

Day 09 – What OS/distribution do you run?

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

I’ve been a Linux geek for almost a decade, first started heavily using Linux in 2001 as part of my youthful play (Mandrake 6, kernel 2.2 FTW! :-D ) and become a full blown Linux user in 2002 with RedHat 8.

These days, I run Fedora on my workstations and CentOS or RHEL on my servers – I love the Red Hat approach towards structuring the OS and the very rigid release policies, but there’s a number of reasons for my Fedora choice:

Developed by a strong community focused and driven on the goal of being a true free as in freedom operating system backed up by an ethical company (RedHat).
Fast-paced release cycle, every 6 months a new release with brand new features.
Binary-based distribution, something like Gentoo would be faster paced but then I’d have to spend a lot more time compiling and tweaking.
I’m familiar with the OS environment and packaging for it, infact I run my own repositories for both RHEL/CentOS & Fedora which are publicly available.

My use of RHEL (or CentOS if it’s a non-work system) for servers is mostly for the same reasons, as well as the fact that there’s a huge support life (about 7 years) for RHEL which far surpasses the hardware itself.

Of course, I haven’t always been a Fedora user, I have a rather colourful operating system background, which is why I do feel at least a slight right to be able to comment on OS debates:

First computers I had were i386s with Win 3.1 and MSDOS. Used to hack around with BASIC/QBASIC coding on them, tweaking games and just generally prodding everything to see what would happen.
First real computer came with Win 98, I spent a couple years learning HTML, hacking more BASIC and getting into C/C++ coding with 2D directx games.
Experimented with Mandrake 6 for a while, Linux was this amazingly awesome yet completely unfamiluar environment – very different these days, in a way it’s sad the the mystery has gone.
Eventually moved to Redhat 8/9 as my primary box along with a Windows XP laptop.
When the original Fedora Core came out, I was pretty unhappy with it – whilst I see the business focus of RedHat made RHEL more sense, I’m still sad that they killed their free as in beer release and still think it did some harm to their brand awareness – think about the fact that there would be no CentOS if RedHat still had a free release.
Disillusioned with Fedora Core, I stumbled through the interwebs until I found the beauty that is Linux From Scratch.
Linux From Scratch (and Beyond Linux From Scratch) involves compiling *everything* from the kernel up to the desktop environment and applications, all manually from the tarballs and patches – no package management tools or dependency solving. Doing it on my 433mhz Celeron with 192MB RAM would take about a week…. Those were the days. :’)
LFS was awesome, but difficult to maintain, so I ended up moving to my own distribution for a while (Jedo Linux) originally based off RPM before shifting to source-based portage distribution with entirely custom ebuilds.
Ran Ubuntu 6.06 for a couple years when I started my first job as I needed something with easier package management for work purposes.
Work ended up buying me a shiny Macbook, used MacOS Tiger/Leopard for two years, whilst running Ubuntu at home.
Moved away from Ubuntu after seeing how much Fedora had improved, started with Fedora 9 and have been using it ever since.

Aside from my personal use, I’ve supported a number of different OSes for commercial purposes: WinXP, *shudder* Vista, Win7, Windows Server, Debian (which for some reason I’ve never been a big fan of) and Solaris.

So I’m a bit of an OS slut, but these days I’d say I’m firmly a Red Hat fan and will continue to be so for the forseeable future until I decide that Linux is too mainstream now and move to something like BSD or Minix. ;-)

Day 08 – Preferred method of communication with humans

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

I’d be tempted to say “none” here, however whilst all human interaction is painful, some forms are less painful that others. :-P

In reality I’ve gotten better with interacting with people over the years, conferences, business dealings and large amounts of social pressures and interactivity for business have lead to myself becoming pretty comfortable and confident around people.

For a business conversation, I prefer email most of all, followed by phone calls. In personal life, I still love email, but tend to use Twitter and IM more for convenience and lightweight interactions.

I think overall, email is my preferred communication method – IM and Twitter can end up being too intrusive and disruptive, I love the fact I can read it when I want, mess around with filtering and rulesets and archive permanently – as it is, I have archives going back to 2003 for all my emails.

Day 07 – Preferred smartphone platform. And which do you use?

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

Being an open source geek, it probably won’t surprise you that I’m a fan of Android, Google’s open source operating system for mobile phones.

I currently own an HTC Magic G2 running CynogenMod 5 (Android 2.1) and am loving it, whilst it has it’s faults (mainly this model lacks CPU/RAM) it’s a great little phone.

Incase you’re not familiar with Android,

Open source operating system developed by Google and released under an open source license.
Wide range of Android phones and devices (inc tablets and laptops) released by a variety of manufacturers.
Runs the Linux kernel and some open source libraries but doesn’t have the typical linux userspace, instead most of it is written in Java running on the Dalvik JVM.
Designed to be an open platform with the ability to install or distribute any application.

There’s a number of good reasons why I’d chose it over Win Mobile, iPhone or Symbian:

One of the more open platforms – most of the OS is open source and I can customise it or use other people’s modifications – ATM I’m running CynogenMod on my phone to take advantage of OpenVPN and some applications which require Android 2.x
Symbian and Win Mobile (version 6, I haven’t seen 7) is an entire generation between the new smartphone operating systems like Android and iPhone. And Apple’s products are far too locked down and restrictive for me to support them.
No forcing users to use a specific OS/application (eg itunes) just to load files or content onto the phone – just mount like a standard USB storage device.
Range of vendors providing huge selectivity of platforms.
Ability to develop for Android on Linux systems.

Android isn’t perfect though, there are certainly some limitations/problems that I’m not completely happy with:

Vendors/carriers implementing their own lockdown in the phone bootloaders to try and prevent users from running unauthorised kernels. (looking at YOU Motorola!)
Performance – a lot of the Android phones (particularly the earlier models) are very laggy, I suspect the CPU/RAM is just a bit too scarce compared to the actual requirements of the phone.
A number of components are still proprietary – such as Google apps (including the marketplace) and the telephony drivers for the server.
Google’s marketplace doesn’t clearly differentiate between proprietary or open source applications, making it difficult if you want to aim to only use open source applications.
Vendor variation and telco control.

This last point is a big issue for myself – Google allowed the vendors too much flexibility to customise the phones and still call them “Android”, what is already happening is that some vendors are reskinning or customising the firmware, whilst others are not releasing updates, so thatsome of the phones are stagnating on old versions of Android.

To make it worse, the telcos have control over update distribution rather than the vendors, so you have to wait for your telco to approve and push out updates and experience shows they aren’t the fastest or most efficient organisations.

But, despite some of it’s faults, over all it’s a pretty decent OS and certainly gives Apple a run for their money whilst utterly thrashing the older OSes like Symbian and WinMobile 6.

And it runs Linux ❤

Day 06 – Primary geek fuel (snacks/drinks)

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

Finally an excuse for posting a picture – blog posts are always far more interesting when there’s a picture. ;-)

My primary geek fuel would have to be cola of some variety, historically I drank mostly Coke, but lately I’ve been trying to cut down on my can a day and instead I buy a 4-pack of Royal Crown Premium Draft cola once a week to enjoy over the weekend – it’s deliciously brilliant stuff (although a little pricey as it’s an AU import), very smooth to drink – doesn’t last nearly long enough!

Other than sugary substances, I tend to start the day with a Soy Latte (would have more if it wasn’t for the cost/inability to make them at home) and have a growing coffee consumption going on, tends to be the less cola I drink, the more I go for coffee.

In terms of snacks, I’ve been cutting back on processed snacks such as M&Ms, chocolate and cornchips and been demolishing bags of flavoured peas lately – the wasabi peas pictured are so great, go well with almost any beverage (alcoholic or not).