Day 01 – Why do you consider yourself a geek?

This is the first post as part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

Anyone who knows me would easily be able to confirm that my level of geekiness is high enough for me to go on for hours listing the reasons, however sadly it’s 23:25 and I still have a mountain of tasks to complete before going to work tomorrow. :-(

I think it’s my obsession with computers which makes me a geek – I think my friend Chris Neugebauer summed it up well in his post – being a geek means going above and beyond a normal level of interest in something.

I’ve been using computers heavily for almost half my life and my interest has never diminished, although it has certainly changed over time and moved into different areas – the thing is technology is so exciting and I love the problem solving aspect of it and the new exciting challenges that arise almost daily.

So other than obsession, why am I such a geek? I’d go with a number of reasons:

There is no space on my desk that isn’t covered by computers – I have an obscene amount of computers and systems, probably enough to rival a small telco. ;-)
The sticker on my laptop which says “my other computer is a data center” isn’t a lie. I really do have a small datacenter. (2x 42U racks)
The internet is the most important thing in my life, I would argue perhaps the most important development for humanity to date.
I will spend hours, days if I have to, to track down and resolve a problem – to get something like Linux working on a tricky bit of hardware I’ll dig through mailing lists for kernel patches, dig into the code and lose my sanity all in the goal of obtaining a solution.
Real life is that thing I have to endure to get between computers.
My most important and cherished asset is the data on my hard drive. Everything else is just stuff that clutters up my life. (yes, it is backed up BTW!)

(As a side note, why “geek” rather than “nerd”? I consider geek a badge of honour and can be someone quite cool, nerd implies it in a negative sense, eg maybe someone more socially inept.)

Dawn of a new era!

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Today was the first day of my new old job (no, that’s not a typo) at Prophecy Networks, feels strange getting back into a regular routine and doing normal people things like eating lunch at sane hours of the day and waking up in mornings.

It’s not all smooth sailing just yet, I still need to complete a number of hand over tasks and some ongoing projects, but I’m getting there – by the end of November, I should have a much more sane/normal life. :-)

If you follow along on my blog much, you will know that today is the start of 30 days of geek (#30daysofgeek) which I posted about here.

I’ll be posting the first day shortly and there are a few people joining me! :-D

30 days of geek

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I haven’t been particular good at keeping up with my aim of a post a day since the end of the 30 days of me challenge, part of the problem is I need to plan in advance what I’m going to write, otherwise it’ll never get done.

The other issue is that the next couple of weeks are hectic as I prepare to transition to my new job – November will (hopefully) be a much saner month.

So I’m proposing a new challenge, which I’m going to call 30 days of geek… for every day in November, I’m going to post something geeky and computer related. Maybe this will help balance out all the introspective stuff from the 30 days of me challenge that people had to suffer. ;-)

If you feel like joining me, please do! Post a comment to this article with your blog URL so others can find it easily and use the hashtag #30daysofgeek on social networks.

Day 01 – Why do you consider yourself a geek?
Day 02 – Preferred programming language?
Day 03 – What does your day job involve?
Day 04 – Greatest application written to date.
Day 05 – Quick nifty hacks you’re proud of
Day 06 – Primary geek fuel (snacks/drinks)
Day 07 – Preferred smartphone platform. And which do you use?
Day 08 – Preferred method of communication with humans
Day 09 – What OS/distribution do you run?
Day 10 – Picture, screenshot and specifications of your primary computer.
Day 11 – Favourite hacking environment – music, light, seating, etc
Day 12 – What area do you want to expand your skills into?
Day 13 – How did you become such a geek? Career? Personal interest?
Day 14 – Favourite computer conference?
Day 15 – Earliest geek experience
Day 16 – First computer you’ve ever owned & your favourite ever.
Day 17 – Post a useful HOWTO to solve a challenge you’ve come across recently.
Day 18 – Most cringe-worthy geek moment
Day 19 – Most hated computing environment.
Day 20 – Where do you stand on Internet Censorship?
Day 21 – Favourite thing & worst things about working in IT?
Day 22 – Release some software under an open source license that you haven’t released before.
Day 23 – Post a review of an application that you use.
Day 24 – How do you feel about Open Source vs Proprietary software?
Day 25 – Microsoft – friend, foe or other?
Day 26 – Apple – friend, foe or other?
Day 27 – Fix a bug in some open source software and commit the patch
Day 28 – How many computers lying about the house?
Day 29 – Looking back (at geek life), would you have done anything differently?
Day 30 – Where do you see technology advancing in the next 20 years – and where will you fit in?

So that’s 30 days of geek, which I’ll be starting on the 1st of November, join in, it should be fun :-)

LCA Squeeeeeeeee

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Registrations opened for linux.conf.au 2011 a couple of days ago, not wanting to miss out, I’ve quickly gone and registered for the conference, accommodation (well, I’ve sent the PDF form and am awaiting a response, blergh) as well as both international and domestic flights.

I’ve decided to use the opportunity of the trip as a chance to make some deters to see friends and have a bit of a relax in the Gold Coast, Tasmania and Melbourne before/after the conference.

I’ve booked all the flights now, my schedule is as follows:

20 JAN        Wellington -> Brisbane -> Gold Coast
FLIGHT       (AirNZ NZ0826 – 16:35 arrival at Brisbane)
21 JAN        Gold Coast
22 JAN        Gold Coast
23 JAN        Gold Coast -> Brisbane
TRAIN?      (aim to be in Brisbane early afternoon – train?)
24 JAN        linux.conf.au for entire week in Brisbane CBD
….
30 JAN        linux.conf.au -> Melbourne (1hr stop) -> Hobart
FLIGHT      (Virgin DJ334/DJ1332 – 15:00 departure)
31 JAN        Hobart
01 FEB        Hobart->Launceston
02 FEB        Launceston->Hobart -> Melbourne
FLIGHT       (Virgin DJ1325 – 13:45 departure)
03 FEB        Melbourne
04 FEB        Melbourne -> Wellington
FLIGHT      (AirNZ NZ0850 – 18:40 departure)
05 FEB        Sleep & Geekery

There’s still some stuff to work out, such as accommodation, travel in Hobart (might rent a car, I should have my full NZ license by then….) but the key bit – getting there – is all sorted now. :-)

The only other issue left is my credit card bill…. ;-)

If you’re in any of the locations above and I haven’t already mentioned meeting up with you, please drop me a line – I’m sure I have linux.conf.au or twitter friends in some of these cities who I don’t realise actually live there. ;-)

Exciting new job

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I’ve been talking about making some changes lately and moving to a new career path or even going overseas.

I’ve decided to stay in Wellington NZ for now and accepted a position with my previous employer, Prophecy Networks who focus on delivering IT services for businesses and enterprise, starting from the beginning of November.

My new role will be as a consultant working with their clients with particular focus on enterprise & telco level engineering and development projects – exciting and challenging work to keep me from getting bored. :-)

If you’re wondering about what will be happening with Amberdms, don’t be too worried – the company will continue to exist and continuing to develop our open source products but the IT support side of the business will be moving to other providers.

Whilst I’ll miss the busy life of a startup, I’m certainly looking forwards to saner hours (40/50hrs rather than 80hrs) and the stable income it brings.

I’m planning to use some of the free time that results to hack on more open source projects and do some R+D projects of my own as well as a few possible new Amberdms products.

More information and plans will undoubtedly get posted over the next few weeks so add the RSS for this blog to your reader if you want to keep informed. :-)

Microblogging, Twitter, Pidgin & prpltwtr

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As some of you *might* have realised, is that I’m actually slightly addicted to twitter. However I’ve been having a few frustrating problems recently:

Twitter is taking up far too much time, a lot of it due to the very intrusive way that one has to check twitter, thanks to it having it’s own interface.
New twitter isn’t particularly good, it even manages to bog down the performance of my older mac mini that I use as a TV computer with sluggish javascript.
I’m not that happy using a proprietary network and want to move to StatusNet in future, however I need a cross-network client that can do both twitter and StatusNet, ideally one that is open source.
Twitter search and logging sucks – a decent client with built in logging would be very useful.

I use Pidgin for all my other instant messaging needs – I have yahoo, MSN to facilitate communication with people stuck on those networks, as well as XMPP and IRC all via one application with a unified user experience.

I did consider using an open source microblogging focused application, such as Gwibber, however all the ones I’ve found don’t work well for huge volumes of tweets or getting back to historical messages (from a usability point-of-view).

I had a look around at twitter plugins for pidgin/libpurple, and came across two particular ones that looked good:

Both these clients support Twitter as well as StatusNet for future proofing – here’s my thoughts on both:

microblog-purple

Microblog-purple appears to be an older and well polished project. I also found that it was included in the Fedora 13 repositories which made installing and testing very easy.

Where it fell down for me, is that it lacked avatars and would raise notification of new messages for all tweets received, not just @replies. For me, this is a considerable annoyance and I couldn’t figure out a way to fix it.

On the plus side, it did have a very handle command interface, such as \refresh to get new messages ASAP or \replies to get a list of recent replies received.

Whilst this plugin didn’t meet my needs, I can certainly see it being useful or a good option for others, so don’t discount it purely on the fact that it didn’t do exactly what I wanted.

prpltwtr

Prpltwtr looks like the younger project, however has done a nice job of making twitter more XMPP like and has the nice ability to display the user avatars in the chat window.

There were several really nice features:

Avatars so I can see my great looking picture everytime I post (I’m not a narcissist, honest!)
All the searches I have setup appear in Pidgin as chat rooms, so you can load them and just follow along with the conversations – eg at a conference.
When a new @reply or DM comes in, Pidgin opens it as a separate conversation tab, just like if someone had started a new IM conversation with me. This might get annoying, but I think it’s quite effective and I think it can be turned off.
The home timeline acts as chat room, so your normal notification rules will apply – in my case, it only alerts me to messages if someone does an @reply.
There is an option to have all your twitter friends appear in pidgin as contacts. I have this disabled due to the fact I follow 300+ people and it would be a bit much.

It’s not all perfect, there’s a couple limitations/bugs that I might take a look at given time:

The home timeline refreshes faster than the @replies – so sometimes I see a reply in the home timeline to me, but the new window doesn’t appear for another window or so – it should really be smart enough to recognise the reply and load the window at the first opportunity.
The UI for doing replies is a little clunky – I think microblog-purple does it a lot better with the reply done by clicking the twitter handle.
A reply-to-all feature would be nice – this seems to be lacking in so many clients, even official twitter for android still doesn’t have this :-(

Here’s a screenshot showing off the behaviour on my Fedora 13 machine:

Note in particular:

Saved searches appearing in side bar – you can add or look for a specific one by joining a chat using the hash tag as the room name.
The home timeline acts as a chat room – the people you are currently engaging with appear as being in the room on the right.
@replies or DMs are opening new tabs – eg you can see @nzJayZee’s @reply in the home timeline, but it’s also opened into a new conversation tab.

Overall it seems very nice though, maybe slightly immature, but I’m going to give it a run for a week and see if it meets my needs or if I can hack in the features that I need. :-)

Get prpltwtr!

Sadly it wasn’t packaged in the Fedora 13 repositories, so I’ve gone and compiled some RPM packages for it – these can be downloaded from the Amberdms open source Fedora 13 OS repositories. (repo page or direct link)

Unsure about other distrutions, however compiling it is just a case of making sure that pidgin & libpurple development packages are installed and downloading the source tarball from the home page.

There is also a version available for Windows users and in theory it should compile for MacOS…. post a comment if you do get it to work on other platforms please. :-)

Configuration

Once installed, it’s just a case of enabling the plugin and then going and adding the account type. Make sure you check to use OAuth authentication, since traditional/basic authentication is no longer accepted by Twitter.

By default the home timeline will update on a 1 minute basis – right click and edit settings on the contacts entry to change.

The @replies and direct messages are 30mins by default, I changed mine to 5 mins to be more useful to an addict like myself.

prpltwtr

My fridge of delicious unhealthyness

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A few of the twitter people I follow (think Greer started it off) have started posting pictures of the contents of their fridge. Naturally my readers have nothing better todo than learn inane details about me such as the contents of my fridge and scream at the horror of the healthy contents.

I flat with two other people, both of them meat eaters. Since the flat came with a fridge already, I kept mine as the vegetarian-only fridge and my flatmates use the larger one for all their meaty horrors – which also means I get the whole thing to myself :-D

(Mum, if you’re reading my blog, please skip these pictures. I’m sure you won’t be impressed)

Nacho ingredients and noodles (ontop of fridge). Obscured from vision is the flat wifi router. The ethernet cables run down the side of the fridge, across the floor and along a door frame to my bedroom where the server rack is located.
First shelf – Pesto; a couple jars of jam; some expired organic yogurt; delicious, delicious olives; hot spicy jalapeño sauce; several cans of coke lying around thanks to @simon_w leaving them; olive-based margarine; and generic cheese.
Second shelf – Royal Brown Premium Draft Cola – it’s kinda pricey but so, so, good, compared to regular coke – more margarine; pizza bases; and finally several packs of marinated tofu.
Third shelf – sara lee desert (75% consumed); left over curry (in paper bag); 33.3% of a burger.
Fourth shelf – vegetable bin which I never use any of the vegetables in, I think I need to check that tray and toss some out; couple bottles of water and a pack of mushrooms ontop.
Door – Feta cheese (barely visible); crushed chilli; crushed garlic; generic cheese; mozzarella cheese; Pip’s pretty good peanut butter; English mustard; Sweet chilli sauce; 2x Monteith’s original ales; vegetarian stir fry sauce; white wine; lemonade.

The freezer portion of the fridge is pretty packed ATM…. I’m going with a best-bet effort here, because I’m honestly not 100% sure what is actually in the freezer.

Shelf One: Mini-vegetarian spring rolls (Pam’s brand, but actually really good); oven fries; mixed frozen veges; and 2x loaves of bread. I think there might be some more potato products at the back, but I’d have to pull everything out to find them.
Shelf Two: Hash browns, some frozen pasta dish from early 2009; ice cream container containing mixed peas & corn for easy access; English muffins; and ice cube trays (don’t need those so much in Wellington tho…)
Shelf Three: Frozen beans; Fry’s vegetarian somethings; curry pie(s); vegetarian dumplings; frozen corn; crumbed mushrooms (so much nom); a fish pie from a relative who doesn’t quite get the vegetarian thing (not going to eat it, but don’t want to waste it – will find someone to eat it sooner or later); and finally more hash browns.

As you’ve probably realised, my diet consists mostly of liquids, sauces and potato products based on these pictures. I live in the CBD and probably tend not to cook meals as much as I should, the convenience of getting something on the way home is very hard to resist.

Day 30- In this past month, what have you learned

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Since I started the 30 days of me challenge it’s been an interesting month – firstly it’s been great fun reading peoples posts, learning more about my friends and generally making my inbox a little more interesting than usual. :-)

It’s also shown how many people can’t be bothered keeping up with a challenge like this, heaps of people dropped off after the first few days, which is sad. :-(

For myself it’s been a reminder of how much I really enjoy blogging and how I should do it more – so I’m setting myself a personal challenge to do one blog post a day for the rest of 2010…. topics will vary from personal fluff to technical geeky awesomeness.

This month has also been a period of change for myself, I’ve been considering my future, whether I want to stay in NZ, go overseas and what I want my career to be.

Still a lot of unanswered questions for me that have yet to be decided, but I’m sure to keep the blog updated with the latest news. :-)

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed these posts over the past month, leave me a comment if you did, it’s nice to know if anyone actually reads the content that I spew out. ;-)

Day 29- Your favourite song.

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According to the original 30 days of me challenge, today was supposed to be “In this past month, what have you learned” and the final day 30 was to be your favourite song.

I think it’s much better to swap them around and to finish with the introspective self review – so being the pro-open, pro-freedom hacker than I am, that’s what I’ve done. ;-)

So today is “Your favourite song” and the more indepth post about what I’ve learnt in the past month will come tomorrow for you all to read over your Friday night drinks.

Favourite song is a tricky one, since I don’t have a single favourite, rather just stuff that I enjoy which is a massive list depending on what mood I’m in at the time.

So here’s 5 of my favourite tracks that I’ve been playing in the past few days:

Muse – Hysteria
Rush – 2112
Ensiferum – Little Dreamer
Rammstein – Pussy
Nighwish – Over the hills and far away

But there’s so much more, I could go on for pages…

Day 28- A picture of you last year and now, how have you changed since then?

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So this is me from around September 2009, busy posing in my vegetarian t-shirt with my horribly long hair at the time.

Since then I’ve adapted more of a corporate image which admittedly does look a lot better, as well as being *much* easier to look after and maintain.

What else has changed since then? I’m probably not as much of a happy person as I was then, this year has been interesting for me, learning a bit about myself, how I handle stress, being overworked but at the same time gaining experience and confidence in new areas.

And I’m making changes, ask me this question in 6 months time and there could be a very different answer. :-)