Day 08- Short term goals for this month and why

I have a number of goals for the next month or so, unfortunately not particularly exciting:

Complete a couple tricky work projects I’ve been working on and get a new release out the door for a couple products.
Pay off my credit card bill which is getting uncomfortably large (no thanks to Wellington’s delicious collection of takeaway stores).
Carrying on from the above, work on decreasing the size of my winter tummy ;-)
Work on expanding my company’s clientèle
Sell company for $10 million NZD. ;-)
Sell all the junk lying around my flat that I no longer want.
Make some more time for myself to de-stress and prevent burn out. Maybe in the arms of an attractive lady ;-)

Day 07- A picture of someone/something that has the biggest impact on you

This is a tricky one, there have been a lot of people who have had a great impact – friends, parents, colleagues, so I’ve chosen the event that had the biggest impact on me.

This picture is from linux.conf.au 2006, which was the very first linux.conf.au I ever attended, held in Dunedin NZ.

I had just left college and was looking for a job in IT at the time, planning to sit my RHCE in a couple months (which I did and passed), before taking my first job.

To say that linux.conf.au blew my mind, would be an understatement – before then I was a geek sitting in my bedroom, compiling linux systems from source and attending college with a bunch of time wasters – at linux.conf.au, I realised that I wasn’t alone and that there were hundreds of ubernerds like myself out there.

It was an entire week of geekery with some of the brightest minds and celebrities of the open source work, I came away from it with:

Dozens of new friends, some whom I still talk to on a semi-frequent basis.
Realisation that most geeks are a pretty friendly, awesome bunch to hang with.
Discovered, it’s normal to sit around on your laptop all the time.
Knew that I was on the right path with a life in IT.

But linux.conf.au also served as a point in my life where I formulated my ideas regarding ethics, open source, freedom and many of the views that I hold to this day.

Probably one of the most memorable experiences in my life – I still go to linux.conf.au every year and it’s still my most favourite week of the year and I always come back feeling excited and renewed with awesome ideas.

Day 06- Favourite super hero and why

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I’m not a huge superhero fan, I tend to prefer heroes who are (somewhat) bound by the real world yet manage to prevail.

However, I think if I have to choose one it’s going to be Ozymandias as of the Watchman movie fame (I haven’t read the comics, although from what I understand, the character is pretty similar in both).

There’s a number of reasons for this selection, mostly about the fact I can relate or admire him:

Self-made business man – duh, I run a company
Smartest man alive – my ego agrees :-P
Conflicted between superhero and supervillain, in the end destroys entire cities at the cost of millions of lives BUT knowing it will save billions and haunt him forever
Good at selecting hot ladies to hang around him (I mean, check out his cute PA)
Eye for design & theming – he has purple, I have amber :-)

If you haven’t seen the Watchmen movie, you should, it’s a masterpiece of cinematic brilliance, I loved it.

Day 05- A picture of somewhere you’ve been to

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I’m not the biggest traveller, I tend to usually travel for work or conferences – typically at least once a year for linux.conf.au.

It was tricky to find a photo at first, most of what I have taken overseas is of friends or cool conference stuff, but not so many sight-seeing pictures of different places.

What I’ve selected is the photo from when I was in Sydney for linux.conf.au 2007 and got convinced to do some sightseeing instead of sitting on my laptop IMing people who were sitting next to me the whole time. ;-)

Sydney Harbour, 2007

I remember it being very hot, very full of people and BIG. It’s hard to take in the scale from this picture alone, but near the bottom of the bridge you can see a small building. That’s actually a large block of flats – the bridge is absolutely massive, quite stunning, much more amazing to me than the Opera House or the city itself.

Day 04- A habit that you wish you didn’t have

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I have so many habits/attributes I wish I didn’t have, I don’t know where to begin…

I tend to often over-analyse situations and get all worked up over stuff.
I’m slightly egotistical or even narcissistic at times, which I hate – I recently watched Pirates of Silicon Valley and was deeply disturbed at how often I related to Steve Jobs :-/
I know everything. Or at least seem to act like I do. My friend Kai has a good write up about the same problem in better words than I could find.
I alternate between procrastination and productivity, which I hate – I like to always be productive, but sometimes it’s hard to get motivated.
I need to learn to keep my mouth shut at times – I’m pretty opinionated and this sometimes gets me into trouble. :-/

Day 03- A picture of you and your friends

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The challange for day 03 is a little tricky, since there are so many different people I could choose from, but also because I tend not to take photos when out with friends.

However I went out with my team from Amberdms to the Wellington tweetup at Hootch last night and got @amiemccarron to take a photo of the team. :-)

As you can clearly see I'm the evil manager, hence the glowing eyes and all the red relfections from the surrounding flames ;-)

As a side note, I think this is the first photo with all of us actually in it despite working together for about 6 months now. :-)

Migrating Outlook profiles manually

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As much as a I dislike Microsoft Outlook, we have a number of customers using it whom require support services and for the most part, it tends to meet their needs.

Like any Microsoft product, Outlook does have it’s own set of quirks and annoyances. In particular, the process of moving account mail and settings is much more complicated than competitors like Thunderbird who have a simple directory containing both config and files.

Whilst Outlook will use PST files for local email storage (don’t even get me started about PST files…) it doesn’t store the configration for accounts/settings as a file that you can copy across, so after moving to a new computer/account, the files can’t be re-imported.

This can be avoided if you use the windows migration tools, but these aren’t always appropriate for every situation, nor are they any use when you’re recovering selective bits of data from a backup.

The good news is that there is an (I think undocumented) way to copy the Outlook profile settings over to another computer/user.

To do so, run regedit and browse to the following location in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
                              \Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles

Whilst it’s all just blob data, these registry values contain your account settings and details for Outlook. By exporting the profile(s) from this location you can then re-import onto the new account/computer to retain all your settings.

When Outlook starts, it will remember all the settings (excluding passwords) and if it can’t locate the PST files in their previous location, it will prompt for the new one.

Day 02 – The meaning behind your Blog name

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Well this question isn’t a particularly exciting day 02 article – the name of my blog is pretty obvious. :-)

The name Jethro itself has a bit of a chain of history – technically I’m named after Jethro Tull (the band) which in turn is named after Jethro Tull (The Argiculturist).

In terms of the actual name, I believe the earliest reference to a Jethro is the Christian bible – apparently I owned sheep and one of my lazy staff at the time was busy getting visions from god instead of actually doing their job and looking after the sheep.

Naturally I’ve carried on this entrepreneurship to this day, except that instead of sheep I have a lot of servers. Oh and I only worship myself ;-)

nut and shutdown timers

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Network UPS Tools is a useful package for controlling UPSes with Linux servers – I recently moved to this package from apcupsd since it offers better integration with RHEL-style distributions.

Unfortunately the packages aren’t shipped with CentOS, so I’ve created some packages for it which can be downloaded from the Amberdms public repositories.

Most of the setup is pretty straightforwards (follow along with the online help) but the one issue that had me stuck was setting the time until shutdown, which would default to only two minutes – hardly enough for systems such as virtual machine servers.

Turns out this can only be adjusted by changing the settings on the UPS itself – in my case I was using an APC UPS.

You can get a listing with:

$ upsc YOURUPS

To change the timer (at least on APC BackUPS) you should run:

$ upsrw -u admin -p PASSWORD -s battery.runtime.low=SECONDS YOURUPS@localhost

The notes I read suggested that this should remain in the UPS settings, but in testing I found the value was reset – I suggest including the command in /etc/rc.local to ensure it gets run every boot time.

Day 01- A recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself

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To start of the 30 days of me blogging challenge here is the day 01 post containing 15 (hopefully) interesting facts about me as well as a recent picture (or three since I’m bit of a camwhore).

1. I’m somewhat of a workaholic. Actually, that would be an understatement, I’m regularly doing 60 to 80 hour weeks and spending far too much time on a computer.

2. My family unit consists of myself, mum, dad and a younger brother. Dad is from the UK, don’t have much to do with that side of the family, and mum is from NZ. Tend to see mum’s parents semi-frequently, but outside of that I don’t associate with my extended family.

Like my dad always says, “Family stops at front door”. ;-) I just tend not to see a need to associate with them when I share no interests, just because they’re family.

3. I run a Wellington-based IT startup company called Amberdms, focusing on open source software and solutions. This means I get no sleep, work insane hours and am constantly hurrying around doing ten things at once.

4. I’m single. I’ve dated a bit and had a few flings, but never really formed a proper relationship with anyone. I recently started dating again to (somewhat) disastrous and/or amusing results depending on your point of view ;-)

5. According to my twitter followers, I’m known to be obsessed with cougars. In reality, I tend to subconsciously fancy older women, simply on the basis that we tend to interact and relate better.

My dating age range tends to be 18-30, lately I’ve been exploring the upper levels of that range and met some awesome ladies, although I think the age gap is a problem for some – I fear I may be cursed to be single until I’m in my 30s :-/

6. I’m younger than I look or behave – many people believe that I am around 25 but that’s a little off…

7. There are frequent debates about my sanity. In my defence, I’ve never been *proven* to be insane. I’d also like to point out that genius often borders on madness ;-) I might also mention I have a slight ego here…

8. I got into computers properly around intermediate school and was hooked on Linux within my first year of college (high-school for you American/international readers), starting off with Mandrake 6 and later moving to Red Hat 8 and onwards.

For a couple years I had my own Linux distribution (Jedo Linux) as a fun side project, which also taught me far too much about packaging, compiling and how a Linux operating system fits together.

9. I’m a born and bred Wellingtonian, although have been to a number of places in NZ and AU, mostly for business or conferences. Don’t have any particular plans to travel in the near future, I like it here and business somewhat ties me to Wellington.

10. I’m a bitter, godless, atheist, I have very little time for religion – which will get me in trouble sometimes since I tend to open my mouth too much.

I think part of the problem is I can’t see any way someone could believe in religion and it really surprises me when I discover that someone I know has beliefs.

Having said that, I don’t really mind people who are religious for the right reasons (eg: caring about others, being good to people and having their own beliefs) rather than some religious believers who use it to try and silence or suppress things they dislike or try enforcing their beliefs via legislation or constant campaigning.

I’ve met some pretty amazing and caring people and cute couples who find that religion helps them, but I’m not sure it’s something I can ever understand.

11. Of course being a bitter godless atheist doesn’t mean I don’t have morals/ethics/beliefs – I’ve been lacto-octo vegetarian since 2008 and slowly moving towards veganism. This was slowly brought on by considering the fact that I’d never hurt a pet, yet was eating animals of equilivent intelligence, so I made the jump in 2008 and haven’t looked back.

I’m a pretty lazy cook, so I’m not exactly the most healthy vegetarian as you’ll quickly realise reading some of my posts/tweets. ;-)

I try to avoid being the whole “fanatical vegetarian” but I do have some pretty strong opinions about it and sometimes get into “vigorous debates” over the issue.

12. I flat with my friend Tom. Being a meat eater and opinionated, we tend to have interesting debates and philosophical discussions about just about everything anywhere.

13. I’m a strong believer in open source, my laptop runs Fedora Linux and running an almost entirely open source stack (there are a couple proprietary applications for work). Linux and open source has been a huge part of my life, both in getting me a job, but also as a way of making heaps of smart, fantastic friends and developing strong morals/beliefs about freedom, information, government and more. It’s probably one of the largest influences in my life.

14. At times I suffer from being somewhat egotistical and overly demanding with requests – something I’m trying to avoid.

15. I’m an infoholic – addicted to email, twitter and RSS feeds. I read almost every single message I ever get, which can take a bit too much time sometimes.