Once upon a time, a time that feels a very long time ago but I think was only a couple of years in the past, I spent some time regularly commuting to one of my clients.
Armed with a smart phone and headphones I discovered audio books and podcasts as an excellent way to make use of this time. I …
Thomas has reached the grand old age of one year. He accomplished this a few two weeks ago now. Two days after that I switched him to drinking his morning and evening milk from a cup instead of a bottle.
Along with this switch and the gradual phasing out of his baby formula over the previous three weeks, came the …
Following my previous discussion of experimenting with Django and deciding to use it for my next non SEOSS site, I can now announce my first Django site is live.
It is currently in pre-release and still getting lots of development attention. But if you happen to be a landlord who is wanting more from your spreadsheets then go and …
Time has flown (mostly in a sleepy, chore based blur) so fast that it was now almost three weeks ago that the latest addition to our family arrived.
Thomas was born on the 6th November by emergency caesarean section.
It was a slightly unusual birthing process that ended up including some natural labouring, an ECV, ARM, return to …
One of the projects that has been filling, a little too much at times, my recent non-parenting hours is now accepting entries.
The site is an addition to the Infiniti Formula 1 press site to provide competitions for people to design Formula 1 helmets (or a small non-advertiser section of them) that Sebastian Vettel will wear later in the season. …
I think I've been doing quite well at the cooking thing recently. Tonight was planned in advance and I specifically bought vegetables earlier this week. However somehow I have managed to forget the wraps, salsa and fajita mix for tonight's advertised menu. Only a slight oversight!
At least I realised before I started chopping vegetables.
Despite running down our supplies …
I have found the next Android phone that I'd like to buy. In fact, I have paid for the next Android phone that I want to have. However there is no guarantee it will ever arrive!
I need about 30,000 more people to also place an order for what I think would be the perfect new phone, otherwise it will …
Update: I revisited this Grails vs Django discussion in Jan 2015.
Before I met Grails I had spent several years writing my web applications in Perl, including work on two different in-house frameworks to try to make life easier! I also dabbled a little with Ruby on Rails but for some reason it just didn't stick (I think I prefer …
All Secure Domains now provides a dynamic DNS facility that should be easily scriptable and also compatible with common router implementations.
A few days ago I went downstairs for lunch and found Liz and the children trying to make balloon models. So I thought I'd better show them how it's done...
Those were my first two attempts (a dog and a swan, just in case they aren't obvious). :-)
Unfortunately I do need to add (if I don't, someone else surely …
Following my last post about children's books, I thought I'd just mention a few of my favourites (ie the ones I've enjoyed reading to my children over the last few years). Edward is getting a bit old for these now, but hopefully I'll get a few more reads yet with Sophie.
Over the summer holiday our local library has been part of the Story Lab project. Edward's school also promoted the project to all their children before the holiday started so he was raring to go!
This post is mostly to say that we (Edward included) thought this was a great idea and we've enjoyed reading and watching the website as …
Logcheck on a couple of Debian Squeeze servers has been sending me some errors for a while and I finally got time to track down the cause. The errors looked like this:
Aug 5 07:00:56 build1 ssh: getaddrinfo*.gaih_getanswer: got type "SOA"
It turns out that this is due to some scripted outbound ssh connections (in this case Jenkins polling a …
I recently had to investigate an LVS-NAT (via ldirectord) system that appeared to be adding a significant delay to many requests that were passing through it.
The HTTP requests I was looking at were taking around 600ms (with a very large variance) to complete via the director machine, instead of a consistent 35ms when made directly to one of the …
The Opscode wiki only provides some rather vague and incomplete hints for migrating Chef to a new server. Below is what I actually did and it worked for me. This is all running on Debian Squeeze and using Chef 0.10.8 from the Opscode provided Debian packages.
On the new server:
apt-get install chef-server
/etc/init.d/chef-server-webui stop
/etc/init.d/chef-server stop
/etc/init.d/chef-expander stop
/etc/init.d/chef-solr …Last weekend Sophie drew a picture of me, for me:
For the first time in quite a while, yesterday I caught a commuter train into London. I happened to sit in a section of nine seats. In the random collection of people in that set of seats:
Every year or so I am reminded that yet another year has gone by without the HMRC and Companies House fixing their awful electronic CT600 corporation tax return. If you're a company you don't really get a lot of choice about using this form once a year and these days it pretty much has to be done electronically.
I'm going …
A few weeks ago I ran the East Grinstead 10k. I managed it slightly slower than I was hoping (I blame the non-road surfaces and hills!), but it still wasn't too bad at 57:44.
My official position was 200/335 with my fellow runners John managing an impressive 139th and Chris just behind me in 202nd place. We all looked …
I administer (mostly through SEOSS) quite a few OpenVZ virtual machines and I recently wanted to create a clone of one onto a local system for some testing. Unfortunately I didn't have an OpenVZ machine locally, so decided I'd have a go at migrating the OpenVZ virtual to a local KVM instance. The process I went through is below. …