Random Toad

Brand: Union hand-roasted Bean: sumatra, extra fancy Region/Producer: Gayo Mountain Co-Operative, Aceh. Roast: Grind: Cafetière Test brew: Espresso Test Equipment: Kenwood Cremissimo Full bodied, deep rich taste, minimal bitter aftertaste, but not overly sweet. Very impressed. 4/5

The Open Source Solution Centre are running an information evening at the Seagoe Hotel, Portadown on Monday 30th March 2009, there’s more info hereand here. I hope attend and help convey what open source can do for business users and what the tangible benefits and advantages are. There is more information about the Open Source Solution Centre here. You can find more about Job Done Right, my open source consultancy and advice service here.

We both fluffed our vows, he fluffed his inauguration vow, I fluffed my wedding vow, only one is on the web for the world to see 🙂 there is no 2.

More unmissible stuff from @stephenfry Stephen Fry in America (BBC Micro Site) Episode 1: New World Episode 2: Deep South Episode 3: Misssissippi Episode 4: Mountains and Plains Episode 5: True West Episode 6: ?

I had an interesting challenge in work recently, we have 3 data centres running our applications, currently the RR DNS system does what it’s supposed to, spreads the data round each of the 3 DCs evenly. This works fine when all of your data centres have a similar capacity. But ours don’t. This causes problem when your load/traffic gets to the point where one of the DCs can’t cope. Now, there are many expensive and complicated solutions to this, this how ever isn’t one of them, it’s quite simple, has it’s weaknesses, but as you’ll see it’s also quite elegant.

Some pithy but true rules for technology consulting.

There’s a flaw in ssh-vulnkey, it doesn’t always show you the name of the file with an offending blacklisted key in it. Here’s a couple of ways round this: For a small machine, inspect the files by hand: strace ssh-vulnkey -a 2>&1 | grep ^stat64| grep -v NOENT| cut -d” -f 2| sort | uniq | xargs vi Or, a little longer, using ssh-vulnkey to find all relevant keys & reprocess them displaying the filename & then the result of the ssh-vulnkey for the individual file:

I wrote this some time ago, Thunderbird has moved on quite a bit since then (I’m now running 2.0.0.12 on my XP laptop), so here’s a quick roundup on the Add-ons/Extensions installed: British English Dictionary Hey, colour has a u in it. GMailUI mostly just so that I can use j/k to navigate around Lightening Quickly check my published calendars (also see this: exchange to ics).

Following on from Mark and others, this is my VPS, not my Ubuntu desktop, laptop or MacBook… simonm@mccartney:~$ uname -a<br /> Linux mccartney.ie 2.6.16.33-xenU #8 SMP Wed Sep 12 22:06:48 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux<br /> simonm@mccartney:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head<br /> 90 ls<br /> 73 cd<br /> 48 sudo<br /> 34 vi<br /> 17 svn<br /> 16 grep<br /> 13 cat<br /> 11 rm<br /> 8 cp<br /> 7 top<br /> simonm@mccartney:~$

Here: Site Reliability Engineer found from this rather find blog post