port7 - co - uk

So I am sitting writing this at my brothers computer in Edmonton, Julie is doing some last minute panic-packing and Niamh is in the land of nod, we end our 2008 Canadian Holiday.

It has been rather good, I have managed to kick someones screen door off (I didn’t see it, honest!), cast a spell over my brothers computer so that the PSU gave up the ghost just as I started using it, he DVD player also went on the blink when we arrived. We nearly lost the camcorder, and also Niamh took her first tumble down the stairs (pride hurt more than anything).

Despite all the excitement, we have had a great time, its been good to be here with family. To let Niamh get to know her cousin’s Noah and Colby a bit more, as well as her Uncle and Aunty. This is also the longest continuous time I have spent with her, so thats a good thing too.

We spent a few days up in the mountains in Banff at the start, and spent the rest of the time in Edmonton. Where we spent most days at West Edmonton Mall, as Niamh loved the free rides at Galaxyland, and also the world waterpark there.

Anyway if anyone is interested there is a flickr photoset.

It seems my musical prodigy of a brother now has a myspace page. Check it out, he describes his music as ‘ Acoustic / Experimental / Ambient’, its all self-taught and really took us by surprise a few years back.

Last night I had the opportunity to see Richard Stallman speak, he was in Manchester speaking at an event arranged by the Manchester Free Software Group.

I had seen Richard speak previously at FOSDEM a few years ago, but as the opportunity to see him doesn’t come up very often, especially on my doorstep I thought I had better go.

Richard spoke on Free software in general, first talking about the 4 Freedoms and why they are important, then onto the history of the GNU Operating System and also a little on Digital Restrictions Management. After that he took questions from the audience in his own distinctive style ;-). He also an introduction to the Church of EMACS, which drew lots of laughter from the audience.

It was a really enjoyable night, so thanks to all the people who worked hard behind the scenes to organize the event. I came away with renewed respect for Richard and his views, I hope he continues as he is for many years to come.

Reading an interesting post about community equity, some interesting thoughts there. I have been wondering myself recently about how business and community can help each other, getting involved in communities I think is a big step forward.

I may post more about this in the future….

Dear Lazyweb,

Can someone please tell me what the difference between NLPOS9 and IRES2 is? And what do I get over NLPOS9 by going with IRES2?

Is it drivers, is it admin tools, is it support agreements? What is it!!??

Prompted by a mail emergency yesterday, I needed ssh access to the outside world from my current assignment. I am on a network that only allows outgoing http and https connections.

After some digging, I stumbled across gotossh.com a useful service that allows you to essentially ssh from a webpage. I guess they use some sort of ajaxy java magic to encapsulate a ssh client. I know there are questions to be asked of the security of such a service, but it was an emergency and got me out of a hole.

One of the things it did allow me to do, was to ssh to my colo box, and join #manlug via irssi, and I got talking to rjek who said I should try ssh’ing to port 443, through the work proxy. Now I am sure I had tried this before without success, but still I thought I would give it a go. I set my colo sshd to listen on 443, configured putty to use the on-site proxy, and connect to my colo on port 443, and lo-and-behold it worked!

So I am now a happy bunny, with a few options for getting out to the world. I have since discovered corkscrew and also putty with file based config storage (rather than in the registry). Which is nice.

If anyone is getting mail bounced, they might want to check that the mail server is not configured to use ordb.org as I found out today.

I seems if your mail server is set to check ordb.org for spam purposes, it will blacklist everything, as of 26 March 2008.

See this article for info.

Just thought I would add my 2p to the world of comments regarding the announcement that Phillip Rosedale is stepping aside as CEO of Linden Lab, creators of the Second Life virtual world.

I think this is a good thing, Second Life and Linden Lab has seen phenomenal growth over the past few years, and few could disagree that SL has become the leading Virtual World and the one that all others are measured against. As Virtual Worlds are in their infancy SL has been at the leading edge regards the technology, and whilst there is still some way to go, it is now of a size and popularity that stability and service delivery are more important than implementing new features.

The reason I think it’s a good thing is that whilst Phillip has done a fantastic job of building this ship and getting it out of the dock, it needs someone with a different skillset to keep the ship steady in the stormy ocean that is delivering a stable service.

This does not mean that Phillip is leaving Linden Lab, just moving to be Chairman and focus on strategy and vision rather than CEO. I expect he will still be the man to be the spokesperson and do the rounds of conferences and speaking assignments too.

Just booked for a weekend in London, thought it would be a nice break.

I tried to get in at the County Hall Premier Inn, but alas that is fully booked up. But I managed to get somewhere just a bit further down the river. And it so happens that the new place is right next to Borough Market, the famous central London foodie haunt.

So having never been there before, can anyone offer any recommendations, of must-do’s?

Interesting post here on the Capgemini CTO blog, contemplating a future (if I read the post correctly) where licenced software products are a thing of the past.

It’s interesting in the fact that this has come from Capgemini, one of the big consultancies beloved of big business, are they ‘getting it’? This is where Open Source comes into it’s own, in value added services and support costs.

I am reminded by a statement from Mark Shuttleworth a few years back where he claimed that he saw the day some years in the future where the Open Source model would be the dominant model of software development and also delivery.