Yvan Seth's Hole in the Internet

With a new year well and truly underway, first week of work past and all, I thought I'd better reflect on things. Nah, stuff that. I'm off to Australia on the 15th, jumping from the sub-zero to the over-30 temperatures of the West Coast – perhaps even 40! We'll see. While I'm there my 30th birthday will pass, in lieu of having some sort of third-life-crisis I think I'll just enjoy the heat and sunlight.

Continue reading Snow!.

The Nightingale is what we consider our "local". It is a, mostly, relaxed and friendly locals' pub with great beer. There is a core of regular drinkers from an interesting variety of backgrounds, from foreign imports like ourselves to people who've lived in the area since the day they were born. From time to time there is live music, and other special events – but not every weekend (that'd be a bit much, some people want a quiet drink on a Saturday evening!) There's a huge half-covered patio area out the back, with summery BBQs and heaters for the poor smokers in winter (while I feel sorry for them, I'm glad of the smoking ban, without it I'd be outside or not going to pubs.) A lot of the activity in the pub revolves around the seasonal pool and darts leagues, there's also a Thursday dominoes league. Us, we're useless at pool and don't know how to throw a dart, we're there for the beer, company, and conversation.

Continue reading The Nightingale.

Some time ago I wrote about the GSSP-C exam. Being a certification non-believer I thought it would be interesting to have a poke at a certification. The one in question being the, at the time, new GSSP-C (GIAC Secure Software Programmer in C.) It seemed at least relevant to my work (mostly C/C++ back then) and my industry (the dirty world of infosec.) In general I was impressed by the practical resources and also by the message the people behind the exam (SANS) were trying to get across. Afterall… many software security issues are caused by bad programming, the GSSP-C seemed a worthy attempt to address this.

Continue reading Happy retirement GSSP-C!.

There are a lot more "Debian", aka Ubuntu, users around the place these days. In general it seems many newer users have been spoilt by Ubuntu's regular release schedule. Back in the old days we sometimes waited years between Debian releases, if there was something you needed that wasn't in your antique but "stable" Debian you'd have to use backports, if you were lucky enough to find what you wanted there, backport a package for yourself (thanks to the Debian package build tools being mostly friendly), or just compile from source.

Continue reading Backporting an Ubuntu/Debian Package - spatialite for Jaunty.