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Yesterday's NotCon was a winner. It was definitely a grass-roots geek affair, no corporate sponsors or goody bags, just something put together by a bunch of people who wanted to talk about and hear about personal projects various interesting geeks are working on. The start was delayed due to a "distributed denial of responsibility attack," as Danny O'Brien called it; "I was just doing what the wiki said."

Ewen Spence was another of the organizers, unmissable in his kilt. Check out his entry for details and links to other peoples' reactions, including plenty of pictures of rooms ful of geeks.

I enjoyed Danny's Life Hacks talk, which is supposedly going to eventually make its way onto a web site. This talk is basically "Habits of Highly Effective Unix Geeks", Danny has been reading lots of self help books of the organize yourself and get things done variety, and sent a survey to various prolific Unix hackers to find out how they organize themselves.

The social software panel was basically a bunch of guys doing stuff almost totally unrelated to social software, one guy basically plugged his Perl MVC framework (which could be used to build something like Orkut).

Music was a common themes, a lot of people were working on things related to distributing music.

The laptop distribution was interesting - Macs dominated, massively. There were probably about 80% Macs, 18% Linux, and 2% Windows, based on my eyeball survey. Dan was using a Mac which he had obviously moved to quite recently as he was fumbling around a good bit and taking shouted usage tips from the audience.

Danny, Dave, and the other organizers do a lot of things to help people use the Net for political activism, and there was a good panel on that. There was a talk on "Stalking your MP", which was basically encouraging people to start a blog for your MP if they don't have one already, and use it to browbeat them into starting their own site. the Public Whip puts voting records online, and the big new unveiling was They Work For You. This parses the record of Parliamentary debates which is published as a big, nearly unusable text file, and basically links it up so it's searchable, linkable, cross-referenced, feedable, and can be commented on. A very cool use of technology to open up the political process.

Test how Southern you are. It's a pretty rigorous test, I've lived in the South on and off since I was a kid, but not enough; I got 30 out of 71 questions. "Ranking: You need some real work, Yankee."

I'm looking forward to NotCon this Sunday, which looks to be a gathering of down to earth techie types doing interesting things with technology. "An informal, low-cost, one-day conference on things that technologies were perhaps not intended to do." Cool. No I won't be lugging my laptop and blogging it live, although it's possible there will be some sort of streaming video and/or IRC type action.

Brick Lane is basically "Little Bangladesh", a road in the East End of London which is jam packed with Indian restaurants, mostly specializing in Balti dishes. If you dig Indian food, you absolutely must try it. When my Dad, Charlie and Denise all lived in London we had the goal of eating in every restaurant on Brick Lane, but lost track.

Another great feature of Brick Lane is the 24-hour Bagel shop at one end of the road, a legacy of the days when this was a Jewish neighborhood (before which it was a Hugenot neighborhood). Actually there are two bagel shops, but one is almost always deserted while the other is always packed. They bake bagels and pastries in the shop, and you can buy them for 10 pence each.

Anyway, the last time we visited Brick Lane we were annoyed by touts, who have become more agressive and numerous since "our day". Apparently the local council is concerned that the touts are getting out of hand to the point where it may turn people off of Brick Lane and hurt business. It would be nice if the restaurant owners realized what a turn-off the touts are and put a stop to it themselves.

Via the Big Smoker

I've added a new book to my shortlist of bibles for Systems Administrators. The Purple Book is another must-have for Unix admins, as is the Unix Power Tools book. But this one isn't just for Unix admins, it applies to anybody managing multiple systems.

It's a meaty book, with a satisfying heft that isn't fluffed out with purty pitchers or code listings. Although its approach is to avoid being platform-specific, so as to appeal to both Unix and Windows (and probably miscellaneous), it isn't wimpy. The authors cover nuts and bolts of why you should buy proper server hardware rather than put your exchange server on a desktop machine, stick it in a rack with proper rack-mount rails rather than on a shelf, etc. Meat and potatoes stuff.

The value of this book is that it does approach things from the "why" perspective, especially "why" from the point of view of someone who needs to manage a bunch of systems. It's the kind of thing missing from OS manuals, which tend to focus on "how". The fact that it's not vendor-specific means they can take a realistic attitude about selecting tools and processes, rather than just advocating whatever comes with the system and is recommended by the vendor.

I highly recommend this book for any sysadmin who is learning about the best way to manage a group of systems, which, let's face it, should be any sysadmin whatever their skill level. Check out the table of contents for a feel for what it covers.

So the makers of the software I use for this website, a company called SixApart, have released a beta of the new version, which is supposed to have been rewritten to make it easier for Perl-heads to modify. Unfortunately, they've also changed their licensing policy, which is potentially going to force many users who have gotten used to having it free to pay to upgrade.

It's funny, in the zillions of posts about the upgrade, I have yet to see a single person comment on what's changed technically. I would like to give it a spin, but probably won't have time for a while. But I'm curious, because one of MT's weaknesses has always been that it's fairly inflexible, so I'd like to hear how good a job they've done to improve that.

Personally, I'm not that burned about the new model. Partly it's because I'm still entitled to use it for free - I would only need to pay if I had more than one person posting here. I think it would cost $69 if I wanted to use MT for a blog with up to 4 friends, which doesn't seem horrible. I do think they could have made the licensing a bit more liberal, personally I'm a fan of the model Dan Bricklin recently suggested for a small software company. A month or two ago I had pondered the best way to structure licensing if I ever get around to setting up my own company, and what I came up with is almost exactly what Dan suggests.

But even if it's not my personal preferred model, and does have some rough edges, I think SixApart have done a couple of very smart things with their new model. The best thing they've done is open things up for third parties to earn money from their software. Their license used to esentially forbid consultants and hosting companies from charging clients to set up and host MT.

This has always struck me as counter-productive. I guess the intent was to give SixApart a monopoly on consulting and hosting revenues, but doing that severely limited their ability to grow. Other than users who are technically literate and can install and support themselves, your revenues are limited by your staffing levels. If you let third parties make money from your software, they'll go out and sell copies to their clients, with little added cost to you.

Movable Type is a good piece of software. The static publishing model is one that should be a no-brainer best practice which dramatically improves the scalability and reliability of a website. But very few other blogging or CMS applications use it. I hope the user community will get over its outrage, and that SixApart will smooth out its licensing and prosper for many years.

I've been at my current job for over a year and a half, and now I'm moving on. I love the company I work at now, but my role within it has become more and more mired in IT management, as opposed to developing products and services. It's certainly been a useful experience, I've gotten to manage the IT budget, wrestle with building an infrastructure to manage loads of systems, and play with different server technologies. I've strengthened my knowledge of OS's (especially Linux) and networking, but it's time for a career course correction.

My new job is Java development, which is great. I love Java programming, but lately for me it's dwindled to occasional tinkering with our in-house build management system and some personal projects, and getting vicarious thrills from reading Java Blogs. Getting back into a fulltime development role is what I really need, otherwise I'll soon become unemployable. Already it was tough getting through the screening of recruiters with only a dim understanding of technology, who look at my current job and don't see the right keywords.

Ironically, I had several experiences of recruiters not forwarding my CV to a company until several weeks later (i.e. after they've tried out candidates they thought had a "better fit"), but then I did very well once I got through. People actually working on Java based projects can see the value of someone with a good development background who knows application servers very well.

So what's the new gig? It's a startup company, well-funded by VC's, which builds and runs mobile phone services (e-commerce type stuff) on a Java-server platform, mostly SMS and WAP. I like it because it's heavy Java server side (Weblogic, Unix, Oracle) development, and also involves managing the application, so I still get to do the service management. I especially like the fact that I'll be working on applications owned by my company, rather than building or managing something for clients - the dynamic is just different, and in my experience more satisfying.

I also have a feeling of timewarp, going to a small startup with VC funding, which is offering stock options and doubling its users every month. The other day I saw a grown man on one of those push-scooters, which I took as a sign. But this time around I think I'll stay away from the stock market.

So I reinstalled again, this time selecting the core software group and not monkeying with the defaults. Yesterday I had added a few things. It's still a crippled installation, no "man", no decent shell, etc. This would not be bad, after all a minimal install is a reasonable thing to expect when installing only the core packages.

But you'd like to have a fairly convenient way to start with that minimalist system and install new packages on top. How about a tool that lets you walk through the packages available on the installation CD, tagging ones you would like to install? Nope. How about letting me mount the CD so I can trudge through the packages by hand, reading description files (or using a references to the packages) and running pkgadd on the ones I'd like to add?

"No soup for you!" shouts the Solaris installer.

The core system install doesn't include the volume manager, so you have to mount the CD by hand. Not a horrible thing for the veteran Solaris admin, but I guess I'm not veteran enough. You see, the Solaris 9 installation CD is partitioned into multiple slices, which are the Solaris version of disk partitions, and the slices don't all use the standard CD file system format. The slice that mounts with the usual mount command isn't the one with the packages on it. There may be an incantation that will let me mount the slice with the packages without shouting "bad magic number! Bad, BAD magic number!", but I couldn't Google it out. So in the end I put the CD on a running Solaris box and ftped the volume manager packages to the new box. Thank hell the bare bones Solaris install at least includes an ftp client!

I feel like such a newbie, even though I've been managing Solaris boxen for at least 7 years now. I guess most of what I've been doing in the past few years is running existing boxes; my last install was a Solaris 7 box, back before the millenium rolled over.

Still, it shouldn't be this hard.

So I installed s2putty ssh client on my shiny new 6600 phone, but it doesn't appear to work with OpenSSH on Solaris. It connects to my server, but complains that the server won't enable compression. OpenSSH doesn't appear to support compression on Solaris, at least not while privilege separation is enabled, which is a pretty fundamental security measure.

Having the ability to show my geek friends an "ls" of my home area on my phone would be cool, but not cool enough to open a security hole on my server. I don't currently have any Linux boxes with ssh ports open outside a firewall, so that's the end of this for now.

So I finally managed to get Solaris 9 installed on an old sparc box here at the office. It turns out there was an option before the software selection for which I accepted the defaults, and which imposed a bunch of package dependencies outside the core software group. The problem is, I appear to have missed some important packages such as, oh, "man". So I'm going to have to comb through the available package to figure out what else belongs.

Once I get a decent, vanilla core system I will try to make a Flash installation CD, which can be used to clone the current setup. I have another spare Sparc box handy to test it on, although I'm going to have to dig up a power supply and some RAM since we have used the box several times as an organ bank for ailing development servers.

Another problem with the Solaris installer is that it did a poor job of picking up its network settings. Although I told it to use DHCP to configure itself, and the DHCP server shows it made some requests, the installer still prompted me for its domain name and DNS servers, which it then claimed were "incorrect". And when I booted the newly installed box, it had not picked up its hostname (and it never asked me for it), so it called itself "unknown" until I set it manually.