sutton050

I just ran across this site which takes your CV (probably data mining everything about me) and it extracts your education, your experience and your personal insight to generate a value for you. I've just put my CV through this, here's the Skill Cloud.... it's not exact, I know for a fact "Comics" is not on my CV anywhere, B2B software isn't either... BiLingual is a stretch as I speak poor GCSE school French... And a bit of English... But the value it's placed on my CV is interesting.... That is a lot more than I earn.... A LOT more... How valid their valuation is, what metrics or heuristics they apply isn't made clear, it might just be a simple look up and tick the box followed by summing a set of weighted values.  But for my location this is not a realistic estimate, no-one would pay this for me here. Based out of London, New York or anywhere in California then maybe, but here in the middle of England.  No way. But I take this that my current employe

Yeah, I'm serious, I've taken time tonight to look at the release of Ubuntu Server 17.04, specifically to set up a new mini-server which is to be Core 2 Duo powered and on 24/7 as boot strapper & service strapping server itself. But, before I run I like to walk, so I set up a 2 core, 1GB RAM VMware machine from the 17.04 ISO... Take a look at the first thing it has presented to me.... Yes, just read that again... I booted the server... and the only action I took was to log in... Welcome to 17.04... All good... What wait?.. Why am I being warned to upgrade my 12.04?  This is 17.04? Before I ran around like my last vestiges of hair were on fire, I decided to do a simple test, I've previously found that Ubuntu often goes wondering off on the internet for message of the day (motd) information, so I pulled the network card (virtual) out of the machine. This results in a long boot time, but you at least know no remote files or services are going to be listing things on your s

Lets put this clearly, I don't believe in a set dress code (as in defining what anyone can wear) in technology, I've seen anecdotal evidence of the history of IBM where they insist on suits and sock garters and alsorts of things, I've seen companies demand you wear a suit - indeed I used to work in Formalwear production and had to wear a suit - I like suits, however, I don't believe they have a place in the everyday development office. If you're seeing customers, if you're "forward facing" then sure, dress up.  But smart casual is enough for me, what is "Smart Casual"? Jeans, sure.  Shirt, sure.  T-Shirt if it's plain, sure.  What's not... Well, how about a 30 year old sagging woolen jumper?  Please no, just no. What about a bright orange flair neck shirt which has its top three buttons missing and is worn by a hairy chested 1970's throw back?  Please god no. What about shoes?  Well, I wear a nice pair of Rockport leather shoes, t

As a systems admin, or dev ops, or whatever your job title might be, never ever assume that the person you're handing a system to has a clue.  This might seem harsh, but it's true, and proves itself true time and time again. "Assumption is the mother of all f**k ups" About a year ago I deployed a system which automatically sent requests to remote machines (via SMS) getting those machines to report their status or send back error information, but also to gather some basic information. It has run happily for a whole year, it has been all pretty plain sailing, the hours and hours of work I put into it, to automate it and keep it self-sustained have paid off, zero faults, zero down time, self-regulation is the way forward for me; even if it took slightly longer to put the system in place, it has needed no human input for nearing a year! However, the unit needed to move, about a week ago, it needed be physically picked up and taken out of my small server room and into the

I've just been party to a conversation about a project elsewhere in my work place, my team is not involved, I was observing passively (alright, alright, I was ear-wigging). The conversation was quite heated, one member of staff was adamant things were fine, whilst another was adamant they were inadequate.  The two of them were at complete logger heads.  The driver of the conversation ran like this: "We're not really designing software, we're asking everyone's opinion, writing it all down and only picking the things we really need to do" As an agile developer this is essentially how I run my team, we write every possible item down, everything and I weight them, schedule them and during out sprint hand-overs we reorg whom is going to tackle diffing parts of the system to share the experience and share different things. This chap however, was incredulous... He expressed "WRITING EVERYTHING DOWN" as a bad thing... He only wanted to do the things he felt

How robust is your back up solution?  Go on, be honest with yourself, how good is it?... Because I've seen a whole host of them and, at this very moment, this is the screen up on one of my servers.... Yes, my raid 5, just a test raid 5 with three really bad recycled SAS drives in it has failed; this doesn't surprise me, but it does delay me because I now have to rebuild the data... However, I know my data is good.... Lets see how good my back up is. This back up is coming from a DD created raw image of the virtual disk, stored to and soon lifted from my NFS accessible ZFS mirrored back up server. Therefore you would be right to ask, why are you rebuilding the virtual RAID disk in the above screen shot?  Well, I'm going to test my back up strategy! I popped the known bad disk and the good disks out, replaced all three and I'm able to test a restore to a new virtual disk set, I have a USB boot drive ready, this is a test. This kind of test, a real live restore, is sorely

Whilst cutting code I employ a coding style, which I enforce, whereby I output the scope of the variable being used with a prefix. "l_" for Local "m_" for Member "c_" for constant "e_" for enum And so forth, for static, parameter and a couple of others.  I also allow compounds of these, so a static constant would be: "sc_" This is useful in many languages, and imperative in those which are not type strict, such as Python. Some confuse this with "Hungarian Notation", it's not.  Hungarian notation is the practice of prefixing a type notification to the variable name, for example "an integer called count" might be "iCount". I have several problems with anyone using Hungarian Notation, and argue against it thus. With modern code completion and IDE lookup tools this is really not needed, with useful and meaningful naming of your variables the type is not needed and finally there are multiple types with the s