adrift on a cosmic ocean

Recently I wrote about getting my IPv6 tunnel setup working properly again after a while of it not working very well (or not at all). Since my ISP doesn't yet (to my knowledge) provide native IPv6 connectivity to regular consumers, I tunnel IPv6 via Hurricane Electric, which on the whole works pretty well. Another fantastic thing that my ISP does is throttle YouTube (and presumably other) traffic…

I've written a couple of times in the past about my use of IPv6 at home. Sadly the state of native IPv6 for consumers is not so much better, so I'm left without native connectivity to my router (to be fair, I have assumed nothing has changed but it is possible Deutsche Telekom is now offering it without making any fanfare about its arrival). So I still have the humble Hurricane Electric tunnel…

Disclaimer: I'm not what I would call a "hard-core" Chef user, but I'll explain in a moment why that is irrelevant. I've been working on and off with Chef for almost a year and a half now; certainly not something I use every day or even every week but perhaps a handful of times per month something will come up that requires me to jump into Chef land and get some real work done. There are…

If you are reading this successfully via my site, or some RSS feed, it means that my blog migration has been successful. I'm unfortunately a typical internet technologist in some regards - if the internet machines are working, I don't tend to spend much time maintaining them or planning any upgrades. The upcoming expiration of my domain name and shutdown of a trial VPS I had running for some time…

And now a break from my usual programming-related posts to bring you something back on the sysadmin side of the fence, for a change. I'm in the process of setting up a new VPS for myself, and probably will move my blog over to it when it is all set up. I say VPS, but really it is an OpenVZ container (which I guess passes for VPS just about as well). The critical difference is that you are running…

In day to day life as a systems engineer there aren't too many opportunities to build solutions based purely on theoretical studies or research papers - generally solutions are built for you and you "just" need to make them work, tie up the spaghetti, shave the yak and so on. Entering the world of programming and software development though, a lot of new problems come up that you can find your own…

I'm a long-time fan of simple UNIX tools that do one thing well and nothing else. At previous employers I've even taken great delight in asking interview questions in which the best answer would be a simple awk one-liner rather than a complicated multi-line catastrophe involving cat, grep, sed and perhaps even other tools. Poor interview techniques aside, awk is really useful, and if you have…

Well, well, well. One virtual "week" later, but two real world months later, I have finished the chapter on Erlang from Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. Based on the Git repository where I am recording my coding efforts through the book, I've been working at it for almost 11 months, which is slightly disappointing, but I have noticed during the chapter on Erlang a subtle shift in how my brain is…

We've been in the country for almost four years and I still feel like I don't have a very good grasp on the language. OK, there are indisputable differences between children and adults in language learning but that doesn't mean you can't learn a language in adult life. I just find that I procrastinate, and find it hard to prioritise the language learning into my daily routine. Sometimes it is just…

Yet another instalment in my journey through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks - this time on Scala. The iteration period has gone down significantly to almost an actual week, so that's some marked improvement on previous chapters! I would say that I haven't even really used Java seriously - what little I did in my university time I've forgotten, and I don't believe I was ever competent in the…