In both cases, I was contacted out of the blue by a Google recruiter. The first time I had been considering looking for a new role and pursued it immediately; the second time I hadn't been and put off the recruitment process for several months, during which the same recruiter contacted me again twice to follow up. If nothing else, that's a nice ego boost, but a more cynical mind might be considering the shotgun approach to a narrow recruiting filter and commissions :D

First, a quick data point, I was applying for an SRE(SA) position on both occasions - Site Reliability Engineer (System Administration), because in most of my roles to date, I've been doing both sysadmin and development work and I've never seemed to drift towards one pigeonhole or another. SRE(SA) seemed optimal - interesting sysadmin work on large-scale systems and quite a bit of tool-writing to boot. This was decided on between myself and the recruiter, based on the self-assessment form you are given to fill out. I would love to know how they get around illusory superiority and the Dunning-Kruger effect with those forms, especially given the wierd bias they'd have in the dataset from having so many of the best in their fields working there.

Both times, the process proceeded in the same way:

 As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been planning a move from wordpress.com to my own dedicated server for a while now, not only for this blog but also for On Target and Wallpaper and herself’s book site. I said I’d write things up once I was done, so…

Step one in this process was local testing. I already had a LAMP stack running locally on the r61 so I just had to create a directory, download the latest wordpress.org tarball and untar it into that directory, then edit wp-config.php, create a database for the site to use, and walk through the automatic install. Very easy, very clean, and took about ten minutes all told. Got to hand it to wordpress there, the man-hours that have gone into streamlining and debugging the install process really shows. Once it’s installed, I went back to the wordpress.com site, exported the blog and imported that into the local wordpress.org site, downloading the images and uploads as I went. It worked almost flawlessly, let down only by timeouts as my typical Irish "broadband" proved to be more "slimband" once more. Afterwards, though, the local blog and wordpress.com blog were nearly identical. Now I could install every plugin and theme and play about with them.

Step two was registering domain names. It’s step two because wordpress will allow you to map a domain name to an existing blog, and I hoped that would ease the handover slightly. However, wordpress.com charge you per domain, so I just mapped one.

Step three was to get the dedicated server itself; the choice for me came down to either server.lu or Hetzner and in the end I chose Hetzner’s DS3000 server offer. I did try to buy Irish, but noone comes even close to the offers Hetzner and … Read the rest

Over the next two months or so I plan to move this blog over to a dedicated server, not because wordpress.com is bad, but because wordpress.org just offers a lot in terms of themes and widgets and things to play with (and because I want the server anyway for various programming projects, and it may pull duty hosting On Target and Wallpaper and herself’s book site as well).

Step one in this process was to install wordpress.org on a local LAMP stack on my laptop and that’s done and I’m playing about with it and maybe I’ll write something up on that later, I’m planning on writing about the entire process of switching from wordpress.com to wordpress.org anyway.

Step two was registering domain names. It’s step two because wordpress will allow you to map a domain name to an existing blog, and that eases the handover slightly. So far I’ve only mapped the one domain, but the others will all become active over the coming weeks. So in a few weeks, you can read this blog at all of the following:

• http://stochasticgeometry.com (this one is live at the moment, in fact it should be in your address bar)
• http://stochasticgeometry.mobi (in a mobile format, naturally )
• http://stochasticgeometry.net
• http://stochasticgeometry.org
• http://stochasticgeometry.eu (because why the heck not?)
• http://stochasticgeometry.ie (this may become the primary domain name in fact)

Step three : Profit!

Actually, step three is to source the server, but the underpants gnomes are funnier…

One of the problems with running a dual boot WinXP/Linux system, apart from the fact that you rarely boot into Windows except to play games (and so you tend not to play games much – though FreeSpace2 SCP is helping there!), is that if you have a shared media folder that sees frequent creation and deletion of large files (say, for example, if you were bittorrenting cookery shows or news shows on a daily basis), the shared media folder tends to lead to a high fragmentation rate on the Windows partition (it has to be on the Windows side because while Linux can read and write NTFS with ease thanks to ntfs-3g, Windows has… issues with ext3). As in, 62% fragmented.

And then you start to realise why your dual-core 64-bit 3GHz machine with the 4Gb of RAM is stuttering while you’re trying to learn how to make pork wellington (like beef wellington but with pork tenderloin).

So you boot into Windows, flag the partition as dirty because the defragger won’t work until chkdsk runs, reboot to run chkdsk (which takes three hours to complete), then log in and fire off the defragger. A dozen times. And then, with fragmentation at 59%, decide to try a better debugger. Download the free trial of O&O and fire that off, and wait….

and wait….

and wait….

…*sigh*

That’s a whole day and all night so far, and still the damn disk isn’t happy.

I’m seriously thinking of just saying “Feck it” and erasing the Windows partition, expanding the Linux partition to take the whole disk and just using Virtualbox (which I do 95% of the time that I need anything on windows – which is literally to maintain one single diagram that hasn’t been translated from Visio to Dia/Inkspace/Xfig yet, and to … Read the rest

The more you look at legislation in this country, the nastier an opinion you develop about it. You’d be able to forgive minor errors, small awkwardnesses, even larger problems so long as the common good was served, but the more I look at statute law in Ireland and more critically, at how it is drafted, the less charitable I feel about the drafters. Much of the stuff I see, I see through the Firearms Acts – that stuff I talk about elsewhere.

This time, though, it’s more apropos to here. The new Broadcasting Bill 2009, currently on it’s last stages in the Oireachtas and about to become the Broadcasting Act 2009, has a lovely little sting in it.

In section 140 (the definitions), it defines “television set” to mean:

any electronic apparatus capable of receiving and exhibiting television broadcasting services broadcast for general reception (whether or not its use for that purpose is dependent on the use of anything else in conjunction with it) and any software or assembly comprising such apparatus and other apparatus;

Nice little bit there. What it basicly means is that if you have no TV and you watch Youtube over your broadband connection (or download video footage and watch that), then you need to have a TV licence.

Yeah, that’s a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? We’ve the worst broadband rollout in the EU, in a nation where we prided ourselves on being the gateway to the EU for IT companies, where we have fancy plans for rolling out high-speed broadband to every sheep farmer in Mayo (and wireless broadband for their iPhones while they’re out with the sheep); and now we’re charging a 160 euro tax for those who opt to have broadband installed.

You wouldn’t mind if there was … Read the rest

After the debacle that was the attempted upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, I sat back and thought about using Ubuntu for a while. In fact, I’d been thinking about it when I wrote the blog post on the upgrade. And the conclusion I came to was this; I started using Linux with Debian, way back in the days when 3.0 was in testing; I used it on my desktop, on my laptops, on my robot, on the lab server and anywhere else it could fit; and I stayed with it up to the point where I needed some hardware support and was too lazy to build from source, and tried Ubuntu because “all the cool kids were doing it”.

And that was a bad mistake. They may bar me ever re-uping with SAGE for saying something as basic as this in public, but stability is far more important than having the suspend-to-ram function working or faster graphics regardless of whether it’s a mainframe or a laptop, if that is, you’re actually doing work with your computer. I did know that at one point. I blame reading too many Rails sites

At any rate, plugged in the external 1394 hard drive, backed up everything (~50Gb in under an hour, sweet), stuck in the netinst cd for Debian Lenny’s amd64 version (feck it, if it didn’t install, I had the i386 handy as a fallback), walked through an incredibly improved installer process, and now I have a pristine system running Gnome, KDE (3), Openbox, Windowmaker, XFCE, LXDE and matchbox (for a project).

The only nonstandard thing in here is that I went and got the 1.2.1 version of Mercurial from the testing repository by hand because otherwise it wouldn’t hg pull from the 1.2.1 repos in the lab.

It’s … Read the rest

What *bangs head on desk* was *bang* I *bang* thinking?

I tried KDE4 before, I didn’t like it. I downgraded back to KDE3 just to get something that worked. I know my new toy upgraded to Intrepid without problems, but that was running Xubuntu, not KDE, so why did I think that a quick apt-get dist-upgrade to Kubuntu 8.10 was going to work on the machine I have all my precious, precious data on?

Argh! This is becoming unacceptable. The whole point of an upgrade is to improve the functionality of the system. In my case, the Intel wifi driver was happily causing kernel panics and locking the machine solidly, with only a sadly flashing caps lock light to indicate that it wasn’t merely “thinking about it”, that it was really right off the deep end into la-la-land and wasn’t going to make it home for supper. Ubuntu forums indicated that the problem is fixed in Intrepid, and it’s been out for a good few months now, long enough to work out the kinks. Right?

Yeah, right.

Not only is the problem not fixed, it’s far far worse – kernel panics every five minutes or so in fact. That’s unbelievable. I had fewer panics than that while writing device drivers for 2.4 for crying out loud. Worse, nothing else works properly either. KDE4 design choices aside, things like menus and submenus render by blotting out a chunk of the screen and then filling it, so you get this distorted and torn section of the screen for a half-second or less before the menu appears. That’s just klunky. Bluetooth, it turns out, doesn’t work at all. It’s in the release notes. Along with a dozen other failings.

Look kubuntu folks, a little word here. A system as large … Read the rest

Just been added as the moderator of the Servers and Systems forum on boards.ie. This should be fun