A Sourcesense colleague, after hearing that some people were questioning the value of Apache as a destination for open source software, asked me to clarify to him when Apache is, and isn't, a good place for your open source code.

Here's what I told him:

Today, my son dropped something on my keyboard. Off popped the 'p' key. The machine is out of warranty, so my only option is to knuckle down and fix it. After some period of fiddling, I'd worked half out, but was far from sure what I was doing with these surprisingly flimsy pieces of plastic.

I've just been asked how to pronounce my name. The following was suggested:

oo-PIE-uh-VEER-uh

Perhaps more helpful would be a sound file so here one is: mp3.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@       WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED!          @
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The RSA host key for odoko.co.uk has changed,
and the key for the corresponding IP address xx.xx.xx.xx
is unchanged. This could either mean that
DNS SPOOFING is happening or the IP address for the host
and its host key have changed at the same time.
Offending key for IP in /home/xxxxxx/.ssh/known_hosts:400
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

I have had a points system with colleagues for many years now. Basically, if you can show a colleague some a trick, that they will likely use, you score a point.

The nice thing about it is that I've never totted up the points anyone scores. Scoring a point is a satisfaction in itself.

And today a colleague scored a point: 

watch -d -n20 df -h .

Will run  df -h every 20 seconds. And even better, it highlights what has changed since last time.

Very useful. 

I need to create 2 million entries in a mysql table for some testing. Figured I'd use a bash script. The script took 10 minutes to write, but would took 1min39s to create the SQL for just 5000 rows. Extended inserts made no difference. I spotted that I'd used md5sum to create dummy data. Removing that speeded it up to 49s. Removing some debugging echo statements got me to 39s.

Finally, I decided to rewrite it in Python. 0.2s!! Now there's optimisation for you, and a lesson in when not to use bash.

I host a single page site for someone. Nothing big. A photo and their email address.

They asked me to change their email address on the site. Fair game. I went to look at their site. It said "It works!" and that was all. All reference to their site was gone on my server. Okay, must have forgotten to unpack it from my backup when I reinstalled my server. But no, no copy of it in my backup either. Oh. How do I explain this - this is very embarassing.

I'm working in an office today. The internet connection went down. We were told that it was some BT issue in the ISP's data centre.

Then, a colleague pointed out that the internet was back. Strangely, the only people who can now connect are myself and this colleague who are using Ubuntu Linux. Windows and Mac users still have no connection.

Very strange.

So, I'm in the market for work.

You can see my profile here. My recent work has been very varied, including both Java work (helping to maintain our java web framework) and systems work (bash/python, automating the maintenance of our server farm). 

 If you think there are ways I can help you, then let me know at:

Some while ago, my ISP told me that my host seemed to be being used to for junk traffic. Their answer: re-image my host. After a while, they went quiet, without me having done anything at all.

I took the point though. My host was a Debian based system that I installed some five years ago, and have not updated nearly frequently enough. My main reason for not upgrading was because my mail went through the box, with virtual hosting exim4 system that I installed way back, that I would stand little chance of reproducing quickly.