Work

Things are deceptively quiet, I've just finished up all the stacked up admin tasks from overnight and aside from one mystery user who I need to track down, it's quiet. Too quiet.

Play

After 25+ kernel compiles, I think I've nailed the 2.6 USB problems down to APCI weirdage. I've yet to put my theory into practice, though, as I'm also trying to work out why X also freezes within 15 minutes logging in. I've found a rather need tool for graphing mail throughput for postfix and I've also being playing with LRRD to make pretty graphs for postel.

Work

Rough day. We've had 4 machines with failed RAID sets to sort out, plus a rather important admin box with a bizarre filesystem fault plus another box which freezes almost randomly. All good fun.

I'm starting to wonder how anyone can use FreeBSD in a production environment. Ports is useful for installing but nearly useless for maintaining a server.

I've been chatting with a client to whom we sold a couple of dual Opteron boxes. They're having trouble saturating the servers with enough work. That's a good thing, I think :)

Play

I've been messing with the 2.6 test kernels at home with little success. I use Debian and there seems to be some issues with the packaged version of the hotplug software. I've not really investigated all that deeply yet, though.

An acquaintance of mine, who is a well respected IP lawyer, was good enough to share his opinion of the SCO case with me. You can read his thoughts here.

Well, that's bizarre. As you can see it's been over a year since I last posted, mainly because I'd completely forgotten about Advogato - sorry :)

Clues is still going strong and we're, fingers crossed, about to take on two more members of staff. Dave has been working quite hard on his GPL'd ACAP server called Infotrope and Steve, is, well Steve.

I'm told that around 90% of companys fail in their first year, so, given the current UK job market in the IT sector, I think we've done quite well.

Despite my vow to update this regulary, it's now been a whole month since I last posted here. I have recently learned that persuding someone to let you do work for them is one thing, persuading them to pay for it afterwards is another. Still, Clues is soldiering on.

In a little blast-from-the-past, I got an e-mail from a chap who'd bumped into a long abandoned SourceForge project of mine - a GUI mail client written in Kylix called suckmail. Jon's mail client is a lot more complete than suckmail was and it prompted me to download and install the open edition of Kylix 2 and the Indy sockets components. I may waste some time butchering Jon's code.

We now have a kitten, Sina.