Older blog entries for ianmacd (starting at number 57)

Still unpacking in the new apartment and still settling into the new job. These things take time.

Sarah and I got engaged while in England, but haven't yet set a date for the wedding. The venue is also unknown, but is likely to be somewhere in New England. It won't happen any earlier than next spring, with the summer being a likelier bet.

Godverdomme, ik ga trouwen. Ongelooflijk! Nu maak ik me al zorgen over hoeveel mensen er zullen zijn aan mijn kant van de kerk...

We drove up to San Francisco on Saturday and spent five hours with a jeweller before finally finding the ring we wanted. So, now I'm skint again. Je moet er wat voor over hebben.

Back from holidaying in the UK, back at work at Google, and in the process of unpacking in our new apartment in Palo Alto. It's been a busy time as usual.

Currently playing with Netgear RT314 router/firewalls. Give me iptables over this thing any day of the week.

So, two full weeks have now passed since starting my new job at Google. It's a very interesting experience, and culturally worlds apart from my previous employer, Linuxcare. It will take me a while to get used to working in an environment where the intellectual property is considered essential business leverage and not an abomination, where all company information is treated as privileged and confidential, and where inventions are patented, not released for incremental improvement. I guess this explains why my best efforts to find any of my new colleagues on Advogato turn up blank.

Right now, I feel rather useless in my job. I'm a sysadmin with very little clue how each piece of the infrastructural puzzle fits together to make the whole. I already have business cards and a cell phone, but am not yet self-sufficient in my work. These things take time. No doubt I will one day yearn for my erstwhile empty plate and lack of responsibility.

So, what else is going on?

Well, Sarah and I are moving to Palo Alto this coming Thursday. That will place me within healthy biking distance of work (Sarah will be a lot further away, since she still works in San Francisco) and give us a much roomier apartment with lots of daylight, a swimming pool, etc. I won't be sad to leave the dinginess of our current apartment behind. We'll be getting a lot more for our hard-earned cash in Palo Alto.

The day after that, Sarah and I fly to England for two weeks of holiday fun in London, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. I can't wait.

hacker seems to have come up with exactly the same basic CVS completion routine for bash that I wrote and that is included in the source distribution of bash 2.05, as well as on the Linuxcare BBC.

Incidentally, bash 2.05 improves the completion facility significantly with the addition of the -o parameter to complete. So, if you need CVS completion in bash 2.05, use this instead:

_cvs()

 {
        local cur prev

         COMPREPLY=()
        cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
        prev=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}

         if [ $COMP_CWORD -eq 1 ] || [[ "$prev" == -* ]]; then
                COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W 'add admin \
                               checkout commit diff \
                               export history import log \
                               rdiff release remove rtag \
                               status tag update' $cur ))
        fi

         return 0
}
complete -F _cvs -o default cvs

This is as basic as it gets, since there's no attention paid to any switches, but it does cover a great many cases of basic CVS operation. If someone could extend this to cover all of the cases, as I have done for rpm, that would be great.

Since joining Google, I've added p4 (Perforce) completion and intend to extend my iptables and tcpdump completion routines when time allows.

Anyway, I need to get packing, or we won't be ready for our move on Thursday.

We drove down to Palo Alto this evening to sign the lease on our new apartment. It's expensive, but 1000 square feet will come in very handy.

Anyway, the lease is now signed and the deposit paid. We'll move in on or around 1st August.

It's hard to believe that just a couple of months ago, I was deliriously happy at Linuxcare and had no plans to leave San Francisco. How quickly things can change.

There's a great little storage area in the new place in which I can build out a network and connect DSL. I can't wait to get started on this project.

I may also need to get a third bike, this time a decent mountain bike, to take advantage of all the off-road trails in and around Palo Alto.

dyork, thanks for your good wishes. Incidentally, the fix for your rpm problem is not to upgrade to rpm 4.x, but to install 3.05 or later, since these versions can also read 4.x RPMs. I think 3.07 is the latest 3.x version.

Things are moving rapidly.

Not only did Google inform me yesterday that I can start work as soon as I like (the receipt of the H-1B transfer application came through -- woo hoo!), but we also viewed a great apartment in downtown Palo Alto in the evening.

Another prospective tenant had first refusal on the place, so we waited with baited breath today to see whether she would accept it. Fortunately for us however, the other party needed more time, so it was offered to us.

So, within a few weeks, Sarah and I will be going to live in sunny downtown Palo Alto, starting a new chapter of our lives in the process.

A new job, a new place to live...

I feel good.

So, my last day at Linuxcare was on Friday and I'm now officially between jobs.

I thank my lucky stars that I have the requisite skills to have survived so many rounds of lay-offs, was able to resign of my own volition in my own good time, and secured multiple other offers in the midst of this economic downturn.

I'm glad I'm not a junior admin any more. I interviewed several to replace me at Linuxcare and the job market is not a pretty place to be selling your wares right now. If you're unemployed, you need to have some senior level skills to find decent work right now.

So, this week will see me viewing apartments in Palo Alto and probably enjoying a few biking trips, as I make the most of my free time before going to work for Google next week. If there's time, I intend to brush up on some of my low level TCP/IP and programming skills. I desperately need to brush up on my C coding.

And so begins my last week at Linuxcare, as I hand over the reigns to my successor, Rodney.

It's a bittersweet time in my career, because I usually leave a job only when I feel I have outgrown it. This time, my employer has outshrunk me.

Such is life, though. I take with me some very valuable lessons, many of them non-technical.

Sunday was spent looking for a new apartment in Palo Alto, which Sarah and I will move into some time in August or September. We saw a couple of decent ones in complexes, but the rents are pretty steep because of all the extra facilities they include that we'll never use.

I would like to live on the corner of Homer and Emerson, since there's a Whole Foods, a Mexican restaurant, and a good breakfast place, all at that intersection. Getting a place around there will be a pretty tall order, though.

We spent time with a couple of Sarah's friends this weekend, so didn't get an awful lot done. I downloaded Mozilla 0.9.1, which took two hours over a modem and then another three to compile on my laptop.

I'm kind of looking forward to my time off work next week, although not as much as I would be if I still lived in Amsterdam. I don't have many friends in the Bay Area, don't have a computer at home, don't have DSL, etc. It could be a lonely time and I definitely don't want to end up watching daytime TV, since American TV is the worst in the civilized world as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe I'll go travelling, although international travel will be out of the question because of visa considerations. Santa Fe would be nice, but Sarah wants us to go there together. Maybe I'll head up to Washington and visit Mount St. Helens. I don't really feel like travelling alone, though.

Whatever happens, Linuxcare and I will have parted company by the end of this coming Friday. So ends another chapter in my illustrious career.

I interviewed a number of candidates today for the role of successor to the throne of Linuxcare's senior system administrator.

In just a couple more weeks, all of this will be someone else's er... concern.

I'll be conducting more interviews tomorrow.

I went for a bike ride today on my Koga Miyata Randonneur, the first time I've used it since having KLM ship it over here. How shameful!

pompeiisneaks had to turn back after the Golden Gate, due to breathing difficulties, but Matt and I continued on up the Marin Headlands.

Matt stopped to take some photos with his Nikon Coolpix 950 (the same model of camera I have), so I continued up the hill before eventually encountering Andrew G., a fellow Linuxcare employee. We biked to the summit together and chatted for a while in the sun, until eventually joined by Matt.

Then, the three of us enjoyed a great downhill experience, although weaving in an out of the cars is a real pain in the arse.

We continued down to Sausalito and enjoyed milkshakes and ice-cream in the June sun of San Francisco Bay. If this sounds like a simple pleasure, it is, and I am grateful for it. It reminds me of the joy I used to experience in feeding the newborn ducklings in the Sarphatipark, back in Amsterdam.

Biking always has a great purging effect on my mind. Everything suddenly comes into focus, you become acutely aware of your own wonderful insignificance, and return home with a refreshed view of your life.

Conclusion: Sarah is the only thing in my life that truly matters right now, and she matters more than anything else that has ever figured in my four-and-thirty years on this earth.

So, what else has been going on lately?

Well, I've been playing with iptables a lot, including multiple match extensions. Stateful firewalling has brought Linux to the stage that it really can rival a Cisco PIX for securing a company's networks.

Last week, we got the new Linuxcare network up and running in San Francisco. I also bid a fond farewell to fellow sysadmin, Matt, with whom I have had so much pleasure working. Thanks for everything, Matt.

I'll still see him on our biking trips, but it saddens me a lot to no longer be able to work alongside him. The same goes for Phil, Anne and Kelly.

The sadness of seeing my merry band of colleagues erode in this way has led me to conclude that my best time at Linuxcare lies behind me. I've therefore decided to call it a day and move on to a new chapter in my life.

Accordingly, I'll be going to work for Google in a few weeks. There are some serious technical challenges to rise to down there in Mountain View, and I'm very excited about joining the team. If only the bloody H-1B transfer would hurry up and come through!

Since I don't fancy the hellish commute along highway 101 south, Sarah and I will probably end up moving down into Silicon Valley somewhere at the end of the summer. Palo Alto has my vote, though that may be too far for comfort, considering Sarah's commute into San Francisco.

Exciting times lie ahead, I'm sure.