My working environment

It's not a good title. But I can't think of a better one right now. Here's a first hack at a diagram of my day-to-day comms setup. It's only a start, and doesn't cover a bunch of stuff. I'll add to it soon.

The green arrows represent places I input. The blue ones, places I (or others, more on that later) view stuff. Most data paths are labelled with the protocol or protocol families used.

I'm very proud

to announce that IPv6 has affected me, in actual real life.

We run a moodle server. It's pretty important. We run it in a DMZ, and it's protected by a commercial firewall product. It's running on Ubuntu Gutsy server, and we spent Monday and Tuesday upgrading all 30-odd instances from moodle 1.72 to moodle 1.9 . This went very well and proved very easy.

We also did a whole bunch of ubuntu package upgrades, which cowardice had caused me to shy away from till now. I mean, how comfortable would you be if aptitude upgrade told you the kernel would be removed?

Aaanyway, we did it, and it all worked. Except now, it was dog slow. Like 40 seconds to return a page. So, off I went on the now familiar hunt for the wotdidIdowrongthistime bird.

I'd noticed a long pause at the start of every aptitude download, and there was the clue. I ran a sniffer on the moodle box, and it's name server. And there was the problem.

Each time the moodle box needed name service, it would send four DNS requests for AAAA records, which the nameserver just never saw. Then the moodle box gave up waiting, and tried for an A record, which the nameserver saw and responded to, and on we go.

Turns out that our firewall didn't want to pass AAAA requests, or the ubuntu box was sending them up it's own bum or somewhere else sub-optimal. After a few minutes googling and wincing at the ubuntu forums, the answer turned out to be this:

in /etc/modprobe.d/, create bad_file with the line alias net-pf-10 off.

And all is happy again. S'pose I ought to be talking to firewall vendors soon...

Going google - progress report

After some months in internal debate (internal to me, that is), I've decided to go google. And last weekend I shifted 6 year's worth of stored email up to gmail.

And I have to say, it's looking good. It's quicker than IMAP (certainly when dealing with big chunks of messages), and the spam handling is at least an order of magnitude better than mine. And the interface is pretty nice.

We don't need no goddam folders.

Previously, I'd been using a middling complex procmail setup to auto-file everything I wanted to keep into auto-named folders, with the folder names generated from the from: address, and all actual mail folders grouped in folders according to initial letter. So all mails from bill.gates@microsoft.com were filed in the IMAP folder /b/bill-gates . This made it considerably easier to find old mail when I wanted it, without relying on me to manually file it correctly (which would have been a non-starter).

So when I transferred to gmail, I kept the folders as labels. Big mistake. Because searching 12,000 messages via gmail is so quick, there's no need for filing. So I spent two hours removing labels from everything. Big win. Preceded by a coupla hours of big loss.

Instant Messaging.

I realised on Tuesday, once I was settling down to actually using the thing, that if you're using the chat widget which lives in gmail, the conversations are archived in with your email. Which is expletively neat. What's rubbish is that the chat I had with a person who clicked on the 'chat with' button on the blog wasn't automatically archived. 'Cos actually I needed to keep that. Happily, I'd not closed the window yet.

Now part of the reason I'm doing this is about changing the way I work. I've had enough of relying on installed applications for run-of-the-mill stuff, and the work that goes into managing that.

The other part is that I need to be better informed as to how well this can work. I'm seriously swayed by suggestions that institutional IT support should let the likes of google focus on providing commodity applications like email, word processing and document sharing, and we focus on providing better and better access to those services. 'Cos google are just gonna do it better.

It's important to me that I point out here that I'm not outlining my employer's policy, nor speaking for my employer. These are my own versions of other's thoughts. Not my employer's. Is that clear enough?

motorway junction geocoder

It's a yahoo pipe, which for some major subset of UK motorways, takes the motorway and junction numbers, and returns a geo thing.

This came out of an idea I've mentioned here, and which Ive since discovered is the basis of this product.

But while I was playing around, I realised that none of the big mapping providers do this - or at least I couldn't get them to. Perhaps you'll do better than me, "M6 Junction 6" always landed me in Manchester. Not where I wanted to be.

So I searched, and searched, and found a couple of GPS waypoint files listing UK motoroway junctions. None of them in any kind of useful format. Still, where there's a will...

So out comes gpsbabel, and a few 'tests' later, I've got a GPX file, which works. The rest of the pipe is about getting the XML structure to work.

It doesn't do much, but as far as I know it's the only one of it's kind, and it does do what it's supposed to.

I'm pretty pleased with meself, me.