Tue, 10 Jun 2008
It's all very technical, you know...
Increasingly I am asked how things are going at work. Unfortunately, I struggle to give a meaningful answer in conversations with "normal" people - I don't know how to begin to explain that this afternoon I set up a pbuilder environment that lets me build Debian packages for our customised etch-with-backports i386 distribution using my amd64 machine running Debian sid. Or that this morning I ran into some interesting problems with dpkg-shlibdeps and symbol versioning in lenny when trying to downgrade some dependencies to 'Suggests'. "Er, yeah, it's going fine."
One recent big project has been a real bonus in this regard, because I can explain it even to the hairdresser - it's "like a mobile phone that you can put in your computer". Fantastic. "And we do the software that runs it." Everyone can understand that. "We make it talk to the internet." No way! You're so cool, Tim, tell me more.
What else do I do? "Well, sometimes I filter people's email and web traffic for spam and viruses. And sometimes I make databases run faster. And sometimes we set up systems that monitor other systems." But phone calls are the best.
Posted: 10 Jun 2008 22:02 | | Comments (0)
Thu, 03 Apr 2008
PostgreSQL UK 2008
Yesterday, I was at the first ever PostgreSQL UK conference, in Birmingham. The venue was familiar from various events last year, such as GUADEC and PyCon UK - the Conservatoire is becoming quite established as a relatively cheap, central UK venue for technical events.
I gave a talk about monitoring PostgreSQL databases on behalf of credativ. (Slides for all the talks are available on the PostgreSQL wiki.) I got a reasonable level of comments and feedback afterwards, and perhaps those will help with the development of some better monitoring solutions. The act of preparing the talk also let me discover a few different monitoring tools that look useful - perhaps I'll get the chance to look at them at some point.
As for the conference itself, there were some interesting talks about PostGIS, full text searching, and analysis of EXPLAIN output. I think it was worth attending just for those; but we also got to meet a bit more of the PostgreSQL developer community in the UK. We also got in on the beginnings of the new UK user group - hopefully they will be organising more meetings over the coming months.
Posted: 03 Apr 2008 20:08 | | Comments (0)
Thu, 11 Oct 2007
Mönchengladbach
This week, I have mostly been in Mönchengladbach, at the German office of credativ GmbH. It's a completely different experience working here, compared to Rugby. For one, the building is a lot bigger - several stories, compared to the tiny room we have at the moment in England (soon to change, hopefully). I've been meeting a lot of people, and trying to remember their names.
It's been a while since I was last in Germany - exactly seven years, in fact. This time round, I get to visit German pubs, and try Kölsch and Pils. I discovered yesterday that I share a birthday with another credativ employee, Bernd.
I haven't had much to say, for a week or two - I've been busy with work, and don't yet have an internet connection at home. Also, I can see my evening computer usage starting to dwindle, what with spending eight hours in front of a monitor during the day.
Posted: 11 Oct 2007 16:58 | | Comments (1)
Mon, 17 Sep 2007
First day at credativ
My first day at credativ went well. In the morning I updated some RHEL packages on a couple of test servers. I suspect the live systems will be next.
In the afternoon I copied over some PostgreSQL configuration tuning for an upgrade from 7.x to 8.x. I'm getting up to speed with the various systems - there's even the threat of fixing bugs in Java code, in the future.
Posted: 17 Sep 2007 23:21 | | Comments (1)
Fri, 07 Sep 2007
First post
I've accepted a job at credativ, in Rugby - I start on the 17th. This means I'm preparing to move back to the Coventry area. (I just can't get away.) It's very exciting, and all that. :)
I celebrated today by getting an overpriced lunch at Starbucks. The other thing I've splashed out on has been a bunch of German reference books - I want to brush up for communicating with the German branch. I believe I'm going to be sent to Germany for a few days to meet the rest of the company, soon.
I'm still planning to go to PyCon UK this weekend.
Posted: 07 Sep 2007 16:46 | | Comments (2)
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Tim Retout tim@retout.co.uk
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