Matt Daubneys Blog

Having seen other peoples success of growing chillis from seed (specifically theopensourcerer) I thought this year I’d have a go. So in what could possibly be said to be a familiar style…..

Packets of Chilli Seeds

I’m only attempting three types of chillis this year, cayenne long hot, navaho and scotch bonnet. In the interest of science I’m trying theopensourcers method of germinating the seeds, and tomorrow evening will be attempting some in plain pots with compost in a heated propagator. This may mean I end up with an absolutley enormous glut of chillis, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Here are the seeds ready for the airing cupboard.

Seeds Ready for the airing cupboard

I’m also in the process of building an automated watering system for these once they’re in the greenhouse using arduinos, and hopefully connecting to a server in the house using an easy radio link to report the conditions in the greenhouse Many thanks to theopensourcerer for the information he’s posted on his blog.

Friday marks the beggining of a new year under the gregorian calender, so it’s a good time to reflect on various things from the last year, and suggest some changes for the next.

Last year was, for 6 months at least, a rubbish year. With Uni going rapidly down hill, being diagnosed with depression, and everything generally going wrong, I’d rather forget most of it. The last few months have been significantly better. Acquired myself a CCNA, and a job doing things that I enjoy.

So what needs to change next year? Well, in no particular order:

1. One of the downsides of having a job that is largely programming is that I don’t get that much exercise any more which has led to me putting on some weight. Ideally I’d like to turn this around, but would initially be happy for it to be stemmed. Hopefully a bit of Wii fit every other night will help this while it’s dark in the evenings, and as it lightens up I’ll try and start doing some walking or some such.
2. Start putting away more moneys, now my debts have gone (hooray) I can start to put away some pennies for the future.
3. I intend to increase my participation with Ubuntu community in the coming year as well. Hopefully culminating in gaining Ubuntu membership. In order to achieve this, one evening a week will be dedicated to contributing to Ubuntu, be it through support, bug squashing, testing or whatever. This will probably be aimed at Wednesday evenings, but will shift around a little as real life things will undoubtedly get in the way.

I think 3 is enough to be getting on with. Hopefully this year will be better than the last

For the past few weeks life has been busy, and when I say busy I mean hectic beyond belief. In that time I’ve had a few OSS revelations I’d like to share.

As an experiment at work I thought I’d try using eclipse as an IDE instead of my normal vim+terminator job. Scary as it is, I find myself actually quite liking eclipse. It may be that my work machine has 4GB of RAM, and so copes better than the machines I’ve used in the past, or it may be that I’m starting to lose my qualms about what tools I use to do a job, as long as a job gets done. The PHP and Python tools inside eclipse have made my life a lot easier, and I really do find little things, like it reading out the docstring I’d put in a function when I hover over that function when it’s called, useful. Has eclipse evolved to where it’s useable or has affordable technology caught up with eclipse? A bit of a quandry for me that one.

The other small revelation I’ve had recently is that KDE4 is now inherently useable, and quite shiny to boot. when I’ve tried it in the past I quickly got fed up with things that didn’t quite fit or where missing completely, but now time has passed, and like KDE4 I believe I’ve changed a bit, and actually quite like it. I won’t be using it at home for a while, as the 7″ screen on this tiny little netbook certainly won’t make it very use-able compared to the  20″ odd monitor I have at work. The one big thing annoying me with it at the moment though is that konquerer doesn’t seem to fit with the default theme. Niggly annoyance I know, but surely that should be a papercut?

The last revelation I’ve had, though it’s not really a revelation, is a pang of guilt. I’m inherently a consumer in the whole Linux ecosphere. I consume by far more than I give back, and at the moment I simply don’t have the time to give back as much as I’d like. So this is my decree, and a proclamation that as of next year (with certain exceptions) I intend to deem one night a week free software night. On that night I will help to squish bugs, I’ll sit on IRC and be patient with people trying to help them through problems, I shall try and get involved in the various mailing list debates I sit and read, and I shall attempt to stop consuming quite so much and start giving back as much as I can.

In order to do this I will need a little help. The whole software workflow thing is a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve had little formal training in such things and as such tend to wing it more than I’d like. Can people point me in the direction of some good literature to help mend this? I’m quite willing to get my hands dirty if people are willing to be patient with me as I learn how the OSS developer crowd works so I can learn and adjust. In a way I’m hoping that this will flow back and help me at work as much as it’ll help me contribute back to the community in general.

If anyone also has a project they might want a hand with one evening a week from the of the month, feel free to drop me a line by your favourite communications method

Last weekend was LugRadio Live 2009 and the first ever Oggcamp. Since, for a couple of years now, I’ve been meaning to get more involved with the Ubuntu and greater Linux community, and having now got a job and be able to afford these wonderful things, I thought this would be a good time to put some faces to names.

Since this was the first event of this size I’d been to, I was a little nervous in all honesty. The only person there I’d ever met before was Popey and I’m not particularly good in a crowd of people who are essentially strangers. What actually happened turned out to be the complete opposite. People were welcoming, open and incredibly friendly. It was good to feel included.

What about the events themselves? Well, LugRadio was very insightful. Wandering around listening in to the talks was incredibly interesting and has actually helped me with my day job. The talk on the OpenStreetMap has got me fired up and interested in finishing mapping my village. I’ve also become reinvigorated in hardware hacking. Given a little time I might start looking at trying to get a hackspace going in Reading, however I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my plate at the moment taking precedence, if you’re interested though, let me know! A shared work load is less work for me!

Oggcamp was just as fun for other reasons. Actually being involved in the day and helping out gave me a fantastic opportunity to meet people and have a bit of a day of random chatting. If this event happens next year (maybe I should be saying when to drop a hint) I’d love to be involved again! Meeting the people in the various communities really has driven me to push forward with community involvement, and hopefully pushing forward with some testing with kit at work that the general community may not have access to to provide more information on bug reports and what not. As my programming prowess increases as well, I’ll start trying to contribute more code to the community as well.

Overall, I have to say a big thanks to everybody who made me feel welcome over the weekend, and an even bigger thank you to the organisers of both events. Seriously guys, well done on an amazing weekend. My advice to anyone attending one of these for the first time, come say hello, get involved, honestly you’ll feel better for it! Hopefully see you all next year.

It’s been etched into my diary now, so I’m going to both Lug Radio Live 2009 and Oggcamp. Both of these will be quite exciting for me as they’ll be the first large scale linux events I’ve been too, however judging from the general community populace, both should be quite friendly and cool!

I’ll be travelling up to wolverhampton from the Newbury/Reading area, so if anyones heading up from that area as well, let me know and see if we can organise some kind of lift share. Hope to see a lot of you there!

Next week I may not be around so much. I’m off to Cambridge to do a week long CCNA course. This is going to be hard going at 12 hours a day for 6 days, but should be very rewarding.
Why am I doing this to myself? Well, I need a job, and it’s very hard to distinguisj yourself from the current crowd, so I believe that achieving a CCNA off my own back should help prove how determined I am to progress in an IT environment. I’ve been going through and making notes all over the prereading today, and it doesn’t seem too bad. It’s going to be a bit of a push on my memory, but I believe it’s do-able.
It’s a little bit daunting I will admit, this being the first professional course I’ve enrolled on since I finished Uni. Hopefully the people will be as nice as the Ubuntu community.
If I’m slow to respond to anything this coming week, I apologise and will get on to it asap once I get back.

Well, now that Uni has finished, I need a job. Having been doing a Physics degree at Swansea, I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that I don’t really want to go into a Physics field, and would rather move across into a computer networking position. This comes with a few problems. Firstly, I have no professional experience with this kind of work, I do have lots of amateur experience, having networked my house and helped administrate the University Computer Societies network. I have been exploring the option of doing a CCNA to give me a kick start into a career, but these are expensive.

Why does this mean anyone should hire me? Well, I’m incredibly eager to learn. Having no professional experience means I will have to learn fast, and I fully intend to do so. I’m more or less convinced I want to do a CCNA, to the point where I’m willing to fund it myself and just need to find the funds to do so. I have heaps of experience with Linux servers, I’ve administered several for friends over the years and attempt to help people fix their Ubuntu machines in #ubuntu-uk and on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. I also have experience mending windows machines, again largley for friends and family. I am incredibly enthusiastic and really want to get on and work, having been sat on my bum for the past 2 weeks just applying for jobs, I’m now reaching the point where I just want to get on and work. I’m reliable, hard working and eager to get involved.

My CV can be found here in pdf and here in MS Word format, so if anyone has any opportunities going, please let me know!

Recently I’ve been fighting off depression and it’s made me take stock of what I do quite a lot. Sometimes it’s necessary for me to stop what I’m doing and often it’s because I’ve looked at what I’m doing and become a bit confused. When ever I do this I end up looking at what I’m doing and asking “How is this me?”. It seems like a silly question sometimes, but life is consistantly changing, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, so it’s necessary now and again to stop and define what things really mean.

Who am I? I think it’s safe to sat that what you do and how you act defines you, so I shall pick a few things on what I do and how I act to try and define myself.

Physics

How is this me? I’ve always felt that everything has a reason that can be understood. When told that the universe has been created I always ponder if this was true, how was it created? What where it’s initial ingredients? How can you set off a system with a few simple rules to create such a complex system? What are these rules and can they be replicated. I’ve always felt that this is part of me, and the more I understand of how the world we live in works, the more I see that it’s important to find a place in it.

I always want to understand why something has happened, how something has gone wrong. These in some ways drive me to do things. As I’ve struggled recently with the depression I feel that I’ve been losing this drive a bit and become too accepting of facts and not questioning things enough. This is me.

Linux and OSS

How is this me? While the idea of financial gain is nice, it somehow seems unnerving. In the land of software, it sometimes seems as if it has got to a point of being all about financial gain, and not what can be done.

Linux and OSS are not just about freedom, they are about being able to push what you can do and do it faster, more intelligently to save effort. A lot of proprietry software seems to think that the software is the important factor, but it’s what the user can do with it that’s more important. If a piece of software can’t do something I need to do, then why shouldn’t I be able to add that functionality? If I needed that functionality chances are someone else will do someday to, so I can give that back to the people who originally made the software. While this doesn’t make me monetarily better off, somewhere it will make someones life easier. This is a net saving in frustration and seems to be worth far more than a few pounds extra at the end of the month.

Linux is also about a community, and more of life should be about this. I have found that the UK Ubuntu community is made up of some of the nice, most helpful people I’ve talked too. Some of whome I have started to regard as friends, and hope to make that so once Uni has finished by taking part more and giving more back to those who have given me so much. Much of the philosophy of this I try and take forward to other parts of my life, not just software.

Photography

How is this me? It’s one of the things that makes me stop and look at the world. Sometimes days can get so busy with repetitive, thoughtless tasks that I don’t stop, look or think. When I’m out with a camera I’m always looking, at the way the grass bends with the wind, the way the sun shines across the waves in the bay, the orange glow of the sun rising behind Port Talbot. Small things that seem to be more interesting when you think about what they are, how they happen and what it all really means. Somehow being behind a camera really makes me look enough to appreciate these things the way they should be.

Friends, past and present

Life is incredibly short on cosmological timescales. People come and go, but everyone you meet leaves a mark on you somehow. People I used to be close to have slowly moved away, some people I haven’t seen in a long time. Some friendships are worth more to me than others, but all are individually valuable. These people in a way have formed who am I, what I believe is rightor wrong and what I feel is important in the world. In many ways, bits of everyone I have met are me.

My future wife

In many ways she has shaped the current me more than a lot of other factors, and that isn’t a bad thing. I have known people I would give up a lot to help, but she is the one person I would give up everything for. She is the reason I look forward to a settled married life. There’s no need for piles of money in that future, just enough to get by and her by my side. In a way she is the little piece of the world I have been looking for, and feel like I’ve almost found somewhere I want to be.

There are many other things that are me, but these few I currently feel are the most prominant. So now, people of the interweb, I challenge you to find out just who are you?

your workspace look like? Just because I’m interested really, heres the mess that is mine.

My Workspace

I generally use the laptop to show notes and slides I’m working from, and do my work on the desktop.

So what does yours look like?

Today I started the first fact finding mission for my new project. The Mrs and I went for a walk from Langland Bay,long the cliff tops to Mumbles.

This walk was in the end about 3 miles in length. The start was on the route of the number 12 bus from the Quadrant Station in Swansea town center. We got off the bus near Caswell Avenue and walked along the Langland Golf course, avoiding the occasional golf ball and made it down to the bay.

A Panorama of Langland Bay

This is quite a nice little place for rockpooling at low tide, and the rock formation on the east side of the beach are very interesting to say the least.

We walked across the bay, wandering through the various rockpools and taking a gander around before heading up the cliffs along the footpath. One thing we really didn’t expect to find was a toy fire engine wedged between two rocks. Wonder if it was a native one or was lost at sea.

The path along this cliff top was edged with gorse, some of which had already started to flower, and the views from the top where amazing. Pick a nice day to go this way and the views will literally knock your socks off. This path splits into two half way along, one goes up along the top, and the other skims along the base of the cliffs. We started on the top one, then half way along that dropped down to the bottom one to watch the coast guard doing exercises.

Helicopter Rescue

After this we wandered along the cliff tops to Mumbles, stopping at the cafe near the pier for a mug of hot chocolate and some lunch. Then we pottered along to Verdis for a breathtakingly tasty icecream to munch on while we walked around the Bay to Oystermouth, where we caught the bus back to the bus station.

A nice short walk, with some breathtaking views.