My main desktop computer at home is a PowerPC based Mac Mini. I have been running it as a debian Linux system since I bought the machine in 2006. One of my reasons for going with PowerPC was to be different. Choice in CPU architecture is important just like choice in software. Debian Squeeze includes [...]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Firefox 9 on PowerPC
Posted: January 25, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: firefox, firefox 9, mozilla, software
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Troubleshooting
Posted: January 23, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: debugging, leadership, programming bugs, software, technology, troubleshooting, work habits
Looking back on my activities in the past few months I realize that there have been a few occasions where my role has been to help with the troubleshooting process. In the past year I have given talks at PGEast and PGEU on troubleshooting Slony but the process I use applies to most technology problems.
MS-Project plans on a Google Calendar
Posted: January 9, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: google, Google Calendar, Microsoft Project, open source, project-management, software
One of the least favourite parts of my job as a software developer is when the project manager comes to me with printout of a project plan done in Microsoft project and asks asks if the plan is okay. The project plan printout shows a list of tasks, described by a 3-6 word title, along [...]
Sending email from alpine through hotmail
Posted: January 3, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: alpine, email, hotmail, pine, smtp, smtp authentication, software
Configuring the alpine email client to send email through the hotmail mail servers for an alternate role was more difficult than I was expecting. The issues I encountered can be summarized as Make sure that ‘PLAIN’ does not show up in the disable-these-authenticators setting of your .pinerc file. Hotmail supports PLAIN and LOGIN SMTP authentication. [...]
Amazon EC2 went down, will I lose my job?
Posted: April 24, 2011 in UncategorizedTags: cloud, disaster recovery, EC2
Last Thursday Amazon EC2 suffered a major outage effecting many sites and services hosted on EC2. Friday was a holiday in North America (Good Friday) but the holiday weekend ends on Monday when many I.T. managers are going to to have some explaining to do.
Custom Printed Maps of Lakes, Part 1
Posted: January 9, 2011 in openstreetmap, UncategorizedTags: osm, penlakemap, postgis
Recently I wanted to make a custom printed map of Peninsula Lake in Ontario Canada. The Canadian hydrographic service has been kind enough to give me some of the lake depth data that they had collected for the recent G8 summit. I wanted to take the OpenStreetMap data of the lake and surronding area and [...]
Yesterday I gave my “Intro to OpenStreetMap” talk at FOSSLC in Ottawa. I think the talk went well, no one threw things at me. My slides are available here. The talks where recorded. I’ll post a URL to the recording as soon as they are put online. I was surprised at the number of other [...]
I’ve been working on importing some Canvec data into OpenStreetMap and thought I’d write about the process.
Tonight I attended an OpenStreetMap pub night in Toronto. In addition to some of the regular local OpenStreetMap mappers (Heather Leson) was there. Heather is involved with Crisis Commons. Crisis commons is a groups that tries to use crowd sourcing to help in emergency situations. For example, following the earthquake in Hati they (along with [...]
Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to Ottawa for PGCon. When I arrived in Ottawa Wednesday night I made my way over to the Royal Oak where I got summaries of the developer conference and (in case you haven’t heard Pg is moving to git) and of the tutorials. Thursday morning I snuck in [...]
