Pontifications from a Practising Procrastinator

It is easy to do good work that matters to you.

All you have to do is exceed the expectations of the person(s) that you are working for in those tasks for which you have taken ownership - those tasks that matter to you.

The difficulty in that for me involves starting work.

I can find so many things to do before I start to do anything productive that nothing productive gets done.

I have email coming in with pundits relating the next big thing, I have news feeds that have to be checked, I have RSS feeds for a gazillion sites guaranteeing that something will change each day. I have ebay stuff to do, I have pictures to plan and take, I have forums to check and contribute to, and I have housework to do too. On top of that I am now watching about 8 series on TV so I have to watch those when the wife is out (Sci-fi is not her thing!).

All of which is a great load of excuses for not doing anything that matters to me.

Deciding what matters to you when you are your own master is hard for me - I have always defined myself in terms of my employment - now I am not employed, I am a little bit undecided as to what I should turn my attention.

Which brings me to the point of all this navel-gazing.

"End Malaria" (Kindle link - non-affiliate) may be a strange title for a business book, but it contains some musings by some gifted people that are all about working smarter and happier. And a portion of each sale goes towards mosquito nets for Africa to help end malaria. That's a win-win.

Reading it may simply be another way of not starting something that matters, but it got me writing this blog post....

In the shadows...

I was inspired by this article at Lightstalking.com ( one of my "go-to" web-sites for photography related items ) to try some simple low-key setups and shots.

Here is one result:


and while I like this, I think it is just a bit too ethereal.

This one, on the other hand, seems much more natural.


And when I try to analyse why, I come down to the faint shadow of the apple on the ground - that tiny detail just seems to "ground" the apple in reality, where the porcelain doll above just seems to float....

Here is a set-up shot for those who are into that sort of thing.


Yes, it was full daylight and if that puzzles you, can I point you to the aforementioned article ?

Comments are always welcome.

A Community Project

Each year, around the middle of August, the town of Irvine in Ayrshire, Scotland holds a festival known as Marymass.

The Marymass Queen and The Four Marys for 2011 (The Sunday Church Service Procession)


The festival is claimed to have been around since the 12th century, and today it is intimately linked with the Irvin Carters Society which has been around as long as there were incorporated trades in the town.

This year a call was put out for local photographers to document the festival in a project called "Marymass Through the Lens".

I was one of the photographers who responded, and I decided to document as many of the "peripheral" events as well as to try and get some shots of the main parade.

You can see some of the pictures I am submitting for the final project here.

If you would like to see the program for this years events (all finished now) it is here.

This was a fun project, and I enjoyed doing it - hopefully it will continue in the following years as a record of one of Scotlands oldest festivals.

Events that I took pictures at:

Marymass Special Highland Games
Marymass Lawn Bowls Championship
Senior Citizens Folk Concert
The Shows (Fairground rides etc.)
Horse Judging and Parade
Open Chess Tournament (1 of 2 left in Scotland, so I am told!)
The Sunday Church Service Procession
The 10K run (and no, I was not participating!)
The Flower Show

I thoroughly enjoyed donating my time to this worthwhile project, and I will update this blog post as soon as an outcome of all the photographers work is known.

Golfers

In Scotland, we have Golf Courses. They are everywhere. Some are private, some are expensive, some are municipal and a very few are public.
All have one thing in common - passionate, funny, crazy, emotional users. On any day of the week. On every day of the week!
And usually they make very good photography subjects.
I had some spare time yesterday so I thought I would give my camera a scare and take it out of the bag and use it.

I shot about 50 or so pictures and here are three I thought were worth sharing:


When I played golf, I had the uncanny ability to find the only piece of "rough" in a green sea of fairways. These guys just reminded me of that!


And this guy looks like he is trying to send this ball into the middle of next week... (it ended up in the bunker!)


Well, what can I say? Just because I was looking for golfers was no reason not to snap this guy in fighting position!

Yesterday was the first time I had been out for a while, and I once again found that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" - meaning a break now and then can be a good thing!

Thanks for listening.

How long!?

Wow! Coming up on two months since I wrote anything in this blog.

I'll bet no-one missed me ;-)

Lots of changes have been happening in my personal life - since I had a month off from work in January, to be precise.

During that month (off on sick leave for a very bad leg condition) I spent much more time with my wife than at any other time in our 33 years of marriage - either I was working or she was working, and we never spent this much time together - ever.
My wife is not currently employed ( I will not say "doesn't work" because keeping a house is hard work!) and suffers from arthritis. How badly, I only just appreciated in that month off.
Long story short, my working hours are soon to be drastically reduced. While this will mean a dramatic reduction in income, I am hoping it will lead to a better quality of life for my wife (and me!).

So in about a month or so, you might see an increase in activity in this site, and perhaps the Project 52 and Project 12 can be resurrected from the deep, deep, deep hibernation they are in - for which you (the one subscriber I had) have my apologies.
Some times "real life" just gets in the way....

The Cloud and you

Two things I can say for sure:

The cloud will fail.
The cloud will get better.

How much any of these two things means to you is dependent on how willingly, and how totally, you embrace the cloud.

Obligatory history lesson starts here:
In 1979 I built my first computer. I soldered the chip-carriers (2, I think) to the tiny PCB, and I soldered all the discretes in their rightful places and I attached power and it had life. A little while later it died (faulty character generator, if you must know).
From then on I had various computers (PET, TRS-80, AMSTRAD 464/664/PCW9512, CoCo, Amiga, Atari, Jupiter Ace, Sinclair Spectrum, IBM XT, IBM AT, a multitude of clones, home-brews and lately Apple Macs.)
All have failed in some way or another.

Lessons learnt from the above history? Technology will fail you (usually when you need it most) and technology improves if it lasts long enough.
Obligatory history lesson ends here.

Therefore, the cloud will fail, but it will improve.

If you are going to use the cloud, decide the level of failure you can tolerate, then use the cloud up to that level, and no more.

One example I know of:
A small business was having server problems - capacity and hardware were below par. The owner, a fairly tech-savvy guy, crunched his numbers and came up with a solution using Amazon. Unfortunately, like a lot of small businesses, the risk analysis was pretty much non-existent, and Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity were words heard once in a management seminar. But, hey, it's Amazon - what could go wrong? Well, Google "Amazon Cloud outage" and you will have a good idea. His business is still going, but some of his customers are tending to use the business less these days, and some are still in "negotiations" over goods supplied late.

Amazon are doing a lot to make sure this doesn't happen again, and so is the small business owner.

Between them, (with lots of hard work) they should be able to put this incident to rest. Out of it will come an improved cloud service, and a chastened, but wiser small business owner.

Why I use Open Source Software

Don't get me wrong - I use and advocate the use and support of closed source software any time I feel it is appropriate to do so. But it's not that often these days.

But I don't think the following scenario would have been possible using closed source equivalents, and I am damn sure that the cost of using them would have blown my budget out of the water!

I run a network. It has over 400 users, many of whom are mobile, work abroad for extended periods of time, and work all the hours God send us. Planned downtime is a rarity. Unplanned downtime is happening more frequently, but due to outside problems (power outage, internet congestion etc) rather than internal problems - although we have our fair share of those too!
I use Open Source software wherever possible and I do so because it is generally a better "fit" for the network tasks I have than some proprietary software. And I can usually bend it to fit what I want - I can't do that with closed source.

So when I get an OS solution that works, I tend to generally leave it alone. Oh, I apply security patches, but rarely do I update anything that's working unless I need the new feature(s) or they come with a security update.

That's why you can find installations of Apache 1.3 still working on intranet machines, why I still have working Slackware 11 installations and why some un-maintained programs are still doing the business on the network - they work and they are on internal machines with no security implications.

So when a power outage along with a faulty UPS takes out a machine that has been working steadily for the last 5 years as a dhcp server, a nat box, a wireless sign-on web page, a transparent proxy and a router for several private IP ranges, I take the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and software with thanks. When it happens on the Friday of a long weekend ( Friday through to Tuesday ), I am even more thankful for the opportunity to work on it uninterrupted.

Here is the setup:
Hardware: 4 disk rack mount 1U box with dual Athlon processors and 2 gigabytes of RAM ( A bit light these days, but should be enough) and 2 disks only installed
Software: Slackware64 13.1, standard full install. Main packages are Squid, Apache, dhcpd, dnsmasq, and some custom start up scripts for adding addresses to ethernet cards and starting iptables with the nat table entries and port redirects for the transparent proxy.

The process went something like this:

Install Slackware. ( 30 Minutes )
Get dnsmasq working as DNS server only
Get dhcpd (installed version) working. (15 Minutes )
Get Apache in default mode working then configure for my defaults. ( 15 Minutes )
Get Squid. Get Slackbuild script for Squid. Compile Squid. Install Squid ( 45 Minutes )
Read Squid documentation (BIG package, lots of changes since I last used Squid in anger!) (4 Hours )
Implement necessary changes to Squid configuration, test, and repeat. ( 12 hours, including Internet searches, reading Blogs, Wikis etc. )
( Transparent proxying using Squid was a hack in Squid 2, that has been elevated to "built-in" in Squid 3 - but judging by the Blog pages and wiki's it is problematic in Squid 3...)
Curse Squid (5 Minutes)
Get a copy of Squid 2, try to compile in 64 bits on target box. (2 hours, failed )
Curse Slackware ( 30 Seconds )
Find, install, configure and test an alternative to Squid for transparent proxying (TinyProxy )( 1 hour )
Install, test, debug and eventually modify the PHP pages for the wireless page signon. ( 3 hours)

Test all functions from various areas of the building ( 4 Hours )

Total time taken: ~ 28 hours on the software, spread over 2 days.

All the software was available, free and easily downloadable - no feature crippled demos, no limit on the number of connections/users/CPU's, nobody upselling, nobody bombarding me with phone calls/emails for stuff I don't want/don't need and am quite capable of finding for myself if or when I do, and no expiry date where they get a chance to do it all again in 12 months time.

And that is why I will put up with the occasional failure (looking at you, Squid*) in the Open Source model - they don't market this stuff, they just make it useful!

(* By the way, I am quite happy for Squid users to prove me wrong - it is a BIG package, and has over 170+ options, so there is every chance that I screwed up and not Squid - but TinyProxy went in, I did a minimal config and it just worked...)