Alec the Geek

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Archive for October, 2007

My OSDC 2006 talk got blogged

Posted by Alec on 29 October 2007

planet catalyst

Alec Clews has a good few things to say about building “audit trails” to record all of the details about a binary build

Sam Vilian very kindley mentioned the talk I gave last year at OSDC but I’m not sure if he agreed with my approach or not…

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Posted in ego | Leave a Comment »

Alec’s measure of Mac adoption

Posted by Alec on 27 October 2007

Apple: “Let me show you my sales figures. My sales figures, let me show you them”

2.164M Macs sold

Whenever I spend time on the business lounge at airports (which is far too often), I now idly look around to see how many Macbooks I can see. For those who have never trod in such hallowed halls, all the suites in the business lounge are iether on their mobile or using their laptop (or often both).

99% of the latops are running Windows, there are ‘never’ any Linux system (although that’a hard to tell) and a small smattering of Mac’s (from 0-3). The zero to three figure has occured on my last 5 visits and the number always gone one way: 0 to 3. Too early to say that’s a trend, but I’ll keep looking…

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Posted in Business, Mac | 5 Comments »

Intresting tool — will this increase the public commons of IP?

Posted by Alec on 25 October 2007

Slideshare.net provides a web application to allow the sharing of slideshow presentations, with verbal commentary, on the Intertubes. My fellow Perl Monger Paul Fenwick has published a great presentation on how to use Hiveminder for Lifehacking.

Posted in Web, Work Practices | Leave a Comment »

Handy Hack: Use the ‘locate’ command on OS/X

Posted by Alec on 16 October 2007

The locate database at Mac Singularity

The usage is merely locate filename but you have to have the locate database made first, and this is not done by default. You have to do this: sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

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A really bad example of commercial blogging

Posted by Alec on 13 October 2007

Why Tripwire Really Isn’t Real-Time | Solidcore Blog

Don’t get trapped in a scan (and scan again) cycle with Tripwire – get the authentic real-time technology from Solidcore

As I work for Tripwire the following blog caught my eye the other day. The post is a pretty crude piece of commercial snipping and falls into a couple of major traps.

  • The information is out of date. The product does now support real time monotoring
  • By using negative and derogatory language it associates the product it seeks to promote with the same image

So what is the lesson for ‘product’ bloggers?

  1. Only talk about your own product or facts that will not change
  2. Keep your language positive and limit your own comments to your own product. There is no reason why you can’t chose to make comments about product features your competitors are weak on, but you don’t have to mention them.

You also avoid the chance of a law suite of course…

So don’t expect me to mention any competitor products here.

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Posted in Personal Opinion, Work Practices | Leave a Comment »

Tripwire — what a great product

Posted by Alec on 13 October 2007

<vendor_post type=”spruiking“>

As regular readers know I recently joined Tripwire as a technical manager. I recently had my first round of presentations to customers and an opportunity to show off the product. It was interesting to hear a variety of needs around different platforms, applications and processes.

Tripwire Enterprise was easy to talk about — it has a great user interface and a really well defined set of features. Sales presentations are all abut aligning these features to the customers priorities, instead of bending the product the to look like it’s what the customer might need (which has often been my experience with other applications).

If you need to identity the changes going on in your data centre then make sure you give it a look

</vendor_post>

Posted in Configuration Audit | Leave a Comment »