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November 30, 2006
Apparently they'll let anyone in these days
[Ed: Title is said in jest]
The phrase "Stratum 1 clock source" has always made me think of NIST, atomic clocks, cesium, expensive servers and lots of bandwidth run by a government agency or university and accessible only under certain conditions.
Today I configured an NTP server to sync to the Public NTP Server Pool and was surprised to see which NTP server it was assigned:
# ntptrace localhost localhost: stratum 2, offset 0.001531, synch distance 0.120854 dsl081-199-165.nyc2.dsl.speakeasy.net: stratum 1, offset 0.000004, synch distance 0.000599, refid 'GPS'
Cool to see that precision time sources are inexpensive enough to let the "average guy" with a DSL connection contribute with the big guys.
Posted by pete at 5:28 PM
November 29, 2006
Finding 'who done it' with CVS annotate
I'm getting to know CVS a lot more intimately, since it's now one of my primary work tools.
Several times I've wished I could find the history of a particular line of code, either to find who knows something about it, or to see when a line was added/last changed. Had read and re-read the man page on my development (RedHat 7.3, for various reasons) and couldn't find anything related.
By chance, I was looking at the cvs man page on my Ubuntu server, noticed this cvs command:
annotate
What revision modified each line of a file?
- Synopsis: annotate [options] files...
Tried it on my RH7 dev server (obfuscated snippet):
1.153 (hcg 11-Nov-03): -allow_blah=>1, 1.154 (rtk 11-Nov-03): -noblah=>[0,1,2], 1.154 (rtk 11-Nov-03): -blah_names=>['blah1','blah2','blah3'], 1.180 (bts 12-Apr-05): -foo_blah=>$bar, 1.180 (bts 12-Apr-05): -foo_bold=>0, 1.153 (hcg 11-Nov-03): );
On further digging, info cvs covers annotate and many other details not mentioned in the cvs man page.
Posted by pete at 8:14 AM
November 28, 2006
Back to my (career) roots
I started my career (not too many years ago) as a programmer (dBase and FoxPro), but soon after got really interested in network engineering and operations and eventually moved into an operations management career path.
Throughout my career, I've always found my programming background useful. As a network engineer, there were lots of opportunities to accelerate or automate tasks with programming (so I learned Perl), and as a manager I had a better grasp on build-vs-buy decisions and could speak raw "requirements." Many times I fantasized about becoming a full-time programmer again, but was resolved to it being just a hobby.
In March, Mike started a new job with OpenAir. I was really intrigued with what he told me about working at OpenAir, so when a software engineer position opened in August (and it seemed prudent for other reasons), I decided to apply.
I started working for OpenAir on Oct 30. I'm still coming up to speed on a very complex piece of software, but I am definitely enjoying programming full-time again. More to come as I get reacquainted with programming as a day job, and with OpenAir.
Posted by pete at 10:02 PM
November 27, 2006
New home
My blog has a new home. It's lived on my server at home for several years, but after too many outages during trips/vacations (and coaching neighbors/wife/kids through resetting unreliable DSL modems and wireless routers) it's time for some peace of mind.
After some shoppping, Mike and I settled on bluehost. Mike beta-tested with his site, and everything has run pretty well.
Hopefully this will be more reliable and make future vacations less stressful.
Posted by pete at 11:01 AM