Systems Administrators vrs Engineers

So a few years back I was doing a fair bit of sys-admining, and a fair bit of programming. I would say probably 50-50 in my time. Since then I actually went down the route of doing a lot more programming, and as little sys-admming as possible. Im a firm beliver that programmers should be forced to do *Some* systems administration so that they understand the concepts and ideas behind security and the other issues that Sys-admins have to deal with, but I also believe that programmers shouldn’t be the sysadmins of the boxe’s they deploy to.

Of course in a small organisatio, you don’t get those kinds of options – its very hard to justify the expense of a specialist sys-admin where every month is another extension on the mortgage of the CEO (or whoever your startup financial backer is).

Anyways, my problem is that on my personal server, I’m not actually very comfortable in claiming to be the sys-admin of it anymore. I havn’t got a clue whats going on with it any more. Four years of solid programming with only minimal systems-administration in the mix. So this is why, when trying to get some of my new code (in Python – you hear that – I’ve broken my “all languages beginning with P are evil” habit) to start on the server, I broke *everything*.

Thank you, goodnight.

Electronics & Active Smart Posters

So you’ve all seen the video of me making the Prototype 1.2 (back in this post) but now we’re actually gearing up to make a real productised version of it. What this means is turning a prototype system into a single board working version. This presents me with a couple of challenges – mainly over licensing and IP.

I will be the first to recognise that what I’ve done in terms of hardware is hardly rocket science – I’ve taken a module from here, and a module from there, and wired the two together. My touch of genius has come in the form of the code sitting on the microprocessor (module 2) which is driving and controlling the first module.

Module 1 – the really tricky bit, actually isn’t a problem – we’ve paid for a license to use this circuit, and we pay a small royalty for each product we produce with it on.

Module 2 – the microprocessor board, is proving a little more difficult to source – my current build is based upon Arduino, that is I have developed a shield containing Module 1 on it. I was hoping that the license for Arduino would enable me to adapt the circuit design and build the entire board as one. However, Module 2 is released under Creative Commons Attribute Share-Alike License, which basically means if I use their schematics, I have to license the entire board as that.

And looking for other, more friendly “Open Source” schematics, is prooving very tricky to find, so I resorted to a different tactic – just designing the entire microprossor module myself. Actually, it wasn’t that hard – if your design (from the docs of the microprocessor you are building for) then there is only very small descions you can take. It turns out (after comparing my design against the Arduino, and about three other Atmel based prototyping microcontroller boards), that there is only very very slight differences in terms of schematic – and this will also be reflected in layout – following standard design layout “logic” will lead you to the same conclusion.

mmmm, final version sounds so near.

Glue4 becomes Proxama

I don’t work for a new company, we’ve just changed our name, so now, I am a honored employee of Proxama. Its been a very painful (for other people in the company) on choosing the new name – it has to be unique, not just in the UK but internationally, and it has to say something about the company. The reasons behind the Proxama brand, being based a little on the NFC world that we’re in, it is kinda nice.

Also, because we’ve been expanding (again), we’ve had a review of our “official” positions in the company, i.e. Job Titles. Mine’s changed and now I’m the “Systems Architect” which reflects the lower number of coding hours and the higher number of writing and documenting and drawing hours that I do. I like it.

Yes, actually I’m 6 days late in making this post, as it happend on Monday

AngryBot – easier .NET app to IRC interface

So I’ve been working a bit on Angrybot recently. For those of you who don’t know, AngryBot is a wrapper around meebey.net’s smartirc4net IRC interface (which can be found at  http://smartirc4net.meebey.net/jaws/ ). Anyways, the idea behind this wrapper was to provide a much simpler interface for people to use an IRC bot as a reporting tool, or as a method of communicating with the people that want to use it.

My view on it is that people are writing their own applications or deamons or services or whatever you want to call them, and want to call IRC functionality from that – they don’t want to be bothered with writing all the IRC handling stuff, (which to be fair, meebey’s code does a lot of it for you), but instead just has hooks into particular commands, or just has it sitting there as a class that they can call “send message” on.

Implementing a command at the moment requires a reference in the project to the Meebey dll, but I am wrapping around that soon.

Now I have a few bugs to fix, and I have to add the parrellism to the normal commands, but its certainly a good start to see it in a public place after sitting on my desktop for 2 years (in various states, including a poker playing bot).

In the mean time, I am currently trying to break/fix some stuff for a “top secret plan”…. mwhahaha haha haha haha ho ho.