Tim Bishop

Finding the time

It seems I’ve never got enough time these days. I’m a FreeBSD ports committer, but recently I’ve hardly done anything. All I’ve managed to do is keep my own ports updated. It’s quite frustrating because I want to be more involved. Then there’s the other projects like libstatgrab, they don’t even get a look in. I blame the “day job”; …

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What a weekend

On Thursday I arrived back from Cornwall after a fairly lengthy drive, and to get back in to the swing of things I dived right in to the deep end at work. This weekend there was a complete power shutdown on the campus for some “essential electrical work”. This required us to shut down all our machines, wait a few …

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An end to comment spam

I finally decided to put an end to comment spam – I’ve installed a captcha. Whilst I was away on holiday I received around 3-5 spams a day, so rather than just deleting them I figured I needed to prevent them. The wordpress docs are a really useful resource. I decided to go with SecureImage since it looked fairly good, …

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Escaping for a while

In an attempt to allow my mind to rest from work-related matters I’m heading off to Cornwall for a couple of weeks. I’ll be back for the Easter weekend when I’ll be shutting down all our systems at work for a campus-wide power shutdown.

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Comment spam :-(

Not that long ago I questioned how long it would be until I got comment spam on this blog. It didn’t take long for that to be answered; over the past day or two I’ve had 3 of them. Admittedly that’s not too many, but given this blog has only been running for two weeks that’s a pretty depressing start. …

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Upgrading Debian

If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been working on a new filestore project at work for a while now. After getting things working nicely on our Solaris machines, and finally moving my home directory over, I decided to tackle our Debian server. It quickly became apparent that I’d need to upgrade the machine, which was running …

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BT Exact IPv6 Tunnel Broker is back

It looks like the BT Exact IPv6 tunnel broker is finally back up and running after being offline for a week. It seems they had a hardware failure of some kind which knocked out their whole TB operation. I appreciate this is a free service, but it’s still a pain not having it available. That said, I was reluctant to change to another …

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Why I absolutely hate spam

If there’s one thing that drives me completely insane in the modern world of computing it’s spam. It consumes my time, day after day, and devours the resources of our mail systems. In my own mailbox I get a few hundred spam messages a day, most of which I’ll never even see, let alone read. Thankfully most of these are …

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A new libstatgrab release

We’ve finally done another libstatgrab release. It’s been the best part of 8 months since the last release. Given the length of time you might be mistaken for thinking we’ve made lots of changes, but we haven’t. All this release really includes is some mostly untested Windows support, and handful of bugfixes. I guess the problem is that we’ve hit a bit …

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