🧑‍💻 Funky Penguin

opinion

Working late (consistently) is a sign of failure

I recently enjoyed this article, in which Jeff Sutherland describes how working longer hours actually makes you less productive. Of note : He started telling people that working late wasn’t a sign of commitment—it was a sign of failure.

featured

Bought a pebble watch, saved my brain

In “Buy a watch, save your brain”, I wrote about how I hoped to buy a wrist watch (at the time, it was the rumoured “iWatch”), and reduce the amount of distraction I caused myself each time I checked the time on my iPhone. Well, the “Apple Watch” announcement has

balance

In defense of traditional work-life balance

I enjoyed Rian van der Merwe’s first column on A List Apart, in which he defends a traditional view of work-life balance. The following echoes my own policy - I try to be 100% at work during work hours, but afterwards, I’m 0% at work (crises and extraordinary

attention

Watching video is harder than reading

This video (below) complains that we’re getting ever worse at focusing our attention Personally, I find it much harder to focus on video than I do on reading. My preferred means of learning is reading, followed by listening, followed by video. I think it’s because reading permits you

asterisk

Automatically reboot multiple Cisco 79xx phones

We’re upgrading our Asterisk PABX at the office soon, as as part of the preparation, I needed a way to automatically reboot about 20 Cisco 79xx IP phones. I found a reference to a ‘reboot.pl’ script at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+phone+cisco+79xx, but

ebook

Grab any of Packts geekbooks for $10 until July 5th

The folks at Packt Publishing asked me to mention that they’re having 10 years $10 special, to celebrate their 10-year anniversary. Their entire range of books (geared towards niche geek topics) are available for $10 each. This is a good opportunity to brush up on some rusty areas, or

advice

Stumbling into what you love

Thanks to the Farnam Street Blog for recommending this commencement speech by Daniel Pink. To paraphrase his message, you can’t be prepared enough for life before living it. You may have an idea of the direction you want to take, but you should be open to stumbling into what

dadops

Using a Foscam Pro and FI8909W as an iOS baby monitor

A friend who’s just joined the #dadops team asked me what baby monitor solution we use for our 2-year-old. According to my wife, this is one of the best tech investments I’ve made… The hardware (Foscam FI8909W) I bought a Foscam FI8909W off eBay (the easiest and cheapest

review

Review of Packt Publishing's ESXi Cookbook

Because I previously authored a book on PHPList, I was asked by the folks at Packt Publishing to review their latest book, VMWare ESXi Cookbook. Review follows. Mohammed and Aravind have done a good job at covering a broad range of topics related to ESXi. I was pleased to see

opinion

Carving your own path

I liked this point in the story of the development of Circa, my favorite news app: So much of what is released tends to be derivative in some way. But when you’re solving a problem in an entirely new manner, you have to carve your own path

opinion

Why financial incentives aren't the optimal way to motivate your knowledge workers

In “The 6 Rules for Rewards”, Jurgen Appelo points out that extrinsic motivators (bonuses, etc) are far less powerful than intrinsic ones. He makes the bold statement that employee bonus schemes can actually reduce effectiveness. Reflecting on this - I wouldn’t want to loose my yearly bonus at my

opinion

Buy a watch, save your brain

Jeremy Vandehey points out in “This is your brain on mobile” that buying a watch can reduce the amount of time you spend distracted on your smartphone, since you won’t be whipping it out to check the time, only to repeat a few min later because you’ve forgotten.

wordpress

Making postie work with cron jobs, fails with wp-config.php outside of web root

I use the excellent Postie plugin to post to this blog via email. I’ve been battling for days to get it to automatically check the mailbox for new message though, and while I still haven’t got it working using WP-Cron (WordPress’ “pseudo-cron”), I’ve finally managed to get

reflection

Confirmation Bias

I read Shane Parrish’s mental model on confirmation bias this evening, and found it resonated with me. I’ve notice that once I’ve struggled with a decision and come to a conclusion, then I find myself coming up with more and more reasons why my decision was the

productivity

The illusion of speed

An excerpt from the excellent Farnam Street Blog (below). I’m trying to be more intentional about how I spend my time, and be more “present in the moment”. I especially liked the following, re the difference that it makes to slow down, not considering all hours to be equal:

reading

On the joys of Actually Reading

Against the author’s wishes, I’m sharing the article titled “Actually Reading”, a comment on the fact that we (I’m guilty of this) often appreciate an article for it social “sharability” rather than the value it adds to us. I’m trying to combat this in my own

junos

Restart VRRP on JUNOS to fix master/master issues

I spent about 30 min this evening chasing a non-existing VRRP issue between 2 JUNOS SRX devices after a hardware drop-in replacement. One was configured as master, one as backup. Both were in the master status (normally indicating a lack of L2 connectivity), but each could ping the other on

dadops

What we imply to our kids by the way we live

I enjoyed Minimalism with Kids, finding several point re minimalism and life in general which I intend to apply. This paragraph stood out: In a family, minimalism is really a conversation about what’s important. What’s necessary. Why we own things and do things. A lot of times, a

junos

Copying SSH host private keys between JUNOS devices to when replacing hardware

A certain customer of mine is (rightly or wrongly) pedantic about security warnings. Recently, we did a hardware replacement of a JUNOS device (an SRX240 firewall). While the config was a drop-in replacement, users who tried to SSH to the host post-migration would normally see an SSH “host key has

centos

Importing existing RAID devices into new Linux installation

Recently I had to rebuild a CentOS5 VM host as CentOS6. My VMs were stored on a RAID1 pair (seperate from the OS disks). To avoid any possibility of impacting the VM data during the re-installation, I removed the VM data disks from the host during the reinstall. After successfully

productivity

Sending tasks to Things.app via email

I stumbled across this useful hint on the Things forums which adds a feature to my workflow which I felt important enough to record here. Most of my digital inputs come via email. It’s hugely useful to be able to (with a single keystroke) forward an email to my

icinga

Monitoring OSX with Icinga / Nagios using NRPE

I have a fairly comprehensive Icinga monitoring platform monitoring my various linux hosts, but one area which has been lacking until now is the monitoring of the OSX Mavericks Mac Mini that I use for a home media center. Considering this is used by my family to watch TV/Movies,

icinga

Monitoring Veeam Backup and Replication 7 with Icinga / Nagios

We’ve recently deployed a Veeam Backup and Replication 7 platform, and needed to monitor the ongoing success of the backup / replication jobs. I identified a plugin which does most of what’s required, but seems to have 2 current shortcomings: 1. In-progress jobs trigger false warnings 2. Date calculation

project

Easy squid tricks and pranks with Vagrant

For April Fools this year, I decided to update my 2011 squid prank, and gain some experience using Vagrant at the same time. I rebuilt the entire environment using a Vagrantfile, which permits anybody to check out a few files and reproduce it. See https://github.com/funkypenguin/squidprank for

ssl

Solving vsftpd's unsupported record version unknown 48.48 error

I use FTPS with vsftpd to update my WordPress plugins. This means that the wordpress files don’t need to be writeable by the webserver user, which adds another layer of protection and separation. I make FTPS available to localhost only, and force SSL encryption end-to-end. This makes debugging a