Since my first IT job ever, I’ve taken part in a tradition started by the guy I was replacing. A tradition known to us as escape.pl, and something people in my local Linux Administrator community have kept with for well over a decade now.

The Most Important Script You’ll Ever Write?

The first time I saw it it was written in Perl, I’ve since written them in Bash, Java and now Javascript. I’ve just seen one written in AWK. Some are cleverer than others, some just do the bare minimum. Some are executed by hand, others are run each time a new terminal is opened thanks to .profile, .bashrc or whatever’s managing your shell environment.

I’ve been working on several product niches, following Anton’s Drop Ship Lifestyle system for a few months now, along side all my other projects, and this week I got my first sale so I’m very excited for the future.

Drop Ship Lifestyle has a very vibrant community, both online with their members only forums and in Chiang Mai, Thailand where Anton is based at the moment, and watching everyone else getting results has been extremely motivational for me. However there is nothing like actually getting results yourself and it’s very reassuring to know that the Drop Ship Lifestyle system really does work.

I’ve been doing some awesome things to a new VM for work, namely installing CouchDB, Apache and running Node.JS apps along side a WordPress plugin using Angular.JS. It’s pretty cool. But computer’s are dicks so when it came down to installing Monit to ensure everything was lovely I got the following error: Couldn’t fork %pre(monit-5.5-1.el6.rf.x86_64): Cannot allocate memory. Bum.

error: Couldn’t fork %pre(monit-5.5-1.el6.rf.x86_64): Cannot allocate memory

Seem’s simple enough, for whatever reason Yum cannot allocate memory, so lets take a peak

I love reading but reading for myself is something that only happens nowadays if I go on holiday. There’s far too much work related material to read instead.

One of the things I want to do is read more, and for myself. There are at least a dozen books going dusty that I haven’t read yet and many more that I need to catch up on!

I’d been toying with the idea of escaping my 9-5 for a while and came up with 2 different ideas. The first was to go to the Mana Retreat in New Zealand, volunteer and live for free whilst meditating and doing yoga.

The second idea was a Thai fight camp.

Googling lead me to JohnnyFD and this book, 12 Weeks in Thailand: The Good Life on the Cheap, a sort of motivational biography about how Johnny visited Thailand on holiday and then decided to move there training in Muay Thai and becoming a scuba instructor.

Today I took action and booked flights out to Phuket, Thailand and made arrangements for my first week out there.

Most People In Life Don’t Show Up

Technically I started making arrangements last year, when I handed in my notice at work, only to ask for it back and change role.

I also booked a trip to Turkey over Christmas which I didn’t go on as I wasn’t feeling it.

It’s rare that I’m genuinely in shock and awe of something, but that’s how I felt last night in The Albert, down under Brighton train station!

The menu came with a crazy amount of options, so for the burger I added bacon and cheese and for the chips, thick cut rather than skinny and chilli and cheese. Not chilli cheese mind, as that was a separate option, as were the beef brisket, hash browns, onion rings, guacamole etc etc etc TOO MANY CHOICES! The entire thing came to £10 on the nose.

I’m slowly migrating a bunch of awesome things from a really old server, it’s still running Ubuntu 10.04.. to a really nice and shiny one. Which has 2 new 3TB HDDs in RAID 1, which are syncing..

<br /> cat /proc/mdstat<br /> md3 : active raid1 sda4[0] sdb4[1]<br /> 1847478528 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]<br /> [>....................] resync = 0.1% (2061952/1847478528) finish=28857.9min speed=1065K/sec<br />

Earlier today I was setting up a brand new server for a migration and just as I was typing scp .ssh/authorized_keys2 my brain went and asked a question..

What is the difference between authorized_keys and authorized_keys2?

I’ve been working with Linux for well over a decade and some of my practices stem from things I learned in the ’90s that still work, putting all my public keys in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 is one of those things.