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Entries for archive: 2008-01

Found 7 entries.

Working for Catalyst in Wellington

Yesterday I was asked to write a short testimonial describing working for Catalyst and living in Wellington from the point of view of someone coming here from abroad.

A number of \l{Catalyst|http://www.catalyst.net.nz/} employees are off to \l{LCA|http://linux.conf.au/} next week and my testimonial will be placed on the back of a leaflet to be given out to prospective employees during the \l{Open Day|http://linux.conf.au/programme/open-day}.

What I'm putting here is the original version (slightly edited) though I think it will be shortened somewhat due to a lack of space on the leaflet.

- --

Testimonial

Years ago my brother told me that he couldn't see himself living anywhere other than Coventry. Coming from Liverpool and living in Manchester at the time made me wonder how completely crazy my older brother was. Of course, at that time in my life I knew I still had the world to see.

Since then I have lived in London, Frankfurt, Perth and Wellington for varying times between six months and five years. You could say that I have now seen the world. By the way, the five year stint is Wellington and still ongoing (and no, I have no plans to leave - yet). There are many reasons I could use to explain why I'm still here but for the moment I will offer just two. It's quite simple - work and play.

So let's get the mundane one out of the way first - work. Ahah, see I fooled you. Work isn't actually the mundane one of the two (neither of them are) but let's discuss work anyway. It seems that work is apparently something which is a daily grind, another day, another dollar and a myriad of other boring phrases used to describe our nine-to-five work habit. I'd like someone to show me this 'work' they speak of which everyone else seems to consider that nasty time-consumer we force ourselves to do five days out of seven in return for monetary compensation.

My version of 'work' seems to be a lot different than that most other people seem to always moan about. Of course it's a lot of hard work (and I won't be naive enough to tell you otherwise) but there are certain advantages of working for Catalyst. The knowledge and talent of the people inside Catalyst is higher than any of my previous employers and always a great source of new ideas and learning. The open source slant within the company from the outset to the newest employees is self-evident. Talking to and working with people who contribute every day to Perl, Linux, Debian, MythTV, Moodle, Drupal and various other open source projects is a big eye-opener and I feel privileged to work with such bright and open-minded friends.

And that's the other thing you'll get at Catalyst - friends, not just colleagues.

Which leads us on to play. Fridays usually kick the weekend off with drinks and food at work, which always includes homemade bread from the staff disguised as bakers. Wellington being such a vibrant and small city means wherever you go, you're sure to bump into people you know. This gives the place a nice family atmosphere though of course there are also plenty of things to do for younger couples or singletons.

Having lived in a number of cities throughout my life, I have finally settled. It seems that one of my favourite phrases at the moment is "I love Wellington, me" and whilst that's my accent talking, you can see quite clearly what it means.

There's always something around the corner, something new, something different and something challenging, in both work and play. I honestly can't see myself living anywhere else so why not come and see what you're missing out on.

Andrew Chilton - Senior Developer

Andrew has lived in 5 different countries, worked for organisations of under 50 employees and over 13,000 employees, worked in the film industry, the space industry, has an Open Source project he is proud of and has eaten well over 79 bowls of Coco-Pops in the last three years (okay, that last one isn't quite true).

Labels: open-source, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, wellington, oss, catalyst

Inserted: 2008-01-24 22:51 (2 years, 7 months ago)

Latest Pic I Like

I've added some more pics to my Flickr account.

When I first started this blog, I did a few weeks with a WPoW - "Wellington Picture of the Week", but it turns out I didn't do it for long.

Anyway, with my new camera, I'm uploading bits and pieces and will blog about one or two here. Don't worry, I won't go over the top with photos, just one or two posts a week maybe.

Here's todays, taken in Seatoun:

Hope you like it.

And as with most things I do these days, I'm giving it away free. All my photos on Flickr are licensed under the Creative Commons "Attribution-No Derivatives" license (shame Flickr hasn't updated to v3.0 of the licenses yet).

Go nuts!

Labels: sky, photos, wellington, silhouette, wpow, flickr

Inserted: 2008-01-18 01:04 (2 years, 7 months ago)

Software Driven by Imagination

For years, it has been said that Free and Open Source Software is created when someone has an itch. That may be true, but I'd like to present a view after that initial itch has been scratched.

I'll start this entry as a question and answer session.

Question: How many times have you created a piece of software - one which scratched that initial itch - but once the initial problem had been solved you stopped working on it?

Answer: Loads. Not one or two, or even five or six. I'd say upwards of 10, maybe even 15 or 20. I even have old repositories to prove it.

Question: Why is it that once the problem is solved, work is almost immediately dropped?

Answer: Mainly it's because the challenge of fixing whatever the itch was then goes away and the itch dies down. Also because the interesting thing you wanted to solve is no longer interesting. It's sad to say that because of this no-one ever sees the beautiful code you stayed up for three or four nights crafting.

Question: So how does a project move from the initial itch stage into being a full blown development project.

Answer: Imagination.

And there you have it, it's that simple. Imagination is the driving force behind any large project. Without it, the project stalls and nothing else gets done. As proof, let me give you a few examples:

• imagine if all the computers in the world were able to talk to each other
• imagine if everyone in the world could get free access to information, including reference material and education
• imagine if anyone could run the software they choose to, for free, and be able to exchange both it's source and any documents in any way they please

Hence, from the above musings, the internet, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, Linux and ODF all came into being. Though they might have had different thinking at the time, I suspect each of these projects stemmed from someone's first itch but only carried on because of their imagination.

Imagination is important because otherwise projects would just stop. If the itch has been scratched, even if the software is also released as Open Source, no new development will happen since there is nothing taking it anywhere. There is nowhere left to take it - it has fulfilled its destiny (think grep).

The only thing that can take that project forward is imagination. You need to be able to figure out what the next step is, where you want to go and where you want to be. Even if the original need has been fulfilled, imagination means there is always something to do next.

I was thinking about all of this on the bus on the way home from work. I'd just had a conversation in which the other person stated that various government organisations had listed Drupal and Plone as their preferred CMSs. I had been pimping Zaapt as something that is ready to be used in a production site. Granted, those other CMSs have a few more features than Zaapt - and I can point to a few reasons why - but it just seemed that because these other two were the preferred CMSs that Zaapt wouldn't get a look-in. Or indeed any other CMS for that matter.

So that's why I'm glad that I have imagination. There have been many times recently that I have imagined when Zaapt will be used on big projects, hell even government ones. And the reason is because I always wonder what I can implement on Zaapt next (e.g. the list of features needed for v0.2 even though v0.1 is only just feature complete).

At first, you'd wonder if that closed thinking would put me off. Certainly, I'm disappointed but it doesn't worry me, besides, I like a challenge. Zaapt has already scratched my initial itch and fulfils all of the initial problems I set out to solve - in fact, the itch disappeared a long time ago.

But yet somehow Zaapt is now one of only a handful of projects that I have kept developing consistently over the years. The main reason for this is because I have an imagination. There are so many places to go with it, things to do, places to see, all fulfilled by the usual constraints - time and resources - but gladly not constrained by imagination.

And I imagine that Zaapt will eventually be the biggest CMS built with Perl[1], which was always one of my original intentions :-)

[1] Yes, I know that is a tall order and maybe that's not just imagination but a dream - still, we need that too.

Labels: perl, zaapt, drupal, cms, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, plone

Inserted: 2008-01-11 20:25 (2 years, 7 months ago)

Some Cool Stuff Coming Up

There are a few things in February I'm really looking forward to.

Firstly, it looks like Grant has snared Damian Conway to come and speak to us at Wellington.pm . That is going to one awesome evenings.

And secondly something which made me smile. I read the Amazon Web Services blog and saw this article about New Zealand and Australia the other day. So I followed their wiki entry to this page about Mike Culver's Schedule only to realise that he's already coming to WellyLug/Catalyst :-) It seems that Brenda was to blame for this - so thanks Brenda.

Also, Brenda, Reed and co. have been busy figuring out which language to use next (and it even got posted on PerlBuzz). I'd have also said Ada is Anal but then, I had to do Ada 83 (Ravenscar Profile) for 9 months once.

Labels: programming, planet-geek, aws, perlmongers, amazon

Inserted: 2008-01-10 00:28 (2 years, 7 months ago)

Playing with Flickr

After getting my new digital camera today, I've started uploading some pictures to Flickr. It's fun.

Instead of using Flickr as a store for all my photos, I'm just going to upload some of my favourites. Unfortunately, today I couldn't go out and take any nice pictures because of the terrible weather, so I took a few just to play around with the camera.

That's just the small version since I thought the medium version was 400 across and not 500 as it actually is.

Anyway, here is another photo to enjoy:

< <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/andychilton/2174255167/" title="20080107_185926 by andychilton, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2016/2174255167_9c87feef1e_m.jpg" border="0" width="240" height="180" alt="20080107_185926" /></a>
</div>

And you can see more at andychilton's Flickr page. If you have an account, go add me as a contact.

Labels: photos, wellington, flickr

Inserted: 2008-01-08 00:17 (2 years, 7 months ago)

S3 Revival

After lately talking to different people about the Amazon Web Services, I have become interested in them again.

And after ages and ages wanting a place 'in the cloud' to store my files, I decided that I'm not going to wait for Google's GDrive, but instead am going to use Amazon's S3.

So, all those old photos I have dotted around are currently being uploaded. I'm using a program I wrote, s3bak, and whilst I haven't touched it much in a year, it's still working fine. It's even got some nice features. Think I'll be hacking a little on that in the next week or so.

Anyway, it'll be more important to me tomorrow when I finally get myself a new digital camera. It's not top of the range but the price/functionality is exactly what I wanted. The Canon A570 IS isn't too expensive but has some of those things I like, such as aperture and shutter priority.

I also think things like S3 are underused in some commercial senses. There's certainly one thing I'd love to use it for in work and it would save buying a lot of hardware and save a lot of hassle.

As I said to someone recently, "because it's on the same system Amazon use, if something goes wrong, they would stand to lose a lot more money than you would" - hence, the reliability of the thing is phenomenal. If it's good enough for Amazon, then it's good enough for my backups.

I also intend to use it for various web projects I have brewing too. Not to mention EC2 and the other Amazon Services.

Labels: photos, planet-geek, ec2, planet-catalyst, s3bak, s3, amazon

Inserted: 2008-01-06 23:36 (2 years, 8 months ago)

New Year Novella Challenge

Over on KiwiWriters, we're doing a new type of challenge this new year. Write a novella during January - it's that simple.

Many people are scared off from either NaNoWriMo or SoCNoC because it sounds like a daunting task. Fifty thousand words in a month really is a good challenge but here is an alternative for you.

Much like there are marathons and half-marathons, KiwiWriters now presents the half marathon of writing challenges. The New Year Novella Challenge (along with a forum) is a great way to get started in doing stories that are just that bit longer, and you never know, it might give you a taster for one of the bigger challenges later in the year.

Anyway, here's my participant's icon:

As always, I finish this post with, Join Us.

Labels: new-year-novella, nanowrimo, kiwiwriters, planet-geek, socnoc, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-01-02 01:15 (2 years, 8 months ago)