Lance Wicks
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JudoGeek Blog

Super Lego Mario 

Super Lego Mario movie:

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Teen SciFi and "Little Brother". 

Steve Eley over at EscapePod recently bemoaned the lack of teen SciFi out there.

As a kid, my father took me to the local library every two weeks and I took home a stash of SciFi books everytime. Like Steve, they were primarily adult SciFi books. And I really would like to see more teen SciFi produced in the future too. The short-term future is looking bright of course thanks to Cory "Boing Boing" Doctorow who has a new book "Little Brother" coming out. So far both Neil Gaiman and Tim O'Reilly have raved about it and I am really REALLY looking forward to reading this one!

When I was a kid/teen, SciFi was amazing, the stories took hold of me in a way no other genre managed. It changed me each and everytime! Asimov's Robot stories are probably the main reason I am in IT for a living. Technology and computers all came from those books and that is me now. Books change you and Cory's writing I have loved in part because it grabs me like the books of my youth did. Cory's stories (and I generalize) take today and push it forward a couple of months with some cool twists. He takes really simple ideas and makes them cool. His short works are always worth the effort, When Sysadmins ruled the earth is an all-time fav. I think maybe Anda's Game or “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life, Part 02” are indicators of how cool Cory doing "teen" SciFi will be!

I can't wait to read it!!!!!!

Anyway... the reason the above is on my mind and coming out the way it is, is because I went to the local library today and was disappointed at the TINY selection of SciFi they had, weird and really REALLY disappointing for any adult let alone teen who needs a fix of SciFi! Luckily, the Waterstones just a little while away has a wider selection, but a shame none the less.

So be sure to pre-order Little Brother in fact order two or three copies and give a couple of copies to a teen you know! :)

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Onshore, Offshore & Internet Resilliency 

Alex over at europeancontactcentre.blogspot.com has been blogging for a while now and his blog is really getting into a flow. This week he has posted one this week which was interesting as it highlights one of the issues with our reliance on internet technologies.

Alex, writes about call centres and related technologies, it is "what he does", well technically he's involved in voice technology, used by call centres I suppose, but you get the point.

In his post, he mentions the case of a ships anchor breaking a undersea cable that acts as a major pipe to India and the Middle East from Europe. Which wreaks havoc as you can imagine. When I started in IT my first boss drummed the importance of the 7 layer network model. For which I am really appreciative as it really does help you remember that the Layer 1 is the base of the model and without the physical all the other layers die also.

Too often, we forget this and suffer the consequences later.
Outsource your call centre to India and yes you will suffer if someone takes out the cable. Move your CRM to Salesforce and hope the WAN links don't crash, or that their links don't or worse their servers crash.

In my work role, we do lots of work in data centres and much of what we do relates to making sure that all the layers of the OSI model are covered as appropriately as possible. Meaning that you have redundancy on the physical layer, all the way up to the Application layer.

As Alex mentions, you need to consider both redundancy and performance.
A increasingly common DR strategy is to have physical servers on your primary site and a virtual environment hosting the backup servers. This is a pretty sensible DR strategy as you can save a HUGE amount by not having a full set of physical servers at the DR site.

HOWEVER...

Much like outsourcing your call centre to India, you need to know the downside. In a DR environment, typically it is performance, both in a virtual environment and in a straight duplicated hardware environment. For a start, you DR site needs to be geographically separated from your production site, so ping times go up! Performance levels go down.

So, take a look at Alex's blog and add it to your feedreader, it's an interesting perspective on call centres.



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NoseRub - Check it out! 

Hi All,
http://www.lancewicks.com/ has had a small facelift lately, I have cleaned up a few sections and also added a link for "NoseRub:Social Networks" which takes you to http://www.lancewicks.com/noserub/lancew .

Now NoseRub is a decentralized social network, it is also an application and a protocol. It's early days, but Dirk are working hard and unlike many other ideas of a similar vein have a working open source application; which is acting as a focal point for the testing of ideas.

For me, it is a central point for people to find all those little bits and bobs I share on the internet. It pulls my pictures from Flickr and Picassa. It collects my blog posts from this site and elsewhere. Not to mention my micro-publishing from Jaiku/Plazes/Twitter.

So, if for example you are my Father, you know where to go to find photos I might have published; without needing to remember where my Picassa/Flickr urls are. For me, NoseRub provides a central place for people to "keep tabs" on me and also to facilitate finding say my Jaiku feed if you didn't know I had one.

In the longer term, the NoseRub protocol and the ideas around NoseRub will be more interesting. The synchronization between other peoples NoseRub installs will mean that you changing some details on your profile on your site will automatically propagate to my server. By the same token, the idea will be that you can easily move your account from one server to another, NoseRub will do it for you.

There are efforts being built to have "groups" where you can communicate with other people who share something with you. Also, there is efforts into privacy and sharing your information from selected sources with selected people.

I really like this project and met Dirk last year, I am hoping to contribute to the project. Specifically, I hope to help in the "location" area, and specifically on a mobile client to set your location. As I have posted in previous entries, I really like the idea of using location to determine context, and context being relevant to how you share your social information.

All cool, all open source.

Take a look over at http://www.noserub.com/ and enjoy!

P.s. NoseRub is also a OpenID provider and consumer.
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Getting back into Perl (and coding generally) 

At work, I have been doing lots of coding recently and I thought I'd write a little something about it here.
We have a quite large project on that involved working on a variety of servers and working with various softwares installed on the servers.

The process is pretty interesting and challenging, and the tool I am wielding to get the job done at the moment is mainly Perl.

Working seriously with Perl is something I have not done for a year or more. It is interesting to revisit a tool after using others, specifically PHP, and seeing the differences. Perl is such a flexible language and CPAN is just the best resource you'll ever come across. If you ever need to do something in Perl, a quick search on CPAN and 9 times out of 10 there is a module that you can use.

Previously, I had only really used Perl for web based projects.
Using Perl for a non web project really highlights how strong a language Perl really is. Within a single script I am able to telnet into one server, get a bunch of data and compare it to data I have pulled from a command line application on another server. After a couple of regexes I was able to write to a third server Windows event log. It's only about... 40 lines of code and could have been smaller I think if I wasn't being so verbose.

It is also a real pleasure to work with because of sites like www.perlmonks.org where there is so much reliably good information for any tricky situations you find yourself in.

Anyway... loving Perl again!


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