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Rant: The pains of publishing talks
I've just spent about 16 hours in utter frustration trying to publish my dinner keynote from OSDC 2007. Normally I'd use SlideShare for this, as I've done with some previous talks, but I've found it simply can't handle my presentation. Here's why:

Diving
Went diving before the Open Source Developers' Conference. A little special, because this trip included my 100th dive.

Open Source Developers' Conference 2007
I feel that OSDC 2007 was the best OSDC I have ever been to. There were three main contributors to this. Firstly, it was in Brisbane, which is warm, sunny, and has great diving. Secondly, my talk was given a very nice timeslot. Thirdly, I had nothing at all to do with its organisation. The conference just happened, and the other speakers were great. Awesome!

My very nice timeslot was a keynote. This is the first time I'd been invited to keynote at a conference, and was a huge and unexpected honour. Indeed, I was given the dinner keynote, the only session one can be sure that almost everyone will attend, on account of there being both free food and alcohol. The keynote went extremely well, I don't think I could have hoped for a better audience reaction. Once again, a huge amount of thanks goes to Jacinta Richardson, who spent countless hours helping me prepare the slides, and listening to me rehearse again and again.

Julien Goodwin recorded the entire keynote, and while I don't yet have a copy yet, it's my sincere hope to get the recording published on-line. Stay tuned for progress.

Holiday in Middle Earth
December is a quiet season for our business. Lots of people take holidays, so courses are hard to schedule. I think this is fantastic, because it means that I can take a break too!

That break has recently been filled with playing Lord of the Rings Online, which I noticed kept receiving good reviews, and deservedly so. The game looks great, runs on older hardware, can be entirely downloaded and registered on-line, and has been a tremendous amount of fun. I won't go into too much detail, but I can say that it's definitely worth having a play, and if you're a fan of Middle Earth you'll especially enjoy the sight-seeing.

On that note, I've been given the ability to hand out 10-day trials to the game. These are both longer than the 7-day trials you can get on-line, come with cheaper pricing if you do choose to subscribe, and give me kickbacks of free game-time if you do. Let me know if you'd like one, the only real condition is that you have to accept, since there's a limited number of unaccepted invites I can have floating around at any time.

Intruder Alert - Tracking down a rogue connection
The hosts I administer look through their logfiles each hour, looking for things that are out of the ordinary, and mailing them to me. This is where my uncanny ability to remember leap-seconds comes from; it's not because I actually care about things, but because I'll get an e-mail saying that a host suddenly found itself a whole second out of sync with some incredibly accurate clock somewhere. Lucky me.

Most things don't end up in my log digests, because most things are boring. The things I do see are things that I either care about, or have never seen before.

A few days ago I got an e-mail that one machine was trying to contact a particular address, 172.16.45.35. What made this noteworthy is that address is unroutable. It's a reserved, private address space. It doesn't go anywhere on the Internet, and it's not used by us internally, so there should be no reason to try and contact it. The connection indicated it would have been an outgoing web request, and since I was busy working on other things, I assumed that some other fool had set up their system incorrectly, and thought nothing of it. People leave references to their own internal sites in documents all the time.

A few days later I got another e-mail, same result. And then another, the next day, and another. Each time I looked a little closer. About the same time each day, a few attempts to contact this address, and then nothing.

Today, this bothered me. What if we're seeing these packets because there's something running on this machine that shouldn't be? So I go to my proxy logs, and do a search for the address. Nothing matches.

Hmm, that's odd. Let's see what's in our name-server cache, since the address is probably the result of a name lookup. kill -INT on your named will let you see its memory cache, a great trick to remember. Nothing in here, either, but it's now been hours since I got the mail, so the record may well have expired.

What's odd about this connection is that it seems to happen around lunchtime, but not every day, and not always exactly the same time, and sometimes it misses days, so I don't really know if or when I'll ever see it again. Rather than trying to futilely trying to find it minutes after it occurs, I figure that I'll set something running to catch it in the act:

Slidecast - Effective Procrastination with HiveMinder
I've just finished my first real slidecast, Effective Procrastination with HiveMinder, which I gave at Melbourne Perl Mongers a few weeks back. If you're reading this from my main blog then you can even watch a low-resolution version in the embedded player below.