Cruel and Unusual Geography

I know people who manage several, and in a couple of cases hundreds, of servers. While I’m nowhere near that level — I’m a coder, not a system administrator —I do have a few machines that I’m responsible for. The work subversion repository, for example, and the issue tracker, and one or two others, mostly running various flavours of Ubuntu Server on virtual machines.

Manually checking whether patches are required for the kernel or applications

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

becomes more of an effort when there’s more than one or two machines to manage. Enter apticron, a utility which will automatically email you when there are packages needing upgrading.

Configuration is simple; there’s a nice overview here.

Update: there are brief (but accurate) configuration instructions posted now.

This is some of the most fantastic and beautiful delicate art work I have ever seen:

Carved eggshells. Like nothing I've ever seen.

Slovenian (I think) Franc Grom carves these eggs using a small hand-held electric drill. His more complicated pieces have literally thousands of holes.

Franc Grom works on another egg.

There are a few more photos here, but precious little else that I can discover about him online.

This is just cool. New York arty type Kacie Kinzer has created simple little robots that mindlessly drive along, relying on passers-by to direct them to their destination. Contrary to expectations, no-one stole or vandalised them, and in post-911 NY no-one called “terror attack” when faced with a (small cardboard) robot stalking the city.

A tweenbot gets help from a passer-by in NY.

The tweenbots could only drive forwards, and relied on the kindness of strangers to point them to the destination written on a small attached flag.

There’s more info, including images and video, at the tweenbot website.

At work we’re looking for a new designer / integrator. The person we need has good graphic design skills and an understanding of web design. That doesn’t just mean that you can make it look good in Dreamweaver; you need a good understanding of HTML and CSS, and the ability to manually mark up web pages when the tools don’t do it right.

Even better would be some (basic) coding skill. If you’ve had some exposure to PHP or other languages, and/or experience with a CMS (we prefer Joomla) you really should give me a call. (By the way, I’m not the boss, but like all staff have a vested interest in getting someone really good on board.)

Hairy Lemon has a relaxed work atmosphere. The directors work hard at being good employers, and ensure that there’s fresh fruit in the kitchen, and drinks in the fridge for the end of the week. Team cohesion is important, so regardless of how good you are artistically and technically you’ll need to be able to fit in with the rest of us to get hired.

You can email me, or use the contact form on the company web site (we’ve been pretty busy lately, so the web site is still in the process of being updated) and have a look at some of the work we’ve done (branding and web).

Update: the position has been filled, but feel free to email me if you’d like to be considered in the future.