Cruel and Unusual Geography

So, after much deliberation I’ve decided that I have to sell the Land Rover. Sad to see her go — she’s been a good fun runabout — but circumstances dictate that she has to go. This Land Rover Trade Me Auction has a $1 reserve, so I’m sure she will sell. Setting a ridiculously low reserve should attract interest and means that someone (you?) can get a really good deal.

Land rover for sale - $1 reserve on Trade Me

There’s more photos below…

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Vodafone’s current promotion in New Zealand is a young male (the “3GGuy”)  trotting around the country giving away netbooks. They created a Twitter account for the chap, but rather than use that have chosen to spam the Vodafone corporate Twitter account for the duration of the promotion.

Sadly this young chap (and/or his marketing-droid masters) doesn’t seem to understand social media. His first competition was to see who could spam the most.

This has not pleased some folk. Nope. Not at all.

In the Open Source spirit of “if you don’t like it, fix it” I’ve created my first Twitter bot. It parses the @vodafoneNZ Twitter stream and posts all tweets that don’t contain references to 3GGuy to @vfNZno3gguy. The updates aren’t instant, but should come through within half an hour or so.

The filtering is pretty basic at the  moment (it’s keyword-based; feel free to suggest modifications in the comments), but will be updated as I’m able.

Again, the 3Gguy-free Twitter feed is at @vfNZno3gguy. I hope this is of use to some folks.

Update:  the @vfNZno3gguy account was mentionned by @lancewiggs in his “how NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation” post.

So, the 40-hour famine is the weekend of 22-24 May. For the first time, both my kids (ages nearly-7 and just-9) are doing a 20-hour no-food famine.

If you’re doing the famine, good on you! If not, here’s my challenge to you: can you spare $1 or $2 (in New Zealand currency) to support malnourished kids in Bangladesh? It’s less than the price of a coffee, but buys much more than that. If we can get lots of people to donate just $1 or $2, it will add up to a substantial amount.

You can donate from anywhere in the world with a credit card. This is Jonte’s third famine. He finds it a bit of a challenge, but achievable. He has a goal of raising $280 this year. It’s Amelia’s first famine. She’s going to find it difficult, as she’s pretty unhappy when she’s hungry.

Both kids are going around family and friends looking for sponsorship; this on-line appeal is an extra, hoping to get a few more dollars for a genuinely good cause.

Donate on-line: sponsor Jonte or Amelia with a small credit card payment. They’ll learn about the generosity of strangers, you’ll get a good feeling for almost no cost, and the World Vision workers will have more resources to help the genuinely needy.

Here are the links again:

Sponsor Jonte. He’s 9 years old, is into gymnastics, basketball, dance, Star Wars, reading, and too much telly.

Sponsor Amelia. She’s almost 7, loves gymnastics, swimming, cuddling up with her Dad and a good book, and Barbie.

You don’t need to donate a lot (although you’re welcome to!) and just $1 or $2 will be hugely appreciated.

Thank you.

Update: for those wondering where the money goes: it doesn’t go to me! All payments go directly to World Vision for their excellent work.

Update 2: the payment facility will probably close off this weekend (the 30th or thereabouts).

A brief post to show off the short video clip of my son’s first miniball (beginners’ basketball) goal. The Middleton Grange Gators (in green; my boy is number 13) are playing the Pioneer Leopards.

I recently wrote about using apticron to keep track of package updates required on your Ubuntu or Debian server. It turns out that the instructions linked to from that post are out of date.

When apticron is installed (on the one Debian and two Ubuntu versions I’ve tested this with) there is no configuration requested. Instead, the default is to mail the update notice to root on the local box. To change this, edit the EMAIL field of /etc/apticron/apticron.conf. I’ve found that no other configuration changes were required.

I’ll post more on setting up a simple mail handler Real Soon Now.™

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.