York Minster Ceiling by Jon Middleton, on Flickr Here’s a photo for those not wanting to read about technical things. It’s one of the many I took in York Minster on our recent holiday there. I can only post old photo’s for a short while as I’ve not made it out with my camera for the last week or two, as it’s been almost constantly raining up here on any occasion I could get out.

Since Saturday I’ve carried on looking at Ruby on Rails and so far I’m very impressed. While reading though the first part about of Agile Web Development with Rails, I wrote a simple web application which displays some data from a single database table, requires a logged in session to change data and always has user management via the admin interface. I don’t think I could have gotten this much done in so little time (and code) in any other language.

Last night I went to ScotRUG mainly to meet mathie, but also to find out what all the fuss is about and so far I like what I’ve heard. It being like Python (without the whitespace) is a good thing as Python has been my programming language of choice for many years. While thinking about starting this blog I was looking at PHP, trying to get my head round it as a programing language (which is a title I don’t think it really deserves).

Some sort of Thistle by Jon Middleton, on Flickr Between the large amounts of rain today we managed a quick walk in Holyrood park. It’s a wonderful place, but it’s getting really hard to take photos there which are different enough from the many others I’ve taken over the last 6 months. This is one that stands out from in the set I’ve put on Flickr. Thistles do make really good subjects.

Recently I had given Cisco technical study a rest and did some reading about other logistical aspects of running a complex networks. There are plenty of tools to version control your software and configuration files (e.g. CVS, RCS, Subversion). However there seems to be almost a total lack of tools which allow you to track the larger picture about your systems and devices on the network. I’m talking about the details of about a device (a Configuration Item in ITIL terms):

Untitled by Jon Middleton, on Flickr This photograph is from the last night of our recent holiday in York, when I tried to take some different views of the Shambles. There is so much detail at and above head height, which is very easy to miss so much by just forgetting to look up.

Hidden Doorway by Jon Middleton, on Flickr There’s something wonderful about hidden (or closed off) doorways. This one is from York Minster. I keep seeing them while wandering round Edinburgh, however I never seem to have a camera with me at the time.

York Minster for the Blind by Jon Middleton on Flickr This is the first non-back dated post to my new public blog. This is a photo I took on our holiday in York (UK) a few weeks ago. Currently it’s the most viewed picture in my photostream.

Following seeing a link a a book called The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t on Cutaway’s blog (Security Ripcord) I just had to order it from the US. Not really sure how I managed to find this blog post this evening given that it’s from January, anyway it’s a rant on security training being a liability. Given the views I’ve seen on training over the years I’m not surprised on that one.

Untitled by Jon Middleton, on Flickr This week has mostly been lost to being ill, ended up not really doing anything for the last two days of my holiday due to feeling shitty with this nose and throat bug; then I did not make it into work on Thursday or Friday. Today we managed to make it out of the house for a quite a few hours, we visited Greyfriars Kirk with the camera and then had a wander to Transreal.

Untitled by Jon Middleton, on Flickr I’ve not posted a photo a in a couple of weeks. This was taken last Thursday in Hollyrood park straight after work. Photo greek bit: Taken with a prime 50mm lens at f/1.8.