Effective scheduling is the first foundation required to realise that opportunity. It’s the best place to start because,
unlike most technical system changes, adopting a flexible on-call schedule can be accomplished quickly and delivers immediate benefits.
Flexibility is key
The most important aspect of an effective on-call schedule is to minimise conflict between assigned on-call shifts and the many existing commitments
that place demands on our time and energy. Attempting to balance
time and attention between on-call and a conflicting committment adds stress to what is often an already stressful situation. That stress
not only lowers the effectiveness of the on-call response itself but contributes to the feeling that on-call is a duty rather than an opportunity to learn.
February already! Summer holidays are over and I’m overdue in writing up a look back on 2023 and my goals for 2024.
2023
2023 was a good year. We had several opportunities to catch up with extended family we hadn’t seen a lot of in the last 3 years, the boys are all continuing to do well at school and unlike many we did not have to personally deal with any major crises or unexpected events. My personal highlight was finally gaining the motivation and discipline to exercise regularly and eat more moderately. I’m fitter than I’ve ever been, and I lost some excess weight and dropped several clothing sizes. The resulting compliments were equally flattering and horrifying - I never realised how much attention anyone paid to my physique!
The mental models in our heads shape every discussion. Understanding how they align or differ between participants in a conversation is an important aspect of effective communication. This is particularly relevant for topics such as on-call where a wide range of different experiences lead to strongly held opinions.
This post steps back from high-level discussion of the opportunity on-call offers to focus on describing two key mental models I use to think about on-call and the roles and responsibilities of the different people involved.
On-call in software teams has a bad reputation. Niall Murphy’s 2018 polemic, Against On-Call is well worth a watch if you need a refresher on the many reasons why the reputation is justified.
Despite the current reputation, on-call can and should be an activity that every software engineer participates in and finds some measure of fulfilment from. Similar to how type 2 fun provides fulfilment after the fact even when not enjoyable in the moment.
I’m six months into my journey of building a business which means its time to reflect and review the goals I set for the year.
No further investment in co2mon.nz
In March I made the decision to focus on completing the market research for co2mon.nz. The results of that research led to two key conclusions:
Indoor air quality/ventilation is not a problem many people are actively thinking about or looking to spend money to improve.
Even when introduced to the problem and educated about the need, most people are looking for a one-off expense or solution (e.g. the physical monitor) and are much less interested in a monitoring software service.
Based on that, it was clear that this is not an opportunity that I should continue pursuing and I’ve put co2mon.nz into maintenance mode.
co2mon.nz currently uses monitors based on Oliver Seiler’s open source design which I am personally building. This post describes my exploration of how to achieve production of a CO2 monitor that could enable the growth of co2mon.nz.
Goals
Primarily I want to design a CO2 monitor which allows the majority of the production process to be outsourced. In particular, the PCB should be able to be assembled in an automated fashion (PCBA).
Over the last month I’ve performed some market research to better understand the potential for co2mon.nz and to help me decide whether the product I’ve built has a fit with the market or not. The key conclusions I’ve drawn from this work are:
Air quality is acknowledged as important, but monitoring it is not an urgent or pressing problem for most people.
Most of the value is seen in the hardware rather than the software service.
Keep reading to hear more about the results that lead to those conclusions.
I’m calling time on DNSSEC. Last week, prompted by a change in my DNS hosting setup, I began removing it from the few personal zones I had signed. Then this Monday the .nz ccTLD experienced a multi-day availability incident triggered by the annual DNSSEC key rotation process. This incident broke several of my unsigned zones, which led me to say very unkind things about DNSSEC on Mastodon and now I feel compelled to more completely explain my thinking:
Previously, I explained why ventilation monitoring is important, and the opportunity I see to help accelerate deployment of high quality ventilation monitoring for small businesses and organisations.
In this post, I’m going to discuss my plans to tackle that opportunity:
My journey to ventilation monitoring
I started looking into ventilation monitoring in detail last year when I wanted to ensure that the classrooms of our local primary school were well ventilated during the Omicron outbreak. That research revealed that the existing products on offer were challenging to deploy in a school environment from a cost perspective while also not providing perfect functionality.
The key decision I made mid-March was to commit to pursuing ventilation monitoring as my primary product development focus.
Prior to that decision, I hoped to use my writing plan to drive a breadth-first survey of the opportunities for each of my product ideas before deciding which had the best business potential to focus on first. Two factors changed my mind:
As noted last month, I’m finding the writing process much slower and harder than I expected – the survey across all the ideas may not complete until mid-year or later!
I’ve realised that having begun building co2mon.nz last year, to stop work on the project at this point would leave me feeling that I had not done justice to developing the product and testing the market - seeing it to a conclusion is important to me.
This decision is an explicit choice to prioritize seeing a project through to a conclusion (successful, or otherwise) regardless of whether or not it has the highest potential of the various ideas I could invest time into. I’m comfortable making that trade-off in this instance, but I am going to bound my time investment to two months. I’ll evaluate at the end of May whether I’m seeing sufficient traction and potential to justify continuing further with the idea.
The importance of clean, fresh indoor air is one of the most tangible takeaways of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to being an effective risk mitigation strategy for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses, clean, fresh air is necessary to enable effective cognitive performance.
Monitoring indoor air quality is relatively easy to do, but traditionally has not been a key focus. I believe air quality monitoring should be accessible for any indoor space, and for highly occupied indoor spaces should be provided on a continuous basis. This post explores the need and an opportunity for a business that can accelerate the adoption of ventilation monitoring through the following topics:
February ended up being a very short work month as I made a last minute decision to travel to Adelaide for the first 2 weeks of the month to help my brother with some house renovations he was undertaking. I thought I might be able to keep up with some work and my writing goals in the evenings while I was there, but days of hard manual labour are such an unfamiliar routine for me that I didn’t have any energy left to make good on that intention.
To achieve my goal of publishing one high-quality piece of writing per week this year, I’ve put together a draft writing plan and a few organisational notes.
Please let me know what you think - what’s missing? what would you like to read more/less of from me?
I aim for each piece of writing to generate discussion, inspire further writing, and raise my visibility and profile with potential customers and peers. Some of the writing will be opinion, but I expect a majority of it will take a “learning by teaching” approach - aiming to explain and present useful information to the reader while helping me learn more!
This is the second of a two-part post covering my goals for 2023. See the first part to understand the vision, mission and strategy driving these goals.
I want to thank my friend Nat, and Will Larson whose annual reviews I’ve always enjoyed reading for inspiring me to write these posts.
I’ve found the process articulating my motivations and goals very useful to clarify my thoughts and create tangible next steps. I’m grateful for that in and of itself, but I also hope that by publishing this you too might find it interesting, and the additional public accountability it creates will be a positive encouragement to me.
This is the first of a two-part post, covering high-level thoughts around my motivations and vision. Make sure to check out the second part for my specific goals for 2023.
A new year is upon us! My plan was to be 6 months into the journey of starting a business by this point.
I made some very tentative progress towards that goal in 2022, registering a company and starting some consulting work, but on the whole I’ve found it much harder than expected to gather the necessary energy to begin that journey in earnest.
After nearly 7 years of dormancy, I’m rebooting this website and have a goal to write regularly on a variety of topics going forward. More on that and my goals in a coming post…
For now, this is just a placeholder note to help double-check that everything on the new site is working as expected and the letters are flowing through the “pipes” in the right places.
Technical Details
I’ve migrated the site from Wordpress, to a fully static configuration using Hugo and TailwindCSS for help with styling.
Firstly, thanks to all who responded to my previous rant. It turns out exactly what I wanted does exist in the form of a ID-000 format smartcard combined with a USB reader. Perfect. No idea why I couldn’t find that on my own prior to ranting, but very happy to have found it now.
Secondly, now that I’ve got my keys and management practices in order, it is time to begin transitioning to my new key.
2014 and it’s still annoyingly hard to find a reasonable GPG key management system for personal use… All I want is to keep the key material isolated from any Internet connected host, without requiring me to jump through major inconvenience every time I want to use the key.
An HSM/Smartcard of some sort is an obvious choice, but they all suck in their own ways:
FSFE smartcard – it’s a smartcard, requires a reader, which are generally not particular portable compared to a USB stick.
Yubikey Neo – restricted to 2048 bits, doesn’t allow imports of primary keys (only subkeys), so you either generate on device and have no backup, or maintain some off-device primary key with only subkeys on the Neo, negating the main benefits of it in the first place.
Smartcard HSM – similar problems to the Neo, plus not really supported by GPG well (needs 2.0 with specific supporting module version requirements).
Cryptostick – made by some Germans, sounds potentially great, but perpetually out of stock.
Which leaves basically only the “roll your own” dm-crypt+LUKS usb stick approach. It obviously works well, and is what I currently use, but it’s a bunch of effort to maintain, particularly if you decide, as I have, that the master key material can never touch a machine with a network connection. The implication is that you now need to keep an airgapped machine around, and maintain a set of subkeys that are OK for use on network connected machines to avoid going mad playing sneakernet for every package upload.
I’ve written before about my initial investigations into the Kindle, and I’ve learnt much more about the software and how it communicates with the Amazon servers since then, but it all requires detailed technical explanation which I can never seem to find the motivation to write down. Extracting reading data out of the system log files is however comparatively simple.
I’m a big fan of measurement and data so my motivation and goal for the Kindle log files was to see if I could extract some useful information about my Kindle use and reading patterns. In particular, I’m interested in tracking my pace of reading, and how much time I spend reading over time.
It’s general election time again in New Zealand this year, with the added twist of an additional referendum on whether to keep MMP as our electoral system. If you’re not interested in New Zealand politics, then you should definitely skip the rest of this post.
I’ve never understood why some people consider their voting choices a matter of national security, so when via Andrew McMillan, I saw a good rationale for why you should share your opinion I found my excuse to write this post.
A stumbled across Start Com a few months ago, an Israeli company that run a Certificate Authority (CA) called StartSSL with a root certificate in all the modern browsers and operating systems. Best of all they don’t participate in the cartel run by the rest of the SSL certificate industry and offer domain validated certificates at the price it costs them to issue them – nothing.
I had the first opportunity to use their services today when I needed an SSL cert to secure the IMAP server I run for my parents and I was very pleased with the experience. The web interface is a bit weird and you have to jump through some strange hoops, but to save paying more money to the SSL certificate cartel it seemed more than worthwhile.
IPv6 adoption is increasing, and along with it come a new set of behaviours and defaults that system administrators and users must learn and become familiar with. I was recently caught out by Linux’s handling of IPv6 router advertisements (RAs) when forwarding is also enabled on the interface. It took me a while to figure out and searching for obvious terms (such as those in the first half of the title of this post) didn’t immediately yield useful answers, so here is my attempt to help shed some light on the subject.
For my birthday back in October, my wonderful wife gave me a Kindle 3 from Amazon. I’d been considering other e-book readers for quite some time, but I had mostly ignored the Kindle due to the lack of EPUB support and a general dislike of Amazon’s DRM enforcement. In the end, the superior hardware and ecosystem of the Kindle overpowered those concerns and overall I’m very pleased with the purchase. The screen is amazing, literally just like reading off a piece of paper and the selection of books is OK. I’ve been buying almost all my books from Amazon to date since it’s so easy (the Whispernet is amazingly quick!) but it’s not terribly difficult to get EPUBs from elsewhere onto the device after a quick run through Calibre to turn them into a MOBI file, so I keep telling myself I’ve still got some flexibility.
I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the release of Xero Personal which has been heavily promoted by [Xero](]http://www.xero.com and BNZ (as MoneyMap) for the last few months. Unfortunately my first impressions of the product today are extremely underwhelming. Xero Personal is definitely not worth anywhere close to $5/month for me at this point in time and I’m unlikely to even keep using the free trial.
To set the context for that statement, Xero Business set the bar high. I first used the original version of Xero while it was still in beta and even then it was clear that it was an application that took accounting to a new level and would provide an order of magnitude improvement in how I maintained the accounts for our business. That promise held true once we started paying for it, even though the cost of Xero is more than 10% of our annual expenses, the time and hassle it saves makes it a worthwhile investment. By contrast today’s release of Xero Personal offers nothing new above existing personal finance websites or desktop packages and would take me extra time to use as it fails to handle many of the basic transactions that a normal household will encounter.
It’s been a while since I’ve taken any sort of quiz like this, so when David Farrar from Kiwblog posted his results today it prompted me to give it another go.
My Political Views
I am a center-right moderate social libertarian
Right: 1.33, Libertarian: 1.97 Political Spectrum Quiz
I completed the quiz pretty quickly and felt the need to answer ‘it depends on the specifics’ to many of the questions, so take the results with a grain of salt. I think it is a reasonably accurate description of me though.
From the better late than never category… I finally got around to signing keys from the LCA2006 key signing party, the verification sheet from which has travelled with me from NZ to Dublin and then sat on my desk for a few years. I inevitably lost a few of my notes and verifications along the way, so if you were still expecting a signature from me and didn’t get one let me know!
I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that National has delayed the introduction of S92A via an order-in-council. It’s a nice short-term victory, but I’ll save the champagne until the law is fundamentally rewritten.
The most pleasing aspect of the decision is simply that it was made at all. Within two weeks, a small band of protesters were able to harness the power of the Internet to direct international attention and place enough pressure on a Government, whose Prime Minister admitted to not having read the bill prior, that he then took the time to understand the issues and personally announce the delay in implementation of the law. We owe much thanks to the Creative Freedom Foundation for all the effort they put into co-ordinating the protest and ensuring that a single coherent message was presented. Just a little bit of my cynicism and belief that politicians never listen to public opinion outside of election campaigns was chipped away today.
If you’re reading this post via the website rather than a feed/planet then you will notice that the site has gone completely black in support of the Creative Freedom Foundation’s campaign against S92A of the NZ Copyright Amendment Act which is due to come into effect on 28th February 2009. I’ve also joined the wave of people blacking out their “avatar” on Facebook/Jabber/MSN, etc.
S92A introduces “Guilt Upon Accusation” whereby if you are accused of copyright infringement (downloading music and movies, etc) “repeatedly” (likely 3 or more times) you are at risk of being disconnected from the Internet by your ISP. The law does not require any proof or substantiation of the accusations and the entire process would occur outside of the courts and the established legal system. Not only does it place every user at risk, the wording is very unclear on exactly what type of organisation is considered an ISP and there is significant concern that schools, businesses, libraries and hospitals will be placed in the difficult position of determining whether their users have broken the law and require disconnection.
It’s been a while since I last acquired new gadgets but I think I’ve made up for lost time with my last weeks purchases.
You may remember that I’ve had my eye on the Openmoko phones since early 2007, but in between shifting across the world and starting a new job I never got around to purchasing one of the first versions. The second version, the “Freerunner”, was released in June this year and I placed an order with Pulster, a local distributor, shortly after. The phones have been in hot demand, so I only received my phone last week, a wait of of almost 2 months, and it turned up missing one of the cables that was meant to come with it. Still some distribution kinks to be worked out.
matt@krypton:~$ dpkg -s flashplugin-nonfree | grep Version
Version: 10.0.1.218+10.0.0.525ubuntu1~hardy1+really9.0.124.0ubuntu2
Granted this package is in hardy-backports not hardy proper, but still, what on earth?!?!
Comments
Comment by Philipp Kern on 2008-07-14 05:05:38 +1200
Well, it’s documented in the changelog on https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree. Ubuntu more or less refrains from using epochs unilaterally[0]. This upload was done to undo a bad backport to hardy, i.e. an old version (9.0.124.0ubuntu2) was uploaded to supersede one with a higher version number (10.0.1.218+10.0.0.525ubuntu1~hardy1).
I highly recommend making some time to read the The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report. Based on a census of the Australian Open Source community conducted at the end of last year, it presents a range statistics about the state of the Open Source community and industry in Australia.
The report seems to be aimed at demonstrating to Government and Businesses that Open Source has become a very viable business strategy in Australia and in particular how increased adoption of Open Source would reduce the Australian trade deficit. You don’t need to worry about being put to sleep. The report is relatively casual in tone and easy to read with lots of bright graphs to present the key statistics and findings. Including:
I (as root) have a directory hierarchy that I want a particular group to always have write access to. The files and folders inside the hierarchy are owned and manipulated by a wide variety of diffrent users.
Essentially I want to delegate ‘root’ access for a portion of the filesystem to a particular group.
My first attempt at implementing this was to use the standard POSIX ACLs that are available for almost every filesystem Linux supports.
Obviously I’ve had Internet access at work during this time, but there has been so much new information to take in that I haven’t really had time to do any Debian or WLUG work.
I’m still waiting for the shipping company to deliver my computers, so it will be another week or two before I have a development environment that can build and test package. Once that’s setup again I have updates queued for the following:
In just a few hours, I’m hopping on Emirates flight EK433 from Auckland to Singpore, to start the first leg of my trip to Dublin. I’ll be travelling for pretty much the next month, so if you’re trying to get hold of me please don’t be offended if I take several days to reply.
Kat and I have setup another blog to detail our travels, and I’ll try and keep this blog free of too much personal stuff so as to not clutter the various planets that it is syndicated to. If you’re interested in our travels and what we are up to then head over to http://www.mattandkatbrown.com.
I’ve accepted a job with Google and we’re shifting to Dublin!
Back in January, Kat and I decided that it was about time we put thoughts into action, and booked some one-way plane tickets to get ourselves to Europe. Our plan is to spend at least a couple of years (more if I have my way) exploring the other side of the world and generally broadening our horizons.
We leave NZ on the 31st of March flying on Emirates to Singapore. We plan to spend a couple of weeks in Malaysia visiting some of Kat’s extended family (who I’ve never met), followed by 3 nights in Singapore, a night in Dubai, finally ending up in London at Heathrow Airport on the 17th of April.
