Simon Butcher

A surprised me this (long) weekend with a trip to Barcelona for my birthday. I'd been before very briefly on a road-trip back in 2006 with Scott and loved the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of the city considering the size.

As per usual, no real plan existed for the weekend, so we relied on random wandering and the occasional geocache to navigate to interesting spots, so there's not a considerable amount to say really, and I haven't sorted through the photos yet. I tend to avoid playing the tourist and try to live like a local on holiday, so city trips tend to be more about shopping, eating, and exploring the life within the city, rather than queuing to see monuments.

Ahh, Easter. A time for many — my nieces included — to eat obnoxious amounts of chocolate (thanks, by the way, Datalogic for providing this year's stash).

For others, it's a time to reflect on a guy who was purportedly nailed to a large cross after throwing one hell of a party with lots of booze, but was later found with a traffic cone, at which point one of his mates (Tom) earned himself a nasty reputation for putting his fingers where they don't belong (although he was probably still hung-over).

Many people just see it as time off work.

For me, it's a bit different.

Looking for cheap flights on the Internet? Yeah, me too. The travel industry seems to intentionally make it hard to find the best prices, so you're doomed to play the game and hope you score a deal when you buy your tickets.

Like a casino, the odds are always in favour of the house, but there are a few tricks I've discovered over the years to try and help beat those prices down. I hope you find some of these tips useful.

Apparently the reason I'm so slow to get blog posts out is because my posts are always really long or difficult to assemble. That's pretty much true, so let's keep this one short. Do you prefer quality over quantity, or vice versa? I prefer quality, which tends to become quantity. Woops‽

Secure shell (SSH) is the workhorse of a UNIX system administrator. Due to its ability to secure connections, protect login details, provide authenticity and even tunnel traffic, SSH replaced telnet in the real world many years ago. Authenticity is not guaranteed, and for administrators working with a large farm of servers it's important to ensure you're talking to the server you really wanted, and not something that's moved into its place.

SSH employs a private/public asymmetric keying system, keeping a private key closely guarded and using the public key to not only secure the connection but help prove that you're talking to the right server. Most SSH clients will allow you to remember the public key for a server after your first connection; ensuring subsequent connections are to the same server by revalidating a hash of this key, known as a “fingerprint”. To help validate the fingerprint on your first connection, you can store a fingerprint of the SSH server's public key in DNS for additional verification.

Another year, another free box of chocolates from the suppliers at work. This year I managed to fly my parents over from down under for Christmas in the snow (albeit unintentionally). Could there be any more snow and ice?

Now that they're here, I intend to prove my theory that there's a Belgian Beer for everyone, and my ultimate goal is to get my Mum (who doesn't drink alcohol aside from the rare glass of wine) to admit that's the case.

I wish you all the best for 2011!

Following on from the new computer, two-thirds (or possibly one-half) of my monitors have arrived, finally! Backordering can be painful sometimes. They're two 20.1" Hewlett-Packard LP2065 monitors S-IPS panels; all part of my evil plan.

With a native resolution of 1600×1200, that should help with my desktop real estate issues (effectively 3200×1200). The anti-theft feature is a nice idea, but I really appreciate the dual dual-link DVI connectivity.

I have a bit of saving to do before this is done…

Following a successful long weekend last year, we returned to London again for another long weekend of shopping, vegetating, and a little bit of sight-seeing.

Here is a tiny selection of photos from what we got up to. I'm glad I took my DSLR.

I've been holding back from buying a new PC for quite some time now. Actually, it's been years. My main PC has been a Toshiba Satellite M70 (1.6GHz Pentium M, 2GiB RAM, 60GB HDD, surprisingly good speakers, and an annoying DVD drive which cannot be flashed with RPC-1 firmware). It's a great little laptop, even today, and aside from the low-end GPU and slow HDD, it runs really well.

This poor thing has travelled the world with me, but it's about time I upgraded. For several projects I've been needing a lot more processing grunt, RAM, local storage, and (eventually) desktop real estate. Today most of the stuff has arrived, and it's taken so long because I've been very picky about what I wanted in the build. It's been a long time since I've built a PC, and a few people have asked me to show them the build…

I'm in the states for work for two weeks and was encouraged strongly by our financial director to take a trip over the weekend. I decided to head to San Francisco, despite people thinking I'm mad (the office is in Greenville, South Carolina).

Maybe it is a bit mad to travel ≅4000km for a weekend city trip, but it's nothing compared to travelling between Brussels and Melbourne! I flew to San Francisco immediately after work on Friday, via the hilariously named George Bush Intercontinental Airport (presumably because “International” just isn't enough). Well, maybe a bit before “after work” since I… err… snuck out to catch my flight…