Two weeks in Mountain View
I’m bored while waiting for my plane to depart from San Francisco airport. I’ve been out in the US for two weeks, being inducted into Google at their Mountain View headquarters.
What an amazing place the Googleplex is! Excellent free food (breakfast, lunch, dinner), arcade machines littered about the building, the free massages, big company bashes every Friday, volleyball courts, dinosaur skeletons and giant robots…it’s not your average workplace.
The people I met were all fascinating, and they’re really into the cool projects they’re working on. Google is renowned for being very tight-lipped on its technology — and rightly so — they get up to some amazing things here.
Best of all; everything I’ve seen so far backs up the message that Google is everything it claims externally to be: very concerned about privacy, ethical, low-carbon, philanthropic. It seems too good to be true! I hope there’s no catch I’ve missed…but then I’m still very much in the “honeymoon” period here. I haven’t even been to work in my own office yet!
I now have a weekend to get over the jet-lag — only 7 hours thanks to daylight savings time differences — and prepare for my first “real” day in London.
I’ve had a great time out here; I’ve met up with some friends in nearby San Francisco and visited some of the beautiful scenery around here. It’s truly the nicest part of America I’ve ever been to — but then I’m mainly comparing against Florida and Los Angeles; neither of which are particularly pretty. The people here just seem more cosmopolitan than I was expecting, too.
The whole trip has been a little bittersweet though: I miss Ness and William terribly, and can’t wait to see them again tomorrow morning.
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 14:50:00 GMT on 31st October 2008.
Goodbye ProFactor...
Yesterday was my last day working for ProFactor Software. We went out for some drinks with our current client, PKR Technologies and I’m now terribly hungover. It was a great night!
I had some fantastic times with ProFactor, and more recently with PKR too. I’ve worked on some very interesting problems and met some very interesting people, many of whom I’m glad to say have become good friends.
I’m now enjoying a day with my family before I leave for to spend a fortnight at my new employer’s headquarters in Mountain View for my induction. I can’t wait to learn all about my new job and the technologies that will be available to me, but I’m not looking forward to being away from Ness and William for so long.
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 13:12:10 BST on 18th October 2008.
A big change coming up for me
Several months ago I was approached by Google, sounding me out to see if I was interested in applying for a job. I love Google — it being a kind of programmer’s heaven — but I also really enjoy my work at ProFactor and the freedom and flexibility it brings.
I decided to apply anyway, just to see how far through the interview process I’d get. After a chat with a recruiter, a phone screen interview and several on-site interviews, I was flattered to find out I’d passed, and was offered a job at the London office in their mobile department.
It was never my expectation to make it through all the interviews, but after an awful lot of deliberation I’ve decided to take the job.
It will be a gigantic change for me — after four years of running a company with my friend Nik going back to being PAYE will be a shock.
I’m very sad to leave the business, but Nik is continuing with it and I wish him and ProFactor all the very best of luck in the future. My thanks to all that have supported me through the four years at ProFactor.
I’m finishing with ProFactor at the end of next week, and I’m starting with Google on the following Monday. It’s going to be a very intense time — I’m so excited!
Aside: Spookily, the winner of the “Doodle 4 Google” this year came from my old school!
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 11:02:10 BST on 7th October 2008.
Samba PDC problems after changing server IP
Samba is great, but is a real pain to configure, and very hard to diagnose problems. There’s plenty of log information to plough through once you’ve remembered how to enable it, but whenever I find myself having to change anything about my setup, I’ll spend at least a couple of hours scratching my head wondering what on earth is going on. In the interest of saving somebody else from this pain…if you find yourself banging your head against a wall primary domain controller (PDC) having weird symptoms like:
- Long hangs in Windows when browsing the domain.
- Logins fail intermittently.
- Trying to joining a machine to the domain fails with the error “domain unavailable” even though the domain is definitely there.
And you see errors in log.nmbd of the form:
domain_master_node_status_fail:
Doing a node status request to the domain master browser
for workgroup PROFACTOR at IP 192.168.200.220 failed.
Cannot sync browser lists.
…then there might be a simple explanation. If you’ve recently changed your server’s IP address, there are a number of places where the old IP will still be lurking, possibly causing the issues above.
nmbd caches browse master information in /var/cache/samba/browse.dat — your PDC’s old IP
address will be listed here, and when nmbd starts up, it sees it as an existing, distinct
domain master browser that then doesn’t respond to it any more. Stop nmbd and then delete the
file.
In a similar way the WINS resolution system caches IPs — delete /var/lib/samba/wins.dat.
Restart the samba servers, and hopefully all will be well.
Filed under: Coding
Posted at 22:15:00 BST on 10th September 2008.
