Hush hush

For over a week now, I have been working remotely, Friday 18th July being my last official day of full-time freelance employment at The Ministry. I’m working 3 days a week and 2 of those remotely. It has been a busy time -- I travelled up to Wolverhampton for the LUG Radio’s last ever Live Show. My friend Kevin Sandom was presenting his Grouphug Linux bash shell clustering program. It was good to get out amongst the free open source fraternity. Oh, and there was a fantastic quote by Kevin, whilst we were eating cakes without forks in the churchyard and talking about language:

“It’s only when you need to say something different that you need to say more”

I didn’t stay too long, as I’m still moving my innumerable boxes down to The Village. So I only caught a couple of talks, one of them by Emma Jane Hogbin entitled Form an orderly queue, ladies, about women in Free Open Source Software. The key point was that we should be focussing on world domination!

As I have started working remotely for the The Ministry, I have had to install some software on Ubuntu, as we all know what happens if you leave sensitive information lying around.

There’s Truecrypt, so that I will be able to totally isolate whole chunks of data. I had to download a tar.gz file, which you have to unpack and run. It comes up with some licensing information, and then extracts to a .deb file. The coolest thing about Ubuntu, well, one of them, is that you can double-click a .deb file and Synaptic installs and registers it, so that all the dependencies and uninstallation is handled automatically. Sweet.

The other piece of software I’ve started using is KeePassX, a password manager. It looks very promising, and runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Finally, I have installed Grsync, a graphical front-end for rsync, a command line synchronisation tool. This is because already I’m starting to come across all sorts of synchronising issues… next stop, maybe I’ll start using some sort of Concurrent Versions System?