The year of 2024 comes to an end, and what a year it has been! As I usually do, I post (at least) yearly retrospectives, covering my life in the past year. This is one I posted mid-year 2024 , and this is 2023s . It is meant to inform people outside my inner social circle how my life has been going - to give an overview that people who talk to me every day may not have, for example. ...
I had a problem recently with the server where the server was constantly having to boot into ‘rescue mode’ due to a problem with the fstab. I didn’t understand at first why this kept happening. Then I realised that somehow, the sata disk order was occasionally being rearranged. This meant that the correct sata disk order was not being maintained, which meant that Kali Linux was kicking the server into rescue mode, as it was not finding the files it expected to at the correct mount points. /sda1 was becoming /sdc1, for example. ...
I got into a bit of a situation where I broke the main server. Instead of replacing it, I decided to wait a few weeks until I had access to a new case, mobo, CPU and PSU so that I could move it into that case, and take advantage of my Nvidea 970 graphics card. Previously the card WAS in the server, but there was one main problem, the graphics card wouldn’t fit in the case, see here: ...
I have been taking some extended time off work for the past month, to deal with my mum’s illness and unfortunate passing away, and because my work situation is so bad it’s borderline horrific. One thing that has cheered me up a bit is what my wife C. and I have been able to do to the house and to work towards our personal goals in this time. ...
I think that there is a very real problem around the definition of the purpose of a ‘QA’ or ‘Quality Engineering’ department and what it is expected to do in an organisation. I have been hired for many ‘QA/QE’ roles which had vastly different ideas about what the purpose of that role was, what my responsibilities were, how I should communicate with other people, and what I should do day-to-day. ...
Every year I’ve been doing these ‘retrospectives’, usually once per year but sometimes a couple of times per year. Things have changed quite significantly since the last retrospective , and I was in a pensive mood, so I thought I would write a retrospective for half the year. I finally found a job, with CGI, early in the year, and started in March 2023. Unfortunately, for reasons I’m contractually obliged not to get into, it wasn’t long before I was looking for work again. I resigned from CGI at the end of June. ...
I have moved over from wordpress.com that I was using before on DavidCraddock.net to self-hosting using Python’s Hugo. I hope this will be a good move! A bit of content didn’t make it, but most of it, thankfully, did. I will continue to tidy up bits and pieces as I go along.
Here is a quick diagram I mocked up to detail exactly how video routing works in the studio.
If you’re currently in high school in the UK and want to be a GOOD and EMPLOYED software engineer.. this is my advice. Start programming on personal projects right away, and keep it up during your entire working career. Always have something going on in the background. Get into a RUSSELL GROUP university in the UK and take a technical, demanding degree in a computing-related discipline, for example, Physics, Electronic Engineering, Maths, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. If you can’t get into a university and course that isn’t in the top 25% of courses for your subject in the UK, and someone isn’t paying all your bills (e.g rich parents), don’t bother going to university, It’s not worth the loan. Find another way. Look into apprenticeships. Try to not be a total ’tech head’ and develop some creative and artistic side to you, taking up writing is a really good idea as it improves your thinking and communication skills. Ideally learn to write humanities essays to the standard of the first year humanities majors at your university. Try and get onto as many technical internships and technical work experience as possible throughout your degree. Once you have graduated, and found that the Junior tech worker job market is depressingly non-existant, move back in with your parents and start your informal and free ‘post-graduate’ learning. Take AT LEAST this free course but also certifications such as AWS certs, and anything that you have researched on Reddit etc that you can do cheaply and is sought after by your chosen target job (as evidenced by being mentioned on job descriptions of jobs you’d like to apply for). Increase your work on your personal projects and move to open source them and build up a following from them, and possibly a side-income. Keep in contact with your old uni friends, especially the ones that have got jobs. Read ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ by Cal Newport , learn to market yourself, build your LinkedIn presence, network like crazy, and hopefully you will get your foot in the door with that ‘all important’ first job that you can launch a career off of. You’ll certainly deserve it.
My music acquisition process for DJ music: ARM (Automatic Ripping Machine) rips CDs I buy into FLAC form without any interactivity. You just insert a CD into the Linux server, and then it ejects it when it’s done. Lidarr downloads FLACs of any tracks of artists I have in my collection, but I don’t have their full discography. It does this automatically and silently in the background. Once a day, a cron job imports ARM and Lidarr downloads into my Beets.io music library, and deals with file integrity checks, tagging, metadata, library file structure and embedded images of the artist. Whenever I’m ready to have a fresh library copy, I run my batch script on my W11 DJ laptop and it robocopy mirrors the entire library from my Linux samba share onto my computer. I then send it through MixedInKey 10 to analyse the BPM and the music key of each track, and to check again the integrity of each file. Once that is done, and any corrupt files removed, I import the file library into Serato DJ Pro, and analyse the entire collection. This again removes any dud files from the collection. Now I have a complete music library, I run a batch file to reverse mirror the music from the DJ library back onto the server, so my collection doesn’t accumalate corrupt files. Now I have a full DJ music library of FLACs on my DJ laptop, over 22,000 files, great for requests!