Patrick Meidl

We've been on the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, for 4 weeks now. Sabine continues her work on Darwin's finches at the Charles Darwin Research Station which she's been conducting for more than a decade now. I got a short break (well, actually three months) from my job at the EBI which is both parental leave (I spend the afternoons with Luca which I enjoy a lot) and an opportunity to help Sabine with her research (I focus on my main skills and write perl scripts to manage the project's data).

After a cold and wet summer in Scotland, we were hoping for lots of sun here, but so far it's been rather cool (typically around 25 degrees Celsius) and cloudy, which is normal for the season. I shouldn't complain though, it's much more pleasant than during my last stay here in the El Nino season of 1998, when we had almost 40 degrees at 100% humidity and not even the sea (with up to 33 degrees water temperature!) offered relief.

Last week, the server running this website was hacked. The malicious intruder made use of insufficient form validation in a demo web app which I had installed years ago for testing, and then had forgotten to remove it :( an IRC bot was installed, and spam emails were sent from the machine. I immediately took the machine offline, and after an examination of the damage it was soon clear that a complete re-install was necessary. This was a sad moment since this machine had been set up in 1999 and only had upgrades to the latest version of the (Debian) OS since then. oh well, at least it was good to see how straightforward a fresh Debian install is these days, and I probably also got rid of a lot of cruft and am running the latest version of Debian (etch) now.

I recently discovered the wealth of podcasts for software developers out there. IMHO, podcasts are a very useful way to learn new skills, especially since you can listen to them during times when you can't read (e.g. while driving a car, or when you are too tired to read in the evening).

Here is my personal top 5 list:

1. The Java Posse - a must for everyone interested in Java; informative and funny.
2. Software Engineering Radio - detailed episodes on software development topics
3. Daily Global IT News Update - five minutes a day of assorted IT news
4. FLOSS Weekly - a weekly discussion about open source software with prominent guests
5. Hanselminutes - a Microsoft biased look a web technologies; insights into the "other side"