teaparty.network central

If this is anything, it's the (minimalist) home page of Tom Yates. What it isn't is anything to do with the US's astroturfed Tea Party movement. I want to make it clear that I have no sympathy whatsoever for their positions and views. My teaparty affiliations are all from the Mad Hatter's tea party, instead.

This page is primarily intended to allow me to export certain pieces of information to the outside world.

This website lives on its own co-located server, seen here in our lounge shortly before deployment, in the company of suitable friends. A picture of me working on an earlier incarnation of the server in an earlier colo can be found here.

Obligatory picture

Stupid picture of me and a penguin
One of these is a cuddly master of free software and operating systems. The other is me.

General contact information

Email: madhatter-at-teaparty-dot-net. I apologise for the address-scraper-blocking, but I'm getting a lot of spam and don't want to make life any easier for spammers; that said, turning on greylisting reduced the spam about twenty-fold. teaparty.net is my own domain. Email to it may sometimes bounce, if I'm between servers, but sooner or later it'll always be back on the 'net.

Work-related email should be sent to tyates-at-gatekeeper-dot-ltd-dot-uk (again, apologies for the address-scraper blocking). If you're curious about the work of Gatekeeper Technology, specialists in open-source networking and security systems, drop me a line. We don't do proprietary systems; please don't waste our time, or yours, by asking us to. I also write about free software professionally; most of this has been done for LWN (Linux Weekly News, as was).

I live in Cambridge, UK. I used to have my address up here, but have removed it; email me if you need to know it. Alternatively, ask the Wayback Machine (to which I have deliberately provided no link).

General interests

I do have a life. Herewith a partial list of my personal interests, which will acquire content in proportion to my spare time.

I'm an (elected) community moderator on Open Source StackExchange, and can be found there by clicking on the image to the right. I used to spend quite a lot of time on ServerFault, StackExchange's sysadmin Q&A help site, and remain a sort of silverback there (sits grunting in the foliage, but is rarely seen). I fell out of love with SF; contact me directly on the offchance you're curious about why.

I got interested in SE because it allowed authentication via OpenID, a protocol of which I much approve (but which completely failed to be adopted because it broke the big websites' ability to collect marketing data on their users). SE, too, later dropped it; sic transit gloria mundi.

profile for MadHatter on Stack Exchange, a network of
free, community-driven Q&A sites

Books

There is truth in the rumour that I wrote one, along with a friend from MIT; it's now out of print. We were working on a second edition, to cover 2.4.x kernels, iptables and OpenBSD 3.0, but Wiley decided they didn't want it after we wrote two-thirds of it. Perhaps we'll write another one later!

Some reviews I've written of other people's books can be read here, though none is recent.

Anything else?

I founded the toasters' administrators' mailing list, which as of 24/8/2011 has come back to teaparty; MathWorks, having kindly hosted the list for many years, decided not to do so any more. Toasters are large file servers from Network Appliance, but if you needed to be told that, you probably won't find the archive very interesting. Don't let me stop you, though.

Other sites are hosted on teaparty. For the benefit of search engines and the curious, they are:

A number of mailing lists are hosted by the worldwide teaparty.net organisation using GNU Mailman. The list of lists can be found here.

Unless specified otherwise, any content that I created on this site is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Viewable With Any Browser

Edit information: $Id: index.html,v 1.77 2024/03/15 17:15:40 madhatta Exp $