teaparty.network central

If this is anything, it's the (minimalist) home page of Tom Yates. This website lives on its own co-located server; a picture of me working on the server in an earlier colo can be found here.

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

One of these is my OpenPGP public key (new key 2008-07-02). This is signed by my old key (2003-08-18 to 2008-07-02), so if you can verify my old key more easily than the new one, then relying on the new one should be easy. My very old key (used until 2003-08-18) is also available.
The key whose fingerprint currently appears on my cards is the old key; if you want to communicate securely with me and you have a card, you will need my current key to encrypt to, and my old key in order to verify it.
Another of these pieces of information is our digital photo album, which is now organised with the excellent, free (primarily as in "free speech", but also as in "free beer") Gallery package. Older photos can still be seen here.
I've started to log my technical explorations. This is partly for my own benefit, and partly in case anyone else finds them useful. Absent any better name, I shall call them Tom's Tech Notes.

General contact information

Email: madhatter-at-teaparty-dot-net (apologies for the address-scraper-blocking, but I'm getting about ten thousand spams a month and don't want to make life any easier for spammers). 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 Micro$oft systems; please don't waste our time by asking us to.

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).

Obligatory picture of me

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

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!

I have also more recently started reviewing books professionally. At the moment, I'm doing all my reviews for DiverseBooks, but am open to other offers. My reviews can also be read here.

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.

My wife.
Local politics: I'm a member and active supporter of the Liberal Democrats, the UK's third largest (but most progressive) party.
My church.
Playing the trombone, most regularly with Diss-Located Bones and CSD Brass. I can't quite bring myself to remove the link to my old quintet, Valve Job.
Science Fiction.
Riding motorcycles, and motorcycle touring in particular. You can see our new bikes here.
Single malt scotch whiskies
Amnesty International and the Urgent Action network:
"When the first 200 letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. The next 200 letters came and the prison officers came to see me. When the next pile of letters arrived, the director got in touch with his superior. The letters kept coming, 3,000 of them, and the President called me to his office. He showed me an enormous box of letters he had received, and said: How is it that a trade union leader like you has so many friends all over the world?"
-- A released prisoner from the Dominican Republic
Curries - cooking and eating.

Anything else?

I used to maintain the toasters' administrators' mailing list. 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.

I'm also the secretary of the Essex Youth Orchestra Association - an organisation for ex-members of any of the Youth Orchestras in Essex, UK, and other persons who think they might want to join. If you want to know more about that, go to the Association's website.

I oppose the expansion of European patent law to allow software to be patentable. It's already covered by copyright; there's no need to expand protections any further. Click below to find out more.

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

demo.teaparty.net, the content demo site (not interesting)
www.brossi.net, my wife's family site (work in progress)
www.gatekeeper.ltd.uk, our company site
www.kript.net, a friend's personal site
www.eyoa.org.ukThe Essex Youth Orchestra Association
www.waide.me.ukThe Waide family website: where one of my sisters hangs her .hat.

You can see server statistics for most of these here.

A number of mailing lists are hosted on teaparty.net, using GNU Mailman. The list of lists can be found here.

I also run redirection services for a few friends who have content hosted elsewhere. These are:

www.jozaq.com, Trev's band
www.interscript.co.uk, Michael Wheeler's interscript site
dormouse.teaparty.net, Ken Zetie's home pages (link currently broken)

My geek code? It's


-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GS d-- s:+ a C+++ U++++$ P++ L++++$ E--- W++ N+ w--- V PS++
PE-- Y+>++ PGP++ R+ tv-- b+++ !DI e++(++++) h r+++ y?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Here's a decoded version.

Edit information: $Id: index.html,v 1.29 2008/07/03 09:29:37 madhatta Exp $