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.
Having read this story on the BBC's
website, 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.
- GPG keys:
- My current OpenPGP public key, signed by the
key below.
- My older key. Used from 2003-08-18 to
2008-07-02, this key is the one whose
fingerprint appears on my business and personal card. If you have taken my
public key from a keyserver you will need this key to verify my current public key.
- My very old key, used until 2003-08-18.
- 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.
- In 2004 I started to log my technical explorations, and I have continued to
do so whenever I'm breaking technical ground that's new to me. 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.
- Gerry: here's the
webmail system, ok?
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
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 (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).
|
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.
- Science Fiction.
- Riding motorcycles,
and motorcycle touring in particular. You can see our bikes
here.
Incidentally, if you live and ride in the UK, and aren't a member of MAG, the Motorcycle Action Group, you're taking a
real chance with your own ability to ride the bike you like, in the manner you
like, in the
future. EU regulations, intransigent or downright hostile highways authorities,
liability-related changes, poorly-maintained roads, all of these and
many other threats continually face
UK riders. Banding together through MAG is the best way I know to fight them.
If you're in some other European country, find your local FEMA affiliate, and support them.
- Single malt scotch whiskies, most often via the Scotch Malt Whisky Society.
- 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.
- I seem to be spending quite a lot of time on ServerFault, an online sysadmin Q&A help
site, where I go by the name of MadHatter. I got
interested in the site because it allows authentication via OpenID, a protocol of which I much approve
(but which is completely failing to be adopted because it breaks the big
websites' ability to collect marketing data on their users).
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 review 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, who kindly hosted the list for many years, have 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:
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:
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 1.50 2011/08/24 12:53:25 madhatta Exp madhatta $
