John Leach
John Leach is a human living in Bradford, UK. He makes regular and diverse changes to the universe. He doesn't care much for writing about myself in the 3rd person.
You can e-mail me at john@johnleach.co.uk. I have a gpg key if you need it for some reason.
What I'm doing at the moment
I co-founded and run Brightbox, a UK based Ruby on Rails virtualized hosting company (with Jeremy Jarvis). We've recently launched a new UK cloud server platform.
When I make the time I also work on one or two personal projects too, like News Sniffer, various Ubuntu packages or building quadcopters.
Things I have written or said or made
Recent stuff
- My blog
- My personal blog about kind of everything, tech, politics, cookery, photography, music.
- My twitter feed
- A microblog updated multiple times a day, usually.
- My github page
- I push most of my code there nowadays
- My work blog
- I also blog occasionally on my company's blog.
- Everybody Loves Eric Raymond
- A web comic I created starring Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond and others. Dormant for a while now.
- Bruce Schneier Facts
- Things you might not know about Bruce Schneier. I wrote the app and the first few facts and curate the rest.
- ipq.co
- Service to allow instant creation of dns records. More info on my blog
- UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel
- A talk I've given at a few conferences about rediscovering some of the great features of UNIX-like operating systems. This was recorded at the 2010 Scottish Ruby Conference.
- Beautiful command-line interface design
- A talk I've given about writing command-line programs with good interfaces
- My lanyrd profile
- I've given talks at various conferences
- My quadcopter project
- I'm building a quadcopter, which is fun and dangerous. I'm documenting it on my blog.
Older stuff
- My old work blog
- I also blog occasionally on my company's blog.
- The New World Odour
- Satirical news site I used to write for. Dead now.
- High Availability GNU/Linux with Heartbeat
Free software I've written or been involved with
Recent stuff
- Web Page Parser
- A Ruby library to parse web pages, like BBC News
- Xapian Fu
- A nicer Ruby library for the Xapian full text indexer
- Phusion Passenger
- I maintain Ubuntu packages for it
- Ruby 1.9.3 packages for Ubuntu
- I maintain Ubuntu packages for updated and performance tuned versions of Ruby
- News Sniffer
- My News Sniffer project is free software!
- Netfilter.rb
- A Ruby "domain specific language" for writing Netfilter firewall rules
- Ubuntu Linux Distro
- Bug testing. and package development.
- PowerDNS Pipe
- A little Ruby library to make writing PowerDNS pipe backend scripts easier.
- Wordpressto
- A Ruby library for reading and writing to Wordpress blogs via the XMLRPC interface.
- Brightbox CLI
- A command line interface for the Brightbox Cloud API
- Desperados
- A Ruby library for Ceph's Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS).
- Ceph
- A distributed network storage and file system. I've been testing it and reporting lots of bugs.
- Puppet recipes
- I write lots of puppet recipes as part of my job. We make them available under a free software license
- Puppet git receiver
- A tool to receive and apply puppet manifests via git.
Ancient stuff
- Firestorm Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS)
- Plugin developer, bug fixer, beta tester (C)
- Ethereal
- Wrote support for Firestorm ELOG alert logs (C)
- CLIGS - Cute Little Image Gallery Script
- An old PHP project of mine to make nice photo galleries
- Flickr Tools
- Some scripts to do cool stuff with images from flickr (Python)
- Wikipedia - an online free encyclopedia
- Words and photos
- Watch Your Mouth
- Software to monitor the BBC News 'Have Your Say' website for censored comments. Superseded by News Sniffer now
- Ferreted
- A Ruby library to index ActiveRecord models with Ferret
Other projects I'm involved with
- News Sniffer
- A project to monitor the corporate media (Ruby on Rails).
- Compost This
- A database of things you can and can't compost. (Ruby on Rails)
- Recycle This
- A blog of how to reuse stuff, rather than it going to landfill.
- Geekz Shop
- We (used to) sell geeky stuff, like t-shirts and stickers, featuring infamous geeks (retired now!)
- Brightbox
- Ruby on Rails deployment and infrastructure-as-a-service platform.
- Ukepedia
- Wikipedia on Ukeleles
- The Gillroyd Parade
- West Yorkshire's one-time second-best three-piece acoustic folk-scifi band (now retired).
- West Yorkshire Linux User Group
- I (used to) help arrange the meetings and maintain the website
- Eye Vagina
- I pranked some people on chat roulette, which seemed to amuse the Internet
Other stuff
Photography
Some of my photography is available here. The best place to start is probably one of the selections galleries. Then perhaps onto places or portraits.
I have more photos (with some duplicated) on my Flickr photostream
I'm working on moving all my photos to my blog, so there are some there too.
All my photography is under a Creative Commons attribution license so you can use it freely as long as you credit me and pass the same rights onto others.
More...
I live with my best friend Louisa Parry who is quite lovely.
I'm a legal guardian of 2 mostly black cats, Boron and Carla, and a dog called Lithium (Lily for short).