John Leach

Photo of 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.


Contact

You can e-mail me at john@johnleach.co.uk. I have a gpg key but do bear in mind that my government can compel me to give them access to it.

I'm also johnl on the Freenode irc network.

What I'm doing at the moment

Jeremy Jarvis and I started Brightbox, a UK based Ruby on Rails virtualized hosting company. We've recently launched a whole new UK IaaS platform.

When I make the time I also work on one or two personal projects too, like News Sniffer and Xapian Fu. More and more of my work is going up on github nowadays.

Things I have written or said

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 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.
The New World Odour
Satirical news site I used to write for
High Availability GNU/Linux with Heartbeat
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.

Free software I've written or been involved with

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)
Ubuntu Linux Distro
Bug testing. and package development.
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 Superseded by News Sniffer now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
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 Debian/Ubuntu packages for it
News Sniffer
My News Sniffer project is free software!
Netfilter.rb
A Ruby "domain specific language" for writing Netfilter firewall rules
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. Also maintaining Ubuntu packages.

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

Other possibly interesting random downloads

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). Our other two cats, Silicon and Carbon, died recently :(