Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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Month: November 2011

Left the circus, going to work in the Potato field

Potato sign

I’ve mused a few times on this blog about the relative merits of full-time and freelance and what would convince me to go back into a full-time job, but it’s happened. I’m delighted to say that as of December 1st I am a full-time Django Developer, working for Potato, as part of the small (but growing) Bristol team. I’ve been freelancing full-time for Potato since October and have really been enjoying being part of a specialist team, working on interesting projects for interesting clients, using interesting technologies. I’ve learned so much in a short space of time working with talented and supportive colleagues, it’s been extremely enjoyable and satisfying. So when I was offered a permanent contract I was happy to accept – yesterday I went to London to meet my London-based colleagues and founders, and while I was there I signed a contract.

So other than a few existing freelance odds and ends that need handing over, I’m no longer a freelancer and not taking on any new clients or freelance work with immediate effect. My five years of freelance have been one hell of a ride, with lots of ups and downs, but i’m glad I did it, and proud that I made a success of it. Right now i’m looking forward to seeing what lies ahead in the world of potato!

Lost network interfaces in virtual machine

I was having a confusing issue where after moving an ubuntu virtualbox virtual machine I was losing the virtual network adapters (i’m running one on NAT so the machine can access the internet via the host and one host-only so I can network between host and guest). After a bit of head scratching, I realised this was because the way I was “moving” a machine was by copying the hard disk image and creating a new machine. This means that the MAC addresses were getting reset. If I went into the virtualbox machine settings and changed these to the same mac addresses as were being used on the vm before it was moved, the network interfaces reappeared. I guess that’s why I should be moving the machines with the config file too..