Last Wednesday was my last day working as an Accendo contractor in Tecnomen Shannon. For my first full time “real” job, I could have done an awful lot worse. I’m very grateful to both Accendo and Tecnomen for the experience and everything else. I’m also going to miss the friends I made during my 18 months there.
(Aside : kick ass – my darling fianceé just delivered a ham and cheese toastie for lunch!!)
I have moved on to work with Sentiera, a relatively young company specialising in media delivery systems – primarily for advertising in business premises. My role here will be as development lead on the client side of this system, a custom built piece of hardware running GNU/Linux and various other pieces of software to play the media.
As part of the leaving process, I did a thorough clean out of my work computer. For quite a lengthy period while working in Tecnomen, my work computer (a Solaris 8 Sparc workstation) was my primary connection to the Internet (see this post for details on that!) so, as you can imagine, it had built up quite a wealth of personal information. Some would be obvious, like files and directories that you created or downloaded purposely. These should be pretty easy to find and clean out, because (under Unix anyway – you Windows users would probably have more hassle!) these are generally stored in your home directory. So, a thorough scan through that should pick up on all these bits and pieces. But the other things which you mightn’t think of, and which should be removed are just as important :
- Saved browser passwords
- Personal email
- Temporary files
I used Firefox as my primary browser, so all the stored details for that were in ~/.mozilla/firefox so I simply tar’d up that directory and deleted it before I left. As an added bonus, when I untar’d it into ~/.mozilla on my GNU/Linux desktop in the new job, it worked perfectly, so I had all the bookmarks and saved passwords I’d built up available on the fresh new install. This also meant that my extensions were still there, and configured as I had them. This is particularly useful for Adblock, as I had blocked quite a number of ads for the different sites I track on a daily basis.
I received little to no personal email to my work account. The most I got were forwards from the guys in work! So, cleaning this up wasn’t too difficult, and I generally delete email I’ve read unless I need to keep it for a specific reason (eg. important information for a project, or waiting for information to reply to it etc.).
The temporary files I reckon a lot of people wouldn’t think of. These are created when you do things like view pdf’s or other documents that require an external program to view from within a browser or email. Most of the time, I’ve seen these created with random names. On my work machine, though, they were created with their actual filename. This makes them very easy to scan over and pick out specific one’s of interest for anyone who’d be interested. It’s easily fixed though – rm -rf /tmp/* && rm -rf /var/tmp/*.
I was out for a few drinks with some of my ex-workmates from Tecnomen and Accendo last night. I explained the wonders of the Jameson hangover cure to them, though I think they were a bit sceptical! However, I can confirm that, once again, it has worked!! Keep an eye out for the scientific study, coming to a scientific journal near you soon!
