http://theunpixie.blogspot.com/2012/02/is-sysadmin-community-inviting-to-women_24.html

At a job interview last year, I was asked “What is your philosophy of system administration?” It’s a good question and one I hadn’t been asked before. Here’s Digital Elf on his philosophy of system administration: https://digitalelf.net/2011/09/philosophy-of-system-administration/ What’s yours?

I just got email from the office of the associate dean for research in the college of engineering where I work. They want people to go fill out a doodle poll so they can figure out when to schedule a meeting. When we don’t provide a necessary service the users will find a workaround. Most…

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Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a serious force to be reckoned with. After retiring she was also a particularly good lecturer and had effective ways of getting across points those outside the industry might not be thinking about. One of them was how she would regularly hand out 30cm pieces of wire at her talks and then later on point out that is roughly how far light travels in 1 nanosecond. We in the computing industries actually owe a lot to her and too seldom think about her era of computing history.

I was amused to see SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a web-comic that is often extremely NSFW; it is lewd and crude but in a way that points out sexism and other negative behaviours) make Grace Hopper the focus of today’s cartoon:

The webcomic may not be to your taste generally, but I hope you enjoy this one.
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I have been working with Google for 3 weeks trying to get GADS to sync our passwords from OpenLdap to Google Apps. GADS kept saying in all the logs that the password was sync’ed correctly, but no luck. I worked with Google Support and we tried everything (almost) including generating lots of debug logs that said yep the passwords sync’ed ok, but they were not sync’ed. I searched for answers on the web – no luck.
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(This was originally posted at morgajel.net. Preface While system administrators often have many different goals, here are two that seem fairly universal: Automate the redundant tasks Hand off the simple tasks I’ve recently found that the build utility Jenkins can be a major boon for an Operations team, and wanted to share my findings with…

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Being a Python newbie, and having just converted my home SCC repositories from Bazaar to Git on OS X Lion, I thought I’d write up a basic how-to guide. I used Tailor, written in Python, to do the conversion. I decided to gain some fluency with Git after attending WordCamp Las Vegas recently, since many, many folks are using GitHub to publish their projects.
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We nearly tripled our USB thumb drive write speed by changing the partitioning and aligning the filesystem with the parititioning, following “Increase USB Flash Drive Write Speed” http://linux-howto-guide.blogspot.com/2009/10/increase-usb-flash-drive-write-speed.html

LISA was awesome this year. I’m publishing my notes on Toby Oetiker’s presentation on his two new projects, remOcular and Extopus. 1. RemOcular is a technology stack for enabling a generic but cool web interface to UNIX command line tools. There is a JavaScript framework called qooxdoo with which you can run complete applications in…

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