After much tearing out of hair, learned to use dblatex (not passivetex) to generate PDF’s from my DocBook XML. Runs faster and smoother – that is to say it actually generates the PDF instead of just spewing out LaTeX errors.
Coming from a rather hardcore X11 background (mm, X10 with b/w displays), my adjustment to Life With Mac has been made much easier recently with the installation of a utility called Zooom/2. [2] Although it can’t (yet) bind my X11 finger-macro of alt+mouse2+move to window-move, it can bind it to any combination of modifier keys,…
The cool thing about being a sysadmin is you’re always learning – whether you want to or not… Today I sent an email to a colleague from my corporate email account, and while we were IRC’ing about other stuff– he told me that no, he didn’t get the email. Huh. I double-checked my sent-items folder–…
I’m trying AsciiDoc to obviate the XML “tag soup” I am eating with my DocBook docs. There were two things I had to tweak to get the asciidoc .TXT -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3: 1. Remove or comment out every mention of the “–nonet” switch in my xmlto (v0.0.23) (xmlto…
Today I was working with my DBA on a server migration– the replacement server is configured, loaded, secured- and before we lit it up, she asked me to take one special final full cold backup. No problem! …until I started monitoring the backup (to estimate when it would be done) – and was seeing well,…
This is not the ONLY or even the BEST way to do it – this is just my way. I took 10 years to travel this path, and I made many friends along the way. In a nutshell, I took about 7 years of routinely working 12 hour days, plus 2 years practicing dealing with…
It’s Friday afternoon, about 2pm. I have a console/management server that is having some difficulties with Splunk 4. Whether or not the RHEL version (4.8) is the cause– I have finally decided it’s time to upgrade to RHEL current (5.4). That way I can at least eliminate the OS as the cause of the issues…
(Reference, yesterday’s blog about moving servers from one row of racks to another): OK, so I had several servers to move to a new rack in another row. As of this morning, they were ALL done, except one. The person who we wrote the application for on that server (the “owner”), had not responded to…
I don’t know about how it works in YOUR organization, but where I work, as the Unix Systems Admin (job title, “IS Project Manager”, go figure) – I do everything to manage the server from birth to death. Ordering, receiving, unpacking, installation, management, performance, uptime, retirement. And all the bits in-between. Today I was moving…
OK, a few minutes ago, I had written a really lengthy blog entry about LISA. It was awesome. And then– I got interrupted by someone needing help, and well, an incorrect click basically wiped out my posting- before I had submitted it. (Did I mention my personal hard drive at home blew up last week?…