I was speaking with an (older) acquiantance last night and he was complaining about people who get in their car and immediately get on their cell phone (or “mobile”, for most of those outside the US). Which reminded me of how lazy and spoiled we’ve gotten. Do you remember when we had corded phones in…
This week one of the things I dealt with was the elimination of the tilde (“~”) from URL’s as part of the migration process to our new personal web hosting service. Searching around, I found that there’s not a lot of information about how to do this, though all the tools are there if you know where to look. In an attempt to save others some time, here’s what I did…
The idea of “mentoring” has always been a hot topic in the system administration community. This is reflected in the roots of the SAGE name, recognizing that the commmunity was (at that time) more like a Guild than a rigidly-defined and codified academic discipline. SAGE tried to create mentoring programs several times, but they never really took off, yet there were always people willing to take up the gauntlet again and again. At the first planning meeting for LOPSA (August 2005), we spent a lot of time talking about community and we seemed to all agree that mentoring was one of the most important parts of the community we were planning to serve. This topic was again raised at the LOPSA Community Meeting at LISA (December 2005) as one that our members felt strongly about. When we ask our members about what should be our highest priority services, a “mentoring program” always ranks near the top of the list.
We as a community seem to want a mentoring program, but before we begin again, shouldn’t we ask ourselves, ”’Why have sysadmin mentoring programs been less than stellar successes?”’
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There was some discussion on #lopsa about doing backups of mysql using mysqldump and having to deal with extracting tables from large dump files. This is what I came up with. It’s worked well enough for extracting full tables from a RHEL4U1 mysql dump. #!/usr/bin/perl -wn # # extract a specific table from a mysql4.X…
I stumbled upon Gliffy.com, a web-based Visio clone today, and was quite impressed. The good: – 100% web based – Good layout – Intuitive user interface – Worked in Firefox 1.5.0.4 under OSX 10.4.7 without crashing once. Very few flash-based applets seem to be able to make that claim! – Has all of the basic…
I work for a dotcom that didn’t go dotboom. We’re trying to hire a sysadmin and we’re offering 75th percentile rates (or higher) for the “right person.” Despite an aggressive interview schedule, good perks, a great company to work for, it’s been next to impossible to find anyone. We’ve made a few offers and been…
I have really mixed feelings about this technology. On the one hand, I’m in the passenger seat of a car traveling west on I-8 somewhere west of Gila Bend. It’s cool that I can get broadband wireless here, but what does this mean for really “getting away from it all”? I guess I still feel…
Call me old-skool, but I like Pine. A lot of people like their fancy Thunderbird or Evolution, or even (shudder) Outlook, but I’m a confirmed Pine user. I like the speed, and I’m a CLI nerd, too. I know from #lopsa that a lot of other LOPSAns are Pine users as well. Mutt is also moderately popular, but I could never make the switch; my brain was already mapped to Pine key bindings.
As much as I like Pine, though, there were a few features I found lacking. The biggest one was a “Trash” folder. I’m delete-happy, and frequently find myself digging through the trash to get something out, be it a whole email or just an address. Pine is very Un*xy in its implementation: something deleted is deleted, sayonara, ciao, toodle-oo, [BALEETED|http://www.hrwiki.org/index.php/50_emails]! Continue reading
Today is the first anniversary/birthday of “OpenSolaris”:http://opensolaris.org/os, the open source code base of the Solaris Operating system. Happy anniversary/birthday! Recently, there were nominations accepted for OpenSolaris contributor awards. As I read over the nominations, I initially felt that they were similar to other OSS contributions; they were heavily weighted towards people who did code putbacks,…
DCOP is KDE’s interprocess communication protocol. Conveniently enough,
developers are pretty good about exposing interfaces to it, and there
is even a shell binding. There are some awfully neat things you can do
with it from a shell interface. This script lists the URLs of all the tabs
in my Konqueror windows: Continue reading