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
[Cfengine|http://www.cfengine.org] is an awesome tool for managing any number of machines between 2 and 200,000. You probably already knew that. If you’re using Cfengine, you probably also know that it can get pretty verbose, especially for more complex edits. If you have a configuration file wherein order matters, adding a line suddenly becomes nontrivial. iptables…
(memo to self: Do not take on ANYTHING extra during the month before or the 3 weeks after E3.) The Ruby/Rails agile development *environment* is truly amazing, and the best “thing” I’ve ever seen for enabling rapid development. It’s been a while, but I was finally able to finish working through the sample application, the…
It was, I believe, at USENIX ’05 that I first heard about Mailping, a utility that would send an email message, check for its receipt, and report on the health of your mail system. Unfortunately, the utility had fallen into disrepair, and I couldn’t find an alternative. So I did what any hacker would do:…
I’m going to start putting together a list of folks who are willing to come to speak to local groups. Some of us have heard local folks speak on a variety of topics. We’d like to encourage them to visit other local groups as well! Is this you, or someone you know? Either contact me…
So if I were to tell my friends eight years ago that I was going to go to work for a municipal government agency doing sysadmin and automation and control work, they’d have laughed me out of the room. Despite my friends postulations that the term would be changed to “Going Aquatic,” I’ve had quite…
Like most sysadmins, I make heavy use of email. I actually run a Cyrus IMAP server on my desktop and use fetchmail to grab mail from the company server, filter it through procmail for things like analyzing cron job output and emailed logs, and then hand it to Cyrus’s deliver program, which processes it through…