This year’s been pretty good, but the last two months were pretty lame.
In the last six weeks, I found out Caramel
has lymphoma, got unemployed, and had emergency surgery to remove my appendix
on Christmas Day. The unemployment caused me to lose an …
I never really liked C’s assert() feature. If an assertion is violated, it’ll
tell you what assertion failed but completely lacks any context:
example: example.c:9: main: Assertion `i == 3′ failed.
This is better:
Assertion failed insist.c:7 in m…
It’s been about 8 months since the last xdotool release, and I think it’s long
overdue! This release has a ton of new feature and fixes.
Download: xdotool-2.20110530.1.tar.gz
As usual, if you find problems or have feature requests, please file b…
Ready for log and event management that doesn’t suck or drain your budget? It’s
time to logstash.
After lots of refactoring and improvements to logstash since the first minor
release last November, logstash is ready for wider usage now.
Read my ann…
I’m sure this is covered well elsewhere online, but that’s never the point of
these things 
I was helping with some capacity planning and run-rate math today at work and
found that ec2 reserved instances are much cheaper compared to on-demand – If…
Having become fed up with dealing with rpmbuild, spec files, debian control
files, dh_make, debuild, and the whole lot, I automated my way back to sanity.
The result is a tool I call “fpm” which aims to help you make and mangle
packages however you …
I was working on integrating jQuery Mobile stuff into fingerpoken and needed a
way to make the content area of pages full-screen. By ‘full screen’ I mean
still showing the header and footer, but otherwise the content needs to fill
the rest.
I couldn…
I’m giving a presentation this week at the Puppet Bay Area user meetup
and while working on slides, I wanted to be able to present while not being
attached to my laptop.
Enter: fingerpoken
Fingerpoken lets you turn your iphone/ipad/itouch into a …
Today starts the 3rd year of the SysAdvent calendar! How time flies!
What is SysAdvent? It’s a 24-day event where I publish one excellent sysadmin
article each day, starting December 1st. The articles are written by fellow
sysadmins around the world…
Truth should guide your configuration management tools.
Truth in this case is: what machines you have, properties of those machines,
roles for those machines, etc. For example “foo-1.a.example.com is a webserver”
is a piece of truth. Where and how y…
