June 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Adoption: It's time!
This is the second post in a series about our adoption trip. Read the first post if you dare.
Fast forward to Friday May 7th, 2010, 6:30PM at O’Hare. We were supposed to leave at 3:30, but we’ve had interference from a volcano, the plane was at the wrong gate, it’s tow truck busted, and now our pilot and first officer have had to go to the plane to taxi it to our actual gate...
1 tag
Adoption: Getting the Call
It’s February 22nd, 2010, around lunchtime and I’ve just finished ordering a fancy ham and cheese at Artisan, a local fancy sandwich making shop. It’s my first time here, but I’m with two of my co-workers, and they’re regulars. I’m a bit confused because there’s no obvious good place to stand and wait for my fancy sandwich. So, I’m standing around...
1 tag
Meet our son - Gavin
It’s been 2 weeks since we’ve arrived home from Ethiopia with this handsome guy.
Gavin smiles a lot, seems to like everyone he meets and gets very cranky when he’s hungry. He was born in Assela just over 5 months ago and he’s our first child. Right now he has a bit of a cold, or sinus infection of some sort that our doc is helping us work through, but otherwise...
December 2009
2 posts
too much chocolate
me: i think i ate too much dark chocolate today
ed: impossible
me: am i supposed to be hallucinating ?
ed: always
me: nevermind then, situation normal
ed: excellent....
my other blog
A few weeks ago, I started a blog at www.badgerhound.com for my tech musings. Lately, my interests seem more focused around startups and the state of tech in general, than hard-core sysadmin topics like building RPMs. For now, I’m enjoying having a separate place to vet those ideas. I don’t know if that means I won’t blog about anything technical over here, or if this will...
November 2009
1 post
September 2009
5 posts
posting to Tumblr from emacs
I’m now using Tumble, the emacs mode for posting to Tumblr. This post is mostly for me to test it out further, but I’m very impressed with it thus far.
Now, I just need to remember that the default syntax is markdown and we’ll get along great.
Installation was easy. I just installed the ELPA package and added somthing like this to my emacs config:
;; tumble - emacs tumblr...
if my post is short, does it make it to twitter?
trying out tumblr
and testing twitter and facebook integration. test. test.
I haven’t played around too much yet, but I did spend some time importing my old blogger posts. I might throw the script up on github if I think it might be useful to someone else out there.
June 2009
1 post
I can still read?!?!
So, I had jury duty the other day. Well, I didn’t get picked to sit on a jury, or even interviewed really. But, I did get to sit in a room for the better part of a day that I couldn’t leave.
Oddly, it’s been awesome. The chairs sucked, there was some super-surly South-sider, the men’s room light didn’t really work (might have been for the best), but I was able...
February 2009
1 post
Hurray for blogger!
I don’t know how common knowledge this is, but the Blogger twitter account just left some great details about dealing with exports in a comment on Craig Burton’s blog. Add in the conversion tools here, and I’m a happy camper about being on the blogger service. Now, I just need to remember to export my data every so often, just in case.
rant: iPhone apps
Apple, the app store sucks. Yeah, it’s a brilliant innovation to have an app store for a smart phone, but I’m over that. You have a serious problem in that you’ve made it so trendy and cool to create iPhone apps, that damn near everyone is doing it. As a result, there’s a total lack of quality in many of the apps. For free ones this isn’t that big a deal, because...
January 2009
7 posts
reminder: include created_at field on database...
From now on, include a created_at or some other field on every table to make it easy to dump a subset of the database for testing, development.
reminder: convert rails foo.erb to foo.html.erb
To help with migrating old projects to rails 2.x conventions
why you need twitter
It seems that for better or worse, our world is increasingly dependent on small, bite-size communications. And, you probably suck at it. I’m sorry; maybe you’re too old, or too young, or you never got around to taking that creative writing class in college. It’s going to be okay, we’re all bad at something. Just watch me try to communicate with a large group in real life...
more blogging on the go...
Trying this one out since iBlogger required a line-break option that would have required me to reformat most of my old entries. That’s something I’d like to avoid. Look ma’ a photo.
[photo was here, really]
— Post From My iPhone
Update: This was with the blogpress iphone app, (I think). It also seems the photo service that’s built in lost my photo at some...
blogging on the go...
This is a test blog entry from iBlogger. I hope it turns out pretty because the idea of typing up a new entry from far off locales turns me on!
[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]
iPhone and Google syncing Shangri-La
I love Google Apps. And it turns out, I’m really digging my new iPhone. Using the iPhone with Google is awwwwkward. What follows is my current solution for syncing contacts and calendars between my Google apps account, Addressbook, iCal and my iPhone. Getting email perfect might be a later post, if I ever figure that one out. The main goals were to 1) sync my main Google Apps account...
December 2008
2 posts
Inspiring Woman Computer Science Pioneer
Google has a great blog post and YouTube video about Jean Bartik a true pioneer in the field of Computer Science. I hadn’t heard of Jean before today, but this video interview of her being inducted into the Computer History Museum is great, truly inspirational. For those that know me, you’d agree that I don’t use happy, warm, fuzzy terms like inspirational,well, ever. ...
Yum bug in RH5.2
I’m still banging on hosting my first yum repository, so I’m by no means as knowledgeable with how it stores metadata, etc as I am with apt-get. But, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t get yum to recognize my packages right after adding them to the repository. It turns out that yum caches metadata for some time period, an hour or so, which is abysmally long when you’re...
Mozy with external drives
It’s finally time to upgrade the external hard drive that hangs off the mac mini serving up our media media at home. While most of this isn’t really critical data I do back it up with Mozy, because, it’s cheap and easier than re-creating. So far, I’ve added the new drive, copied over all the old data with rsync and swapped names of the mounted drives. Mozy seems pretty...
November 2008
5 posts
early in the morning
Stormy, aka server cat, decides to help me and a coworker manage a server move with our hosting provider, really freakin’ early in the morning.
installing rmagick 1.15.x on RHEL 5
I had an old post on getting rmagick to compile on RHEL4, and consider this an update (if you still happen to use rmagick 1.x). I suspect you probably still need the urw-fonts package installed in RHEL5 but you’ll also want to add the --disable-htmldoc flag.
Don't call it a comeback
I’ve finally, and painfully finished importing my old blog posts mostly by hand. I tried automating it, but there seemed to be too much tweaking required between the source that mephisto stored, and how blogger would deal with it. Please let me know if anything seems out of place or broken.
Hosted Blog?
I’m testing out using a hosted blog, with Blogger, because my normal mephisto-based blog is on the fritz thanks to my ruby / rails upgrade. And, quite honestly, I’m not sure I really enjoy maintaining the blog software anymore. I don’t really have any super-hardcore customizations that I need in a blog. So, here goes. Update: I’m a bit bummed there isn’t a way to...
October 2008
1 post
howto: ignore files in subversion
Since I tend to forget ::
svn propedit svn:ignore directory
then *.log, etc.. that you would expect in a .cvsignore.
September 2008
1 post
thank you, mephisto
I’m going through a boat-load of spam comments in my queue, and I really just wanted to thank mephisto from letting them get to the actual site.
August 2008
1 post
Fight Club: MacBookPro results
It didn’t really take long for me to decide to give OSX the lion’s share of the hard drive. I think the biggest thing was that the current madwifi drivers (from trunk) didn’t provide reliable access at home, and that sucked A LOT. Many of the other issues with the UI, etc I would have eventually been able to deal with. I’ve still left some space for a linux install, and I’m itching to try...
July 2008
1 post
Fight Club: MacBookPro
I’ve been putting off upgrading the trusty MacBookPro to Leopard for a while. I use fink and the Unix-ey side of things quite a bit, and really wanted that to be stable. Well, turns out many of the apps I’d like to try out are now Leopard only. So, upgrade time. But, with a twist. I’ve long lamented the quality of packaging on the Mac, fink and macports both have their failures and...
May 2008
2 posts
I have survived, part 2
I’m back, and still surviving The Orbitz Years When I started in the NOC at Orbitz, I really only expected to stay a year or two cutting my teeth before finishing school and moving on to something new. Well, that year turned into six, and that finishing school thing never really happened. I was, however, lucky enough to get to know some truly awesome people, and work in three rather...
I have survived
As of a day or two ago, I have survived for 28 years of life. Of those, I’ve spent roughly the last decade working in technology. I’m not normally a huge birthday person, so maybe it’s been the recent onslaught of “your parents music” at work, but for some reason it strikes me as a milestone. So, I thought I’d share a few memorable points and people from the last 10 years of being a geek. The...
April 2008
2 posts
I just wanted to apologize
for that last post. I was moving this blog do a different virtual host and wanted to test it out, but didn’t have anything real to say, and well “I’m sorry”. With that out of the way. It’s time to put some energy back into this. But, rather than a bunch of empty promises that I’ll write something every day for the next 30 days or some other such non-sense, you’ll just have to wait and see....
Mozy mac client...
seems to now report status to the command line in kilobits rather than Kilobytes. Sneaky.. sneaky.
March 2008
2 posts
Twitterrific from the command line using ruby
I caught this Ruby Inside post about using ruby as an applescript replacement earlier today, and started reading the associated links, and searching for something I could try to do with ruby and applescript that might actually make my life a little easier. Thanks to my friend Dave, I’ve been giving twitter a 2nd chance. So, I created a tiny script to let me tweet from the command line. It’ll...
Mozy for the headless Mac
Frequently mentioned on Lifehacker, Mozy Home is an incredibly economical network backup option at $5 a month. The online backup service will store an unlimited amount of data, and has Mac and Windows clients. The big caveat there is that you don’t have unlimited throughput, so it can still take a while to backup a large fileserver, say. In that case it’s especially important to be able to...
January 2008
2 posts
fink error: environment variable set to: 10.1
I, recently, decided to move some of my home rails sites to my aging PPC-based mac mini. I’m still running Tiger on it because I’m lazy, don’t need any new features, and know how macports & fink work in Tiger. I ran through the normal, install fink, ruby package,… routine. But, when I got to compiling some of my gems, I got this error: ...
Happy New Year 2008!
I hope everyone had a safe and happy time over the holidays. I’m just getting back to normal life after a month of craziness, and I need to figure out my resolutions, or lack of, for the new year. What are you doing differently or better this year?
December 2007
2 posts
Introduction to RPM
Better late than never. This is the first “real” article in the Packaging Software series. It’s long, but hopefully it’ll help someone out. Enjoy!
So what’s an RPM?
In it’s distilled form, a big ball of files that hopefully make up something useful, like software. But wait, there’s more! It’s not just a file format for installing, uninstalling, updating, verifying software, it’s also the...
rails 2.0 released!
Every ruby nerd in the world will be blogging about this. I’m no exception. Ruby on Rails 2.0 is out and represents a mountain of progress. Many thanks to the rails core team and everyone that’s assisted in bringing this to us, the masses.
Riding Rails Ryan’s Scraps 37 signals blog
November 2007
5 posts
google: do no evil, when it's convenient
Techcrunch has a post on Google’s recent disclosure of a blogger’s IP address to the authorities. What’s disturbing is that, at least according to TC, Google did not require a court order before tattling on the blogger. UPDATE: It seem TC and I may have spoke too soon. A couple of commenters on the TC post seem to indicate there was something lost in translation, and that there was indeed a...
why facebook needs to win
They need to win the social wars for _me_. That’s right, for me. I was on friendster. I was on orkut till the Brazillians took over. I’m on linkedin. And now, I’m on facebook. I’ve gone where my friends have gone, and I’m sick of it. I’m tired of creating all the connections to my friends. Tired of putting in my updated contact info. Tired of figuring out what the whiz bang features...
nginx for fink
I just submitted an nginx package to fink after waiting about a month to define which files were documentation. Hopefully, it’ll be validated and added quickly, but if you need it now head over to sourceforge to grab the .info and .patch. The packaging tutorial over at finkproject should have all the info you’d need to build it for yourself. As well as teach you how simple it is to get started...
And you thought Beowulf was epic
Peter Marklund has put together a mammoth 341 slide presentation to introduce you to Ruby and Rails. Get it here [pdf] or at his slideshare. I haven’t flipped through it all yet, but, so far, it looks like a great resource.
Google to bring Linux to the masses?
It seems that Walmart just started carrying a $200 computer from Everex that’s running Linux. And it just happened to be Google’s Ubuntu-based distribution. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how Walmart’s customers react to a very affordable computer, running an operating system they’ve never heard of.
October 2007
9 posts
rmagick / imagemagick RHEL4 and font error pain
If your working on RedHat enterprise 4, trying to install rmagick and you get an error like this :: Magick::ImageMagickError (unable to read font `/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n019003l.pfb'): try installing urw-fonts. That is all.
Soldering HOWTO
Hack-A-Day has a great little article on the basics of soldering. Check it out, here
embed shared documents with edocr
I’m not much for re-canning Techcrunch posts, but edocr seems pretty neat. Check out this Vi cheat sheet.
rails on fink
I should have really taken better notes as I got setup using fink, but here’s a braindump of what I needed for rails to work for me. Note, rmagick and me are not near as angry with each other as we were under macports. Install Fink Go Here - You should be able to figure out the install. Set it to unstable
# Edit /sw/etc/fink.conf # set Trees line Trees: local/main stable/main...