genehack.org

been a while.

• Emergency Elisp — break glass in case, yadda yadda
• Rules of Sysadmins. At $ORK, we call #8 The Friday Rule; I just wish all my cow-orkers respected it. I’d add a corrollary to rule #4: there is a better way, but you don’t have the time to implement it…
• Stop the presses, Joel Spolsky writes about system administration and makes sense: Five Whys
• xkcd endorses Obama. Unrelatedly, yesterday’s xkcd may be one of the best single-panel comics ever.
• Pride and Palpitations — semi-sad but very true
• Rails is shitty
• drool
• God — must love the tagline, “(like monit, only awesome)”
• Words to live by: If it hurts, automate it (via jmason)

• nsscache: open source named services system release — we’ve been doing a variant of this at work for a couple of years now. of course, we’re not google so nobody cares.
• Perl leading Wide Finder results — I’ve been wondering when Perl was going to show up…
• Why you should buy an OLPC XO Laptop — Really hoping that TheChild’s arrives for the holiday…
• Why Apple Spaces is broken — Yesterday, Rafe twittered about Apple integrating Growl; after the Virtue Desktops/Spaces fsckup, y’all better hope they don’t even try.
• JJG’s TPOOW ‘ye olde school’ section rediscovered. again.
• Gore Nightmare Wins as Europe Pays to Ship U.S. Coal
• Func: Fedora Unified Network Controller
• NeoVictorian Computing
• How Many Nines Does One Person Need? — Danny O’Brien churns out an interesting series of articles about personal computing, with emphasis on both. Read ‘em all.

• There is no flag large enough
• Installing MySQL on Ubuntu the Mark Pigrim way. In response to this for those of you missing the snark.
• Advanced Uses for Syntax Highlighting - coloring based on the blood alcohol level of the programmer at time of last commit
• OpaqueMenuBar kludge for Leopard
• App::Cmd talk from PPW - came in handy the other day when I started working on something App::Cmd based
• Adventures in Digital Photography with Linux part 4 and part 5. Ganked from somebody’s del.icio.us stream
• Replace the Leopard’s login screen background
• Regex tool for Emacs
• Simple Incident Reporting
• How do you train for cyclocross races?
• Do Not Use Gnus um, FAIL
• The Endless Search for a Mail Client That Doesn’t Suck — I just wrote a little Perl shim to manage some aspects of mail downloading, because I got so tired of craptastic IMAP access via Exchange. One of these days I’ll release that code.
• Sup - Ruby-based “mutt-killer” MUA.
• Operations is a competitive advantage… — I sent this link out on an internal list at work, and got back this picture which tells you something both about the general nature of my job and the place I work. (The picture is only somewhat accurate — the “product” size relative to the workers is actually bigger, and it doesn’t say anything at all about the metings. Otherwise, spot on.)

Gack, tabs everywhere, lists of crap dumped out of tabs, it never ends.

• What the Hell Is Microsoft Doing with My Computer? — I think the word you’re searching for is ‘ownz0r’. HTH, HAND.
• What “overweight” looks like and why BMI is nuts.
• Multi-TTY Emacs on Gentoo and Ubuntu — much like The Shins in Garden State, running multiTTY emacs will change your life.
• Interesting Postsecret-related human interest story.
• Declaring .emacs bankruptcy — I’m declaring bankruptcy bankruptcy. Beat that.
• To The Stoner Who Works At Cottage Inn Pizza — this made me laugh pretty hard yesterday.

So incredibly far behind on things that I’m starting to wrap around to being caught up — or at least that’s what I keep telling myself is going to happen.

• Preparation for Parenthood — potentially relevant for some, I am given to understand. Numbers 5 and 9 are fully in effect around these parts lately.
• Six keys to understanding CSS layouts — one of these days I’m redesigning some crap…
• Distributed administration using SSH — in my perfect world this whole article would be replaced with a mechanism that caused your web browser to punch you in the face until you were unconscious, and then write “use a real configuration management system dummy” in permanent marker on your forehead in backwards type so you’d see in the mirror in the morning until the message sunk in. Unfortunately we are not yet in my perfect world.
• Speaking of software and pain, here’s JWZ on CDDB. On my endless todo list: finish the writeup about my obsessive-compulsive CD rip/media file tag’n’store system.
• AskMe on shaving whole head — contains useful links; I took my beard off about two weeks ago and am currently enjoying a mostly hair-free skull, but maintaining that state isn’t helping with the “no time” issues.
• A graphic illustration of American political realities
• pler — the DWIM perl debugger
• PerlySense — stuff for Perl/IDE integration. I swear I saw a nice article about this on PerlBuzz but I’m not finding it now. Drop it in the comments if you know the link, kthx.
• Strap on the tin-foil beanie and check out this stock forum thread about the “bin Laden” trades that were apparently recently made. Good for tickling your paranoia if nothing else. Here’s more on the same thing, in the same vein.
• Black Hats on OpenID
• Git on MacOS X

I’ve got another 50 or so things to pass on but it’s time to start getting the kids moving towards (pre)-school…

Last time I had to quit Firefox, I had something like 50 open tabs, so this is clearly long overdue…

• I’m not really a podcast person, but I have been digging the KPunk shows, which lead me to this trippy video. No idea what the guy is saying, but it’s entertaining. He also dropped this great acoustic cover of Straight Outta Compton. Yes, acoustic.
• Gas::Prices
• Brtfs
• Google has some configuration management thing called “Slack”. I looked for the download a while ago and couldn’t find it, but it was pointed to on some mailing list I’m on. So, here’s the Slack project page. Why that’s not on a Google URL when they’ve apparently done presentations about it at meetings, who knows.
• Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” wins Locus award — linking it here because of the acceptance speech: “Systems administrators are the unsung heroes of the twenty first century, our tireless morlocks who keep the entire universe running. The best sysadmins I’ve met treat their jobs as holy callings. They understand that they’re keeping the infrastructure of the information age alive and functional.”
• nBox — for work
• Create local Yum repo — also for work
• Nature Precedings: Early Access to Scientific Results
• HOWTO knit a baby viking helmet
• Asshole driven development
• Mark Atwood - What is the Next Big Thing? (via Dan) It may play out this way at smaller scales, but I think anybody who has a lot of servers now (and actually legitimately uses the cycles) is still going to have a lot of servers in the future. Locality trumps the grid.
• Perhaps I could describe what I’m feeling right now as “sudden heat.”
• Antibacterial products may be bad news — and the microbiologists go “DUH!”
• Gordon Lee trial date set; Comic Book Legal Defense Fund needs help — Gordon Lee is being prosecuted for giving an “obscene” comic book to a minor.
• Cheney tells agency that Vice President’s office is not part of the executive branch — no controlling legal authority? oh, wait…

Things are supposed to slow down in summer, right?

• The Harveyville Project — heh, somebody is trying to start an artists colony down the road from where I grew up. If you look at the map, the town I grew up in is in Osage County, right where the blue line coming down from I-470 ends. Next year is a “go back to KS” summer; maybe we’ll check these guys out… (via Dan and others)
• Informational emergency in the operating room — people always roll their eyes when I give them this scenerio…
• INT
• Aquamacs 1.0 drops

And now, off to play with this shiny bit of alpha software that landed in my lap last night (coughomnicoughfocuscough,cough…)

• Marine Corps Wants America’s Favorite Marine To Shut Up! — An honorably discharged Marine who served in Iraq has been re-called to active duty so that he can be “other than honorably” discharged. Since his discharge, this Marine has been active in anti-war protests. Politically motivated retaliation? You do the math.
• My name is Adam Kokesh, and I need your help — The Marine’s personal account. His hearing is today.
• Mark Pilgrim talks about One Year With Linux. Idiots come out of the woodwork.
• Dan Lyke on gender discrimination among bloggers — from January 2005. Everything old is new again.
• File::Touch
• The Zero Install system — scary.

Firefox is wanting half a gig of RAM. Time to dump some of these tabs…

• Supremes to Victims of Wrong House Searches: Deal With It
• Five Ways to Improve Your Perl Programming
• Case insensitive filesystems SUCK, part #3981. Yes, Apple, I’m still looking at you.
• The Two Things — perfect bar conversation fodder for the next time you’re stuck for something to talk about
• You’ve seen this already, but it deserves a link: Google Street-level view. So awesome.
• How did you become an admin?
• The strange allure (and false hope) of email bankruptcy — auto-responders set to stun, yo.
• Dealing with (spam) backscatter
• USDA blocks cattle farmer from testing all stock for mad cow — the invisible hand is flipping you off
• Personality::Type::MBTI
• Praise Eris, none of my users are quite this stupid. That’s some next level fscking up there.
• Rescuing a(n SVN) repository — via Dan’s unfortunate accident, put here as a talisman against actually needing the info it contains.

And now I’m magically back down to only 20-odd open tabs, and I’m using all of those…

Best error message evah: “you don’t exist, go away!” That’s what glibc tells you if your account information happens to get deleted from /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow while the system is still up and you’re logged in. Tends to freak out the average user; don’t ask why I know this.

• Catalyst Wear
• Web page footer stick technique — one of these days I’m going to do some web stuff again…
• Ghost bike memorial
• Om mani padme hum
• Wiki clock — thx paperbits
• Let’s Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death
• Jimmy Carter is One Bad Ass Mofo.
• Rafe considers an OS change
• Sysadmin job interviewer tips
• USDA to Allow More Conventional Ingredients in Organics — this seems like a full-bore Bad Idea
• Preview art from next Scott Pilgrim book