http://jonebird.com Nesting place for this bird's projects Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:14:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I sit in the Atlanta Airport reminiscing over the events of PyWorks '08. This was the first year for PyWorks but MTA combined the conference with PHP Architect and I believe everyone was happy with the combination. At a minimum, people had engaging conversations between the groups and a significant ... http://jonebird.com/2008/11/16/pyworks-in-summation/ In anticipation of heading down to PyWorks 2008, I have been thinking about creating a business card for the sake of keeping in contact with people I meet. One of my main goals, while attending and speaking at PyWorks, is to network with people and mark 2008 as the ... http://jonebird.com/2008/11/06/2d-barcodes/ The challenge to build a tool which manages multiple vendors and platforms by way of piggy backing off their technology is a losing battle. Be it provisioning, patching, monitoring, etc it doesn't matter. To choose such a tool, you end up paying big bucks for other people to constantly watch ... http://jonebird.com/2008/11/04/management-tools/ For the 2008 PyWorks convention, I will be presenting about LDAP and Python. The presentation is really about demystifying LDAP and encouraging people to use and extend LDAP for their config file needs. In efforts to make my point, the last half of my presentation will be a time for ... http://jonebird.com/2008/10/25/pyworks-stuff/ I am on a island at work and there is no one else to converse with other than Wilson. The island is called "Isle de Emacs" and Wilson is, I guess, psychoanalyze-pinhead. But occasionally I do get a visitor to the island and the conversation is more or less the ... http://jonebird.com/2008/09/18/essential-emacs-knowledge/ Some time ago I lost my harddrive. At that point, I was making infrequent backups to the laptop. Not very admin-like for someone who's profession is a Systems Administrator. It could have been much worse, but still a pain none the less. I had to solve various issues with my ... http://jonebird.com/2008/09/18/fixing-my-weblog/ An Idea for a helpful Admin ToolWhat if you got a page and/or ticket for an obscure server's particular service? The unique problem is that your environment is huge, you're still relatively new to the company, co-workers are not there to help you and you have never heard of this ... http://jonebird.com/2007/11/13/20/ Have you ever wanted to send a signal, which normally produces a core file, but the process has one of those annoying signal handlers setup to catch the signal you're sending? The nerve of that application trying to intelligently handle signals! I actually have a real need to remove the ... http://jonebird.com/2007/06/21/stripping-another-process-of-its-signal-handler/ What is the best programming language for a system administrator? Queue the language war, please. The typical arguments are "your language can't do this", "this library doesn't have a consistent naming convention", well "my language is faster", yeah and "your syntax is hideous to read much less use", blah blah ... http://jonebird.com/2007/01/15/python-admin-vs-java-developers/ Nothing too fancy here. Just a list of the most common things I find desirable while writing shell scripts. Use meaningful variable names This point is strictly for the sake of readability. Too often when trying to read somebodies script I'll actually do various search & replaces of their ... http://jonebird.com/2006/11/06/scripting-best-practices/