Right now, this blog, my email, and a whole bunch of other services are hosted on a Linode Xen VM. I don’t really keep up to date with administration and upgrades the way I used to, and honestly, I’d rather spend my time working on other things (like …

I use git quite a bit these days, both with an internal server at work and with a bunch of my projects and random code that now live on my github account. The transition from SVN hasn’t always been easy. Here’s a quick cheat sheet of some of …

Some random interesting links from Slashdot for today:

• The Greatest Battle of the Personal Computing Revolution Lies Ahead - Slashdot. A bit of a rant, but makes some good points that are close to my heart, and unfortunately far from the thoughts of many non-techies.
• Terms of Service; Didn’t Read …

On the lighter side, I found a few web sites by Tom Blackwell that do some fun stuff with text overlays on images. seems like a nice little tool for those end-of-project powerpoints, or to send out the monthly “most rolled-back commits” medal…

Custom Tombstone Maker

CustomRoadSign.com

CustomMotelSign.com …

I saw a link to this YouTube video shared on Tom Limoncelli’s blog. It’s a 1953 US Navy instructional video about an all-mechanical fire control computer. Yes, I really mean a computer that can solve continuously changing 25-variable fire control problems using only mechanical means (gears, cams, etc …

I’ve been doing some work with RabbitMQ lately, and have been doing some testing against its HTTP-based API, which returns results in JSON. If you’re looking to pretty-print a JSON response for easier viewing, here’s a nice way to do it at the command line using …

Since I started my last job, I’ve been using Nagstamon on my workstation; it’s a really handy little system tray application that monitors a Nagios/Icinga instance and shows status updates/summary in a handy fashion, including flashing and (optionally) a sound alert when something changes. Unfortunately, there …

Today is my last day in my almost-year-long stint as a System Administrator at TechTarget. Monday, I start a new contract-to-perm position as a Linux Engineer with Cox Media Group Digital & Strategy. I can’t say a whole lot about the new job, other than it will hopefully be a …

A while back, I did a technical phone screen with a big online “social” company (I won’t say who, but they’re a household name, growing fast, and doing cool things; that doesn’t leave too many options). I rarely remember to write down interview questions, but I was …

At $WORK we lost a disk in the RAID1 of one of our external nameservers, and it rekindled an occasional discussion of migration from ISC BIND to PowerDNS. PowerDNS has separate authoritative and recursive servers, and doesn’t seem to natively support views or split-horizon the way BIND does, but …