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 …

I’ve been doing a lot of RPM packaging lately, and on different (and very old) distros and versions. Sometimes I lose track of all of the macros used in specfiles (_bindir _sbindir dist _localstatedir, etc). There’s no terribly easy way to dump a list of all of the …

The bulk of this post was written way back in April 2012. If you’re just coming here, and looking to setup oVirt, you should probably skip down to the postscript for an update, and ignore most of the content here (as it’s applicable to an older oVirt version …

I’ve recently started casual work on a side-project to collect, store, and analyze apache logs from a bunch of servers - for the initial implementation, I’m looking to handle about 15M access_log lines per day (that works out to 173 lines/second assuming an even distribution, which there certainly …

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 …

In an earlier post, Piwik Web Analytics, and some unfortunate stats about my blog, I mentioned that the Feedburner stats for this blog show a relatively high subscribe/unsubscribe rate for this blog. I think a large part of that is my tendency to blog in spurts, and even worse …