Had a case where I had some rails app that was using files for its session store and had been running like that for months. While it was a careless (and dumb) thing to run it that way, we had to do something about it since it was eating up close to 85% of the […]
Been thinking about the role of testing in a software organization. Steve Rowe of M$ has a great blog post on finding the right people for the job. He breaks it down into 3 types of roles that are useful in a test team: Runtime testers Scripters Tester Developer Definitely a good read for understanding […]
The League of Professional Sys Admins (I always want to say Extraordinary Gentlemen but who would classify a sys admin as a gentleman?) has an interesting post on comparing systems monitoring to continuous integration The concept of using monitoring as a continuous testing service to validate your changes against the environment in order to reduce […]
Interesting stuff. Here is a snippet… Scale your application, while leaving your existing database untouched by front-ending the database with In-Memory-Data-Grid (IMDG) or caching technologies. The database acts as a persistence store in the background. I refer to this approach as Persistence as a Service (PaaS). Although I do question how reliable the background persistence […]
From their website OpenMac: The Smart Alternative to an Apple The Psystar OpenMac works just like an Apple Macintosh Yes, very desirable. However, we’ll see if Apple lets them continue with it… Hope they don’t get sued out of existence
After a long time of not updating my trusty old iLamp iMac, I finally updated it to 10.4.11 over the weekend and let it lie. Later on I hear a report that Safari won’t start up. That’s odd, I’ve never heard of Safari having launch problems before. I check the log and I see something […]
Anytime I’ve been running a perl based script on my leopard box I got this really irritating output with whatever else I was expecting: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LC_ALL = “En_US”, LANG = (unset) are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to […]
Because the packaging certainly isn’t…
I had this task where I wanted to pull information from del.icio.us for some data processing so I decided to take a look at what was available for Ruby. Before, I say what path I took let’s go over the choices I dug up. Ridiculous First up was Ridiculous which labels it as a simple […]
I was thinking about the concept of naming machines and in general I try to first think of a theme to help decide on a naming convention. I don’t know where I read about this… perhaps in the DNS & BIND book or some other website (before blogs really took off) however I just rediscovered […]
While not much is known about Google and their Data Center operations this makes a decent attempt at aggregating all of it in one spot… Read more
I love reading about these smart uses of waste byproducts I bet this might work well in Japan if it wasn’t for those pesky earthquakes. A new data center in Switzerland is being used to heat a nearby swimming pool. In what appears to be a first, the town pool in Uitikon, Switzerland will be […]
Well worth the read.. Well, read it already!
Virishi tells a story of Meraki (an off-shoot of MIT Roof-Net) changing their tune. Today I learn that my failure is due to the fact that Meraki has automatically updated the software on all of the units (including legacy, such as ours) so that you cannot install a different firmware on it, at all. Not […]
Colin Percival had this to say on security: Schneier suggests that this “particular way of looking at the world” is very difficult to train — far more difficult than the domain expertise relevant to security. I respectfully differ: In my opinion, this mindset is not particular to security professionals; and universities have been successfully training […]