I went to the June meeting of the LOPSA-NJ group tonight, where we held a roundtable discussion talking about traits that make a good system administrator. Here are some of the traits we came up with. Adaptability Organizations are not static. Nor are their IT departments. If you’re in a big company, being adaptable might…
Author: bkjones
O’Reilly OSCON… and Brew Fest!
I’m going to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year. I went in 2006 as well, and had a blast, in addition to learning quite a bit, and meeting tons of people whom I’ve been acquainted with online for a long time. That was 2 years ago. Since then I’ve been acquainted with…
Notes on Book Shopping from a Tech Bibliophile
Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a tech bibliophile. I have owned more books covering more technologies than I care to admit. Some of my more technical friends have stood in awe of the number of tech books I own. I am also constantly rotating old books that almost *can’t* be useful anymore out…
Simple S3 Log Archival
UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/ Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know,…
Funny what you learn about yourself when you buy an iPhone
This is *not* a ripoff of xkcd (though I read that regularly, and so should you) – this is seriously the best graphic I can come up with, and it does the job. Yesterday I looked at doing all kinds of stuff to my iPhone. I wanted to see if I could get Python and…
Couple of Python Design Pattern Links
I’m a little relieved to learn that I know slightly more about design patterns than I initially thought. Still, there’s tons to learn, and I’ve been checking the O’Reilly “Upcoming Titles” list to see if “Design Patterns in Python” ever shows up, but I’m always disappointed (if you know of any such upcoming book, let…
Explosion at The Planet Causes 9000-server Outage
Here’s the email I received on Saturday from The Planet, where I have some dedicated servers hosted: Dear Valued Customers: This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no…
Not that anyone necessarily cares…
But Google has changed their favicon to a lower-cased ‘g’. Just sayin’.
Scalability Best Practices: eBay
Following a link from the High Scalability blog, I found this really great article about scalability practices, as told by Randy Shoup at eBay. Randy is very good at explaining some of the more technical aspects in more or less plain English, and it even helped me find some wording I was looking for to…
Make old svn revision the current revision
I ran across an issue that my google-foo has had some trouble handling. Maybe what I did is the only way to do it, in which case maybe this will help someone in need… but I rather like to think that someone here will have a much nicer solution. I use Subversion at most of…