Last week, I read a great blog post (and even better comments), and then this week I read something else that made me think more about Microsoft, open source, and Microsoft’s direction going into the future. By way of disclaimer, I’m indifferent to Microsoft. I don’t use their products if I don’t have to, but…
Author: bkjones
Need a new web host
Ok, this blog is currently hosted by 1and1.com, and I think that needs to change, which is sad, because up until recently, I’ve been pretty happy with the performance. However, I recently had an issue, and some things came to light about my package that I wasn’t aware of. First of all, the maximum time…
Vim messing up indentation on your pasted code?
I’ve had this issue forever. I want to paste in some code from somewhere else into a Vim session on some random box, but I have to remember to do “:set nocindent noautoindent nosmartindent noreallypleasedontindent” all the time. Well, I finally had some time to google for an actual solution to the issue (I knew…
All Linux Distros Suck
1. In reality, all Linux distributions suck, some just suck in ways you might not have discovered yet. While I am not the holy master of all that is Linux, I like to think that, having deployed, administered, maintained, and supported a good number of distros (not to mention UNIX variants), in varying environments and…
Loghetti 0.9 Released: Now worthy of use!
The first released tarball of Loghetti was called the “IPO” release. This version actually warranted having an actual version number. I chose 0.9, and we’ll be moving toward 0.91, in .01 increments to a 1.0 release. Later on I’ll try to detail a roadmap, but I haven’t had enough feedback for that yet (though I’ve…
A simple nanny script in Python
I have a support issue with a provider of mine, but was able to reverse engineer the problem and put in a stop-gap measure to keep it from ruining my weekend. The issue is a misconfigured daemon supplied by the provider, and occasionally, this daemon just goes away. I don’t know much about the daemon,…
A non-degree-holder’s view of hiring decisions
I get a good number of job offers without sending resumes around. I guess my name shows up in enough places, associated with enough buzzwords, that recruiters fire off emails first and read the fine print later. The “fine print” in my case, says that I do not have a college degree. 99.999% of the…
Amazon Adds Static IP and “Availability Zones” to EC2
This is cool. You can now associate a static IP address with your EC2 instances. No more mucking about with 10-minute DNS timeouts or dynamic DNS routines. You can also elect to start certain instances in multiple locations using “Availability Zones” These new features will make it a little easier for people to deploy larger…
Hadoop, EC2, S3, and me
I’m playing with a lot of rather large data sets. I’ve just been informed recently that these data sets are child’s play, because I’ve only been exposed to the outermost layer of the onion. The amount of data I *will* have access to (a nice way of saying “I’ll be required to wrangle and munge”)…
The Power of Open Source
I think my very favorite aspect of the open source development model is that it allows me to practice the philosophies I use in my every day personal life, and apply them to software development as well. In my teens and early 20’s I read quite a lot of Aristotle and Plato, and a very…