I was lurking around on twitter during my lunch hour (yes, even freelancers need a lunch hour), and @bitprophet tweeted thusly: Get syslog-owned log names from syslog.conf: grep -v “^#” syslog.conf | awk ‘{print $2}’ | egrep -v “^(\*|\|)” | sed “/^$/ d” | sed “s/^-//” Followed by this: (Interested to see if anyone can…
Author: bkjones
LinuxLaboratory woes, Drupal -> Django?
Ugh… So, today I tried browsing to one of my sites, linuxlaboratory.org, and found a 403 “Forbidden” error. Calling support, they said it was a “billing issue”. Well, I pay my bills, and I haven’t received any new credit cards, so I’m not sure what that’s about. Further, they haven’t contacted me in any way…
I’m Offering Pro-Bono Consulting
I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I…
Training Patterns
So, I’ve been talking to some friends about training. I work with several firms in various aspects of training. Usually I’m actually delivering training, but in some cases I’m just helping to produce the training content, and occasionally I actually help build a full-fledged internal training regimen. I love doing this work, because it lets…
Linux/Unix File Copy Trick
I have a need for this hack every now and then, and I *always* forget it for some reason, so I’m putting it here for safe keeping. I’ll start a “hacks” category, too, so I can locate these quickly, and so you can too 🙂 So, here’s the hack: [jonesy@cranford testing]$ ls bar foo [jonesy@cranford…
My first screencast: The Linux Boot Process
So, I’ve taught the Linux Boot Process as part of a couple of different training courses now, and I thought I’d share it with the world in the form of a screencast (it’s hosted at my co.’s site). This is also a test to help me figure out how to “do screencasts”, generally. The material…
A Missing Battery in Python: a bash “select” equivalent
So, someone showed me a script they were writing in bash. They were doing a lot of manual menu creation, then using “read” to collect input, and manually mapping the input to longer strings, and then doing string manipulation stuff. Trying to help simplify and make things a little more sane and readable, I discovered…
More Lessons in Freelancing
So, I’ve been freelancing now for 9 months. I did a post a while back about what was working and what wasn’t, and I still stand by those recommendations. But that was over 6 months ago. Since then a lot of things have happened. I’m happy to report that, so far, things are going great….
Totally Hooked: ‘Things’ for Mac
First, I want to point out the only thing I hate about this application: the name. It’s bad for me, it’s bad for the developers… it’s just bad. If I ever had a problem, how am I supposed to do a search for that? If the developers want to find blog posts like this one,…
‘Beginning Linux Administration’, Now With Open Enrollment
So, my training business is doing better than expected, which is good news in a tough economy. I’ve gotten some feedback from readers about my mention of training services offered through my company. My company has historically only performed training at client sites, and some folks had hoped I would expand into offering “open enrollment”…