I had to do this recently, and so I thought it would be useful to share this for two reasons: Someone else may need to do it and find this technique useful Someone else may know a better way of doing this Quick ‘n’ dirty explanation: you have two lists. One list is a superset…
Category: Linux
Google Calendar Syncing
So, I’m kinda tired of trying to find a solution to this. What I want is a non-commercial, freely available application (NOT service) that will sync bidirectionally between Google Calendar and Apple iCal, Evolution, and whatever Mozilla calls its calendar today (Sunbird?). I’ve used Spanning Sync, which worked well enough, but I never liked that…
Code Editor Goodness: Komodo Editor
Geez…. for a sysadmin I sure seem to write a lot of code. In the past year I’ve written an assignment type for Moodle in PHP, cobbled together an API in Perl to manage various LDAP resources, and I’ve just completed a prototype for an XML-RPC server that will be an interface to our data…
Trying to make friends with Python… again
I like the idea of Python. I have diverse interests, technically, and I like to think that there’s a language out there that I can use to write small script, a large website, a stored procedure, or a distributed system. The same language is used to write a very large chunk of systems code on…
More news for Spanning Sync Refugees
First, there are lots of people who are pretty outraged by the new Spanning Sync pricing of $25/year for a subscription service or $65 for a one-time license. The people who are the most outraged are those who are intimately familiar with how buggy it is because they were beta testers. I’m in that camp…
Safety Precautions When Using the ‘rm’ Command
Usually, if I have a bunch of files that need to go away, I’ll see what I can do to avoid using ‘rm’. Many times, I can move a directory containing the files out of the way, or I can make a backup directory and move the files there. However, at some point, those files…
Can Ubuntu Cut the Gordian Knot?
When Windows was released, it united a vast but rather fragmented society around a single philosophy. On the one side, you had end users. They had to get work done, and they needed applications to do that. On the other side, you had application developers, who needed a platform conducive to making useful applications to…
My LUG/IP Presentation: The Road to Geek Authorship
A few months ago, Tom Limoncelli (noted author and, now, a member of the Google team) spoke at our LUG about topics from his newest book, “Time Management for System Administrators”. It was a great talk, and it’s a pretty darn good book as well. Anyway, the point here is that, after the talk, there…
Lack of competent Linux admins leads companies back to Windows
I was reading on ZDnet about some companies who migrated to Linux from Windows, and some of them migrated back to Windows! I’m not kidding. I was hoping to pull some deep insight from this set of stories about experiences in different data centers, the kinds of logistical problems that crept up, services deployed that…
First LUG meeting I’ve been to in years
Well, the title isn’t 100% true: I went to a couple of LUG meetings for the University where I work, but you don’t get the same kind of diversity in applications that you do when you just walk into a public meeting at the local library. At the university, there’s diversity in terms of department:…