I brought my MacBook Pro in for a warranty repair yesterday around noon. Since then I’ve been using a Lenovo T61 to get basic work done, and also to see if any progress has been made in the area of Linux support for my laptop. I bought this laptop specifically because a website said that…
Category: Productivity
On Remote Workers and Working Remotely
I’ve been on both sides of the remote worker relationship. On the manager side, I’ve managed some good-sized projects using an all-remote work force. Indeed, I’ve hired, managed, fired, and promoted workers without ever knowing what they look like. On the worker side, I do most of my work remotely, and I have for some…
I’m a Top 25 Geek Blogger… for some value of “Top”
I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or…
Freelancing: What’s working, what isn’t
So, I’ve been a full-time freelance consultant now for almost 3 months, and I’m happy to say that business is going well so far. I’ll be coming off of a 3-month contract at the end of this month, and I’ve already had some success in building the business in that time. I’ve also had a…
Generating Reports with Charts Using Python: ReportLab
UPDATE (Mar. 26, 2010) Just realized I never posted the link to the PDF the code here generates: here it is. My bad. I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before,…
A merger, migration, mysql, python, and more news
First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind…
Design Patterns in System Administration
Most readers of my blog know that I consult, in addition to usually having a day job. I started my career working for a consulting firm, and couldn’t let go of the endless fascinating problems that exist in the “technological landscape”, and in addition, the seemingly endless numbers of ways to solve them. I’ve learned…
OSCON Day 2: Launching a Startup in 3 Hours
Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well…
Day 1 of OSCON Begins, and More Tips for Conference-goers
I got an early start. Too early. But I’m from the west coast, so my body thinks I slept in. I wandered around a bit, took a few pics which you can see at my Flickr OSCON set, and I discovered a couple of things that might be of interest: The starbucks in the conference…
Show Me Your Python SysAdmin One-Liners!
Ah, the lazyweb. Today, I’m putting together content for a class I’m teaching on basic Linux administration, but during my meeting with a group of trainees to determine the scope of the course, they requested that I completely skip any coverage of “perl -e” one-liners, and show them the Python equivalents. Of course, I found…