Somebody on a mailing list asked a question about shell quoting. The quoting issue would not have been so difficult had it not been for the fact that it was a command that was to be run on the other end of an SSH connection. Here’s the command he was trying to run: ssh -t…
Category: Technology
How to buy used voting machines on the internet
There’s a really interesting writeup by a Princeton University professor about how he was able to purchase a lot of voting machines on a government surplus site. Interesting highlights: the machine doesn’t match the marketing glossies with regard to “security” (surprise, surprise), and there’s no qualification process to go through to buy from the government…
Things to give your Sysadmin for Valentine’s Day
Ok, well, they don’t actually *make* any of these things, to my knowledge, but I was thinking about it today, and thought of this list of stuff that might be cool little thoughtful Valentine’s Day gifts for the geek in your life: A heart-shaped USB key that says “All my love are belong to you”…
Entering SQL Mode
My primary job focus is the design, deployment, maintenance, and support of infrastructure services like web, mail, dns, ntp, nfs, nis, ldap, print, and database servers (this is not to mention the routers and access points, sun rays, lab machines, beowulf clusters, etc that my group also maintains). However, recently I’ve been doing, well, some…
My Photo A Day Project
So I’ve been trying to take a picture every single day for almost a month now. Most days I take more than one picture. One day I completely forgot to take a picture. This wasn’t my creation. My buddy Steve told me about it, and he found it online somewhere else (maybe here). You can…
How not to manage code
I’m a systems guy. The reason I’m a systems guy is because I’m not a fan of long periods of coding. If I was, I’d be a developer. So anyway, I *do* write code, and I maintain a Moodle course management deployment. We needed some local customizations made to the code, and I even wrote…
Will Wikileaks Keep Anyone Honest?
I, for one, am hopeful that it can. Wikileaks is a website that allows anyone to anonymously post confidential information as a means of providing a more permanent, public record of corporate or governmental wrongdoing. Why do people trust Wikileaks? Because it would defeat their own purpose to break the trust of the community to…
Sys Admins Make the Worst Customers
It’s a vicious cycle: sysadmins can find a wealth of shortcomings in just about any technology that crosses their desk. Vendors completely ignore sysadmins as a market for their technology, in part because they’re impossible to please, and in part because it would cost too much money to even come close, which would mean that…
Embarrassingly Simplified Home Networking
Tonight I did some rather emasculating things to my home network. I had a pretty nice one. I had my cable modem coming in, then ran a cat5 straight from that to my Smoothwall firewall machine, which had three interfaces – one for the cable modem, one for the internal network, and one for a…
The iPhone Compromise
iPhone was announced officially yesterday at MacWorld. I was really looking forward to it. I was ‘cautiously optimistic’. If you know me, you know that cautiously optimistic, for me, is pretty damned optimistic. I’m an incurable cynic. I can’t help it. So what about this phone stood out to me? What stood out with this…