I’m going to OSCON in July, and I know that just about everyone I know who is a participant in this crazy life we call IT (or web 2.0, or whatever it’s called now), is flying to a conference or something in 2008. I’m starting to notice more and more posts like this one, so…
Might as Well Use Python
One of my jobs after being promoted to Director of IT at AddThis.com is to find a senior PHP developer. I’ve learned a few things from the search we’ve been doing over the past several months: What we really want is a senior developer, versed in PHP There are apparently none of those in existence…
MySQL Data Sharding Toolkit in Python
This rocks. It’s not complete, but Pyshards is the closest thing I’ve seen to a real attempt at making a more or less generic sharding toolkit, written in Python. This is not just great because it’s written in Python or because it helps people who need sharding capabilities in MySQL. It’s great because having a…
Run your own cloud
What if you’re a sysadmin that supports a large development community, or a large systems research facility, or something else that requires you to provision systems that, perhaps, *aren’t* cookie-cutter machines? A lot of different solutions actually exist for doing this, with varying degrees of complexity and usefulness. However, in order to give people the…
I just want to say…
That my wife, while on the phone with her mom, completely *not* coached by me, used the term “memory leak”, correctly, to describe the cause of a technical issue. I knew she was a keeper, but this is above and beyond.
Data munging with Vim and AWK
So, I had some data in a file. It was temporal data. It looked like this: 100 4/15 16:50 143 4/15 16:51 121 4/15 16:52 209 4/15 16:53 105 4/15 16:54 321 4/15 16:55 173 4/15 16:56 205 4/15 16:57 197 4/15 16:58 211 4/15 16:59 But I needed it to be in ISO 8601…
What Makes a Good Sysadmin?
I went to the June meeting of the LOPSA-NJ group tonight, where we held a roundtable discussion talking about traits that make a good system administrator. Here are some of the traits we came up with. Adaptability Organizations are not static. Nor are their IT departments. If you’re in a big company, being adaptable might…
O’Reilly OSCON… and Brew Fest!
I’m going to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year. I went in 2006 as well, and had a blast, in addition to learning quite a bit, and meeting tons of people whom I’ve been acquainted with online for a long time. That was 2 years ago. Since then I’ve been acquainted with…
Notes on Book Shopping from a Tech Bibliophile
Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a tech bibliophile. I have owned more books covering more technologies than I care to admit. Some of my more technical friends have stood in awe of the number of tech books I own. I am also constantly rotating old books that almost *can’t* be useful anymore out…
Simple S3 Log Archival
UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/ Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know,…