Today I spent the day completely breaking down and replacing the entire above-ground portion of my in-ground pool’s plumbing. I had some problems crop up with my multi-port valve, and I had to take a few things apart to troubleshoot and remove the pump as the source of a pressure problem (namely, there wasn’t any)….
Two ssh-isms I forgot today
1. To remove an offending known_hosts key without opening the file or using sed or whatever, you can just run ssh-keygen -R <hostname>, which will remove any and all keys for the given hostname (see man ssh-keygen for other options like this). 2. To copy files from a local directory with spaces in its name…
UNIX mtime vs. ctime
Sometimes I get questions from people about stuff that I’ve long since taken for granted. One is “what’s the difference between mtime and ctime?” The answer is simple, but I wanted to post it here in case it can help anyone. In UNIX: mtime is “modification time”, and it is the time at which the…
New Job!
I started a new job about 6 weeks ago. I’m now doing infrastructure architecture at http://gfdl.noaa.gov GFDL stands for Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. It’s a NOAA site that supports atmospheric and climatology research. So in other words, the work I do supports research into things ranging from global warming to what the atmosphere on Mars…
Vacation
I relinquished control of my house to my friend and neighbors for the coming week, and I’ll be in Martha’s Vineyard until August 27th with my wife and daughter, along with my mother- and father-in-law, sis-in-law, and her fiancee. We have lots of activities planned, including tuna fishing (if they’re running). So, if you don’t…
My Gatorade Attacked Me And All I Got Was… the thirst quenching of a lifetime?
I just want to ask the folks who do the marketing for Gatorade to stop coming up with beverage names that border on being downright threatening. No, really. I went into the refrigerator to look for something to drink just now, and way in the back I noticed a bottle of something I’d never seen…
Catching up, Part 2: Python Magazine Update
So, it’s been 1 month since we officially announced Python Magazine’s existence. I’m very happy (and even more relieved) to report that things are going wonderfully so far. In these early days prior to the actual release of the first issue, the focus is primarily on content development. This is also called “getting articles in…
Catching up, Part 1: New Job!
Ok, I have lots of blogging to do now. I haven’t blogged in at least a week, and plenty is happening. First, I have a new job. For those who didn’t know, for the past 6 years I was working for the Computer Science Dept. at Princeton University. I’ve moved over to work in an…
Looking for the Twitter Kool-aid
So, *another* person asked if I’m “on twitter”, so I went and got on there. Whatever. As far as I can see, it’s a useless distraction, but people seem to be obsessed with it. I’m convinced that these people don’t have any real work to do. Once you sign up, the only thing you can…
Where does that Python DB handle go?
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long. My solution works, but there’s a better way. Create the connection in main(), and create separate *cursors* for each Host. Cursors are cheap, and you reuse the connection. Thanks to Brend on #python (irc.freenode.net) for the enlightenment. Python has been a wonderful language to get to know so far….