I had a stored procedure that defined a cursor using a crazy query, and then a LOOP that did a FETCH and went row-by-row and performed updates and inserts to 3 or 4 different tables. I was having some trouble completing the very last thing the procedure needed to do. So I figured I’d take…
Shell Quoting Conundrum
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…
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…
Smoke Free, 40 days and 40 nights.
So my commitment to be smoke free is proving much stronger than my commitment to keep this blog updated 😉 Sorry ’bout that. I’ve gained some weight. I’ve done a lot of things to make sure my mind never wanders in the direction of smoking. It’s kind of like a mentality migration. It’s hard to…
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…
Smoke Free, Day 24
Right. So. I don’t smoke. It’s a little depressing at times, but that never lasts long. Right now I’m going through my insomnia stage, which I believe will be followed by flu-like symptoms. I’m already coughing up…. stuff. My guess is I have about another month or so where my body decides to do things…
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…