Earth Hour 2008 March 30, 2008

We participated in Earth Hour last night here in Denver. The kids (Janelle is 5 and Kincaid turned 4 yesterday) were very excited about it, way more than I expected them to be. It was amazing the quiet and that darkness that first hit our apartment after I shutdown all computers, t.v.’s, fans and lights.

We didn’t think ahead and get candles or flashlights.

Normally I shut all the lights out in the apartment and it’s not big deal… but I never realized how much light even an idle T.V., and the leds on the front a computer give off. So we made our way through our apartment using my blackberry as a flashlight. It was an amazing Spring day here so we went outside for a walk. My kids immediately asked several questions:

Where’s everyone else?

I guess they thought of it like Halloween. They expected everyone to stop their electronic lives around us and enjoy the night.

Why does everyone have their lights and t.v.’s on?

This was a harder one to answer. It seems that here in Denver, and many other places in America, the word of Earth Hour didn’t really spread. We had fun with it though, walked down to the courtyard of our complex and the kids ran around in the dark in a huge field. After about 30 minutes we got cold and headed back to the dark apartment. There we searched for jammies with my blackberry flashlight again, then we read Horton Hears a Who by the light of the phone. In the end we tucked the kids in just before the hour was over. They really seemed to like it, almost as much as a holiday.

I wondered what other experiences people had with Earth Hour and my wife found this great photo set. I was especially amazed at the pic of the baby in the NICU.

Anyway… I hope to see more American cities participate next year. It was a nice hour to get away from the Internets and the constant hum of electronics. And those pictures of major cities going dark are just surreal.

Starting with git in a team of one March 19, 2008

I became a git fanatic quickly after hearing Linus speak. I had been using Subversion for only a few weeks when I saw the video — after using CVS for years. Not being all that impressed with Subversion, I was thirsty for something more. Git has basically become the way I version any project I start, track changes to system configurations, or even keep revisions of websites I host.

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IT and Ethics. March 18, 2008

Call it what you will: Black hat, bad, abusive, evil, wrong, illegal. There are many things that are greatly looked down upon in the online world of the internets. Some things are outright illegal, and others just annoying. In my 10 or so years of being in IT I’ve only had to outright refuse one request from an employer. I was fortunate in that the combination of my prior performance/attitude outweighed the importance of the requested action. On many other occasions I’ve won at talking the company out of the action or modifying the request so that it met my standards.

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Bash Tip #2 March 13, 2008

Getting around

Sure… there’s “cd” to change directories and tab completion. But there’s more than that.  Here’s some other tips for getting around quickly in a Bash shell.

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Can I use your phone?

There was no hidden camera as far as I could tell. Normally when something like this happens you expect some host of a show to jump out from behind a bush and say some cheesy catch line. Well.. I don’t know, maybe “normally” is the wrong word, since that has never actually happened to me.

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Outbound SMTP Management March 8, 2008

Just about all Linux server distributions install a sendmail daemon that listens on 127.0.0.1 and relays email for the localhost. This is all fine and dandy if you have a handful of Linux servers, but can turn in to chaos once you get 30+ Linux servers.
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Switching to Git from CVS and Subversion March 4, 2008

I’ve been using CVS for at least 6 years now. I switched to using Subversion maybe in the past 3 years. When I switched to Subversion from CVS, I really didn’t understand what the fuss was about. The feature-set was really quite similar and it seemed basically like a matter of personal (or political) preference. People insisted that “Subversion was better” and if you weren’t using it, it’s because you were an ignorant jerk. So I gave into the peer pressure and started using Subversion whenever possible. Admittedly, I found a few things that Subversion would do that CVS just wouldn’t. Symbolic links, for example, are one thing that Subversion can handle and track while CVS simply cannot. However, the general structure/organization for your project between the two systems of version control are pretty much identical. That is, there’s a centralized repository that every developer uses for checking out and committing code. Furthermore, any action requires some communication with the server. Branching and merging has been equally difficult in both, in my experience, so as a general rule I stay away from doing either and keep all code in the trunk of the project’s repository.

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Bash Tip #1 March 3, 2008

Reverse Incremental Searching

Bash Tip #1: Reverse Incremental Searching. Quickly jumping through your bash history is super easy to do if you know about reverse incremental searching. I was shocked when I found out this existed with being a Bash lover for so long and not knowing of it.

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Life in Denver March 2, 2008

As of yesterday I’ve been in Denver for 5 months. It seems like it’s only been a week… Getting here, from Ann Arbor Michigan, was by far the most stressful period of my life.

I had been working for Careersite since 2005 or so… maybe it was 2004. I got quite attached to the infrastructure we built for running the re-write of the old perl code to the Java based version. It was the first Sys Admin position I had that actually had to be concerned about high volume traffic and uptime for a website. I learned a ton from the smart people there, especially my boss Bruce Kohler. While everything was going fine and dandy, we read in the news that a massive number of newspapers signed a deal with Yahoo HotJobs. And sure enough, that meant our customers.

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