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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I give in to peer pressure. February 29, 2008

It’s true, I’m weak. I gave in to peer pressure and I have started a blog.

Hopefully it’ll contain posts that are at least half as popular as the posts I’ve contributed to my company’s blog.

Here’s some of my posts that got some great feedback, including one that got about 40,000 unique views from the digg front page:

• http://blog.indigio.com/index.php/2007/11/30/windows-vista-vs-linux/
• http://blog.indigio.com/index.php/2008/01/23/goodbye-outlook/
• http://blog.indigio.com/index.php/2008/02/05/sysadmin-theory/
• http://blog.indigio.com/index.php/2008/02/24/re-windows-vista-vs-linux/
• http://blog.indigio.com/index.php/2008/02/27/i-got-on-the-front-page-of-digg/

I hope to keep the same kind of theme to my posts here, plus a little more personal blogging since this isn’t a company blog. Plus I’ll have some help from some friends who’d like to contribute.