Category Archives: Tech

Steve Jobs

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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. #

–Steve Jobs
1955-2011

Linode Kernel Check

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[Update: Linode changed their data format on 3 August 2011 which broke this script - it has now been amended.]

[Update 2: And again on 22 August 2011. Amended again.]

I host this site on a Linode, because it’s like having my own dedicated server, running whatever distro I like (Debian, in my case), for twenty bucks a month.

One of the many advantages of Debian is its insanely awesome package management. However, one of the very few disadvantages of running a Linode as opposed to a real dedicated server, is that your kernel package is managed from outside the VM, rather than within.
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A tiny tech tip for pv and du on OSX

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There is a UNIX tool called pv. It’s pretty cool.

You can install it on OSX via HomeBrew, which is pretty cool itself.

What is not so cool is that the Apple-supplied version of du does not support the -b flag, being BSD-esque rather than GNUful. Which is a rant for another day. This means that the standard example of how to use pv to give a progress bar for the tarring up of a large directory under UNIX doesn’t work under OSX.
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Python is… challenging?

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I won’t say “Python Sucks” – that would be a terribly irresponsible thing to say. I will say that it’s “challenging”. It’s certainly frustrating to deal with as a Perl programmer.

On the one hand, I was very pleasantly surprised at just how little code I had to write in order to retrieve all of my WordPress comment notifications. Saving them to mbox format was also simple enough, although mutt‘s idea of what constitutes mbox format set me back for a while. There is, of course, no actual defined standard for mbox, but that’s another rant…

Oh, and this site was defaced this morning. Which was nice. Something to do a file called .wp-rocn.php. Google shows 0 results – maybe a zero-day vuln? I’ve tightened things up a little here, and made backups. We’ll see what happens…
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