Bryan Strawser

QOTD. Victor Hugo: “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Yes, indeed, it’s possible to drink too much caffeine. I am feeling a little buzzy.

Week ahead: Server sound-off. The tech focus is on servers this week, as Microsoft finally releases its oft-delayed and renamed Windows Server 2003. Also, earnings action continues. [CNET News.com]

So Nicole has a cable modem, but it turns out that you need to only use that Mac address..

No problem, I think. I’ll just clone over the Mac address on the Powerbook and goto town.

Nope, not that easy. You can’t do that without patching the kernel.

Grumble grumble.

So i’m contemplating just buying an Airport Base Station tomorrow and being done with it. Hmm.. We’ll see…

Worth Reading: So Who Do We Fight Next ?.

Very interesting.  Its not clear to me that he’s wrong at all:

Keeping Your Server From Running Out of Disc Space.

Keeping Your Server From Running Out of Disc Space

Not too long ago, I got a panicked IM from someone I know in Blogspace.  “Scott my server won’t let me log in to Movable Type.  Can you help me?”  He shot me a root password and I started reviewing the logs, checking for DB errors, etc.  Then either he or I thought of “does it have free disc space”?  A quick “df -h” told us /dev/hda1/ was at 100%.  That’s bad.  So we cleaned up some stuff and I thought he might benefit from some code I wrote a while back.  What it does is once per day send me a report via email like this:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda3              18G   17G  561M  97% /

/dev/hda1              23M  4.1M   17M  19% /boot

none                  250M     0  250M   0% /dev/shm

10.225.183.68:/        36G   23G   11G  67% /mnt/10.225.183.68

 

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

		– Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)

The key thing here isn’t the code.  That’s pretty damn simple.  The big deal is that I made it interesting by appending the results of the standard Unix tool fortune to it.  Here’s another example:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda3              18G   17G  561M  97% /

/dev/hda1              23M  4.1M   17M  19% /boot

none                  250M     0  250M   0% /dev/shm

10.225.183.68:/        36G   23G   11G  67% /mnt/10.225.183.68

 

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced

in it.  People in disguise speak freely.

We all get way to many automated things via email and if you at least make them interesting then you might bother to read them. 

Here’s the php code.  There are lots of ways to make it better but I just dashed it off.  Perhaps it will be useful. 

Note: The real lesson here is that more developers need to start taking user psychology into account.  I’ve had boring sysadmin reports before and I used to generally just delete them.  Now I actually read them since I never know what might be in them.  If I had been a little bit smarter, I would have varied the fortune routine to sometimes give 2 fortunes or 5 or maybe insert a random picture from the net. 

CNN Obituaries Leaked. The Smoking Gun: Leaked Obituaries TSG: “APRIL 16–While all news organizations prepare obituaries in advance of the deaths of famous individuals, the folks at CNN inadvertently gave the Internet-surfing public a chance to preview how the network’s web site would note the demise of Vice President Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, and a few other prominent figures. Until earlier this afternoon, a CNN server housed mock-ups of web pages announcing the yet-to-happen deaths. The CNN pages, which were discovered by the intrepid folks at fark.com, were yanked about 20 minutes after being exposed (though TSG was able to grab a few of the pages for posterity’s sake). The premature obituaries, housed in a publicly accessible area of the CNN server and searchable via Google, were apparently the work of Peter Rentz, a senior multimedia designer at CNN. The mock-ups are virtually identical to the obituary design currently used by CNN when a notable person dies (click here to see how CNN covered the Queen Mother’s March 2002 death). In fact, elements of the Queen Mum’s obit template can be seen in the below Cheney design. In addition to Cheney and Reagan, CNN also prepped online farewells to Fidel Castro, Bob Hope, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and Gerald Ford. (7 pages)”… [#!/sablog : Shanti Braford's daily links]

Lest we forget why he left and abandoned his first Presidential Campaign…

Gary Hart: Hits President in Wartime. Former Colorado Senator Gary Hart continues to test the waters for a presidential run. An hour-long recently taped interview of… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]