I like browsing the web. I do it a lot throughout my day. A lot of people work hard at making the web a cool-looking place. Some sites make simplicity look so easy, that when you look under the hood, it’s all chaos and destruction, folded and crunched together, all to present something really nice [...]
(Context alert: Know Chef. If you don’t, it’s seriously worth looking into for any level of infrastructure management.) TL;DR: I wrote a Knife plugin to visualize Chef Role dependencies. It’s here. Recently, I needed to sort out a large amount of roles and their dependencies, in order to simplify the lives of everyone using them. [...]
I regularly get emails from recruiters all over the planet, telling me about their awesome new technology, latest and greatest ideas, and why I should work for them. Most get ignored. One came in this week that annoyed me, since it was from someone at a company that had sent me the exact same email six [...]
Here I am, sitting calmly, trying to figure out the reasoning for the universe, and I get a GChat notification that someone wants to chat with me. Here’s the transcript: 10:29:12 AM caitlyn ball: hi 10:29:17 AM miketheman: hi 10:29:24 AM caitlyn ball: hey whats up? 22/F here. you? [email protected] is now known as caitlyn [...]
This is a sysadmin/devops-style post. Disclaimers are that I work with these tools and people, and like what they do. In some amount of our professional lives, we are tasked with bringing order to chaos, keep systems running and have the businesses we work for continue functioning. In our modern days of large-scale computing, web [...]
So Elyssa and I decided to go on a road trip. More like Elyssa decided, and I agreed, but you see what I mean. I got on a bus to meet her in NJ, and made it by running out to the bus as it had already pulled away from the station at Port Authority, [...]
In the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a company that is using ScoutApp‘s hosted monitoring service, which provides a nice interface to quickly get up and running with a lot of basic information about a system. This SaaS solution, while a paid service, allows a team to get their monitoring metrics put into [...]
Need I say more? General Info Chat start time Aug 3, 2011 9:44:43 PM EST Chat end time Aug 3, 2011 10:37:08 PM EST Duration (actual chatting time) 00:52:25 Operator Amber Chat Transcript info: Please hold for a Verizon Wireless sales representative to assist you with your order. Thank you for your patience. info: You are [...]
Since a lot of what everyone does on those pesky devices called “comp-you-tars” is becoming increasingly more business-critical, and we’ve come to a point where a web company that has “one server that we all use” is going nowhere, we have piles of lovely silicon and metal, with electric pulses flowing through them to create [...]
As I sit here in another airport waiting area, I again realize the futility of airport security. The entire TSA was probably created to give people jobs and create a semblance of security. This time, I got into the line at LAX – United that had the scary body scanner. I stood in two blue [...]