https://blog.deadcafe.org/tags/geek/ Recent content in Geek on Blog Hugo -- 0.131.0 en Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:39:01 -0600 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2022/12/05/borescope/ Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:39:01 -0600 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2022/12/05/borescope/ I used to really want a borescope. The problem back then was that they were very pricey (and I had less money, more mouths to feed, etc). I recently discovered though that the prices have come way down, so I bought one (on principal) off Amazon for about $40. Here is some video from sending the scope down the seat tube of my bike, to the area above the bottom bracket. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2011/05/25/going_to_debconf11/ Wed, 25 May 2011 16:10:40 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2011/05/25/going_to_debconf11/ See you in Banja Luka! https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2010/12/26/christmas_lights_redux/ Sun, 26 Dec 2010 20:22:55 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2010/12/26/christmas_lights_redux/ Last year, if you’ll remember, I did a half-assed job of putting together a musically coordinated christmas light rig, and promised to Do Better this year. Lucky for me I was vague because under-promising made over-delivering a lot easier. :) What I did manage to do was tackle last years technical debt, and get the code cleaned up. I’ve named it Lumen and put it up on Github. Lumen has two modes, record and playback. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2010/01/25/christmas_lights/ Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:27:59 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2010/01/25/christmas_lights/ We put up lights each year for the holidays, and while I don’t mind having the house decorated, I do not like having to put them up. Despite this, I feel mounting pressure each year to Do Better, which by default means more lights and decorations, which in turn mean even more work. The year before last I had the idea that if I worked smarter I might avoid working harder, and that one of those musically synchronized setups would be pretty sweet. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2010/01/22/going_to_fosdem/ Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:06:50 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2010/01/22/going_to_fosdem/ Due to a scheduling conflict, Jonathan won’t able to present on Cassandra in the NoSQL devroom at this years FOSDEM, so I’ll be going in his stead. I’ve always wanted to go to a FOSDEM, and getting to see Brussels will be a real treat as well. I can’t wait! NP: Black & White, In Flames https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/10/30/nosql_whats_in_a_name/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:19:37 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/10/30/nosql_whats_in_a_name/ Depending on the circles you travel in, you might be aware of the whole NoSQL “movement”. If not, I’m not going try and explain it at this time (explaining it is sort of the problem), but you can get the general idea from wikipedia. I’ve spent the last couple of days at nosqleast and one of the hot topics here is the name “nosql”. Understandably, there are a lot of people who worry that the name is Bad, that it sends an inappropriate or inaccurate message. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/10/26/upcoming_travel/ Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:33:33 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/10/26/upcoming_travel/ I have several trips lined up for the next few weeks: NoSQL East from the 28th to the 30th in Atlanta ApacheCon US 2009 from November 2-6 in Oakland OpenSQL Camp 2009 in Portland, November 14-15 There is also a NoSQL meetup on November 2 as a part of ApacheCon; I’ve offered to present on Cassandra there. I’m also thinking of giving a session at BarcampApache, and I’m scheduled to sit on a “SQL vs. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/08/21/ooops_i_did_it_again/ Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:04:02 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/08/21/ooops_i_did_it_again/ I rewrote my blog software again (actually, it was done months ago but I just now got around to deploying it). The last one used Turbogears, but the 1.x branch is getting long in teeth, and 2.0 came a little too late. Besides, Django is the new hotness these days. Somehow the rewrite resulted in about half as much code, which is always cool, and I finally got to make use of mod_wsgi, (it is everything that I had ever dreamed it would be, and more :)). https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/07/12/transitioning_my_gpg_key/ Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:53:07 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/07/12/transitioning_my_gpg_key/ A few months ago a group of researchers announced a fairly serious attack that shattered everyone’s faith in SHA-1. It has frightening implications for anyone who relies on cryptographic signatures, and while consensus is that there is little danger in the near-term, most people agree that now is the time to start a move to something stronger. So, I’ve begun my transition, (document here), and submitted my new key for the Debconf9 signing party later this month. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/05/10/thrift_packaging/ Sun, 10 May 2009 23:34:11 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/05/10/thrift_packaging/ My latest project at work is Cassandra, a distributed, eventually consistent, column oriented data store. It’s somewhere between Dynamo (Cassandra’s original author worked on Dynamo), and Google’s BigTable. It was developed as an internal application at Facebook, later open sourced, and is now an Apache incubator project. The external interface to Cassandra is thrift-based. Thrift is a framework for creating network services, services that communicate using a compact binary data format. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/05/02/brain_rewiring/ Sat, 02 May 2009 17:54:48 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/05/02/brain_rewiring/ A co-worker of mine uses one of the stranger keyboards I’ve seen, a Kinesis Advantage. He picked it up his after a bout with tendinitis and was sold on it. He was kind enough to let me borrow his spare for about a week so I could try it out. It’s been an interesting week. :) The Advantage differs from conventional keyboards in a number of ways, the ones I think most relevant are: https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/02/15/lenny_released_on_time/ Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:07:04 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2009/02/15/lenny_released_on_time/ Lenny released yesterday. This is great news, and congratulations all around to everyone that worked their asses off making it happen. By my calculations this comes 677 days after the initial release of Etch, (or 22 months and change). I’ve said before, Debian releases When Ready and that (to the best of my observations), consensus seems to be that somewhere between 18 and 24 months is the sweet spot. Not only does this make for the second “on-time” release in a row, but there was an Etch-And-A-Half sporting new kernels and video drivers in the mean time. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/08/15/publishing_divergence_from_upstream/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:24:23 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/08/15/publishing_divergence_from_upstream/ On Monday I attended Martin Krafft’s talk, Packaging with version control systems. Martin has started a project, coordinated via http://vcs-pkg.org, to explore work patterns for packaging and cross-distro collaboration using distributed version control systems. This is a topic that I’ve spent a fair amount of time on so it was interesting to see Martin’s packaging work flow, and hear him discuss its evolution. Today I attended a Bof organized by Luciano Bello. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/04/26/txoss_2008/ Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:26:58 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/04/26/txoss_2008/ The Texas Open Source Symposium in San Angelo is a wrap. This was a small one day event in San Angelo organized by Jeremy Fluhmann (who did an excellent job by the way). I rather enjoyed it, and providing that it becomes an annual event (which I understand is the idea), I will certainly try and make it back next year. I gave a talk on Mercurial during the 11:00am slot. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/04/21/accomodations_in_san_angelo/ Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:31:48 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/04/21/accomodations_in_san_angelo/ I’m giving a talk on Saturday at the Texas Open Source Symposium entitled An Introduction to Mercurial. I’ll be driving there but hadn’t considered making a room reservation until today. How hard could it be to book a hotel room in San Angelo Texas, right? Sheesh. I started out with a Google maps search that included the zip code of the venue, and began working through the options ordered by proximity and user submitted reviews. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/02/25/oh_joy/ Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:09:24 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2008/02/25/oh_joy/ Radeon R5xx 3D programming guide released NP: Running Out Of Pain, 12 Stones https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/10/31/do_you_know_what_your_drive_is_doing/ Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:06:53 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/10/31/do_you_know_what_your_drive_is_doing/ There’s been a lot of “Ubuntu kills laptop hard drives” buzz going around lately. The implication is that over aggressive power management is causing excessive load/unload cycles, exceeding a reasonable duty cycle, and drastically shortening the life of your drive. I run Debian unstable on my laptop but I looked into it anyway and sure enough it’s something which is effecting me as well. As Matthew Garrett points out, it doesn’t have anything to do with Ubuntu, Debian, or Linux in general, the culprit is aggressive power management settings in the drive firmware, or settings applied by the BIOS. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/10/16/duplicity_backport_for_etch/ Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:30:20 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/10/16/duplicity_backport_for_etch/ I’ve been backing up all of my important machines to Amazon S3 using Duplicity for sometime now. It’s worked out really well but required just enough hackery to prevent me from providing straight forward instructions for others. I’m all about sharing the love so I submitted a new S3 backend to upstream using the excellent [boto] (http://code.google.com/p/boto/) library from Mitch Garnaat, and I packaged boto for Debian. The new backend made it into the 0. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/19/free_software_driver_for_radeon_r5xxr6xx/ Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:10:05 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/19/free_software_driver_for_radeon_r5xxr6xx/ Wow. Less than two weeks ago AMD announced that they would be opening the specs for their graphics cards, a few days later they followed through, and yesterday a driver for R5xx/R6xx cards was released. How’s that for fast? https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/06/amd_to_open_up_graphics_specs/ Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:56:18 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/06/amd_to_open_up_graphics_specs/ This is excellent news. I look forward to the day when I can be oblivious of my graphics adapter. https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/04/new_blog/ Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:27:01 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/04/new_blog/ I’ve been using pyblosxom for years. I chose it because it was dead simple and I wasn’t interested in a long-term commitment with a bloated PHP app, (or any PHP app for that matter). Unfortunately it has always been just a bit too simple. I went shopping for new blog software, but sadly things aren’t much better these days than they were when I originally set up my blog. There are a few more choices than there used to be, but the list of options is still pretty short if you aren’t willing to use PHP (again, I’m not). https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/03/good_intentions/ Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:04:20 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/09/03/good_intentions/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/05/02/love_hex/ Wed, 02 May 2007 10:29:17 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/05/02/love_hex/ 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/04/09/etch_released_early/ Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:09:09 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2007/04/09/etch_released_early/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/10/22/bad_forbes_bad/ Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:53:24 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/10/22/bad_forbes_bad/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/22/debconf6_pictures/ Mon, 22 May 2006 12:41:29 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/22/debconf6_pictures/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/21/debconf_may21/ Sun, 21 May 2006 00:48:44 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/21/debconf_may21/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/19/debconf_may19_1/ Fri, 19 May 2006 11:20:07 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/19/debconf_may19_1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/18/debconf_may18_1/ Thu, 18 May 2006 12:52:53 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/18/debconf_may18_1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/15/debconf_may15_1/ Mon, 15 May 2006 14:00:02 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/15/debconf_may15_1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/14/debconf6_0.5/ Sun, 14 May 2006 13:16:31 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/05/14/debconf6_0.5/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/04/09/ucarp_1.2-1/ Sun, 09 Apr 2006 18:04:15 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/04/09/ucarp_1.2-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/04/09/dpl_elect_ajt/ Sun, 09 Apr 2006 17:32:45 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/04/09/dpl_elect_ajt/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/03/07/my_repositories/ Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:11:38 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/03/07/my_repositories/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/03/05/gr_gfdl_2006/ Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:05:39 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/03/05/gr_gfdl_2006/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/02/26/opennms-1.2.7-1sarge/ Sun, 26 Feb 2006 20:00:26 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/02/26/opennms-1.2.7-1sarge/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/01/05/search_for_java_victims/ Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:33:42 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/01/05/search_for_java_victims/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/01/01/aol_security_commercial/ Sun, 01 Jan 2006 21:42:05 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2006/01/01/aol_security_commercial/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/25/cyborgname/ Thu, 25 Aug 2005 22:07:39 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/25/cyborgname/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/13/computer_savviness/ Sat, 13 Aug 2005 11:01:07 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/13/computer_savviness/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/11/lwe-sf-2/ Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:45:41 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/11/lwe-sf-2/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/09/lwe-sf-1/ Tue, 09 Aug 2005 15:14:00 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/08/09/lwe-sf-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/07/12/xsuppository/ Tue, 12 Jul 2005 11:08:43 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/07/12/xsuppository/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/07/10/debconf5_july10/ Sun, 10 Jul 2005 15:35:36 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/07/10/debconf5_july10/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/06/12/logcheck_rule_maint/ Sun, 12 Jun 2005 11:53:43 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/06/12/logcheck_rule_maint/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/06/06/sarge-release/ Mon, 06 Jun 2005 19:02:32 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/06/06/sarge-release/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/05/29/opennms-1.2.3-1/ Sun, 29 May 2005 17:21:00 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/05/29/opennms-1.2.3-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/05/21/official_dd/ Sat, 21 May 2005 21:08:02 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/05/21/official_dd/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/04/30/blogwork/ Sat, 30 Apr 2005 13:28:33 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/04/30/blogwork/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/04/02/opennms-1.2.2-1/ Sat, 02 Apr 2005 16:10:30 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/04/02/opennms-1.2.2-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/03/21/opennms-1.2.1-1/ Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:35:42 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/03/21/opennms-1.2.1-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/03/19/opennms-1.2.1-1woody/ Sat, 19 Mar 2005 17:39:35 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/03/19/opennms-1.2.1-1woody/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/02/14/opennms-1.2.0-1/ Mon, 14 Feb 2005 21:26:10 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/02/14/opennms-1.2.0-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/01/31/opennms-1.1.5-1/ Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:07:53 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2005/01/31/opennms-1.1.5-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/12/24/ucarp-1.1-2_asmon-0.70-1/ Fri, 24 Dec 2004 14:49:14 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/12/24/ucarp-1.1-2_asmon-0.70-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/11/12/opennms-1.1.4-1woody/ Fri, 12 Nov 2004 13:34:27 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/11/12/opennms-1.1.4-1woody/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/11/11/opennms-1.1.4-1/ Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:59:00 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/11/11/opennms-1.1.4-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/26/xsupplicant_1.0.1-1/ Tue, 26 Oct 2004 16:24:08 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/26/xsupplicant_1.0.1-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/14/firerox/ Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:35:34 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/14/firerox/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/12/firedforseti/ Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:43:49 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/12/firedforseti/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/11/asmon-0.60-5/ Mon, 11 Oct 2004 21:05:03 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/10/11/asmon-0.60-5/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/13/ita-asmon/ Mon, 13 Sep 2004 13:18:43 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/13/ita-asmon/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/07/ucarp-1.1-1-test/ Tue, 07 Sep 2004 18:00:00 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/07/ucarp-1.1-1-test/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/07/ucarp-1.1-1-test.bak/ Tue, 07 Sep 2004 16:10:40 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/07/ucarp-1.1-1-test.bak/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/03/xsupplicant_1.0-1sarge/ Fri, 03 Sep 2004 12:44:09 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/03/xsupplicant_1.0-1sarge/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/02/net-snmp-kernel-2.6/ Thu, 02 Sep 2004 17:05:40 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/09/02/net-snmp-kernel-2.6/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/22/xsupplicant_1.0-1/ Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:17:39 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/22/xsupplicant_1.0-1/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/21/ms_insensitive_bastards/ Sat, 21 Aug 2004 21:39:30 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/21/ms_insensitive_bastards/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/18/opennms-1.1.3-3woody/ Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:56:07 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/18/opennms-1.1.3-3woody/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/17/opennms-1.1.3-3/ Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:05:53 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/17/opennms-1.1.3-3/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/13/cdrtools_nonfree/ Fri, 13 Aug 2004 17:49:52 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/13/cdrtools_nonfree/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/13/total_cost_of_0wnership/ Fri, 13 Aug 2004 17:20:21 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/13/total_cost_of_0wnership/ https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/12/dell_remote_access_card/ Thu, 12 Aug 2004 18:42:22 +0000 https://blog.deadcafe.org/posts/2004/08/12/dell_remote_access_card/