gozer's blog

May 4, 2008

Power Maintenance @ Metropolitan Towers

That's just too bad. The building we live in will be shutting down power for some electrical maintenance tonight. Why do I care ? Well, because I have this trusty OpenBSD Firewall that's been humming along in a closet forever. Well, not forever, but almost.

[root@dorsk root]# uname -a ; uptime
OpenBSD dorsk.bc.ectoplasm.org 3.7 GENERIC#50 i386 11:59PM
up 784 days, 10:51, 1 user, load averages: 0.86, 0.64, 0.48
[root@dorsk root]# shutdown -p -h now
Shutdown NOW!
*** FINAL System shutdown message from root@dorsk.bc.ectoplasm.org
*** System going down IMMEDIATELY
System shutdown time has arrived


Oh well, can't be helped. Go OpenBSD, GO!

Posted by gozer at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2008

History

Apparently, I've got to do like everybody else it would seem. However, I wrote the shell-foo the way I would have written it.

$> history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -rn | head

  770   vi 
  692   ls 
  491   svn 
  381   perl 
  256   make 
   83   cat 
   75   grep 
   72   ssh 
   70   rm 
   56   rpmbuild 

Vi, Subversion, Perl & make, yup, that sounds like me on productive days. ssh feels lower than it should be though.

Posted by gozer at 1:14 AM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2006

Done with my talks!

I've just finished presenting my 2 talks at ApacheCon 2006 US and it went really well. I was presenting one old talk, and a brand new one and they both drew a good crowd. Overall, I am quite pleased, with a few little tweaks I want to make to my slides for next time.

For those that might want to see what I was talking about, you can figure it out from:

• TH4 - mod_perl for Speed Freaks! (slides)
• TH9 - Advanced Profiling and Instrumenting (slides)

Or just find it yourself from the Talk section of my website

One think I simply can't pass up was that I noticed there were 2 PHP guys I knew in the back of the room during my Profiling talk:

• Andrei Zmievski
• Rasmus Ledorf

And they had nothing bad to say about my talk ;-) Thanks!

And I lied during my talk, saying Apache2::Instrument was on CPAN, well, sorry, but i've just uploaded it now, sorry for the bugs and the documentation (or lack of).

Posted by gozer at 10:46 AM

October 11, 2006

ApacheCon 2006 US is about to begin

I am awake and about to head down to the registration desk to officially kick off the conference. Somehow, I think this picture from Ted Leung I just noticed in my flickr stream sums it all up very nicely.

Posted by gozer at 5:49 AM

October 10, 2006

Austin, TX, we have landed!

I've finally arrived in Austin, Texas. All in all, it was an uneventful trip getting here. Now, it's time for ApacheCon 2006 US to start!

The weather is warmer than I expected, so no complaints so far.

I do have 2 interesting incidents to share though.

When going through the security checkpoint, I was "caught" with 2 forbidden items. I had a can of shaving cream that was too big, as well as a tube of toothpaste that was also too big. I gave the nice security lady my best :

"Oh, I am sorry, I had no idea you couldn't take this kind of stuff in carry-on luggage anymore..."

Apparently she took pity on me and allowed me to pick one of the items to keep, and she would confiscate the other.

"It's all right, go ahead, pick one and you can keep it, I'll have to confiscate the other one."

I am no security expert, but that sounds like a complete failure of the security mechanism she was trying to enforce.

Before that, when going through US customs, I ended up with a fairly obtuse Immigration Officer that considered my attempts at explaining the concept of OpenSource Software evasive and forwarded me to a nice little waiting room for a secondary screening. Apparently, he suspected there was something very wrong about somebody claiming to be giving software away for free. After what seemed like a long time waiting in a small, removed, waiting room, I finally get interviewed by somebody else. Turns out, he not only understands OpenSource software, he actually runs Linux at home! Very nice, took 10 seconds, shook hands and he let me through. He still wanted to understand one thing:

"Still, why do you guys do this stuff for FREE ?"

Oh, well, if we meet again, and I don't have a plan to catch in 30 minutes, I would have tried to explain it all.

Posted by gozer at 9:25 PM

August 27, 2006

VMWare Server command-line tools to the rescue

I've been a great fan of VMWare for quite some time now. But recently, I've discovered a very elegant solution to a recurring problem I've been having with VMWare Server.

Every once in a while, a bunch of virtual machines would just hang there, as if suspended. A quick at the vmware.log would tell me that VMWare detected a disk space shortage in /tmp and wants to know if it should abort or retry?

  Aug 27 22:27:44: vmx| Question without a remote UI:
  Aug 27 22:27:44: vmx| Temporary files for this virtual machine are stored in directory "/tmp/vmware-root", which is on an almost full filesystem. Please free some disk space.
  Aug 27 22:27:44: vmx| Would you like to continue?
  Aug 27 22:27:44: vmx| Select Retry to continue, Abort to terminate the session.

First thing I do is to resolve the disk space shortage problem, assuming it's still a problem at all. Ping the various VMs, still not responding...

Then, the only thing I could do was to fire up the VMWare console GUI. Ever so annoying when I am using my MacBook and I must run it over ssh from another linux box. I then must loop over every VM, select it, wait for the popup to tell me about this problem, then click retry. Annoying, but since it only happened 2 or 3 times so far, nothing too annoying.

But last time this happened, I discovered a much nicer solution. vmware-cmd (the command-line tool) lets you take care of this very nicely.

  $> for v in `vmware-cmd -l` ; do echo $v; vmware-cmd $v answer; done
  /vmware/vmx1/vmx1.vmx
  Question (id = 821942387) :Temporary files for this virtual machine
  are stored in directory "/tmp/vmware-root", which is on an almost
  full filesystem. 
  Please free some disk space.
  Would you like to continue?
  Select Retry to continue, Abort to terminate the session.
        0) Retry
        1) Abort
  Select choice. Press enter for default <0> : 

Simple or what ?

Posted by gozer at 10:39 PM

February 8, 2005

Sweet bash ssh completion trick

Brian McCallister just posted the nicest
bash ssh completion trick. Check it out:

#!/bin/sh
SSH_COMPLETE=( $(cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | \
                 cut -f 1 -d ' ' | \
                 sed -e s/,.*//g | \
                 uniq | \
                 egrep -v [0123456789]) )
complete -o default -W "${SSH_COMPLETE[*]}" ssh

Yum!

Posted by gozer at 1:03 AM | Comments (0)

February 7, 2005

HEAD revision of a remote subversion repository

I've been dreaming of the day svn info will take a repository URL instead of working from a WC. In the meantime, I've
found a cool trick that solves my problem:

$> export URL=http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/
$> svn log -q -rHEAD $URL \
| head -2 \
| tail -1 \
| awk {'print $1'} \
| sed -e's/r//'

151745

And voila, you can tell the latest revision from a remote repository.

Posted by gozer at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2004

Quicksilver

Quicksilver for Mac OS X

Quite a fabulous little application I stumbled upon. It is the ultimate quick launcher tool for opening applications and documents.

From the quicksilver website :

Quicksilver is an evolving framework for accessing and manipulating many forms of personal data.

Posted by gozer at 8:30 PM | Comments (0)