I’ve been working on giving the site a facelift lately.. trying to make it a little more ‘light’… how am I doing? I’ll also be rotating in various photos I’ve taken in the page header. I’ll try to stick to photos I’ve actually taken myself… maybe as an incentive to do more traveling. I’m also trying out apache alternatives.. first lighttpd with fastcgi then nginx.


I’ve written before about the world being held together by duct tape… and it seems there are more people lately who have decided to rip off the covers and go looking for some duct tape.  The latest headline comes from the world of SCADA systems.

As part of a new and fairly large project I have a need to partition a few postgres tables and have a rolling daily window.  That is.. I want to organize data by a timestamp storing each day in its own partition and maintain 90 days of historical data.  Doing this is possible in Postgresql but it’s not pretty or very clean to set it up.  To simplify the process I wrote this perl script that (when run daily) will pre-create a certain number of empty partitions into the future and remove the oldest partitions from your window.


I’ve been using a mac for a while now and I recently decided to dump Entourage and go to using the native Mail.app.  I noticed a problem though.. within minutes of starting up it would consume several hundred megs of ram and have frequent CPU spikes of 80 to 100%.  If Mail was left open, memory usage would climb above 2 gig with continued CPU spikes.  After much digging I finally found the problem and fixed it.

Now and then I’m called on to help interview candidates for linux admin/engineer slots and as I’ve been doing some of that lately I thought I’d share the way I go about doing a technical interview. This approach seems to work equally well over the phone or in person.

I was called on to provide a method of alerting from within nagios that was more active and direct than the usual use of email or SMS messages.  So I came up with a simple way to have a nagios notification place a phone call to our off hours tier3 support line to report certain very rare but serious problems.

As part of a new project I needed a power connector for a macbook. Not wanting to shell out $65 for an official power supply just for the connector I picked one up from ebay for about $20. On first glance this looks like an apple power supply.. but something just seemed off about it.

The local news talk radio station is having a contest where the winner gets to host their own weekly show. It’s only two hours a week on sunday night.. but it sounded like something that might be fun. So this is my entry. It was recorded and mixed with the open source Ardour digital workstation and the Jack audio sub system under OSX.

More news from the front… GLOBAL WARMING IS OVER, SAYS EXPERT

Before I get into this article… I want to rebut something else that’s been part of this story. It’s being reported that Dr Richard Muller is a long time AGW (anthropomorphic global warming) skeptic and so the fact that he appears to have done a 180 adds to the drama of the story. In fact this is not true at all.. he never was a skeptic.

In an interview about his book back in 08 he was asked what the next president needed to know about GW and he said:

Anyone who has to manage servers and other equipment in remote datacenters can appreciate the need for good documentation.  One reason you appreciate good documentation so much is because it’s so rare. People are lazy and forgetful and when changes are made by lots of different people in lots of different locations it’s easy for reference docs to get out of date and unreliable. So from those two concepts was born a need to create dynamic rack face diagrams and end the dependance on the manual task of updating and distributing static visio diagrams. Attached are templates for most common rack sizes and example php code on how to make it work.