The Atlanta airport (supposedly the busiest on the planet), has an incredibly bizarre problem that due to a recent personal flurry of travel has become more apparent and irritating to me. There is a train that takes one from terminal to terminal, as there is in any large, modern, American airport. This train has a audio prompting system, so in the event you can't see or read the signs, you know what terminal you are in, and what direction the train is going. Read more

(I was just turning my notes into a blog post, so if it seems weird, rambling, and contains too many shell commands, that's why.) I noticed that at my company when someone uses the change password tool in Pidgin, they get an access denied, and no one can set their own passwords. Pain in the ass. Every time a user forgets, or their pidgin client somehow loses the password, they have to ask us for it, and we have to generate a password that they must remember. Read more

There are plenty of great computing books that are specialized to each and every aspect of CS Theory or programming. I got an idea to write a book similar to one of my favorite books of all time The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology. This book was life changing for me as a child. I've never looked at speakers, washing machines, irons, or anything with a motor in it the same way. Read more

This post probably won't help anyone in a similar situation, but I have to vent anyway. I ran out of space on my / partition recently, I foolishly made it only 10gigs, and I my /opt dir was huge. My HDD was due for replacement anyway, so I got an ssd, and started out by pulling the old drive and installing crunchbang linux on the new one. Everything went fine. Read more

I'm proud to announce that a friend and I have gotten our act together and launched SmartOps Atlanta. I plan on running a few training sessions on things that I know about that will make the lives of devops badasses easier and happier. We're running our first training session in 2 weeks, you can register for it on our eventbrite page. I look forward to seeing everyone there. There will be free pizza courtesy of puppet labs and they might send a few copies of pro puppet as well. Read more

Earlier today, I was trying to do something silly with facter, where I wanted to compare the uptime that facter was reporting with the actual uptime that the machine was reporting using the uptime command. I used this doc to get an idea of what I was supposed to do, but couldn't figure out where to actually put the fact on the client I was testing with. Luckily, facter reports this information through facter lib. Read more