How A Healthy Man Ended Up In The Hospital — My Mistakes:
I hike and do martial arts training regularly, and consider myself in reasonably good shape. However, on Monday I started an exercise program with a local Crossfit affiliate, Team Crossfit.
This was an intense workout, but I’ve done intense (worse) workouts in the past, with [...]
A client had an OS X server with tens of thousands of files in a directory tree, and wanted to move some of them based on their creation date. I put together a Python script that worked perfectly on my test system, but failed in production. (I put in a “–dryrun” option, so no harm [...]
I just reimaged my laptop, and discovered that the “apropos” command had nothing in its database. (You use “apropos” to look up man pages related to a topic. It looks through an index to find appropriate pages to list, and the periodic maintenance tasks had not created the index.) OK. No problem. Google is my [...]
This is the sort of thing that’s second nature to a command-line geek, but I thought it was cool enough (in its little way) to share.
The problem: I have a process that runs on a remote server for quite a while. I wish to be alerted when it completes. As long as it’s running, it [...]
“Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management” by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby is a strange book; while not having any ideas that are really NEW to anyone who’s read the other management books I’ve recommended, BCD still manages to impress and be worth reading. It does this by having lots of small, practical advice [...]
This should, of course, be subtitled “Books Not To Read If You Are Me.” These aren’t necessarily bad books (in fact, both of them are good books) but they weren’t that useful to me or to people in exactly my situation. Take this with as much salt as you feel appropriate, depending on what you’re [...]
I just finished reading two different books on software development and management; both are highly recommended.
First, and best is Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This is another one of those must-read books. I’ve been telling everyone that I can’t believe I’ve been allowed to have the job I have without reading it. If [...]
If you’re in the business of developing software, you should read the “Joel On Software” book. Period.
(Shortest review I’ve ever written.)
While I don’t agree with everything Joel has written, I find most of what he writes to be a clear exposition of common-sense approaches to managing software development. No BS, just simple stuff that works. [...]
I’m attempting to set up Duplicity as a backup tool, running from cron over ssh, to backup my home directory to another server.
I of course already have passwordless SSH set up to connect to that server, and use ssh-agent to store the passphrase for my SSH key, as described in another entry. However, I could [...]
I must say, this article by Steve Yegge has done quite a bit to refine my thoughts about hiring geeks. (The beginning is a little long-winded. Push through. It’s worth it.)
On the other hand, I’ve met exactly ONE of the type he’s talking about in my career. Not sure where that leaves me as a [...]