Category Archives: Uncategorized

Two Not-Highly-Recommended Books

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 [...]

Two Good Software Books

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 [...]

Backing up with Duplicity over SSH

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 [...]

How To Hire The Right People

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 [...]

Installing VMware Server 1.0.6 on Ubuntu Hardy

It generally works pretty well, but I found the following problem, and Google was no help:
Building the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.
Using compiler “/usr/bin/gcc”. Use environment variable CC to override.
Unable to compile the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.
********
The VMware VmPerl Scripting API was not installed.  Errors encountered during
compilation and installation of the module can be found here:
/tmp/vmware-config4
You [...]

Real Apple Fanboyism

In much of the web, being called an Apple Fanboy simply means you’re debunking myths thrown about by Mac-haters. And the Macalope is great at that. And if that is being an Apple Fanboy, then I am guilty. There’s a lot of hate thrown around there just because Macs are “cool” and some people have [...]

Book Review: “Release It!” by Michael T. Nygard

I just finished “Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software” by Michael T. Nygard, from The Pragmatic Programmers. This isn’t the book I thought it was when I bought it, but it’s still a really valuable read. “Release It!” focuses on (and most of the author’s experience seems to be) massive, web-scale e-commerce sites, generally [...]

Nice little BASH one-liner to iterate through a directory

for afile in /home/auser/adirectory/*; do echo $afile; done
Useful for all kinds of things. And I can never remember how the syntax changes between doing a for statement in a bash script and doing it as a one-liner on the command line.

Dakim is Hiring! Know any great geeks?

Linux Programmer: http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/sof/598806531.html
Senior QA: http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/sof/598812878.html
Junior QA: http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/sof/598817260.html

How To Deal With Recruiters

I’m about to place an ad on Craigslist (Dakim is hiring; I’ll post a link to the ad here when it’s up.) and every time I post an ad, I get 200 calls from obnoxious recruiters. This is an snippet of an actual conversation that actually happened:
Me: I’m sorry, Dakim has a policy of not [...]