_Woodgie - I never knew there were so many! (this is SO beautiful) http://t.co/qDnn9OPsiK 2 days ago
After a rather extend down-time caused by the back end databases disappearing and a lack of time in which to investigate the issue I’ve finally found them and have the site up and running again. Sorry about that, I’ll try to not let it happen again.
So I’ll be honest. I know that very few people – as in actual humans – read this blog. And so when I see an account made with an obviously gibberish eMail or if a comment is made that’s obviously spam I’ll delete it and block the IP address. I’ve already had to take the step of blocking China and Ukraine. Not something that fills me with joy but the number of spam comments from IP addresses within those countries made it impractical to deal with as they occurred. Yes, that many! If on the other hand I delete a legitimate account or comment, please let me know on Twitter. ~W
“Well that went smoothly…” It’s the kind of phrase to strike terror into the heart of every SysAdmin, but I have to say that the move from the old Mac Mini to the XServe has gone really rather well! There are a few issues with the WordPress 3.5/iFeature Free 5 setup, but they’re entirely unrelated. We’ll see… (Oh, and Paul said I should turn the slider off, so it’s off.) As part of a spring clean I deleted every account made by anyone other than me as it appears that not one of them was anything other than spam. ~W
“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax – Of cabbages – and kings – And why the sea is boiling hot – And whether pigs have wings.” Well, maybe not. But what has come is the time to move the website from a Mac Mini in my spare room to something a bit more permanent. After all, it was only ever meant to be a learning exercise in how to set up a web server, not a long-term host for a website. So in a couple of weeks we’ll be moving from a Mac Mini in a spare room, running off a consumer ADLS line to an XServe that’s been donated to the cause
OK, so this isn’t very in-depth but it might help you. According to Wikipedia: “…Kerberos (/ˈkɛərbərəs/) is a computer network authentication protocol which works on the basis of “tickets” to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner…” According to most every SysAdmin I know: “…Kerberos is there to make our lives more secure and easier, both at the same time! Except when it doesn’t…” Except when it doesn’t. Which, let’s face it, can be quite often when things really go tits-up. And Apple’s switch from MIT Kerberos to Heimdal Kerberos in Mac OS X 10.7 has only gone to confuse things further. Such was the case at work recently when I decided to take a trawl through the system logs on one of my
A while ago I started an article on what I considered made for good management. It was prompted by being on the receiving end of a very very bad management experience and the belief that “It can’t ALL be that bad!”. It soon grew from a page, to two, to three… You know, this thing we call ‘Management’ is actually a huge and complicated beast?! The article has been sitting there – unfinished – for months. And then I read Managing Humans by the very astute Michael Lopp. My article is utterly, utterly redundant; go and read Michael’s book instead. He’s done it for real. I often start articles with “Before I start, let me say this: I’m no expert, but…” he could quite legitimately start with ”Before I start,
FizzBuzz One of the simplest programming exercises around and yet one that even seasoned programmers fall on. In short, the task is to write a programme that “…prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print ‘Fizz’ instead of the number and for the multiples of five print ‘Buzz’. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print ‘FizzBuzz’…” It’s not hard. It really isn’t. It’s far more a logic/workflow problem than it is a programming one. Once you have stated in pseudo-code what you need to do then writing it in real-code isn’t much of a leap. But for years now, nearly a decade, I’ve not bothered to do it myself. My excuse – such that it is – is
WWDC, the World Wide Developer’s Conference. The time when Apple gets together with the people who develop for the platform and tell them how they are going to do things. OK, that may be an overly cynical view of things. I really don’t have a problem with a company laying down rules for how things should be, on the whole they’re there for a reason. I do very similar things in my job as an IT Manager where I dictate to the users that a thing will happen in a specific way. It’s not that the thing can’t be done in many different ways but it makes things a lot easier to support and generally more understandable if everyone does it in as similar a way as
[EditEdit: The clever Mr. Atwood has written another Blog article. In it he hits the nail I was trying to keep upright - without the aid of opposing thumbs - on the head. I want to learn to code because I think it'll be fun.] [Edit: I was pointed to this Coding Horror article by a friend. It's actually what prompted me to write this article. And has prompted me to get on with something I should have done 20 years ago, at least.] But in the name of [insert deity of choice] William, WHY? I’m a SysAdmin and my job is the smooth running of all the bits end users like to be in perfect shape 24/7. Big things, like file servers, eMail, web services and