Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

Make Your Own Darkroom/Writeroom/JDarkRoom in 60 Seconds

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1. If you’re on Windows find a terminal program. On Mac OS X, Linux, etc. open a terminal. 2. Set your terminal colors to green on black. 3. Click the maximize button. 4. Run nano, pico, vi, emacs, whatever. If I see another raving review, blog post (especially Lifehacker), or story about how revolutionary Darkroom, Writeroom, JDarkRoom, or Writer is I think I’m going to explode. I know, I know, Mac users thought of this which means it’s the bomb and all. Pay no attention to the UNIX guys who have been doing it for thirty years… Also, I love how everybody ripped Hog Bay Software off. Apparently Web 2.0 doesn’t include Lawyers 2.0 yet.

When Tech Writers Are Idiots

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Dear Associated Press, The article on how “Hackers Attack Key Net Traffic Computers” is one of the dumbest I’ve ever read. When the author can tell us what the difference between a root name server and a router is he can continue writing publicly about networking. Thank you.

Tip: Use 'at now' to daemonize tasks

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Have you ever noticed how your OpenSSH session hangs on logout if you start something in the background? This is intentional on the part of the OpenSSH developers, but it’s annoying for system administrators who do a lot of backgrounding of things. Certainly you can force-quit your hung SSH session with the “~.” trick but that sucks, too. A quick fix I use is the ‘at’ command. In this example I want to start the Tivoli Storage Manager client daemon in the background: echo “/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsmc schedule > /dev/null” | /usr/bin/at now Customize as necessary, but you see the trick. You do need the atd daemon running to get it to work.

Help Find Jim Gray

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This just came through on the HPCwire mailing list. I’ve been watching this unfold for a week now, having been reading Jim Gray’s papers for years, and it would be sad to see him gone. I repost this information in the hopes that more people will join the search and we can find him or conclusively determine what happened to him. If you can sort through a few images a lot of people would be very grateful. ———— The disappearance of computer scientist, Jim Gray, has initiated an unprecedented Internet-based search, with thousands of volunteers examining online satellite images. Gray, 63, hasn’t been seen since he sailed from San Francisco on Sunday, January 28, to scatter his mother’s ashes near …

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Five Simple Strategies For Driving In Snow

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Five simple strategies that might help if you’re driving in snow and ice. 1. Turning, stopping, and starting are problems. Going in a straight line is not. You can go fast in a straight line as long as any movement of the steering wheel or brake pedal is done with care. No sudden movements! Because starting is a problem don’t stop where you or those behind you won’t be able to start again, such as on a hill. 2. Centripetal force is what keeps you going wanting to go in a straight line, off into the ditch or parked cars, while you are trying to go around a corner. Your tires fight this with traction, but when it’s slick you …

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Not A Complexity Contest

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Dear IT professionals and architects, If we’re having a contest it’s about seeing how simple we can make things, not how complex. Yes, I know you can run blah in blah with blah against Amazon S3 in a grid with J2EE and blah and blah. The more crap you stack on each other the less likely it is to actually work right beyond this point in time. While you’re dreaming up Rube Goldberg IT inventions I spend my time tearing them down and replacing them with simple systems that just work. …Bob P.S. I don’t care if you are an “architect,” you’ve obviously never had to support one of these things. ——————————————– Dear IT managers, The simplest solutions are the …

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Great Places For My Mom To See In San Francisco

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It’s time for another edition of “Ask My Readers.” You folks did so well guiding me to places in San Francisco that I am going to ask you again, only with a different slant (basically not so much drinking advice). 🙂 My mother will be just south of Windsor, CA in March, for a week. That’s 60 miles north of SF. I’m trying to put together a list of suggested destinations, but I need help. She’s a crafty sort of person, likes quilting, not so into art or tech stuff. She’ll be with a couple other ladies who have similar tastes, and who aren’t afraid to drive. I am going to try grouping some of the suggestions into groups, including …

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You Just Cannot Plan For Nature

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“About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.” I was going to put this in my del.icio.us bookmarks but it just didn’t seem like the right place. I am consistently in awe of raptors.

links for 2007-01-30

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(mt) Media Temple – (mt) weblog » Blog Archive » Anatomy of MySQL on the GRID Getting MySQL to scale can sometimes be daunting.

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