Site Administration

AdSense

by

Well, I finally did it. I added AdSense to the sidebar. Sorry folks. I did it for a couple of reasons. I really don’t expect to make much money, maybe enough to cover my hosting. I don’t view the blog as a source of revenue but as a way for me to share things with the world. I’ve learned and taken much from people who have published their work. I wanted to give back, and I hope that some people find some of what I write useful. I do want to find out how AdSense works, though. So many bloggers use it, and some of my clients have asked me about it. I want to have answers for them. What’s …

Read More

WordPress 2.1, Theme Tweaks

by

Okay, we’re at WordPress 2.1, theme tweaks, Alex King’s Share This, and Google Analytics plugins. We’re on a different server, too, so if DNS is a little wacko for a bit it should settle down. “Share This” is cool, but the Javascript stuff doesn’t work quite right yet with my theme. And before someone comments, the reason I have the icon off isn’t because I’m bitter, just that it doesn’t look right with my theme. Yet.

Testing and Development

by

It is really surprising that it took this long for me to build a test environment for my blog. WordPress 2.1 is out now, as most of you are aware. I’ve been looking forward to it. To make sure that it’ll be safe to upgrade I’ve started my own test environment, which I intend to keep around to work on new things for the blog. Upgrading means testing and usually upgrading plugins, tweaking my themes, and tweaking my scripts for changes in the blog. With a growing number of plugins it starts being a chore. As a system administrator I encourage my users to not test things on their production systems. “The first time you do something should never be …

Read More

Site Updates

by

I’ve changed a few things around here, and if any of them are bothersome let me know. 1. I’ve changed the DNS servers for lonesysadmin.net to be self-hosted, adding glue records to avoid the little lag when resolving the domain name. Not a huge deal, but it’s just a little faster. 2. I added Google Analytics code to the web page. I did this a while ago but may not have mentioned it, and I apologize if people were inconvenienced by it. I am also trying to figure out how to add Analytics to the feeds. This is part of my ongoing effort to get useful stats from the site to see what people like of my writing, and then …

Read More

Comment Roundup

by

I looked at my comment moderation queue this afternoon and there were three new comments in there. w00t! I love you folks. Sorry for the delay in moderating them. I wish I could turn that off but without it I tend to get a lot of spam. – Irfan over at the brand new Virtual Scoop blog pointed out the VMware paper on partition alignment. Very cool. I had seen that but had forgotten to link to it. Thanks dude. Reading his first post over at Virtual Scoop, I agree, the day-to-day operations of virtualized environments doesn’t get a lot of coverage. I think I’ll try writing a couple of posts over the next week about what we have to …

Read More

NOLA, SF, MN, OMFG

by

I don’t know why I do it, but I always volunteer to help friends move cross-country. After a day of rest & laundry from the SF trip I took off for New Orleans. We stopped in Memphis for a night to drink on Beale Street, which wasn’t very busy but decent nonetheless. 2100 miles later I’ve seen roller derbies and mind erasers, my Jeep needs an oil change, a new throttle position sensor, and a new window motor (it finally died… wide open, of course), and I know what the destruction looks and feels like, thanks to my friend Maitri’s tour of the decimation of Lakeview and the lower 9th ward. It’s a ghost town in those parts, and odd …

Read More

Unmasked

by

I don’t know quite when I began reading blogs. Almost certainly three to five years ago. The advent of RSS and news aggregators definitely helped that, making the phenomenon about the content and not about visiting a lot of web sites. Two blogs I started reading early on are written by women, each creating an intensely personal chronicle of each life, often with a resolution of minutes. As I thought about it, it amazed me that each one, in the face of identity theft, stalkers, rapists, and general inconsiderate behaviour these two were maintaining their privacy. They were doing so despite their sharing information with the anonymous world. Is this possible? Can privacy be sustained by a blogger? I haven’t …

Read More

Kidding Me

by

You have got to be kidding me. Somebody wrote a half-assed tutorial on setting up a DHCP server and it made the front page of Digg? I crap better example dhcpd.conf files. You know damn well what I’m doing tomorrow. I am going to fight back with my own tutorial. Speaking of which, I need to update my IPMI tutorial. Thankfully Red Hat obsoleted most of it. But for now, sleep! P.S. No, I am not linking to digg or the tutorial. I don’t want to encourage them.

False Positive

by

I just had my first known Akismet false positive: my own comment in response to iowagreyhound‘s got flagged as spam. I hate moments like this, because now I wonder if others have been marked as spam and I’ve just summarily deleted them. Sorry if I have, I certainly didn’t mean to. I’ve been getting between 30 and 100 spam comments a day now, which I think is just crazy.

Shell Scripting & Blogs

by

You know why I love my blog? It’s because of everybody who reads it. Thanks y’all. Case in point: my fix to randomize shell script execution went from # Don’t slam the mail servers! sleepamt=$(echo “$RANDOM/1092” | bc) /bin/sleep $sleepamt to # Don’t slam the mail servers! /bin/sleep $(($RANDOM/1092)) Hehe. It’s like extreme programming, writ large. The second case has fewer dependencies, though, and I like that.

+ More Posts +