MarcoPolo, “context-aware computing for OS X” appeals to all three great virtues of the programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. It makes me want a Mac notebook. Unfortunately, Pro/E, ANSYS, and other necessary tools for my regular work would mean I’d end up dual-booting the Mac all the time. And I’d miss my port replicator and …
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Upgraded to WPMU 2.5.1
Joy. Upgraded the site to WPMU 2.5.1. Took a while to reconstruct my restrictions for new users and blog creation, and I’m switching out some syntax-highlighting plugins, too. We’re nearly ready to unleash this on a horde of unsuspecting graduate students. Code Example: [sourcecode language=’php’] /** * This holds the version number in a separate …
Stupid Puppet Trick: Identifying Groups of Hosts
My Ruby skills are practically non-existant, but I’ve managed to put together a relatively readable custom fact for identifying my Torque queues by a node’s hostname. Behold, HostgroupFact! Now I can factor out my hosts.equiv files back to a parent class, rather than duplicating the same file specifications on a per-queue basis. class cluster-host inherits …
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Stupid Puppet Trick: Poor Man’s Undo
If I apply a set of classes to a puppet client, I may need to roll back those classes’ changes later. Granted, I could just edit out those classes, reformat the system, and rebuild it from scratch, but there may be times when I want to undo my changes in a more granular fashion. So …
I Killed the Mail Server Today
It all started so simply: I was going to set up a little Xen instance to be my next cluster submit host, and needed a spare address for it: I started setting up an instance for ch208i.cae.tntech.edu, since it was no longer on the Xen host like it was several months ago. Crap, the reason …
Better Inventory Management Through Python
One good thing about the switch from the legacy administrative computing system to the new Banner setup is now I can more easily get an unformatted table of my department’s equipment inventory instead of a printed report. This matters to me for a few reasons: The default inventory reports always come out sorted by inventory …
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Wordle: So Much Awesome
Wordle generates “word clouds” from any random text provided to it. Something like a tag cloud, but for body text rather than categories or tags. The poetry-derived ones are cool, but the one generated from this blog’s RSS feed is cool, too: