re:PocketMod – DIY Tiny Paper Organizer

I’m not giving up my Treo 700p as my regular organizer, but there are times when I recognize the advantages of paper. re:PocketMod is a site with a Flash application on it that lets you lay out and print 8 pages of information onto a single 8.5×11 sheet of paper. Properly cut and folded, the …

DIY Planner style TTU Campus Map

A user over at diyplanner.com posted a simple campus map and course information template for college students. I thought it might be useful to make one for TTU. So here you go: PDF version, ready to be printed onto two side-by-side pages. Not sure why the fonts didn’t completely translate over. OpenOffice.org version, ready to …

If The Title of This Post Contains the Word “Tennessee”, Will It Attract Human Spammers?

As noted before, I do love Spam Karma 2. 4000+ spams eaten over the last 18 months or so, and it’s nearly perfect as far as I can tell. But it didn’t catch a couple of… terse… commenters on this post about a presentation I was about to give. One commenter seemed rather irritated, and …

Where’s MarcoPolo for Windows?

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 …

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 …

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 …