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 …
Author Archives: renfro
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:
Transforming Research Computing Practices in TTU’s College of Engineering
I have a cunning plan to promote some better (in my opinion) practices for research computing in TTU’s College of Engineering over the next year or two. This plan is partially derived from things I’ve already been trying to promote, and some other goals laid out by the Python Software Carpentry folks. I’d define success …
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Why Should I Fill Out a Contact Form to Download FlexLM Utilities?
So some years ago, Macrovision buys FlexLM, and a few months ago, spins it off into Acresso Software. And now I’m ready to start using Cacti to monitor FlexLM license usage, but I need Linux versions of lmutil and related utilities. I could just pull them from a package that uses FlexLM, but I don’t …
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Some Days, I Just Hate Solaris
Back in 2000, when some of us in engineering were talking about how best to improve our facilities for high-performance and research computing for our graduate students, we came to a few conclusions: Software was more important than hardware. Some software ran only under Windows, some had no Windows version at all. Of the non-Windows …
Simple Time Log for OpenOffice (and soon, Excel)
Last year, I threw together a mildly intelligent Excel spreadsheet that would help me add up release time entries for various projects, and posted it to an earlier version of this 43 Folders topic. Since they converted from their old forum software to Drupal, my spreadsheet attachment got lost. And since I couldn’t find it …
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Making Solaris Packages from Commercial Software
Creating a managed infrastructure can go pretty slowly when you’re beset with a combination of bare competence and a work schedule that’s overrun with non-infrastructural tasks. So yes, it’s been just under a year since I wrote up how to make Debian packages from commercial software. On to getting similar capabilities out of the Solaris …
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Giving a Presentation at the Tennessee Higher Education IT Symposium
I’m heading to the IT Symposium this morning to give a talk on creating a managed Unix infrastructure from scratch, somewhat of a summary of several things I’ve posted here over the last year or so. Thanks to the folks on #puppet who read over them and gave editing suggestions. Slides for presentation Handouts for …
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Converting National Instruments LVM Timestamps to Excel (UPDATED: and Matlab)
A few days ago, I had a student looking into what would be required to periodically log some temperatures and pressures from a long-running furnace experiment, so that he doesn’t have to babysit it and come back every 30 minutes to record his data. We borrowed a National Instruments USB-6008 data acquisition device and downloaded …
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