Like the heading says, this is my dumping ground for general ramblings about nerdy bits and pieces I've found both at work and home that might be useful to someone else, or not...Category Archives for Stuff
Puppet: The Good, The Bad, And The Config – Part 3
In the previous post the basic setup of puppet on both the server and client was described, but, because I’d rather not use their built in server (scalability issues) it’s still left to install Passenger on Apache to handle the … Continue reading
Puppet: The Good, The Bad, And The Config – Part 2
In the previous post we went over some wordy basics of Puppet along with some quick tips. In this post we’ll actually get to the install. Worth note, I use RHEL (well, a clone: Scientific Linux) but I’m confident that … Continue reading
Dotsies – A New Way To Read
This is just a fantastic way to waste half an hour. Go to http://dotsies.org/about/ and have a read. If you’re into typography or crypto (it’s not crypto, but it’s obscure enough that no-one’ll be able to read it) then I’d … Continue reading
Puppet: The Good, The Bad, And The Config – Part 1
I work for a large visual effects company and manage a decent sized network of machines (a few hundred Linux, Mac and Windows workstations, a few hundred headless render nodes and tens of servers). A configuration management system is obviously … Continue reading
Embedding Tweets
Twitter’s update comes with a handy new feature: embedding tweets, and even better, with shortcodes, but it does come with a fairly big caveat. From the docs: WordPress.com and WordPress VIP blogs have this functionality immediately, and Jetpack users will … Continue reading
ASync Shell Commands from Tornado
I’ve been using Tornado at work for a bunch of web interface stuff and found I needed to call shell commands that might block for a while. To avoid blocking Tornado itself, I looked around the web for a while trying … Continue reading
Managing Your Mail
The video below is admittedly old (Oct 2007) and has done the rounds before but I only saw it recently and it’s made a massive difference to the way I work. I find myself devoting less time to e-mail but … Continue reading
WordPress Child Themes
The site you’re looking at is styled with a child theme. WordPress introduced child themes in version 2.7 and they’re great. It means that you can cleanly modify an existing theme, and if the original writer publishes an update, your … Continue reading
The Next Solution Looking For A Problem…
Cloudera Hadoop Apparently the cool kids (Google) have moved on from MapReduce now, but hey, worth a look.
AD Integration on Linux
Having trawled through seemingly hundreds of howtos and tutorials, nothing seemed to work properly for me. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a very minimal and easy setup running now so I hope it’s of use to someone else. Click AD … Continue reading