August 2009 Archives

A fried egg over a simple salad or a bowl of grains and veggies is one of the best quick meals we can think of. It follows that frying a good egg is one of the best basic techniques you can know!

You know the deal: Alton hates single-purpose kitchen gadgets. So I read him a list of unitaskers that I thought might make the cut. Here's what did—and what didn't—meet the maestro's approval, along with his color commentary

The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put together a campaign to raise awareness of privacy issues surrounding Facebook applications, in particular quizzes.

A new study by Balachander Krishnamurthy, a researcher at AT&T Labs, and Craig E. Wills, a professor of computer science at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, painted a different picture. Indeed, the rise of social networking sites appears to be changing the dynamics of online privacy as we understand it.

Based on what I’ve observed with numerous customers over the past five years, and the current reality, in my world, these tools don’t matter.

There is a time and a place that I want to know more, and no amount of Facebook updates is going to placate this curiosity. Perhaps this is a function of my generation, but there are two defining moments for me in the getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship: #1 Can you talk shit? I’m not talking bland sarcasm, I’m talking about a full court comedy offensive that demonstrates not only that you are aware of your surroundings, but you have a gift for improvisation and the courage to use it. #2 Where’s your bookshelf? It’s this awkward moment whenever I first walk into your home. Where is it? Everyone has one. It might not be huge. It might be hidden in a closet, but in decades of meeting new people, I’ve never failed in finding one and when I do I consume it.

From shopping and banking sites to network- and remote-access logins, we're inundated with requests to create and remember a plethora of passwords. Fortunately, plenty of free tools help us store and organize our passwords in a single, secure location.

Shell scripts should not use absolute paths for programs

If you administer a large SGE system or a small one with very high rates of job throughput then you are already familiar with the importance of the spooling subsystem and the decisions that need to be made regarding what methods to implement. I've long been a public fan of classic spooling on clusters with less than 100 nodes and classic tends to be the standard spooling method we choose on new cluster deployments in our industry.

This seems a sensible approach to use when the intent is not to disable login actions globally.

We have integrated the WebConsole(ARCo) login with Kerberos using pam. Below is the steps to integrate.

This article describes the tools and techniques for resource management that are available in the N1 Grid Engine 6 software, and explains how to use them effectively.

Well, there goes my hard-earned reputation....

For example, as part of my morning information routine, I go through my Gist dashboard. This is a list of all the new information that Gist has found from a wide variety of data sources about people and companies in my social network. It derives the social network from my email inbox, integrates it with my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter social graphs, and then presents it to me in a way that is prioritized by what it thinks I find most interesting. The level of relevance to me is amazing now that I’ve had it running for a few months. While Gist is still in closed beta, if you want an invite just email me.

To ensure that I can easily debug issues similar to this, I like to add the syslog and loglevel directives to the list of kickstart options

Modify xorg.conf for better performance

The utility discussed in the post (mcelog) is pretty sweet, and provides a portion of the capabilities that are currently available in the Solaris FMA architecture. The mcelog utility ships with several distributions, and can also be installed from various network repositories:

"How would you explain LDAP to a sysadmin who'd've heard of it, but not interacted with it before."

you can modify the ksdevice= variable a couple of ways

This is a very very black modification of my slickness theme.

However, sometimes I need a lot more information than just this. I need to know which command was executed at what time.

Michael Halligan said the other day on twitter, “I feel that any sysadmin today who isn’t learning Ruby and either Chef or Puppet will be unemployed in 5 years”.

check_dell_warranty will use SNMP, omreport, smbios or dmidecode to grab the system serial number, it will then make a query to Dell's website, parse the results, and print out a return.

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

This leads me to a fairly important conclusion: the can of worms — the hackable, fakable, fallible DNA database — is already here, and the law of bureaucracy says it isn't going away. But it needs to be secured. To do so, it's essential that it not be used as an authentication tool for identifying individuals. Moreover, DNA evidence can no longer be seen as sufficient on its own to secure a conviction in court. Online checks will still have a place — but only if they're used to match individuals against evidence found at crime scenes, and even then, only as an indicator (not as evidence in its own right).

If you like to monitor your system using age-old command line tools like uptime and top, you want the free GeekTool on your Mac. Today we'll cover how to automatically embed command output, text files and even monitoring images - like web site traffic charts - onto your Mac desktop with GeekTool.

We know many functions can be written in terms of a power series. What if it were possible to write this in sort of a trigonometric series?

GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists. The software aims to provide a unified and user friendly framework for editing structured documents with different types of content (text, graphics, mathematics, interactive content, etc.). The rendering engine uses high-quality typesetting algorithms so as to produce professionally looking documents, which can either be printed out or presented from a laptop.