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Rants

Spamassassin SIGPIPE errors and the zero file mail message mystery

Awhile back I was noticing I was definitely losing emails. As one can might imagine, this is a scary experience since this brings into doubt if the mail system under use is doing something funny to the mail. My first place to look was in the mail logs for the SMTP server and other associated […]

Using a non-standard port for Capistrano SSH gateways

I have a love-hate affair with Capistrano. It is a great tool if you are a Ruby person and need to do something NOW on a bunch of machines. But the docs are in a constant state of suck from my point of view. The Capify.org website helps for remembering the ‘simple’ details on what […]

Glad I’m not the only one who prefers monit over god

Seems someone else ran into issues while trying to deploy god. While, I don’t think god sucks I definitely don’t endorse it. At this point I would only use it under the following conditions: Need for a process monitor tool with more dynamic configuration setups. This is where god really shines against monit’s simpler understanding […]

Getting X working again after swapping hardware on Open Solaris nv100

After having dain bramaged myself for years with Linux usage. I had gotten spoiled into believing an OS should make it simple to do the following: 1. Shutdown computer 2. Swap around hardware components 3. Restart 4. Life is good However any techie should tell you this is a pipe dream on Windows. Mac users […]

Getting KDE 4.1.0 on a Fedora 8 machine when KDE 3 is already there

According to the Fedora FAQ one should be able to update with just this sudo yum –enablerepo=updates-testing groupupdate “KDE (K Desktop Environment)” However when I did, I ran into some icons from packages kdepim-3.5.9 and kdegraphics-4.1.0 conflicting with packages crystalsvg-icon-theme and libkipi. Here is a log… file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/48×48/apps/kpalmdoc.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file […]

I can’t get no satisfying manpages

It seems that with most default UNIX-like installations outside of FreeBSD just include craptastic manpages. This really puts a dent in RTFM. In Linux-land this has been a serious PITA for years (Yes, I know how to hunt around for the packages to install the manpages in Redhat-ish and Debian lang but it is still […]

Japanese declining population rates? How come I can’t find a doctor?

少子化 is the term used to describe the shrinking population in Japan and the many hardships that will bring to the country economically. I remember hearing some analyses on why this is happening on a social standpoint. I’ve not heard (or really bothered that hard to search for) many proposals on how to fix the […]

Losing data in the clouds

Seems that some cloud vendors (sheesh I really only knew about Google Ape… err App Engine, Amazon’s EC2 service, and GoGrid) have been having some issues watching customer data go up in a poof. oops. Datacenter Knowledge mentions Flexiscale having issues The problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main storage volumes was accidentally […]

On the irritation of trying to run GPG on a remote headless server

My short, short suggestion is… don’t: This blog post explains it much better than I can although I definitely have been the victim of trying to generate a GPG key on a headless server to no avail: While trying to generate a gpg keypair on a remote server, I discovered I lack entropy. Eventually I […]

On the future (or lack) of Nitro Web framework

Before there was Rails, there existed other Web Frameworks for Ruby. One of the promising ones is Nitro however it fell into realm of ignorance. On some random surfing I ran across this blog post from one of the main authors of the Nitro Web Framework. It’s an interesting read since the author laments how […]

Happy half-a-decade blog

Yeesh, I just looked at the date of my first post and it’s been a whole 5 years since I started blogging here. What have I learned? People who blog multiple times a day must either have some kick-ass tools to do it quickly or way too much time. I seem to have neither so […]

Why does RTFM with GNU manpages just suck

After looking at a seriously useful tip for cleaning out a clogged postfix queue I puzzled over the -r option in xargs. I’m not an xargs master but I figure if I need it I can always RTFM. Well man xargs on my Ubuntu box provides the typical GNU fair and I spend the next […]

What the fork are you doing Pidgin devs?

After glancing at the Slashdot post on the forking of pidgin and wasting far too much time slogging through the ticket that caused a bit of strife, I’m pretty sure I will move away from Pidgin until the developers stop being dorks (highly unlikely since they seem to develop only for themselves). Quick quick summary […]

One way to clean out a gazillion files in a directory without causing the server to hang on IO

Had a case where I had some rails app that was using files for its session store and had been running like that for months. While it was a careless (and dumb) thing to run it that way, we had to do something about it since it was eating up close to 85% of the […]

OS X 10.4.11 update, you suck

After a long time of not updating my trusty old iLamp iMac, I finally updated it to 10.4.11 over the weekend and let it lie. Later on I hear a report that Safari won’t start up. That’s odd, I’ve never heard of Safari having launch problems before. I check the log and I see something […]