Technology & MSG

At the request of a client, I looked into providing Nagios notifications via Twitter.
Most of the implementations (curl, Net::Twitter, and py-nag) use basic authentication to Twitter’s JSON-based update API without the benefit of SSL. Some of these implementations are more full-featured than others, such as allowing private messages instead of directed messages. There’s also talk [...]

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Took a quick stab at my taxes for the year. It appears that despite a decline in side work — that usually balances out some of my taxes paid — I’ll be getting a larger refund than I expected. As much as I’d prefer to have my money working for me throughout the year, I’d [...]

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I use CrossOver Mac when I need to run Windows applications on my Mac. It isn’t that often, but I’m glad it’s an option. I picked up a free download code a few years ago, before I really had a use for it; I’m not one to pass up a $40 package for free. CrossOver [...]

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A few days before January 1st of 2010, I was migrated to Microsoft Office 2007. So far, I’m not too impressed.
After a few days usage, I’ve found Office 2007 to be softer looking, slower performing, and visually bluer than Office 2003. It appears like Microsoft attempted to do away with all things sharp, both by [...]

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Simply put, Shift-% will find matching braces in Vim.
my @foods = qw(rice celery apple orange potato);
my @fruits = qw(apple orange pineapple);

for my $food (@foods) {
for my $fruit (@fruits) {
if ($food eq $fruit) {
print “$fruit\n”;
}
}
}
If you place the [...]

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As a budding software developer/engineer/guy, I enjoy seeing humorous errors and warnings. Especially in shipped products. It makes interacting with software a less blah experience.
-bash-3.2$ nmap -p 3389,3390,3391,3391 -P0 desire.this.org
Starting Nmap 4.11 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2009-09-30 10:55 GMT
WARNING: Duplicate port number(s) specified. Are you alert enough to be using Nmap? Have [...]

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All I wanted to do was install GnuCash on my laptop. Step one of the instructions stated that I’d have to install MacPorts, which looks like something I’d want around anyways. So that required Xcode, which I don’t have. After resetting my Apple password and answering the demographic questionnaire to become a member of the [...]

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I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 this morning without too many issues. It took longer to download and install all of the plugins than it did to convert the database over. I would have upgraded before, but I was running an antiquated version of MySQL until the server upgrade this past week. The upgrade itself took [...]

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I’ve been in the mood to bake the last couple days, but haven’t gotten around to it. So today — federal return completed and furnace filters changed — I decided to make a batch of fudge brownies. Topped with semi-sweet chocolate chips, they made the entire house smell amazing. And they taste pretty good too.
I [...]

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Because I said that I’d update on my success.
Bad Behavior has blocked 613 access attempts in the last 7 days. 111 got past the plugin, of which 110 were flagged by Akismet as being comment spam. The remaining 1 comment was placed into the moderation queue due to the number of links. So after a [...]

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I am being flooded with comment spam. Now I know I’m not special in this regard; everyone who uses the Internet has to deal with spam. Whether in email or comments, removal is always more tedious than detection. I’m not a huge fan of closed-source services, but Akismet has been doing an excellent job of [...]

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I’ve got to research some options for remote access. The goal is to provide a Windows-based application — which is rather expensive to license and tedious to manage per-seat — to a group of remote users. The licensing is all taken care of from my perspective, so the remaining requirements are as follows.

Sessions must be [...]

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I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving Firefox open for weeks at a time. I like having my tabs available without having to wait. Usually I’ve got Google Reader and Gmail loaded, as well as a few other status screens. I’ve also taken to bitching about the performance problems with the computer. For some reason [...]

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I am making progress in my office cleaning project. I tackled three boxes yesterday over a period of two hours. They were filled with a lot of loose items so it was slow going. Most of the things I’m finding now fall into the recycle or throwaway pile, although some of the bigger items are [...]

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I find ProcessLibrary to be incredibly useful when diagnosing Windows systems. The site — with a refreshingly clean interface despite it being an advertisement-page-disguised-as-a-tool — will tell you all about processes that you find listed in Task Manager. A quick summary of whether it is good or bad, but with details of what it does, [...]

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