Savannah W-ITS

Your mileage should vary, but for me this device was both a poor/bad investment and a trouble-shooting time hog. I picked this up at Office Depot for $20 (regular price ~$50.)  While relatively simple to configure (via a web interface) the device seems to have performance issues (i.e. both dropping established wireless connections as well [...]

NOTE – I’m simply writing about what I find as I explore Ruby on Rails (ROR) – your mileage should vary but chances are you landed here due to a long tail search. Since I am not a Ruby or ROR expert it is quite possible for me to discover a solution or approach [...]

Binary’s Sibling Ternary
The ternary operator for many programming languages allows you to use a shorthand when making simple evaluations.  The usual sequence of conditions (and this can vary between languages, so search for ‘your_language ternary operator‘ for more information.)  Using this operator allows us to take ~6 lines of code and replace it with one [...]

Some thoughts on Automating and standardizing how you might create new scripts (or other) tools
Seasoned Unix/Linux administrators will usually have some level of experience with automating various aspects of their duties including:  backups, deployments, monitoring, code management, system config management, build management, etc.  A number of us will also have simple tools that we use [...]

We have some great generic search tools and a few engines with specific knowledge domains:

generic search from indexed, traditional content from web pages, books and other ‘published’ media (i.e. typical search using Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
computational  search – connect user input with some sense of context (i.e. WolframAlpha – user provide numbers and the engine [...]

Bash – Changing from a proven, ubiquitous tool to a new one – need a reason?  In this case it’s time to explore Ruby – I’m not ready to change yet but I do want to see what Ruby might bring to the table.   I’m starting with a simple Ruby script (extracted from a [...]

I previously posted about our friend Murphy – he has returned…   Stuff happens – all the time.
Seems like it was just yesterday that I purchased an external 1TB Seagate FreeAgent USB disk drive (I actually purchased the drive in February of 2009 – so I am seeing failure in ~10 months with modest use – [...]