Pythian Group

    Roamer, wanderer
    Nomad, vagabond
    Call me what you will

    $ENV{LC_ALL} = "anywhere";
    my $time = localtime;
    say {$anywhere} my $mind;
    local *anywhere = sub { ... };

    Anywhere I roam
    Where I 'git ghclone environment' is $HOME

        # 'grep may_roam($_) => @everywhere',
        #                with apologies to Metallica

Laziness and a severe addiction to yak shaving conspire to constantly make me tweak configurations and hack scripts to make my everyday editing / shell / development experience as holistic as possible. Unfortunately the same laziness, combined with my constant hopping between home and $work computers, severely gets in the way of effectively using those optimizations. Indeed, although I have those nifty toys installed here and there, because they are not uniformly installed everywhere I constantly find myself using the machines’ functional lowest common denominator.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to issue 27. The number 27 according to numerology is “the symbol of the divine light” so I’ll try to do that ideal justice. We’re off to a good start, what with me actually getting this out on schedule and such, so let’s get to it while the day is still quiet.

Operating Systems

It’s been two weeks since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m still loving it. If you are on the fence or just curious, Ryan Paul at Ars has an intensive 9 page review of the release. Read the rest of this entry . . .

A MySQL user group member saw that I use Poderosa as my ssh-on-Windows tool, and asked why I did not use PuTTY. My response was that I like having tabbed windows and hate having to keep opening another PuTTY program every time I want to open another connection. With Poderosa I can open a new connection with Alt-N, and I can even connect directly to Cygwin with an icon.

But Poderosa is not the tool I wanted to mention…. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hi there and welcome to Blogrotate in which I, your humble host and blogger, bring to you interesting stories and events from the past week in the SysAdmin world. It’s been yet another busy week, which is why this is coming out on a Sunday again, so I am going to have to short list this edition but there’s still plenty of tasty nuggets to be found. Read on.

Operating Systems

It’s been discovered that Microsoft released three patches last month without including them in the release notes. Two of the patches were to fix security holes in MS Exchange servers. While this is nothing new it completely removes the ability for a sysadmin to evaluate the impact of the patches on critical corporate systems, which is necessary before rolling out the updates. Not to mention it makes it really difficult to diagnose a change in behaviour if you have no idea there was a change made. See more gory details in Security firm reveals Microsoft’s ‘silent’ patches.

Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads is a strange piece by someone called techbert describing how he logged into the sunsolve to download some firmware for his systems only to find that they were no longer publicly available. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Liveblog of the Professional IT Community Conference session Mentoring: It’s for everyone

Ways to learn:
Audio
Visual
Kinetic (doing it)

Everyone learns differently, but most people learn with some combination of all these three.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I am moderating and liveblogging the Professional IT Community Conference panel called Tech Women Rule! Creative Solutions for being a (or working with a) female technologist.

One point to keep in mind: The goal is not equality for equality’s sake. The goal is to have a diverse range of experience to make your company/project/whatever the best it could be.

That being said, these issues are not just around women; they are about anyone who is “different”, whether it’s race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, cultural.

So what are some of the solutions?
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Why Python?

- Low WTF per minute factor
- Passes the 6-month test (if you write python code, going back in 6 months, you pretty much know what you were trying to do)
- Small Shift/no-Shift ratio (ie, you use the “Shift” key a lot in Perl because you use $ % ( ) { } etc, so you can tell what something is by context, not by $ or %)
- It’s hard to make a mess
- Objects if you need them, ignore them if you don’t.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

The Beacon Pattern:
- This is a “Get out of the business” pattern
- Identify an oft-occurring and annoying task
- Automate and document it to the point of being able to hand it off to someone far less technical

Example:
- System admins were being put in charge of scheduling rooms in the building
- They wrote a PHP web application to help them automate the task
- They refined the app, documented how to use it, and handed it off to a secretary
- They have to maintain the app, but it’s far less work.

The Community Pattern:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I am attending the Professional IT Community Conference – it is put on by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), and is a 2-day community conference. There are technical and “soft” topics — the audience is system administrators. While technical topics such as Essential IPv6 for Linux Administrators are not essential for my job, many of the “soft” topics are directly applicable and relevant to DBAs too. (I am speaking on How to Stop Hating MySQL tomorrow.)

So I am in Seeking Senior and Beyond: The Tech Skills That Get You Promoted. The first part talks about the definition of what it means to be senior, and it completely relates to DBA work:
works and plays well with other
understands “ability”
leads by example
lives to share knowledge
understands “Service”
thoughtful of the consequences of their actions
understands projects
cool under pressure
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good evening and welcome to this weeks edition of Blogrotate. It’s a bit later than usual this week due to client concerns but I could not let this week go by without something. This week, after all, is the release of Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) so I get to leverage my supreme blogging power to promote the product since I use it pretty much everywhere now.

Operating Systems

So as I was saying, the release of Lucid Lynx has the world abuzz. We had a mini install fest here in the SA cluster at Pythian and 2/3 of it went well. It seems that video is the main source of install pain for us in this new version. Read the rest of this entry . . .