I have been blogging about CFEngine here for a while (it's my most frequent tag). As of now, I'm starting to post all CFEngine-related posts to http://blog.cf-learn.info/, which is part of the web site for my book "Learning CFEngine 3". In this way, I intend to group all CFEngine-related content over there. I will still cross-post relevant things here, but if you want to stay fully up to date on my CFEngine writings, please subscribe over there as well.
After building the typical "test bundle" scaffolding in an editor for the hundredth time, I decided to do something about it. The result is the cf-cmd command. via blog.cf-learn.info A little useful script I wrote for making it easier to test CFEngine code snippets. Follow the link to see the full details.
15 Years Ago Today Apple acquired NeXT. Not a bad move.
via daringfireball.net Not a bad move indeed. I loved NeXT computers and NEXTSTEP, and I'm happy every time I see its legacy on my Mac.
A couple of days ago I finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I thoroughly enjoyed it (I may post a longer review later on, but I really liked learning the "behind the scenes" of much of what I witnessed from the outside over so many years).
I'm happy to announce that the website for my book is now live at http://cf-learn.info/. In this website you will find: General information about the book. A discussion forum for any type of questions, feedback or suggestions about the book. Downloadable code examples from the book, plus (over time) many other new examples. List of Errata, and access to the Errata system at O'Reilly A blog devoted to the book and to CFEngine. The site is fairly empty at the moment (the blog, the forum and the errata page are live, I encourage you to participate, particularly if you have purchased the Early Release version of the book and want to provide any sort of feedback), but content will grow over time.
Yesterday my external Western Digital disk (which I use for Time Machine, among other things) stopped mounting automatically when I plug it in. This may *cough*definitely*cough*have something to do with me unmounting it forcefully while it was doing a backup, since I was in a hurry.
Learning CFEngine 3 Automated system administration for sites of any size By Diego Zamboni via shop.oreilly.com My upcoming book "Learning CFEngine 3" is now available as an Early Release, which includes (for now) the first four chapters of the book. You can use the code AUTHD to get 40% off the print book, or 50% off the ebook version.
via scanomat.com I remember joking in grad school that we should've had coffee-on-tap so we didn't need to walk all the way down to the kitchen. Seems my dream has come true. I want one of these.
Today I gave a presentation at UNAM's 2011 Computer Security Conference in Mexico City. Below you will find my presentation (done using prezi.com, follow this link if you can't see it below). You can also get the PDF version.
via theinspiration.com One time on a plane from Brussels to Chicago, I was trying to make space in the overhead for my backpack, by moving a large bag with a flowery stamped design. A large tattooed, biker-type guy across the aisle says to me: "please be careful, I'm transporting a china set in there".
I’m doing some cleanup and reorganization, and captured my current app setup as a reference point. Here they are.
Quick note: The first screen is my most-used apps (some are going out now, like 2Do which I've never liked too much, but was the best way to sync tasks with Outlook, which I'm no longer forced using). Second screen is all my folders. Third and fourth screens are my girls' screens, with the games they use when they borrow my phone. The games I play are mostly in the first "Games" folder.
CFEngine is both the oldest and the newest of the popular tools for automating site administration. Mark Burgess invented it as a free software project in 1993, and years later, as deployments in the field outgrew its original design he gave it a complete rethink and developed the powerful concept of promise theory to make it modular and maintainable.
via radar.oreilly.com I contributed to this article by Andy Oram on CFEngine 3. It talks about the history of CFEngine 3, why it is a powerful tool for system administrators, and what is new in the latest releases of both the commercial and the open-source versions of CFEngine.
A new version of CFEngine 3 Nova was released today, and to go with it, there will be a free webinar called "Introduction to CFEngine 3 Nova" on November 2nd. It will be presented by one of the members of the core CFEngine team, and it will be a great opportunity to learn more about the new and improved capabilities in this release. If you are interested in CFEngine and maybe thinking of going the commercial route, or you need more information to decide, make sure to attend!
The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today. —Brian Kernighan
via nytimes.com Nice article about Dennis Ritchie.
Today I have two big announcements to make.
First, as of this week I have a new job, I am now working with CFEngine AS, the company that develops and maintains cfengine. As you know if you read my blog, I am a big fan of cfengine. It is a mature and able tool that provides extreme flexibility and power to system administrators. The company is full of energy and with very interesting projects to make cfengine even better and more popular than it is today. I am very happy to be working with such a talented team. I will be working with the Products and Services group in a variety of roles and projects, about some of which you may be able to read here as well.
via albinoblacksheep.com And now for an oldie but most definitely a goodie - the Llama Song! (click on the link to see it in its full forever-repeating glory)
Dennis Ritchie passed away last weekend. He was one of the great minds in systems research and development, father of the C programming language, and one of the big contributors to Unix, both of which power the Mac on which I'm typing this, the iPhone on my desk, the Windows machine I use at work, the servers on which this blog is hosted, and much of the infrastructure both you and I use to connect to it.
Farewell, Steve. Thank you for all you did for the computer industry, for design, for music, for telephony, and for so many other aspects of our lives. You will be missed.
A few days ago I learned through Spaf that Gene Schultz had had a severe accident and was hospitalized. Later we learned that the accident was apparently caused by an earlier stroke that went unrecognized. Yesterday, October 2nd, during the afternoon, Gene passed away.
via youtube.com This is making the rounds, so I might as well contribute. Beautiful (and maybe not so hard to do - it's much like a dot-matrix printer, but printing from bottom up). I saw one of these a few years ago at the Motor Show in Geneva (at the Jeep stand), but it was much lower resolution and much less creative.
Cfengine (tested 3.2.0) installs easily on OS X (tested 10.7), given that it's Unix. One problem I encountered was that it does not compile with the bundled version of Berkeley DB (it recognizes it during configure, but produces compilation errors). The solution is to use some other DB engine. I chose Tokyo Cabinet. Using homebrew, the process is simple
Follow mode is a minor mode that makes two windows, both showing the same buffer, scroll as a single tall “virtual window.” To use Follow mode, go to a frame with just one window, split it into two side-by-side windows using C-x 3, and then type M-x follow-mode. From then on, you can edit the buffer in either of the two windows, or scroll either one; the other window follows it. In Follow mode, if you move point outside the portion visible in one window and into the portion visible in the other window, that selects the other window—again, treating the two as if they were parts of one large window. via stackoverflow.com Very useful, and something I didn't know about.
I just finished upgrading our Mac (my wife and I share it) to Lion. It looks very nice. This has been the OS X upgrade to which I have given less thought: purchase, download, backup, install, done.
Today I had my 2nd-Kyu Karate exam. I passed! This is my first exam after having abandoned karate for 10 years and coming back to training 5 months ago, so I'm very happy that it went well. Here's the "after" photo. I am the one with the headband (and yes, I am the oldest in the group other than my Sensei).
As annoying as Outlook is most of the time, it has a few nifty features. For example, this notification:
appears at the top of a compose window when appropriate. It is very useful because it appears if, while you are typing a message, another one comes into the same thread, thus reducing occurrences of "crossed" (and possibly conflicting) responses.
via blogs.discovermagazine.com Amazing short video. Make sure you enable HD, hit play, then pause, and let it download entirely before resuming, so you can watch it without interruptions. And make it full screen!
I hate this game. I hate it so much. I don’t want to play it. I hate playing it. I don’t enjoy playing it. But every day [...] I play it. I cry and I throw a tantrum and I complain and I hate it so much, but I play it.
This time i’m going to talk about the basic components that make up a physics engine and how to put them together; this tutorial is aimed at programmers who have a basic grasp of maths and geometry but would like to step into the world of simulation.
Please note: I am no longer using Windows nor Outlook, so unfortunately I cannot offer any help with problems you encounter using these scripts and techniques.
As you may know, I'm a reluctant switcher from Mac to Windows. I am also a fan of GTD. I had been using Jello Dashboard (JD) to implement GTD under Outlook. JD is a very nice system, the developer is friendly and responsive, and I had even written several patches to adapt it to my way of working. I was even in the process of drafting a series of blog posts titled "My GTD under Outlook setup".
This article explains how you can digitally sign a file or a macro project by using a certificate. If you don't already have a digital certificate, you must obtain one. To test macro projects on your own computer, you can create your own self-signing certificate by using the Selfcert.exe tool.
Apple released iOS 4.3 a few days ago, and if you follow this topic at all, you have probably already heard all about the Personal Hotspot feature, AirPlay enhancements, and whatnot. But buried in the notes for this release was a new feature that caught my attention:
via boston.com Amazing pictures of an incredibly dangerous expedition. Just look at the guy in the photo above, standing at the very edge of a lava lake. Click through for more beautiful pictures.
"Watching you on Jeopardy! is what inspired the whole project," one IBM engineer told me, consolingly. "And we looked at your games over and over, your style of play. There's a lot of you in Watson." I understood then why the engineers wanted to beat me so badly: To them, I wasn't the good guy, playing for the human race. That was Watson's role, as a symbol and product of human innovation and ingenuity. So my defeat at the hands of a machine has a happy ending, after all. At least until the whole system becomes sentient and figures out the nuclear launch codes. But I figure that's years away.
Yet in a city where some of the most prominent buildings have sat vacant for decades and booting a scandal-plagued mayor out of office took eight months, raising $50,000 to produce and install a 7-foot-tall iron replica of the crime-fighting cyborg was accomplished in a mere six days.
It’s an impressive animation of what would happen if an asteroid — maybe 100 500 miles across or so — impacts the Earth. The visuals are stunning, and someone set it to excellent music for the action
via boston.com Beautiful, sometimes heart-breaking photos. Kids are kids anywhere, play and laugh and cry, but no kid should have to live in the poverty shown in some of these pictures.
There's a bug that causes problems when running latex2html on files which have spaces in the path. The workaround is to either move things to folders with no spaces, or add appropriate symbolic links.
via ubuntuforums.org This error had me stumped in trying to process a latex file with latex2html:
I got latex2html to install on the latest cygwin, however to get the configure to pass I had to alter the configure to recognize cygwin as a UNIX. via mail-archive.com Using this patch I was able to properly configure and install latex2html under cygwin in Windows 7.
The only workaround to this is to convert the logfile to the new evtx format prior to parsing it. You can do this in the event log viewer GUI by doing a Save As... but I find it easier to do this at the command prompt:
Nestlé pods, pal; it’s a lifetime relationship. That $500 machine is a down payment on a 400-900% tax on every cup of coffee you make with it: three cups a day and you pay for the machine again, or more, every year you own it. Next, a frying pan customized to work only with a single brand of eggs, yup.
via samefacts.com I don't understand the popularity of those pod-fed coffee machines. The pods are expensive and the coffee is bad. I much prefer my Krups machine - whole beans (my choice) and water go in, nice fresh coffee comes out.
One thing I missed since I moved from a Mac (using The Hit List for GTD) to Outlook (using Jello Dashboard for GTD) was the availability of a global hot key that I could use to bring up a text entry box which I could use to quickly add things into my electronic Inbox, for later processing.
If you are like me, you carry in your backpack, bag or briefcase all sorts of physical stuff, other than documents, papers or magazines. You know the type: phone chargers, USB cables, power adapters, network cables, USB sticks and other small gadgets or accessories. Over time these things accumulate and it becomes harder and harder to find them and to keep them organized.
When I arrived in Switzerland nine years ago I didn't speak a word of German (much less Swiss German!), so for a while I faced a very real and practical problem. I would encounter signs on the street, and have absolutely no idea what they meant. Does this sign mean I can pass, or I cannot? "Watch your step" or "Watch for the vicious dog"? During that period, I often wished for a gadget that I could point at the sign and would give me an instant translation.
via youtube.com Incredible compilation, very nicely done. So many movies, so little time. I haven't seen even a tenth of the movies shown here (mostly I've seen the animated ones, since go to the movies more often with the girls than without).
via boston.com I am sooooo happy to be back in Mexico where I don't have to deal with snow :)
OTOH, there are some beautiful pictures here. Snow can be beautiful, but I think you have to grow with it to really enjoy it. Not my case.
