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. Disk Utility reported everything was OK with the disk, but it still failed to mount. Upon poking a bit deeper, I found these messages in the logs:

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. Go get yours!

via Tweetbot for iPhone

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.

I just switched from Carbon Emacs (which is old Emacs 22.x) to Emacs for OS X Modified on my Mac (which is a Cocoa app, and Emacs 23.3). One of the unwelcome changes was that the Emacs 'Meta' modifier is now by default mapped to the Option key and not Command as before. But this gave me the opportunity to learn how to map the Mac keyboard modifier keys arbitrarily.

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.   Security in the Third Wave of IT Engineering on Prezi  Related blog posts from cfengine.com: CFEngine - The Third Wave of Configuration Management CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering

I'm attending UNAM's computer security conference, giving a talk as well. Some photos from the event (will be updated throughout the day)

via Bad Astronomy Amazing.

via feedproxy.google.com Very nice video.

Nyamulagira, which generally erupts every two years, rumbled to life at 8:06 p.m via news.nationalgeographic.com Must be an amazing sight.

via gocomics.com  

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". Never judge people by their appearance :)

Quadrocopters are really getting popular for research, and for a reason - they are seriously cool. Arms / grippers have already been used on them: They can also do ball jugling: Have precise movement control: And do mapping: Tip of the rotor blade to Axel Tanner for sending me these.

via theatlantic.com Wow.

via theatlantic.com Nice photo set from the Panamerican Games.

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.

via daringfireball.net Voice recognition is hard :)

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.

Let's talk about some of those secret features you may not know about. via github.com Nice article about some lesser-known GitHub features.

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.

via kottke.org WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!

via vimeo.com Nice video.

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.

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) Llama Llama Duck.

via jasonadriaan.com Amazing.

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. I met Gene about 15 years ago while I was a grad student at Purdue. I met him initially at a couple of conferences, and later while he was visiting Purdue for some time.

on youtube.com via web-heads. There's probably a recall on these.