http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga Just another weblog Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:52:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Awhile back I was noticing I was definitely losing emails. As one can might imagine, this is a scary experience since this brings into doubt if the mail system under use is doing something funny to the mail. My first place to look was in the mail logs for the ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/09/09/spamassassin-sigpipe-errors-and-the-zero-file-mail-message-mystery/ Awhile back I installed Ruby 1.9.1 in such a way as to co-exist with my current Ruby installation [1], [2] (I should use rvm [3] these days...) However, one issue that cropped up during an IRB session was I could not copy and paste Japanese characters into the IRB repl. ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/09/08/getting-ruby-191p243-to-work-on-os-x-1058-with-japanese-input-support-on-irb/ In Mercurial I noticed one new feature in the commit command that lets you specify a commit date. $ hg commit --help -d --date record datecode as commit date Too bad the help is too sparse to explain the commit date format. Luckily I ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/06/04/using-hg-commit-date/ I have a love-hate affair with Capistrano. It is a great tool if you are a Ruby person and need to do something NOW on a bunch of machines. But the docs are in a constant state of suck from my point of view. The Capify.org website helps ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/06/02/using-a-non-standard-port-for-capistrano-ssh-gateways/ With the announcement of OpenSolaris 2009.06 I thought it would be appropriate to blog a little about a tool I had been writing to help myself play with Zones a bit easier. My overall goals were the following: Have each zone configured with its own virtual NIC (Crossbow) Allow easy creation ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/06/02/automating-zone-creation-in-opensolaris-200906/ After looking at /etc/inet/hosts I noticed a loghost entry. Being a Solaris newbie I was curious to see why this entry was there. A quick Google brought up this nice discussion: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=47166 Summary, don't delete it. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/06/02/the-role-of-loghost-entry-in-etcinethosts-for-opensolaris/ On small LAN networks that do not have an internal DNS server. There is a nice technology called ZeroConf that uses multicast to enable name lookup resolution. It has been baked into OS X for quite some time now. Linux and other UNIX flavors have been picking ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/05/06/enabling-zeroconf-bonjour-dns-resolution-in-opensolaris/ Tom has a great summary on why. One challenge for the cowboy sys admin is on how to keep oneself engaged while making their job basically... a walk in the park. One thing I have found helpful in creating lists is to be dogmatic about writing docs as you are doing something ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/04/30/good-systems-administration-should-be-boring/ After reading Game Developers and Porn Stars I started recollecting an earlier time in my life. At that point in time I was considering a life as a game developer. I had heard the rumors that life as a game developer was a meat grinder and had really ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/04/26/life-not-as-a-game-developer-porn-star/ Seems someone else ran into issues while trying to deploy god. While, I don't think god sucks I definitely don't endorse it. At this point I would only use it under the following conditions: Need for a process monitor tool with more dynamic configuration setups. This is where god really ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/04/25/glad-im-not-the-only-one-who-prefers-monit-over-god/ I just read a blog post by Blaine Buxton describing the phenomenon of Forced Pairing. In a nutshell, pair programming has to take into consideration the human factor when programming. Some people need their own space to code well. On reflection, this makes sense. When I ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/04/10/forced-pair-programming-considered-unproductive/ I had a need for inserting the name of the current file into a bunch of files I was editing. I was pretty sure there was a function to do this in vim and after some searching I was right. To insert the current filename. In Insert Mode, type ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/03/12/insert-the-current-filename-into-current-edited-file-in-vim/ Nice town... Thanks Pink Tentacle http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/02/27/nihon-town/ The New Yorker has a nice article describing health care reform. But some interesting tidbits from the article is the discussion on the origins of the the modern health care systems for Britain, Switzerland and France. (Wish there were references to double check besides Wikipedia). However, one choice quote ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/02/15/realities-of-leadership-new-yorker-on-obama-reforming-health-care/ I have been following Twitter a bit too much lately that my blog has been ignored a little bit. Then again it doesn't take that much effort for me to ignore my blog on 'other reasons'. Speaking of Twitter stuff... I found an interesting 'conversation' [1] between Tim OReilly and ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/02/07/parenting-the-mark-of-a-civilized-society/ I don't know about other people but my daily checklist aspires to be something like this... 1. Come in 2. Kick serious ass 3. Go home For some reason steps 2 and 3 can be quite troublesome... luckily today was one of those days that the checklist went well! http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/01/06/the-anatomy-of-a-daily-checklist-for-an-awesome-day-at-work/ A nice back story on Writely (what is now known as Google Docs) via HN. I particularly like this snippet [The creators] have been in the application software business for nearly 20 years... they understand the user problem so deeply that they can blend the advantages of each ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/01/02/writely-years-in-the-making-months-in-execution/ If you have ever heard of Alex Kerr and have read his book Dogs & Demonsyou would think much less of Japan as a country. Some of the things in that book refer to many pork-barrel politic government projects that include such monstrosities as huge concrete damns in the ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/12/31/zoorasia-and-the-yokohama-greenery-foundation-its-not-all-dogs-demons/ Luke describes a nice methodology for using Mercurial as a way to track patches from a subversion checkout. This type of workflow stuff is very cool imo because it has the following: Shows a concrete example of how to use a not so trivia tool Works within constraints (in this example, ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/12/28/708/ Akihabara as many people in Japan know was originally the home for buying electronic goods in the Tokyo area. It still holds that reputation however the Anime Otaku crowd have changed the face of Akihabara to also accomodate their needs and desires. One thing that is interesting is the ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/12/22/on-the-origins-of-the-name-akihabara/