October 22, 2011

Jailbreaking an AppleTV 2 with Seas0npass (Gear)

I've had to jailbreak ATV2s twice now, and both times I've gotten caught up in the 'oh yeah just one more thing' details of this particular finicky task. So I figured I'd add my own 'here's how I got it to work' on the off chance someone Googling it in desperation like I had to both times will find it. Continue reading "Jailbreaking an AppleTV 2 with Seas0npass"

June 13, 2011

Diesel-Electrics vs. Nucs - round 720823084 (Weapons)

This article touches on a question dear to my heart, because I love submarines. However, after reading it a couple of times, I have some problems with the argument being framed here. NOTE: I do not do this for a living, and this is just off the top of my head after reading the article in question.

Assumptions

The first problem is that there are several enormous assumptions embedded in the argument which are never acknowledged much less addressed. Here are a few of them, in my opinion.

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May 16, 2011

The Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS134 and the NASA TweetUp (Travel)

I entered today tossing and turning, trying to force myself to sleep. Yesterday I was privileged to take a trip out to Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Centeralong with the other 78 or so folks who had returned for a second launch attempt at the NASA Tweetup (for those of you who care, get on Twitter and search for #STS134 and/or #NASATweetup). We drove past the press, all clustered at the bottom of the pad ramp looking directly at the Shuttle's 'top' where it was hidden by the RSS, and drove around to the side of the pad before spilling out of the buses NASA had provided and immediately all pulling out cameras and various Twitter-enabled devices.

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May 13, 2011

Using Chef to write out a munin.conf file which uses the Chef Server node name to label clients (Code)

Pretty much what it says on the tin. If you configure your munin server using Opscode chef, and you're looking at EC2/Opscode nodes, it's advantageous to label the munin clients in the munin conf using the Opscode node name so that you can quickly match them to the proper records on Opscode. Also, the Opscode name has the EC2 instance ID suffixed to it, which makes it easy to find the node on EC2 as well.

In addition, you want to group your nodes into reasonable groups! So let's say you have project/environment/type attributes which describe each node (like, for example, myapp-staging-app).

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January 26, 2011

Opscode Chef LWRPs and notifications (Code)

Wow, so @kallistec is my hero. I was trying to write a LWRP for my rsyslog cookbook in my Chef repo, and it WASN'T WORKING. The purpose of the LWRP was to allow other cookbooks to declare that they had text-only logfiles, and have the rsyslog LWRP then generate the appropriate imfile configuration stanza in /etc/rsyslog.d.

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