Nothing really exciting to report on day 3. I'm pretty sure I got this licked. I did discover that our Cisco VPN tunnel for clients was borked with the last maintenance on the network, so I lost my backdoor to be able to work from home via Linux :(.

Day 4 I found a reliable way to crash the Evolution "exchange backend". I get mails from Mailman mailing lists as they come in, rather than a daily digest. Clicking on one with the preview pane on will break the "exchange backend" causing me to have to restart the client. This happens after browsing around in "non-list" mails.

Also on day 4 I found myself needing a proprietary piece of client software to access a file server that I manage. I was slightly discouraged until I realized it was written in Java. I then discovered that they don't provide the source, but they do provide the jar files, and an RPM. I then used alien to convert the rpm to a deb, and I was well on my way to managing that file server.

I'm loving this!

Yesterday was my second day running Linux exclusively at the office. Everything is going smooth, I just wish that Evolution was a bit more stable.

Jumped a couple hurdles yesterday as well. I finally figured out the Global Catalog server so I can have our Global Address List via Evolution. I also tweaked OO.org so it would perform better. Follow instructions found here to speed it up!

So far today, no issues.

I’ve decided to run Linux via Wubi on my work Laptop for one week to try and work out any bugs/issues that might come about. So far I’ve had great success! I’m also building a case to present to our management requesting that whoever wants, should be allowed to run Linux. We won’t request software support from Internal IT, only hardware. Give us hardware, we do the rest. We would be in charge of our own desktop support. We’re smart guys here that have many years of Linux experience, I’m sure we can handle it :). I have a page setup on our internal wiki documenting my progress and counter-arguments for reasons they might say no. Wish me luck!

Here is my progress thus far in no order:

• Got evolution working with exchange.
• Need to get GAL server name for address book.
• Ssh agent forwarding from desktop.
• Pidgin works fine with our local Jabber server.
• OO.org seems to be handling normal office tasks, but it feels so clunky, will research a way to speed up.
• Allowing laptop to sleep with Wubi == BAD.
• Unclean shutdown from Windows will cause issues rebooting into wubi as windows seems to have a “lock” on the filesystem. Boot into windows, shutdown clean to remedy.
• Got print access via CUPS. Konica-Minolta provides the PPD’s for linux & mac!

So I submitted a post to perlmonks RE: all the 'history meme' brouhaha. I provided two one liners in Perl (Below) and asked for people to improve/shorten/spice up the 'history meme' via Perl. We'll see how that goes :).

So, here's what I gave them to start with:

history | perl -le 'while($l = <>) 
{$n=${[split(/s+/,$l)]}[2];$h{$n}++;} $i=0;foreach $k 
(reverse sort {$h{$a}<=>$h{$b}} keys %h) {last if $i > 9; print "$h{$k} $k"; $i++;}'

history | perl -le 'while($l = <>) ;
{$n=${[split(/s+/,$l)]}[2];$h{$n}++;} $i=0;@a=reverse 
sort {$h{$a}<=>$h{$b}} keys %h; print "$h{$a[$_]} $a[$_]" for (0..9)'

Matt showed up in my reader with this which I discovered is quite noisey on the intertubes right now. Here's my top ten.. Explanation below.

bsmith@ops654 [02:04:47 (0.00)] ~ 
-> history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
225 winto
82 ls
70 ssh
66 vi
65 checkuus
64 mssh
54 dig
53 cd
50 ping
41 cat

1. winto is a wrapper for screen that does this: screen -t $1 ssh $1.
2. I have to know what I'm looking at.
3. I'm a sysadmin, I'm all over the place.
4. Sysadmins write code and manage config files too.
5. A script that checks pool of servers that can cause some problems in our enviroment.
6. "mass ssh" do cool stuff on bunches of servers (must have in my world)
7. "What the hell is this ip?!"
8. Moving around..
9. "Is that server alive?!"
10. /dev/urandom ?

So I was looking at some of the python source for Compiz Fusions' CCM and was quite amused to find this near the tip top of the code:

    try:
        import sexy
        has_sexy = True
    except ImportError:
        print "Info: No sexy-python package found, don't worry it's optional."
        has_sexy = False

So I got bored again, go figure. I wrote some code that converts my titles into 'slugs' much like wordpress. I then altered my blog table to include it as an index, wrote a quick script to parse my titles and insert them and changed my templates to link via them. Throw in some rewrite magic and wala; hot sauce.

I'm glad I wrote this code base to be simple to manage and extend :). I'm kinda curious how it would fair from a security standpoint, however. Maybe I should just write it off and go ahead with something already baked; but it's fun to muck around like this.

Also, I'd like to appologize for anyone subscribing via a reader. It'll mark all my posts as unread due to the changes.

Sorry!

We have a venue! Still coordinating other aspects of the conference. See more details here: PyOhio Wiki

So after having a conversation with Dave yesterday about search engines, I decided to fix up the urls on my site to be more search engine friendly. I had some really ugly linkage and I'm glad I spent some time cleaning that up. Yay. Me.