http://thejof.com/blog Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:54:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en (Image from In Latte Veritas on Flickr.) No, no, no, not that kind. This kind: jonathan@sfo:~~$ tweet Switching to shell aliases to curl commands to the Twitter API for posting to twitter now. But how? alias tweet='curl --basic --user jof:PASSWORD --data status="!$" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml' That's how. Thusly, http://twitter.com/jof/status/1462312199 http://thejof.com/blog/2009/04/06/twitter-curls/ I've been brainstorming with the idea of having a sort of "brain" process to keep tabs on systems I watch. For recurring problems with consistent solutions, my hope is that it can eventually take care of these without human intervention. Attracting or sending too much traffic to/from a peer? Query a ... http://thejof.com/blog/2009/02/22/brain-process/ [caption id="attachment_216" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="BoingBoing Gadgets 'Referer' hiding in effect"][/caption] I saw this the other day on a BoingBoing gadgets post from within Google Reader. Perhaps an over-zealous .htaccess over at BBG? Interesting spelling nitpick: the original HTTP 1.0 spec (now in RFC1945) misspelled referrer as 'referer' and now it has stuck as a ... http://thejof.com/blog/2009/02/16/referrer/ It's interesting to see what pages different people like to put up when they have to take down their site for a moment. Some put games, some put some information, some put cartoons trying to placate their users, and some just don't seem to get it. http://thejof.com/blog/2009/02/15/downtime/   [caption id="attachment_205" align="aligncenter" width="422" caption="Bandwidth graph for sfo.thejof.com"][/caption] Here's an example of how poking into what your applications are really doing can really save you some compute resources. In early December, I was adding a new job to my crontab and wanted to go over all the things that were running ... http://thejof.com/blog/2009/02/12/slightly-faster-but-still-faster/   [caption id="attachment_200" align="alignnone" width="469" caption="Terminal Glitch"][/caption] Why does this happen sometimes when I accidentally cat out some binary file to my terminal? How can I make it happen all the time, it's great! http://thejof.com/blog/2009/02/10/terminal-glitch/ I thankful for having the opportunity to talk with other UNIX users on a regular basis. I guess it's just one of those SF perks. A coworker and I started using POSIX error messages talking to each other online. Sometimes when you're being poked over a text-based messaging protocol (Jabber, IRC, ... http://thejof.com/blog/2009/02/10/speaking-in-posix/ For the last six years, I've been making use of the same gpg identity. I've copied my private key onto more workstations than I can recall at this point, so I've decided to try and be a little bit better about keeping my keys and signatures in-order and up-to-date. A couple ... http://thejof.com/blog/2009/02/07/new-gpg-key/ Vimperator is great. It's a Firefox 3 add-on that implements a separate input layer above normal Firefox controls so that you can navigate around all the browsing and browser settings with vim-like keybindings. A coworker turned me onto the thing, and I've found it makes working in a browser much more ... http://thejof.com/blog/2009/01/23/vimperator-slick/ Found this bash gem on some corporate BIND management scripts at work - ugh: ZTEST=$1 if [ "x$ZTEST" == "x" ]; then echo "Usage: ....." http://thejof.com/blog/2008/11/07/stupid-sanity-check/