Scripting Sysadmin

RSS readers...

2013-03-20T09:27:00.002-05:00

I tried feedly for a couple of days but I just can't get used to the interface. Its never clear how many unread items I have. I don't want a magazine interface. What I'd really like is a river of news, and if thats not available then a google reader type interface.

The second problem I ran into with feedly is that I can't open links in the background. That is a must for me.

I guess that only leaves me with running a RSS reader locally. In the short term I'm probably going to go with planetplanet.org. I've used it before, and really like it once its setup. I just don't like the fact that I have to edit a configuration file and restart the app every time I want to add an RSS feed. In the long term, I might be able to write my own RSS reader, if I ever get time.

Update: Forgot to mention that I am using liferea on Linux, which seems nice, but I haven't used it as much as feedly. Will update later.

Why RSS is important...

2013-03-17T09:15:00.002-05:00

A lot of people have written about the death of Google Reader.

When twitter and facebook started to take off, I moved to those services to get my news. I was thinking along the lines of what Robert Scoble tweeted:

For me Google Reader has been dead since 2009. Here's a post I wrote back then: scobleizer.posterous.com/why-i-dont-use… Social killed it.
— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) March 14, 2013

However I noticed that the content and news items shared on social networks were lacking in technical content. If you want to get an idea of what kind of technical articles I like to read, take a look at my link blog. I can't get this content via a social network.

Google Reader may be dead, but I hope RSS sticks around.

C++11 Wrapper Pattern - via Herb Sutters talk

2013-01-15T10:08:00.002-06:00

template class wrap {
private:
T t; // wrapped object
::: // wrapper-specific state
public:
wrap( T t_ = T{} ) : t{t_} { }
template
auto operator()( F f ) -> decltype(f(t)) { // strategy: take any code (!)
// wrapper work
auto ret = f(t); // pass the wrapped object to it
// more wrapper work
return ret; // and return the result
}

From Herbs talk : video link
Slides (Example above from page 9)

The App World

2012-12-09T06:55:00.003-06:00

After having used Windows 8 for the past couple of weeks, I've come to a realization. The applications in the windows 8 store are quite different from the normal types of windows applications. The applications are based on a hybrid of web and Microsoft technologies, and contain content. These sorts of applications are distinctly different from the sort of applications that we were used to on windows (or Linux/Mac OS
X). For the first time, we have content based applications originally made popular on the iPad and iPhone brought to the desktop.

I don't see any other desktop operating system that has this sort of eco-system. Mac OS X applications are of the old school variety. If you want content (games, magazines, etc.) you either visit a website with a web browser, or download an iPad/iPhone application. Maybe that's why so many people carry a laptop and an iPad.

On Linux, there are various different types of desktop environments. GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, Ubuntu Unity are the more traditional variety desktops. KDE's plasma is the closest I've seen to an open source app type environment, but I just don't find the interface user friendly.

Using Windows 8 not only made me realize the difference between apps and applications, but that apps bring around a different sort of functionality. For instance, Flipboard for iOS brings about a news reading experience that no news reader on the desktop can match. Same for the nytimes app. Windows 8 is the first environment that lets you do both traditional and new style "app"lications on the same device.

Question is, do people still need the functionality contained in the old style applications? Mobile and tablet sales numbers seem to say that the consumer world doesn't. There is still a need in the business world for the old style applications, but for how long?

Getting used to Windows 8–Closing a Windows 8 app

2012-11-11T09:48:00.001-06:00

I opened a PDF file to read in the default reader app on windows 8. Once done reading I switched to the desktop to get rid of the PDF. Since its open in the reader, Windows complains that the file is open in another app. How do you close a metro application?

Move your mouse cursor to the top of screen. Left click and drag the mouse to the bottom. The app window should grow smaller and then go away. Your app should now be closed.

Windows 8, how to change a new account to administrator

2012-10-06T10:04:00.000-05:00

I used a particular online account (for example, account1@hotmail.com) to sign in and use Windows 8. Account1@hotmail.com has administrator privileges.

When I sign in with account2@hotmail.com and go to the user account metro control panel I can't find an option to make it an administrator. You have to use the older desktop style administrator panel to switch the account from a standard user to administrator.

1. Windows key + X, and then control panel
2. Under users, there should be the option "Change account type".
3. Change account2@hotmail.com to administrator and you're done.

What percentage of the web is using open source?

2012-09-22T22:32:00.000-05:00

via What Percentage of the Web Uses Open-Source?

Developing websites for retina display

2012-09-22T22:29:00.002-05:00

Don't use Javascript libraries for retinafying

I'm not sure if this is a good idea. What about those people (currently in the majority) who have normal displays and limited bandwidth or data cap. As it is web pages are so bloated, what happens when you add web content that is made for retina displays. Suddenly these bloated pages are now an order of magnitude larger in size.

Social as a platform has failed.

2012-09-20T23:14:00.000-05:00

Why IFTTT removing twitter triggers is a warning for developers

Yes, IFTTT is a service beloved by tech nerds, but this change also signals something important about Twitter’s future relationship with developers — something contrary to its previous statements about its recent API changes.

Despite what twitter may or may not have said, it has been clear to me that the twitter API changes over the past few months are a clear warning for developers. This latest move of making IFTTT remove its twitter triggers has to be the death blow for the third party developers community, not just a warning. Come to think of it, the sale of Seesmic to Hootsuite may have been the death blow. In any case, twitter wants you to use its crappy interfaces and lock you in. They are not a platform.

And by the way, its not just twitter. Everyone has realized that they have to earn money. All those venture capitalist are looking for returns on their investment. Even Google is doing this with its walled garden that is Google Plus. Facebook, which always was a walled garden, has dumped HTML5 on its mobile app for a native app and are attempting to bring improved targeted advertising to the users of this native app. Companies building on top of social platforms have failed too. Zyngas stock is down in the dumps even though they actually make money from the virtual goods they sell, etc.

Social as a platform has failed.

How new versions of successful products lead to failure

2012-09-20T22:01:00.001-05:00

Or do they?

New versions of successful products would fail in the past as customers got frustrated with the missing or altered features that they were used to. Dave Winer writes about it here:

People thought we had removed features from ThinkTank, because they had used the Apple II or IBM PC versions. In fact this was a completely new codebase, and we shipped early because there was a lack of software on the Mac. So it didn't have a lot of the features of the earlier product. No matter, the users were outraged by this. They thought they had bought a better computer, and here was the product with less features. We totally didn't anticipate this, because from our point of view it was a major accomplishment to get something out at all.

He writes about dBase and his own product ThinkTank as historical examples. I'm not sure though that we are living in the same world. dBase and ThinkTank didn't have the advantage that is brought by "Network Effect". In the case of twitter, despite the fact that new twitter clients have missing features and that twitter is actively destroying its third party developer community, I can't leave. All the people and services are "tweeting", and until they all move away en-mass to another service, I can't leave.

Apple doesn't have network effects on its side, but they do have a great brand. I'm not sure if a great brand is as powerful as "network effects", but it sure seems like it is. I guess we'll see.

Javascript API for Google drive

2012-09-20T13:46:00.001-05:00

Google Introduces JavaScript Support for the Drive API

To further encourage developers in creating Google Drive applications, Google hasintroduced JavaScript support for the Drive API.

Looks interesting. Should be fun to play around with together with Node.js.

Article on automating your powershell reports

2012-09-20T12:05:00.001-05:00

Automating PowerShell Reports, Part 1

For those of you stuck doing the really boring but necessary work on windows server, here is a good article on automating powershell reports.

Gatekeeper added to OS X Lion 10.7.5

2012-09-20T10:44:00.001-05:00

Apple Adds Gatekeeper to Lion with OS X 10.7.5

According to the article the default setting is the middle one, which is "Mac app store and identified developers". I wonder what an identified developer is. I suspect that open source developers might not be "identified". Which means you won't be able to install software like vlc without changing the setting in the control panel. But before you could do that, you would have to know about gatekeeper first. I think 10.7.5 is going to cause a lot of headaches for a lot of people.

Do you trust the operating system that comes installed on your new hardware?

2012-09-20T09:18:00.004-05:00

Brand-new hardware -- now with malware pre-installed!

What Microsoft discovered is that electronics manufacturers' products were being compromised by insecure supply chains. In most cases, the manufacturers were buying, either knowingly or unknowingly, low-cost counterfeit software loaded with malware. Once the counterfeit software is installed, it's ultimately delivered to unsuspecting consumers.

Usually when I buy a new machine, I end up wiping the operating system of the system, and installing a fresh copy of an operating system. Sometimes its because I want to replace the original OS with Linux. Other times its mostly because I want to get a fresh install of Windows without the bloatware. Now there is another reason, though the article says the problem is mostly with vendors in China, its still safer to start fresh.

Top 20 OS X command-line secrets by infoworld

2012-09-20T09:11:00.002-05:00

Top 20 OS X command-line secrets for power users

They are:

airport
caffeinate
curl
DNS Cache
filetree
locate
lsof
networksetup
open
opendiff

Click on the article if you don’t know what some of them do.

Screenshots of zsh themes

2012-09-20T09:10:00.001-05:00

http://zshthem.es/

A website that shows screenshots of all the oh-my-zsh themes.

Links for 2012-08-11 [del.icio.us]

2012-08-12T00:00:00-07:00

check

Links for 2012-07-06 [del.icio.us]

2012-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

Links for 2012-07-05 [del.icio.us]

2012-07-06T00:00:00-07:00

State of the Climate

Links for 2012-07-03 [del.icio.us]

2012-07-04T00:00:00-07:00

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2012-04-18T00:00:00-07:00

Movie: The Digestive System
Watch this movie!

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2012-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

Links for 2012-03-29 [del.icio.us]

2012-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

Show and Share

Revisiting OS X

2012-03-12T05:59:00.000-05:00

Started using OS X again (Lion), and was a little happy to see that despite all the changes, dmesg still works.

This post is a good pointer to get write capabilities for ntfs on Lion.

On Two UI’s in one OS…

2011-09-14T04:27:00.001-05:00

As Microsoft took away the traditional Start menu from the legacy desktop, a click on the new Start button now inevitably invokes the Metro-styled Start screen. Run an app there, though, and you won’t find it running on the legacy desktop – and vice versa. Thanks to this, for example, you may start Internet Explorer on the desktop and then find that the instance of IE running under the Metro UI doesn’t talk to the other one, so that none of your tabs are transferred between the two. Try to explain that to your grandparents when they get a PC with Windows 8 preloaded.

via SiliconFilter

2011-07-29T11:12:00.002-05:00

Happy Sysadmin Day! :)

P.S, thanks to Tom Merrit for the reminder, does a great job at Tech News Today.

2011-05-29T07:17:00.000-05:00

In Gnome-3 you can Alt - Tab as normal through active applications.
But you can also Alt-~ to cycle through only active application windows.
For instance, firefox usually has two windows open for me, the browser window, and the download window.

First hour of Gnome 3 usage...

2011-05-24T19:59:00.002-05:00

Fedora 15 is out, and includes the brand spanking new Gnome 3. I thought I'd try it out. The idea is to make the interface simpler, cleaner and more modern. What I don't understand is how the changes in Gnome 3 do that? I've read all the justifications that are out there. I don't agree with them. Maybe these changes make sense given time. I'll try to use it for a few days and see.

Here are thoughts after the first hour or so of usage...

I downloaded the LiveCD which boots into a fully functional Fedora system. To install to the hard drive you start the installation application. Once the system is installed, the installation application exits and you are left with the Fedora system running of the LiveCD. I look for a way to reboot. I can't find a way to reboot or shutdown the system. On the top right hand side if you click on your user name, the only option is to suspend the machine. Ummm...

Turns out you have to press Alt - and click on the username and the suspend option will change to "Power Off". WTH!

Ok, I restart the system. First thing I want to do is to change the fonts. They are never right on any distro. How do I do that? Umm....

Turns out gnome-shell in Gnome 3 is a complete rewrite based on CSS and JS and you have to go edit:
/usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css.

Or you can install Gnome Tweak Tool:
in a terminal as root run the following command: yum install gnome-tweak-tool. Thats right, changing fonts so your eyes don't hurt means you have to install an obscure utility you didn't know about. How simple.

Want to minimize/maximize a window...

As can be seen in the screenshot, there is only one button on the window. Close.

If you want to maximize the window, you can double click on the title. The Gnome developers believe you don't need to minimize. You can still get those options if you right click on the title.

No wonder Ubuntu decided to go to Unity. These changes make no sense to me, it just seems to make things harder.

Chromebook fast boot doesn't seem that fast...

2011-05-15T20:34:00.002-05:00

Years ago, I saw BeOS boot up in 15 seconds. Lately I've installed an SSD on my Core i3 laptop and have Ubuntu Natty boot up in seconds. Each of these are full fledged OS's. Keeping that in mind the chromebook's boot up speed doesn't seem that fast to me. Anyone else feel that way? I think 7 seconds is 5 seconds too much!

Six Reasons Why Chromebooks Are a Bad Idea - Technology Review

2011-05-14T14:14:00.000-05:00

Reading this article Six Reasons Why Chromebooks Are a Bad Idea - Technology Review I ran into the following quote:

"People aren't ready to trust the cloud, claims InformationWeek:"

That makes it sound like its the peoples fault that they don't trust the cloud. It should be the other way round, you can't trust the cloud (networks go down, servers get hacked, etc.).

Bad advertising…

2010-12-17T20:42:00.001-06:00

I’m seeing this stupid ad, first in opera 11, and now on firefox:

How do I make it go away? There doesn’t seem to be a way to get it to go away!

Why I don’t like web services…

2010-12-16T16:46:00.001-06:00

Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? [Update: Yes]

I’ve used Del.icio.us for years. I have tons of bookmarks in there. Thankfully I should be able to export the bookmarks. The ability to export your data is rare. In any case, I’d like to have software running on my own machine. If the company goes out of business, I can at least keep running the installed software.