Ryme or Rheason

Five Guys vs. In 'N Out - once and for all...

2011-05-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

OK. I've had enough with people arguing for one burger over the other and I'm here to settle the dispute once and for all...

The burger from Five Guys can blow away the burger from In 'N Out....on a good day. The problem is that Five Guys is a franchise that is inconsistent, at best. I know I shouldn't be talking about consistency when I haven't made a blog post in almost 3 years and the last one was on computer nerd-related shit, but still...I've been to four locations throughout the U.S., in Florida, New York, D.C., and California and have had drastically different experiences at each one. I've had burgers that were awesome and some that were overcooked and flavorless. The better ones have been better than any In 'N Out burger that I've ever had, but they've been few and far between.

At In 'N Out, you always know what you're going to get...an insanely good burger at an insanely low price. Absolute consistency.

It's also hard to compare the burgers because of the price discrepancy...a burger from In 'N Out will set you back around $2, while one from Five Guys is closer to $6. For 3X the price, it is certainly not 3X as good...even on a good day.

Now for the fries...

The fries from both chains each go great with their respective burgers. Five Guys makes a nice, meaty steak fry that is very potatoey (is that a word?). It's a true potato lover's fry with a heavy feel and flavor. In 'N Out's fries are a bit more inspired by McDonald's. They're thin and crisp, but still have a great potato taste.

To sum it up, Five Guys is like a box of chocolates...you never know what you're gonna get. In 'N Out serves up a consistently good burger and fries and will never disappoint. On any given day, a Five Guys burger may blow you out of the water, or make you wish you went to In 'N Out instead...

So, stop arguing and just enjoy the burgers. Both will help to make you fat and look like a true American.

automount with sshfs and sshpass

2008-05-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

sshfs is great for mounting a remote filesystem and having it appear as a local drive. The major drawback is that it is difficult to automatically mount with sshfs at startup without using ssh keys. Using sshpass, I have worked out a solution.

For this example, let's assume the following parameters:

username on remote host: user
password on remote host: password
remote host: host.com
directory: /directory
mount point: /media/ssh

In order to accomplish the mount, you will need to create two files:

A file containing just your password, followed by a newline. In the example, I will assume this file is located at /home/user/.pwd. If your password is "password", it should look like this:

password
A bash script that indicates how to use sshpass. In the example, I will assume that this file is located at /home/user/ssh.sh. Note that the location of your .pwd file must be included after the -f option. This file must be made executable.
#!/bin/bash sshpass -f /home/user/.pwd ssh $*

To mount this from the command line, you could issue the following command:

sudo mount -t fuse sshfs#user@host.com:/directory /media/ssh -o ssh_command=/home/user/ssh.sh

However, the title of this post is automounting, so let's do that. To automount this ssh server, you can add a line like this to your /etc/fstab:

sshfs#user@host.com:/directory /media/ssh fuse ssh_command=/home/user/ssh.sh 0 0

That's it. Pretty cool. Hope you find it as useful as I do.

Create an alias for your mysql database

2008-05-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

I administer a mysql database that is updated with new snapshots (i.e. completely overwritten) every week and have users that generally need to access the latest snapshot. However, occasionally they will need to access an older version of the database, so all versions must be kept online. In the past, when I received a snapshot, I would create a database with the date of the snapshot in the title and send out an email to the users with the new connection information. However, since mysql database names are simply the name of the directory that they are stored in, it is easy to create an alias for the latest snapshot of the database simply by creating a symbolic link. For example, on a linux system the databases are generally stored under /var/lib/mysql. So, if you have a database named db_20080304 you can create a symbolic link to this database like:

ln -s /var/lib/mysql/db_20080304 /var/lib/mysql/db_latest

Now you should have a database called db_latest. You can repeat this process each time you receive a new snapshot of the database. Note that mysql views this as another database so you will need to set the permissions on db_latest separately from db_20080304. The nice thing about this is that you will only need to set permission once. The users do not need to have permissions on the actual databases; only on db_latest. I'm not sure how this will work on other operating systems, but would be glad to hear comments.

Locking root account in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) has nasty side effects

2008-05-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

When I installed Hardy on my machine, I enabled the root account and then decided to disable it again. I did this by following the instructions I found on the web:


# Enabling the account
$ sudo passwd -u root

# Disabling the account
$ sudo passwd -l root

However, I quickly ran into an issue where the root's cron jobs would not run because the account was locked. After some fiddling, I fixed the problem by first re-enabling the root account:


$ sudo passwd -u root

and then, disabling the account properly:


$ sudo passwd -d root

After this, all works as it should.

VMware keyboard annoyances on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy)

2008-05-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Like several other people I've had issues with my keyboard modifiers (shift, alt, ctrl, etc.) when switching from the guest OS (Windows) back to the host (Linux). Apparently, the easiest fix for this is to use the gnome keyboard layout gui to briefly switch the keyboard map to something random, then back to the original layout. So, here is a short perl script that does the same using the setxkbmap utility. If you want to use it, make sure to change the $orig_kb_map variable to match your keyboard model. You can create an application launcher on your Desktop or panel and simply click it regain control of your keyboard modifiers. Until there is an official fix for this bug, this is at least bearable.


#!/usr/bin/perl

# vmkbfix: a script to reset the keyboard layout after switching out of
# a virtual machine.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $orig_kb_model = "pc101";  # The keyboard model
my $switch_kb_model = "pc104";  # The model to switch to briefly
my $SETXKBMAP = "/usr/bin/setxkbmap"; # location of setxkbmap

# briefly switching to a different keyboard model, then switching back
`$SETXKBMAP -model $switch_kb_model`;
`$SETXKBMAP -model $orig_kb_model`;

sqlite rocks!

2008-05-10T08:57:00.001-07:00

I feel like I'm late to the party on this one, but I just discovered sqlite and the associate Perl module, DBD::sqlite. For those that are later than me, it is an implementation of SQL that resides in a single file, with no setup of any kind involved. I'm using it to store data that I frequently need only portions of in my Perl program. This provides a powerful & elegant way of doing just that. I hope you find it as useful as I do!

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) has a gdm ssh client!

2008-05-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Hardy apparently has an ssh client built into gdm, making it easy to login to a remote machine and see your desktop. Seems to work pretty well at the moment, but it would be nice if you could log in to your local machine simultaneously. Something ala NoMachine NX.

Hello World

2008-05-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

This is simply a place to post my random thoughts for all the world's glory.