The Geekery

“Major Hayden” has a handy tip for those running Irssi on a server in a different timezone…

Also links back to the Irssi documentation with other handy tips.

Sysadmin1138 has an interesting followup to an Ask Slashdot question about IT admin abuse… It’s a pretty complete answer, and good insight into what we system administrators have access to, and what we can do.

It’s easy to see from the response that abuse is easy for us, we have the access, the temptation is there, but we’re not all bad. I’ve known people to cross the fine line between doing their job, and looking a little deeper at somebody’s email account whilst “fixing”. It’s not hard for us to peek at chat conversations whilst we sniff out connectivity issues for servers.

Whilst we may possess the power to do so, most of us follow ethics, if not officially documented ethics, our own personal ones. And whilst there are always a few bad apples, it applies to all industries, the large majority of us are good, don’t let the few bad ones make you think we’re all out to spy on you.

Courtesy of LOPSA, I stumbled across Matt Simmons blog. A recent post discussed us all being a large source of information, and how we all suck it in from various sources. He lists off his recent change in using mailing lists, and several other sources of information (including an extensive feed export).

Courtesy of Matt, my feed collection is huge, instead of just large, and was the reason I just flipped over to RSSOwl (see my previous post). I did some reorganization, and my new collection can be found here. I did some tidying, some reorganization, removing of duplicate and broken feeds (something RSSOwl flags clearly). He has some interesting sources, and contacts, worth checking out his sources of information.

Funnily, I realized that Matt is also using the Cleaker theme, which I decided to take a look at over 2 years ago now. Interesting how sysadmins brain’s work

For a while, I’d been using an offline reader, then Google did some upgrades, so I swapped. I’ve been using Google Reader since late 2006, diligently serving my news to me, in its simple, and easy to use interface.

Recently I decided to tinker with a new offline reader, RSSOwl. Simple interface, easy to use, customizable searches, article flagging, and sharing features. Well worth a peek…

Read more…

Unfortunately from 1716 CST through to 1845 CST, the Netdork server was unreachable due to a runaway process. Unable to get onto the server I was forced to initiate a remote reboot of the machine to regain control.

Now the server is back up and stable, I’ll be implementing controls to stop these processes from running away with themselves (I’m sure they went to Vegas).

What do the following things have in common…

• Shipping Containers
• Submarine Diesel Engines
• Rope Bridge
• Van de Graff “silo”
• 660 lb fly wheel

No idea yet? Maybe this will help. Click on the videos at the top, watch each one. Very cool stuff…

I recently mentioned that I was going to try starting to post more again, and so here is my attempt at rebooting myself…

I mentioned a while back that BBC has an odd way of putting headlines.  Whilst the body isn’t funny, the way the title was announced seems a little zombie like…

Severed hand attack victim dies

Was she attacked by a severed hand?  Sadly no, full story is here, but the title makes it seem like she was.

Having watched the TouchPro 2 roll out to all the other major carriers in the US, AT&T finally got their version, renamed the Tilt 2.  AT&T released their edition with Windows Mobile 6.5 right out the gate, which is why I suspect it was held back… I patiently waited for its release, and went out and got it the day after the release… So what do I think?

It really has.  I’ve not posted anything since August.  Not from the lack of things to post, but lack of motivation, as well as too much work stuffs to contend with.  I plan on remedying this issue over the next few days/weeks.  Unlike some who vouch to post daily (which I know I cannot without driveling crap everywhere), I’ll work on maybe once a week with stuff I’m working on.