davidy

attention

Watching video is harder than reading

This video (below) complains that we’re getting ever worse at focusing our attention Personally, I find it much harder to focus on video than I do on reading. My preferred means of learning is reading, followed by listening, followed by video. I think it’s because reading permits you

asterisk

Automatically reboot multiple Cisco 79xx phones

We’re upgrading our Asterisk PABX at the office soon, as as part of the preparation, I needed a way to automatically reboot about 20 Cisco 79xx IP phones. I found a reference to a ‘reboot.pl’ script at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+phone+cisco+79xx, but

ebook

Grab any of Packts geekbooks for $10 until July 5th

The folks at Packt Publishing asked me to mention that they’re having 10 years $10 special, to celebrate their 10-year anniversary. Their entire range of books (geared towards niche geek topics) are available for $10 each. This is a good opportunity to brush up on some rusty areas, or

dadops

Using a Foscam Pro and FI8909W as an iOS baby monitor

A friend who’s just joined the #dadops team asked me what baby monitor solution we use for our 2-year-old. According to my wife, this is one of the best tech investments I’ve made… The hardware (Foscam FI8909W) I bought a Foscam FI8909W off eBay (the easiest and cheapest

opinion

Carving your own path

I liked this point in the story of the development of Circa, my favorite news app: So much of what is released tends to be derivative in some way. But when you’re solving a problem in an entirely new manner, you have to carve your own path

wordpress

Making postie work with cron jobs, fails with wp-config.php outside of web root

I use the excellent Postie plugin to post to this blog via email. I’ve been battling for days to get it to automatically check the mailbox for new message though, and while I still haven’t got it working using WP-Cron (WordPress’ “pseudo-cron”), I’ve finally managed to get

reflection

Confirmation Bias

I read Shane Parrish’s mental model on confirmation bias this evening, and found it resonated with me. I’ve notice that once I’ve struggled with a decision and come to a conclusion, then I find myself coming up with more and more reasons why my decision was the

productivity

The illusion of speed

An excerpt from the excellent Farnam Street Blog (below). I’m trying to be more intentional about how I spend my time, and be more “present in the moment”. I especially liked the following, re the difference that it makes to slow down, not considering all hours to be equal:

reading

On the joys of Actually Reading

Against the author’s wishes, I’m sharing the article titled “Actually Reading”, a comment on the fact that we (I’m guilty of this) often appreciate an article for it social “sharability” rather than the value it adds to us. I’m trying to combat this in my own

junos

Restart VRRP on JUNOS to fix master/master issues

I spent about 30 min this evening chasing a non-existing VRRP issue between 2 JUNOS SRX devices after a hardware drop-in replacement. One was configured as master, one as backup. Both were in the master status (normally indicating a lack of L2 connectivity), but each could ping the other on

dadops

What we imply to our kids by the way we live

I enjoyed Minimalism with Kids, finding several point re minimalism and life in general which I intend to apply. This paragraph stood out: In a family, minimalism is really a conversation about what’s important. What’s necessary. Why we own things and do things. A lot of times, a

junos

Copying SSH host private keys between JUNOS devices to when replacing hardware

A certain customer of mine is (rightly or wrongly) pedantic about security warnings. Recently, we did a hardware replacement of a JUNOS device (an SRX240 firewall). While the config was a drop-in replacement, users who tried to SSH to the host post-migration would normally see an SSH “host key has

centos

Importing existing RAID devices into new Linux installation

Recently I had to rebuild a CentOS5 VM host as CentOS6. My VMs were stored on a RAID1 pair (seperate from the OS disks). To avoid any possibility of impacting the VM data during the re-installation, I removed the VM data disks from the host during the reinstall. After successfully

productivity

Sending tasks to Things.app via email

I stumbled across this useful hint on the Things forums which adds a feature to my workflow which I felt important enough to record here. Most of my digital inputs come via email. It’s hugely useful to be able to (with a single keystroke) forward an email to my

icinga

Monitoring OSX with Icinga / Nagios using NRPE

I have a fairly comprehensive Icinga monitoring platform monitoring my various linux hosts, but one area which has been lacking until now is the monitoring of the OSX Mavericks Mac Mini that I use for a home media center. Considering this is used by my family to watch TV/Movies,

icinga

Monitoring Veeam Backup and Replication 7 with Icinga / Nagios

We’ve recently deployed a Veeam Backup and Replication 7 platform, and needed to monitor the ongoing success of the backup / replication jobs. I identified a plugin which does most of what’s required, but seems to have 2 current shortcomings: 1. In-progress jobs trigger false warnings 2. Date calculation

ssl

Solving vsftpd's unsupported record version unknown 48.48 error

I use FTPS with vsftpd to update my WordPress plugins. This means that the wordpress files don’t need to be writeable by the webserver user, which adds another layer of protection and separation. I make FTPS available to localhost only, and force SSL encryption end-to-end. This makes debugging a

how-to

How to setup a Tor Relay (and why you should)

I just jumped in at the end of a conversation on App.net about the latest NSA revelation, the undermining of worldwide encryption standards for the benefit of the self-appointed world-police. @isaiah pointed out that we (geekdom in general) don’t get as excited about civilian casualties in Iraq, or

debian

Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted with WordPress on Debian

My Debian Squeeze host started having trouble performing WordPress 3.5 core or plugin updates – in the error logs, I’d see messages like: Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted After scouring the internet, attempting to adjust memory limits on php.ini, apache, etc, I eventually discovered the solution

cacti

Fixed Cacti not displaying interfaces for HP 1810G switch

While implementing a new network for a customer, we took an existing HP 1810G 48-port switch under management. As per normal, we setup monitoring (Icinga) and graphing (Cacti), but while the switch responded to Cacti sysname polls (leading us to believe it was happy), it didn’t return any interface

bandersnatch

Bandersnatch - The Jabber Logger

What is Bandersnatch? Bandersnatch is tool to log Jabber instant messaging traffic, and to generate meaningful usage statistics. Bandersnatch is designed for a corporate intranet environment. It is designed for administrators who wish to monitor the use / abuse of their Jabber servers. Peer-Policing Bandersnatch is intended to be a deterrent

bandersnatch

Generate logs from your jabberd2 server using Bandersnatch

This tutorial attempts to guide the reader through the process of installing Bandersnatch for use with an existing Jabberd2 server. Get the sources We need the following: * Bandersnatch * Perl 5.8.x * Perl POE * Perl module: XML::Stream * Perl module: Net::Jabber 2.x * Perl module: DBI (mysql) * Perl module:

phplist

WP-PHPList

The WP-PHPlist plugin integrates PHPList into your WordPress blog, giving you all the mailing list power of PHPList, within the beautiful styling, theme, and widgets of your WordPress theme. This tutorial will take you through the installation of the plugin, assuming that you’re starting with a vanilla install of

JACJ Manual

In preparing an author bio (harder than it sounds!) for a PHPList book I’ve been authoring, I dug up this old copy of a JAJC (a win32 jabber client) manual I wrote in 2003, using Docbook XML. It’s probably no longer valid, but here it is anyway, for