Software Engineer

Jason Hancock

last update:

Here’s a snippet that will print out perl’s @INC path perl -e'print join("\n", @INC);\n' And my results on CentOS 5.5: /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8

things

I’m a day shy of not posting for almost two months. That’s crazy! A lot has changed in the last 60 days. I’ve moved on from SpecificMedia. I’m scheduled to start a new position with Disney on Monday. I’m pretty stoked about that. I’ve had a week off between jobs and I’ve been doing some Android development in that time. I haven’t really been developing too much in Android…more like learning the framework/ecosystem/eclipse IDE/ and getting reacquainted with Java.

Update 2017-10-06: It’s 2017. Don’t use the code below, but use the excellent dalen/dnsquery module instead. Leaving the original post below for historical reasons. I use dynamic DNS at my residence so that I can always log into my server remotely without having to know the IP. I run denyhosts on the server hosting my website at Rackspace to attempt to contain brute-force ssh attacks. If you enter the wrong password N times, your IP gets banned and you can’t connect to my server anymore via ssh.

It’s 9:36PM on a Monday night. For the past few weeks, I’ve been picking up our son from daycare and getting home about an hour before my wife. During that time, I like to crank up some tunes on our home stereo receiver. The problem is that my server and my pc are about 25 feet away from my receiver. I was plugging a long headphone extension cord with a headphone to RCA splitter into the front of the reciever, but our son is on the verge of crawling and I don’t wany any extra or unnecessary cables to be within his reach.

scale 9x

I attended the Southern California Linux Expo(SCALE 9x) conference for the last three days. It was awesome. I learned about some really cools stuff going on in the Linux/FOSS community, gained new insight into stuff I’m familiar with, and got some cool schwag from the vendors. I’m patiently waiting for the spam from the vendors to hit my inbox…I wonder who will be first? One of the things that I found at the conference was OpenShot - A non-linear video editor for Linux.

For a while there, all I wanted was to be a professional photographer. I attended workshops, experimented with stuff from Strobist, took some classes, shot a couple weddings, spent a fortune on gear, and thought what I wanted was to be a wedding photographer. All I saw were dollar signs thinking it was a quick way to earn some additional income on the weekends. I even had the audacity to print up some business cards.

I recently built a small squid proxy cluster. I wanted to see how the proxies were performing. Squid has a built in snmp service with all sorts of checks available. We have pnp4nagios configured to graph the performance data from any nagios checks, so all I needed to do was write a script to query the oid’s and report the results. Unfortunately, the items I wanted to report on (cacheProtoClientHttpRequests, cacheHttpInKb, cacheHttpOutKb, etc.

I’m in the process of building a web based rpm/yum repo management utility. I needed to be able to query an rpm file on disk and get the name, version, and release number of the package. I was hoping to find some sort of php interface to librpm, but my search didn’t turn up any existing code. I was hoping to avoid using a call to the exec function, but I ended up getting lazy.

feeling better

I was pretty stressed out in that last post. That day was really an inflection point…I’m feeling a lot better about stuff. Back to work….

My attitude lately hasn’t been great. I think I’m a little stressed out and it’s negatively impacting my mood and relations with my coworkers and family. All I see is doom and gloom pretty much everywhere I look. The littlest waves in my pool set me off. This isn’t good. I can’t keep going like this. Our vacation to Hawaii can’t get here soon enough, even though the vacation itself is causing me a good deal of stress because I just want everything to be perfect with regard to my photography while we’re there, yet I know already that I’m going to hate all of the images that I capture because I’m too critical of myself.