Jason Hancock

The other day I was hacking together a quick app to monitor some rss feeds and stuff some data into a MySQL database. One thing I really hate is writing XML parsers. I can do it easily, I just find it tedious. Couple that with my lack of knowledge of the RSS format and I wasn’t looking forward to parsing the XML at all. A quick google search turned up SimplePie, an RSS feed parser written in PHP.

I enjoy grilling a lot. I had been watching a lot of food network lately and I kept seeing shows where they would cook pizza directly on their grills. I settled down one night to watch an episode of Good Eats and Alton was demonstrating how to make pizza on a grill. I knew I had to try it. The dough: 16 oz (by weight) of all purpose flour 1 envelope rapid rise yeast (not active dry yeast) 1 Tbs.

I’m a big fan of Stone Brewing Company. They release a special edition anniversary brew each year. This year, they released an IPA. I’ve picked up their anniversary brew religiously for the last five years. My favorite was their 10th anniversary brew. It too was an IPA. This year’s brew is a close second. If you have the opportunity to try it, I highly recommend it. You can usually find it at Whole Foods Supermarkets or at BevMo.

I have been shooting a Nikon D80 camera for the past couple of years. I wanted to know how many shutter actuations the camera had seen (essentially, how many pictures I had taken). This information is stored in the image’s EXIF data. I’m running Fedora 12 on my laptop. In order to read the EXIF data, I installed the Image::ExifTool PERL module. You can do this by running the following command:

I’ve been working with Puppet lately as a configuration management utility. It is written in Ruby, and it appears that Ruby developers love YAML. I’m working on a script to parse some of the YAML reports into something intelligible. I started by installing the php-syck package to enable me to parse YAML; sudo yum install php-syck sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart This installed php-syck-0.55-4.el5.rf on my server. The, I wrote up some test code.

If you’re using the tdbsam password backend in samba and need to check to see if a user’s account exists, you can use this command line(replace with the username of your user: test`pdbedit -w -L |awk -F":"'{ print $1 }'|grep '<username>$'|wc -l`-eq 0||echo"account exists" If you’re not using the tdbsam password backend and are using the regular smbpasswd file, you can run this command instead: test`cat smbpasswd |awk -F":"'{ print $1 }'|grep '^<username>$'|wc -l`-eq 0||echo"account exists"

First, I’d like to thank Cory Wynn. Without his help and inspiration, I probably would still be burning images to physical media for OS installation. Next, let’s talk about what you will need to pull this off. I have Fedora 12 x86_64 running on my laptop. I have a server on which I would like to put CentOS 5.4. I’d like to do this without burning a DVD image for installation (because the box doesn’t have an optical drive).

There are plenty of tutorials out there that show you how to set up a local yum repo that is a mirror of your distrubutions repository. This is not one of those tutorials. Imagine you have some software that you have packaged into an rpm for distribution on your company’s servers. Let’s call the name of the package examplepackage. You’d like the convienience of having it in a yum repo somewhere so that you only have to type yum install examplepackage on your fleet of thousands of machines (or script it, or use a configuration management utility like puppet to install it).

I was sabotaged tonight. I headed out to get a haircut. Unfortunately, there was a Gamestop next door to the barber shop. I stopped in and pre-ordered Starcraft 2 and got a beta key. Downloaded and installed the game. I played one game randomly against someone and got my @$$ handed to me. Played a game with a friend cooperatively vs. the AI and we won. Fun stuff. I’ve never played starcraft before, but I like it so far.

We started working on the nursery today. The previous owners put up yellow gingham wallpaper that we decided to tear down. We tore off the top layer of the wallpaper by hand, then used a garden sprayer to apply equal parts of warm water and fabric softener (we used Downey). The wall paper adhesive was then able to be peeled from the wall by hand. We had to use putty knives in the corners.