Software Engineer

Jason Hancock

last update:

Well, first great news. We found out yesterday that we’re having a baby boy! Should be fun! Now, onto the geeky stuff….I finally found some time to sit down and start playing with Puppet. I’ve been reading through the docs and recipes and playing on a test server. This is a piece of software that is going to change how I work on a day-to-day basis. I’ve played around enough with it that I’m going to challenge myself to completely automate the configuration of our environment from the time the servers are turned over to us until they hit production.

fisheye update

A couple of the guys from work and I headed down to the Salton Sea over the weekend. It was a good trip. Great weather, although I wouldn’t have complained if there were more clouds in the sky. I used both my 50mm f/1.4 and my new 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lenses. I have found that half the fun of using the fisheye is using it in a way that doesn’t distort reality that much, but takes advantage of the extremely wide field of view.

fisheye

I was pretty bummed that I had finally saved enough cash to get the Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 lens, but then had to spend the money to fix some plumbing issues at our house. After much grumbling, I feel better about the way it turned out. I’ve been dying to use anything other than my 50mm f/1.4 lens just to use something different or to have another option. I decided I wanted a fisheye.

I hate that windows builds thumbnail cache files(thumbs.db) and stores them on disk in the directory with the images. I just don’t like it at all. You can turn off this behavior in XP by Control Panel > Folder Options > View > Do not cache thumbnails. But now you’re left with a bunch of these files littering your disk. If you happen to have cygwin installed(or if you copied your files to a Linux/Unix server), you can remove them by running this command: find /path/to/dir -iname "thumbs.

Until recently, I’ve been a very motivated and driven individual. Right now, I feel that I’m at the cusp of something that could be amazing, but I see the amount of work it could take and it feels like I’m not willing to put in the effort. My last semester as a senior in high school, I needed to get at least an A- in my Contemporary Literature class to qualify to graduate with Honors.

sniffing traffic

I was debugging an application at work the other day and needed to monitor tcp network traffic on ports 80 and 8080 from one of our servers to another server. I fired up tcp dump on the server with the following command: tcpdump -Xvnes 0-w /tmp/capture.log 'tcp and host 123.123.123.123 and (port 8080 or port 80)' Replace 123.123.123.123 with the real ip of the destination server. This created a dump file at /tmp/capture.

Well hello there. This blog has been off the net since August. I apologize for that. We moved into our new house in November, but our ISP won’t allow access to port 80 (the port over which web traffic flows) without me upgrading our plan to a business plan. I don’t feel like forking out any additional $$, so I decided to move my blog. Around the same time, I acquired the jasonhancock.

It has been more than 2.5 months since my blog was up. We moved out of our apartment on August 31 and put everything in storage. Since I host this on a server at our place, this meant the server went into storage. We were lucky enough to stay with Laura’s cousin Jacob for two months. We got the keys to our house on November 3, but I’ve just now been able to unpack enough to set up the server.

First, updates on our house….we’ve found that we have a tentative closing date of 8⁄31. This is good because we need to be out of our current place by 9⁄1. This means that my web page/blog may be down for a while while we’re in the process of getting the cable hooked up at the new place and getting my server unpacked. Next, I was tasked with designing a web-based tool(PHP/MySQL) to manage special configuration files for games at work.

We’re buying a house. We’re being fairly conservative on the amount of house we’re buying so as not to impact our lifestyle too much as we really enjoy it. That being said, I had a desire to crunch the numbers and see how I am spending my money. First, I needed to determine what I was going to use as a source for my data. I specifically wanted to get the transaction details for my checking account.