Brian Parsons

In a recent talk at PYCON, Tavis Rudd demonstrated how he overcame repetitive-stress injury (RSI) by coding with voice instead of typing.

His conventions for words that translate into the necessary keystrokes are ingenious and I wonder if they will become a voice-coding standard.

More info here.

I’ve been running Arch Linux on my workstations and on servers for a long time. Every once in a while I see a debate in an Arch Linux forum about it’s suitability for use on production servers. Being a rolling release distribution, it is different than other distributions that concentrate on enterprise and long-term support like RedHat Enterprise and CentOS. Without getting too much into the pros and cons - one of the key reasons that I use Arch on servers is earlier access to newer technologies like the 3.0 Linux kernel series (with built-in xen support). Overall, though, it is due to my familiarity with and love for it. The OS that I load on my servers is there to support my applications. I find Arch is simple and light yet thorough and stable in getting the job done. If you are running Arch on servers or are interested in doing so, here are some practices that I recommend.

Read More...

I needed to find an IP address amidst a bunch of random text. I googled and didn’t find anything that worked for me the way I needed, so I made my own with awk. I thought I’d put it up here in case someone else could use it:

awk '{match($0,/[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+/); ip = substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH); print ip}'

So you can pipe anything through this and it will grab the IP (V4) address(es).

Read More...

While I haven’t *knock on wood* had any EBS failures in Amazon’s cloud myself, I have heard the horror stories and that makes me uneasy. Another issue with disks in cloud that I do run into a lot is latency. The disk io in many cases is slower to begin with, and random bouts of latency tend to crop up.

I have addressed both of these problems by deploying RAID 10 on my Amazon EC2 instances. It sounds techie but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do this. If you are managing an EC2 instance you can do it and I have published a script that will get you there in a few steps.

Read More...

I wrote a python script to update DNS on Amazon Route53. You can use it on dynamic hosts by putting it into cron, or on boot for cloud instances with inconsistent IP addresses.

It uses the boto Amazon Web Services python interface for the heavy lifting. You’ll need that installed. (Arch Linux has a python-boto package)

You need to edit the script to place your AWS credentials in the two variables near the top of the script (awskeyid, awskeysecret). Then it’s ready to go.

Read More...

“There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.” - great article on the psychology of the modern approach to work

Creative Kryptonite and the Death of Productivity