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Integrating OpenAI with Dry's Sample Chat Game

This tutorial demonstrates enhancing Dry's Sample Chat Game by integrating OpenAI's language models, enabling the game to provide intelligent, AI-driven responses to user queries. Dry, the successor to Urho3D, offers a comprehensive framework for developing 2D and 3D games. Leveraging LLMs within the Dry engine opens up new possibilities.

Background …

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Optimizing Memory Management for Plausible Docker on Ubuntu

Running Docker containers on a server with limited memory can lead to out-of-memory (OOM) issues, which can disrupt services and lead to downtime. This guide will show you how to increase swap space on an Ubuntu server to provide a buffer against OOM errors, using a real-world example from a …

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Understanding Pause Functionality in LucKey Park Built on Dry Engine

Dive deep into the pause functionality of LucKey Park built on the Dry engine, exploring how the game's status is managed and toggled end-to-end.

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Installing YaCy on Ubuntu

This guide will walk you through installing YaCy on Ubuntu.

By default YaCy is configured to bind to 0.0.0.0 but it's admin interface is only accessible by default to a white list which includes localhost and 127.0.0.1, since my install is headless on a …

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Building 'Dry' and 'Park' from Source on Fedora Linux

Learn how to compile the 'Dry' game engine and the 'Park' game from source on Fedora Linux with debugging enabled, and how to analyze core dumps for debugging.

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Ubuntu 22.04 Letsencrypt Docker Hints

letsencrypt certbot is now installable via snap (the deb apt repository is no longer maintained).

alternatively you can use certbot via docker if you plan to use the certonly mode.

I did run into some issues & I will document my workarounds here:

domains=(
    example.com
    shop.example.com
)

for domain …
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Vertically Scaling GitLab Server For As Cheap As Possible

Today's essay acts as a power-up love story for the underdog.

A living document & quickstart for:

  • bootstrappers
  • small business under 99 employees
  • solo ops or devs
  • entrepreneurs
  • hackers
  • tinkerers

You also deserve a quick start to a GitLab Server power house!

Regardless of my intended audience, this strategy should scale …

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Russell Open Sources Remarkbox & MakePostSell into Public Domain!

green pixel art style Christmas tree with animated blinking lights

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays, Everyone!

My wife prompts students with this fun holiday writing idea:

"If you could gift the world anything, what would it be?"

I love to read responses in the comments!

pixel art style seasonal wrapped gift

As for me, I have wonderful news, my dream gift to the world will come true …

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GNUnet GNS Nameserver Operator Notes, Quickstart, & Cheatsheet

We GROW with Truth, Freedom, Love.

"You have an ally".

We scroll through the official GNUnet handbook, everything is covered in details, sections have examples. Seems verbose at first glance but also familiar .

Freedom of speech is under attack.

I AM not scared, we understand the technology we have and …

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Copying files between cloud object stores like S3 GCP and Spaces using Boto3

tl;dr if you just want something like aws s3 cp cli, try gsutil rsync.

At work one key item of team's sprint is properly utilizing and securing Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

For one of my projects, I'm learning GCP's Object Store called Google Cloud Storage (GCS).

I have prior …

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I tried to install GitLab on TrueNAS and failed

Ok, so a month ago I changed employment and the new company uses GitLab exclusively for centralized code version control system.

This is my first time using GitLab and my first projects was integrating a dou/cloudmapper with a GitLab runner on a schedule.

After a couple weeks I've learned …

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WeeChat on-boot in a tmux session

Chronicles of a washed up systems administrator.

In the basement, M. Bison (mbision.foxhop.net.), a T430 with a cracked screen runs quietly with his lid closed, acting as a SmartOS hypervisor to 3 Solaris derived zones and 4 KVM ubuntu guests.

One of these guests is the oldest of …

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Dreaming of unlimited home computer storage capacity

Unlimited computer storage capacity is a common science fiction trope and fun thought experiment.

What would be possible if we could potentially store near infinite data at your house in a normal sized desktop computer?

Even better using today's tech, what ideas could we dream up?

This post will explore …

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Unity Collab not working on Fedora because of an invalid CA certificate path

This issue blocked me for about two days and prevented me from collaborating with another engineer at gumyum co-operative video game studio.

An image showing that Unity Collab is not linked

The other engineer's environment was Windows and he was able to interact with collab and our shared project owned by our shared org. My environment was Fedora 30 …

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How to fallback to an older FreeNAS version on update failure

try to log in as root locally, I needed to press ctrl-alt-f7 to get to a log in prompt.

Once logged in as root, I used the beadm command.

For example, beadm list and beadm activate <old-version>.

Finally reboot.

I followed this process and then got my FreeNAS server to …

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Installing Unity on Linux

Russell, why are you installing Unity? I thought you were an open source developer and homegrown video game engine builder?!

gumyum logo

The TL;DR we are starting a video game co-operative called gumyum. The basic idea is to build a large video game company owned completely by members. There will be …

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Pre-signed GET and POST for Digital Ocean Spaces

A pre-signed request grants a semi-trusted user temporary access to a private resource.

Let's unpack that statement ...

Pre-signed means, we bless a specific action on a specific private resource for a short duration of time.

Semi-trusted means, we have authenticated the user, but we don't trust them to have full …

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Hybrid Hot Water Heater Saves 69 Percent On Energy Consumption

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. See full disclosure page here.

Exactly one year ago I fufilled a longtime childhood dream when I invested in roof top solar on my house in Eastern Connecticut (Zone 6b).

Over the past 12 months, I have religiously tracked my families energy consumption using …

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AWS nvme to block mapping

Recently at work I transitioned our fleet from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. During the process I noticed an issue with our newer generation AWS EC2 "nitro" based instance types (specifically c5.2xlarge).

AWS was presenting my root block device as /dev/nvme1n1 and my data …

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Yuletide Trains and Homegrown Video Games

pixel art style seasonal wrapped gift

Each holiday season I find myself drawn to a side passion of mine.

While some build model trains and others create Christmas light shows with synchronized music you'll find me on my sofa where I build, explore, and tinker on my own video game engine.

Maybe the sound of wrapping …

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All Local Heros need a Gig Side Kick

Five months ago during my preparation and ramp up to gardening season, I started thinking about what it would be like to have a partner, a side kick, a secretary to keep me honest and on task.

Somebody who could review old journal notes from previous years and give me …

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Running DynamoDB Local service container on CircleCI 2.0

tl;dr use a custom entrypoint in your CircleCI 2.0 config to limit Java memory to 1G.

The new CircleCI 2.0 docker configuration supports a "primary image" (listed first) which runs all the "steps" as well as zero or many "service images" (listed subsequently). The "service images", although …

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Pyramid SQLAlchemy bootstrap console script with transaction.manager

So I've struggled for a while with the best way to properly setup a console script for my SQLAlchemy Pyramid apps.

I use the Pyramid Cookiecutter Alchemy to setup my projects and as such, I do not have a global and thus importable DBSession object. Instead my database session is …

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Quickstart to DKIM Sign Email with Python

For a long time I have put off DKIM signing email sent from my web services because I couldn't wrap my head around all the indirection Postfix requires to make it work.

Honestly, I put it off for over 5 years...

Today a thought sprung into my head:

"Could I …
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Fulfilling Childhood Dreams: Solar

Ever since I was an 8 year old boy I have wanted solar. I remember reading about the environment and alternative energy sources in a monthly "socal studies" flyer my school subscribed our classroom to. I questioned, even at my young age, why the world wasn't actively switching over to …

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How-to Work From Home

"I work from home" — a phrase I have uttered hundreds of times and is often met with instant amazement, envy, or jokes about pants. My goal for this book is to teach you the hacks I have learned in my career to help you land your dream job. If you …

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webwords: a minimal viable web app with docker in as many languages as possible

The companion webwords git repo lives here.

This project shows how to code the same minimal web app called webwords in as many different programming languages as possible. It also provides guides for building and running webwords as a docker image.

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So You're Planning a Beta Test

I'm running a beta for Remarkbox and here is my biggest take away:

Always collect information from potential customers as soon as possible. Catch customers while they pursue a solution to their problems.

What do I mean?

Well for starters, don't just ask for an email address, have them fill …

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My Search for the Perfect Alternative Hosted Comment System

Nearly 6 years ago I launched the beta for LinkPeek, a web page screenshot service. After all this time, I'm writing to share something new I've been passionately working on called Remarkbox.

I started working on Remarkbox back in 2014 to solve a problem I had after moving my Wordpress …

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Selenium grid on Kubernetes

This post continues from where we left off on the Minikube guide. If you do not already have a Kubernetes cluster, you should read that first.

Selenium Grid allows you to build a cluster of Selenium nodes. Today we will create a Selenium cluster with 1 hub and 4 nodes …

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Minikube

Minikube allows you to run a self contained, single node, Kubernetes cluster on your workstation. Once installed and configured, you may use kubectl to interact with it, just like a production Kubernetes cluster.

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Nginx throw HTTP 503 maintenance JSON for all requests

I found this technique after stumbling on Aaron Parecki's blog. You can read his post here:

Lets pretend you have an API and you need to turn on maintenance for a major change. All your …

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Capability driven Presentation

A web page does not need to look the same on every browser or device. We cannot control the capabilities of a user's browser or device. As web designers, we have the duty to give the viewer the best experience possible. A user will come with what they have and …

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Build RPM or DEB packages for Node.js using Jenkins and FPM

This blog post assumes you already have:

  • a Jenkins master and none or many build servers
  • FPM installed on the build servers
  • Node.js installed on the build servers

I add jenkins-build.sh in the root of the Node.js code repo:

# example usage: JOB_NAME=example-api BUILD_NUMBER=101 bash jenkins-build …
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Register Super Powers with Pyramid add_request_method

The Pyramid web application framework uses a request object to hold state regarding an inbound HTTP connection. A view must accept a request object as the first argument which makes it always available to our views and templates.

This behavior rocks, but Pyramid makes it even better by allowing us …

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Sharing a Pyramid cookie with Flask or Tornado

Do you have a Pyramid application which authenticates users and uses a signed cookie as a session? Do you want to build a microservice using another framework and allow it to use the same cookie and session? Me too!

First we will review a bit of Pyramid code which describes …

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My first Systemd Service Script and Override

At work we mostly run Centos and I have some NodeJS services to deploy. I feel most familiar with Ubuntu / Upstart so this post serves as my notes on systemd.

In this contrived example, we define a service for our taco-api application. The taco-api source code lives in /opt/taco-api …

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Set static hostname for RHEL Centos 7 on AWS

This took me about 2 hours to figure out, hopefully it saves you time.

/etc/sysconfig/network:

HOSTNAME=desired-hostname.example.com

/etc/hostname:

desired-hostname.example.com

/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg:

preserve_hostname: true
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If I swallow lots of air will I be lighter?

After dinner tonight, Carter, my four year old asked me, "If I swallow lots of air will I be lighter?". I thought about the question for a moment and then told him it depends on what surrounds you.

If you are surrounded by:
  • air and you swallow lots of air …
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Output all instance identifiers of an AWS VPC to JSON

At work today I needed an easy way to collect private IP addresses of every instance in one of our production VPCs.

I ended up adding a tool to https://botoform.com to perform this task.

bf --profile <aws_profile> dump <vpc_name_tag> instances --output-format json

For example:

bf --profile customer3 dump …
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Set DNS resolver options

The right way to persist resolver options across many Linux distributions.

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Bind9 on Joyent Triton

Tricks to reduce Bind9's large memory footprint on Joyent Triton.

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Migrating from WordPress to Pelican

Five hints to save time during your migration from WordPress.

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Boto3 get main route table

Library work around.

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List all installed package names in Python

You only need a two lines of code to access package names and versions.

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Filtering AWS resources with Boto3

References to take you from filtering novice to expert.

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Working with botocore's ~/.aws/config

Don't reinvent the wheel, use Botocores Config facilities for work with AWS.

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My Mentor

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Change default gateway on all SmartOS Zones and KVM guests

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SmartOS Ubuntu guest, apt-get not working because IPv6

My brutal yet simple work around.

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A Python script which searches for available interpreters

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Migrating libvirt KVM guest to SmartOS KVM guest

Stop worrying and replace your Linux hypervisor with SmartOS.

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Setting region programmatically in Boto3

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Securely publish Jenkins build artifacts on Salt Master

Your project deserves an asset pipeline.

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Set postgres user password on PostgreSQL SmartOS Zone

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Risk, Process, and Balance

The operations of a company will have intrinsic risk. Risk occurs each time we decide to take an action or an inaction. This means that anything we choose to do, or not do, has associated risk.

An organization which has an unhealthy aversion to risk has a much higher chance …

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autofs /net automount stopped working

So autofs randomly stopped working on one of my Ubuntu hosts (this issue has been found on Arch as well so its most likely a change upstream). I found this error in the logs:

attempting to mount entry /net/freenas.example.net
get_exports: lookup(hosts): exports lookup failed for freenas …
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Custom Rundeck HipChat notification templates

Today I built a GUI and workflow around Ansible using Rundeck. Tonight I started diving into sending HipChat notifications and after a bit of research, I managed to create a custom notification template for each Rundeck project.

Modify your project's configuration file, on Ubuntu it was in /var/rundeck/projects …

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Build release pipelines on S3 with s3p

This weekend I finished my first sprint on s3p which is a Python library and CLI application that manages release pipelines on AWS S3. I put a lot of effort into the readme.rst file, so look there for usage and examples.

The main purpose of s3p is to use …

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Dealing with pagination in Python

So I'm working with an API (AWS ElastiCache) that offers mandatory pagination of results. I need to get all results, so I took some time to work out this logic.

def combine_results(function, key, marker=0, **kwargs):
    """deal with manditory pagination of AWS result descriptions"""
    results = []
    while marker != None:
        result …
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Turn python dict into a key=value string and back again

I'm currently refactoring a script that tags AWS resources and I came up with this one liner to generate pretty output. It basically turns {'tag1':'value1','tag2':'value2'} into tag1=value1, tag2=value2. Here is the code:

', '.join(['='.join(key_value) for key_value in {'a':'1','b':'2'}.items() ])

Oh, and …

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Migrating MongoDB from Ubuntu to SmartOS

First, I installed the mongodb 14.2.0 (uuid a5775e36-2a02-11e4-942a-67ae7a242985) dataset:

imgadm avail | grep mongo
imgadm import a5775e36-2a02-11e4-942a-67ae7a242985

Next, I launched a new zone with this image.

Then I grabbed the uuid of the zone (211b992b-a448-40b4-94c9-00fa82615cec) and I connected into the zone

zlogin 211b992b-a448-40b4-94c9-00fa82615cec

The zone automatically creates a username …

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Set Root Password SmartOS Percona MySQL Zone

I used project-fifo to launch the percona (14.2.0) MySQL dataset. I couldn't get into the MySQL instance so I reached out on IRC. Johngrasty, a friendly guy in the #smartos IRC channel, provided a command to display the randomly generated MySQL password emitted to the zone-init log:

cat …
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rabbits

Digital Rabbit Drawing.

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reality shattered

Emotional overload

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Heka, World2!

This article expands on my “Hello World” for Heka blog post. Check that one out first if you are new to Heka.

In this guide we introduce using Heka over the network by utilizing two Hekad processes on localhost. For discussion purposes we name one of the Hekad processes "sender …

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Mailpile Salt States for Ubuntu or Debian

I wrote these Salt States to install Mailpile on an Ubuntu host. Fun fact, it took me 20 minutes to write these states and they worked the first time I ran them. Disclaimer - I used a throw away server and wasn't concerned that buckets of packages were installed to the …

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You can hack on FreeNAS 9

This post analyses the FreeNAS 9 code base and discusses the various places users may feel confident to hack on.

FreeNAS uses the following software stack:

Django
A Python Web Application Framework which complies with WSGI
Nginx
A very fast web server which may act as a reverse proxy server …
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Nginx with SSL and mixed content errors with upstream WSGI servers

Mixed content errors occur because Nginx (the front-end server) communicates to the upstream WSGI server using http. WSGI does not know (or care) about the SSL session between Nginx and the user. The WSGI server will naively generate URIs and serve assets as http.

To fix mixed content errors, we …

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How to patch Heartbleed OpenSSL defect (libssl) on Ubuntu

Lots of people claim that you need to upgrade openssl package, but this will not fix the issue.

The issue is not the openssl package, it is one of the libraries that the package relies on (libssl).

The output of openssl version -a command …

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IRC Bot (Foxbot) runs canned remote executions using Salt Stack

I extended my IRC Bot Foxbot today to allow it to run canned remote executions on behalf of users in an IRC channel. This is only a prototype or proof-of-concept. Be very careful not to allow users to inject their own commands. Foxbot must be running on the Salt Master …

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Filter Salt Stack Return Data Output

Sometimes you only want to see what has changed, and that is OK.

Create a file like this:

filter.py

#!/usr/bin/python

from json import loads
from json import dumps

import fileinput

stdin_lines = [line for line in fileinput.input()]

ret = loads(''.join(stdin_lines))

for minion_id, data in ret.items …
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Replace the Nagios Scheduler and NRPE with Salt Stack

Note: I will update this post as I progress.

So the idea is to use Salt Stack's remote execution to communicate with all nodes and run the Nagios checks and collect the return output instead of using the NRPE client/service protocol. This reduces the number of agents running on …

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Configuration Management and the Golden Image

When operations first became a thing, system administrators stood up servers using a base image from their favourite distribution. Things were done manually. Some administrators created their own distros, some wrote customised shell scripts to be run once-and-only-once to provision software and settings. This method worked, but it was slow …

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Automatic Backups

My tools for creating automatic backups for various systems

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tar-back

tar-back is a backup utility to tar and gzip target filesystems.
It supports a custom retention, filter exclusions, and backup directory.

I use tar-back in combination with cron to perform regular backups of all localhost filesystems into /archive/fs. I then have a central long term storage server that collects …

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mysql-back

mysql-backis a backup utility script to dump (backup) and gzip every MySQL database on a host.

I use mysql-back in combination with cron to perform regular database dumps of MySQL servers to the /archive/db partition on localhost. I then have a central long term storage server that collects …

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The Three Deployment Management Strategies

There are three deployment management strategies that could be used to maintain a system. Each has pros and cons which I outline in this document.

run once

A proceedure that is run once and only once to setup a system's configuration values and settings. A semaphore or flag generally blocks …

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How to reset HP iLO Lights-Out User and Password Settings with IPMItool

Warning:
Do NOT follow guides that suggest to make a DOS boot disk, this is over complicated.

Use the ipmitool which ships with most Unix based operating systems. I tested on SmartOS and Ubuntu Linux. Use a live boot disk if you must.

  1. Run ipmitool user list to list all …
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How I added two Seagate 240G SSDs as SmartOS L2ARC

How I added two Seagate 240G SSDs as SmartOS L2ARC

  1. removed icepacks from two western digital velociraptors
  2. installed ssds into icepacks
  3. installed icepacks into HP hotswap trays
  4. installed trays into HP prolaient g6 server

How to list all drive installed in Solaris, Open Solaris, or SmartOS

iostat -eE
format

AVAILABLE …
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Test Game Engine with Python and SFML

Over this holiday season, Christmas and New Years, I took the time to mess with some Game Development. I wrote a demo game engine using Python and SFML. I plan to use this post to track my progress.

Video Evolution Playlist

2014-01-01

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Heka, World!

This post serves as a "Hello World" for the data collection and processing software called Heka. Heka is written in Go and was open sourced by Mozilla, the same fabulous group that brings us Firefox!

I intend to use Heka to replace Logstash agents by sending logs directly to ElasticSearch …

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sensu-salt

A while back I explained how to Create your own fleet of servers with Digital Ocean and salt-cloud. Today I will extend that post and show how I deployed a test environment for Sensu, an open source monitoring framework.

Before I test out new infrastructure software, I always attempt to …

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Hackathon 2013 Virtualization

As a warning before we dive into things, this post is less of a formal publication and more of a stream of conscience.

My employer newcars.com has allowed the technical staff to host hackathon! Over the past couple weeks I have had quite a few ideas tumbling around in …

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Backup all virtual machines on a SmartOS hypervisor with smart-back.sh

This post will explain how to create a cronjob to backup of every virtual machine on a SmartOS hypervisor.

Create the following bash script in /opt/smart-back.sh:

#!/usr/bin/bash

# Backup all virtual machines on a SmartOS hypervisor
# Author:  russell@ballestrini.net
# Website: https://russell.ballestrini.net/

# Backup directory …
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Simplify deployments with Upstart and uWSGI

As you know from my previous post, I recently deleted LinkPeek.com and after struggling to get it back online, I vowed to start utilizing configuration management. During this exercise, I noticed that the architecture I use in production seems overly complicated.

The current production deployment stack:

  • Nginx listen on …
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Postfix Salt State Formula

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Control a MongoDB collection in configuration management

This post explains how to use configuration management (Salt Stack) to completely control a MongoDB collection. In our example we want to control a store's collection of plans.

First we create a JSON representation of the collection.

mongodb/plan.json:

{
  "_id" : { "$oid" : "4ef8b9e2be329f491d98f74b" },
  "cost" : 20, "description" : "development",
  "name" : "good", "count …
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Configuration Management vs Remote Execution

It's about time to learn the difference.

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Understanding Salt Stack user and group management

This state will create a user:

russell:
  user:
    - present

This state will create a user and a group. This also makes the user part of the group, and handles creating the group first:

russell:
  group:
    - present
  user:
    - present
    - groups:
      - russell
    - require:
      - group: russell

This state handles user and group generation …

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Create your own fleet of servers with Digital Ocean and salt-cloud

Have you heard about Digital Ocean? They offer a polished user interface, KVM guests with SSD storage, and an API to interact with a cloud of hypervisors. API integration got you down? Don't worry, salt-cloud has already integrated Digital Ocean among it's list of providers! The rest of this post …

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Add a custom header to all Salt managed files using pillar and jinja templates

Salt-stack (salt) provides a solution for centralized configuration management and remote execution. One of the most basic things Salt provides is the ability to manage the contents of a file or a directory of files. Using Salt we can dictate the state of our minions and as a result we …

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High load and CPU usage craftbukkit compared to vanilla minecraft

I started researching the best ways to use salt to provision minecraft servers. I wrote a salt state formula for the vanilla minecraft server deployment. The deployment worked out great so I decided to try my luck with plugins.

In order to use plugins and mods we need to use …

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Honey! I just DELETED LinkPeek.com

During the day I am an ops sys-admin. During the night I am a husband, father of two, and a CEO of a bootstrapped start-up. After launch, my first project was to schedule regular backups of user data and archive off-site. My goal was to create backups but never need …

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Survey Baby Monkey

baby monkey fxhp cartoon

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Automatic event hangout with cron

Create an online only, hangout event

Create a new event with a date far into the future, like the year 2015. Go to the event's options > advanced and enable 'this event is online only' which will create a unique Hangout URI.

Create a cronjob

Create a cronjob on each device …

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Guido name dropped tornado python tulip and pep-3156

Pycon 2013 was excellent, in fact it was my first one I have attended.

I found it odd that django and Pyramid had plenty of talks but nobody mentioned tornado.

The only person that brought up tornado was Guido himself, who has been researching and developing async python since December …

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virt-back's Domfetcher class returns doms from libvirt API

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How to overload default function arguments in python using lambda

Python Lambda functions are very powerful but I often forget how they work or the fun things they do. This post will document how to use a lambda to provide different default arguments to a function.

We will use the human function found in ago.py as an example - because …

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ago.py human readable timedelta 0.0.4 release


We have released ago.py 0.0.4

Special thanks to David Beitey for supplying ideas and python code for this update!

All changes are backward compatible.

Change log:

  • added support for future dates
  • added optional past_tense …
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Tips for getting pull requests approved

Pull rejection sucks!

You have just coded, implemented, and submitted a pull …

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how to drain an iPhone battery without needing passcode

  1. Press home button [ ]
  2. Slide camera button up
  3. Slide mode to video
  4. Turn on flash
  5. Put iPhone on table with light pointed down
  6. Walk away inconspicuously

Extra points if you set the camera to record (just don't record yourself or sounds) which will fill up the iPhone capacity.

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Explaining cache with python

What is cache? I define cache as "a saved answer to a question". Caching can speed up an application if a computationally complex question is asked frequently. Instead of the computing the answer over and over, we can use the previously cached answer. This post will present one method of …

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The Pyramid community taught me the importance of test driven development

Sontek's patch

I greeted the UPS man in the middle of the street to sign for my new Lenovo ThinkPad T430. Because this was My first brand-new laptop purchase I rationalized the time I spent tracking the package from the factory in China to my hands in Connecticut. Once inside …

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miniuri parser and ago human timedelta

I just packaged and published a couple of python modules to pypi:

To install them, run:

Install:

pip install --upgrade ago miniuri

If you want to view their source code, look here:

I hope you enjoy them.

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My top five suggestions for an independent developer creating a new product or service

1. Write everyday. Build a blog for the project and write about milestones, progress, and hurdles. Also keep a personal blog and write about hobbies. Read some theory about "copy writing" and search engine optimization. Write personalized email responses to customers. Great communication skills will have the most impact on …

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Prevent a certain program from running too long in bash

Update - I opensourced this script here: bash kira

I came up this this script to kill certain programs after they run for too long. This works like similar to a timeout. Warning this script is pretty harsh and kills the program.

#!/bin/bash
PROGRAM=replace-with-program-name
PIDSFILE=/tmp/kill-these.pids

for …
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Always attempt to scale vertically first

I spent the weekend fretting because one of my servers was basically being DOS'd by paying customers. During the outage I started thinking about the best way to scale and how I could make the code-base more efficient.

Linux top reported high load, in the 20's. Eventually I figured out …

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High load on web server after updating from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Charts that show the load difference.

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How to rescue logs and config from a failed Citrix NetScaler App Gateway

Today our production Citrix NetScaler broke. The box wouldn't boot and our only backup copy of the config was on the NetScaler itself.

Being the only Unix guy around I attempted to help out the admins working the outage. I SSH'd into the development NetScaler and noticed it runs on …

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The most valuable registration field: How did you hear about us?


How did you hear about us?


I first answered this question when joining Linode. I remember thinking "Wow, this is a great time to ask me!" because the real answer was still in my short term memory.


When I launched LinkPeek I applied this technique. After an amazing launch (thank …

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I just purchased Instagram for 1B and all I got was this lousy image filter

Warning / Update!

This post was originally written from a place of jealousy and bitterness.

Turns out I was wrong about this transaction and for better-or-worse, Facebook (and Mark Zuckerburg) solidified their edge as the king of social for the last 6 years.

Original Post

Facebook purchased Instagram on Monday, April …

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Trouble mounting filesystem on KVM guest after reboot

Just found this out the hard way...

It looks like the attachment of /KVMROOT/guest-dev-app.img on guest-dev did not persist when the KVM host rebooted for patching.

As it appears the virsh attach-disk command works a lot like the mount command.

In order to have a disk attachment persist …

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nosslsearch cname is a bad idea and solution


Google SafeSearch and SSL Search for Schools suggests implementing the following changes to the network:
To utilize the no SSL option for your network, configure the DNS entry for www.google.com to be a CNAME for nosslsearch.google.com.

Here are the reasons why this is a bad idea …
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"I see" said the blind man, to the deaf dog, as he walked off the cliff.


"I see" said the blind man, to the deaf dog, as he walked off the cliff.


As far as I can tell, I am the originator of this version of this quote.

EDIT: changed "originator of the quote" to "originator of this version of this quote".

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What do you name your python virtualenv?


What do you name your python virtualenv?

I name my virtualenv 'virtpy'. Is there a standard name being used out there?

Maybe we can come to a consensus as a standard name? Please feel free to post your virtualenv names here as a sort of poll.

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How to save hundreds of dollars on groceries without clipping coupons

Jenn explains how she drastically decreased our grocery bill.

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How to capture HTTPS SSL TLS packets with wireshark

This article will explain how to use wireshark to capture TCP/IP packets. Specifically I will show how to capture encrypted (HTTPS) packets and attempt to document the "dance" a client and server do to build an SSL tunnel.

What is Wireshark?

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer for Windows …

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Zenoss or Nagios monitoring of HTTPS using client certificate authentication

I recently needed to monitor an HTTPS API for response time and availability. At first I planned to just use the Nagios check_http command.

After gathering more requirements I learned that the API was protected by client certificate authentication. After some research I quickly found that no solution existed to …

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Jake, Finn, and Ice King

My Adventure Time art, painted with MyPaint and wacom tablet.

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My 4 month old's 15 minutes of fame

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Block cipher lab


Consider the following block cipher. Suppose that each block cipher T simply reverses the order of the eight input bits (so that, for example 11110000 becomes 00001111).
Further suppose that the 64-bit scrambler does not modify any bits. With n = 3 iterations and the original 64-bit input equal to 10100000 …
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Monoalphabetic Cipher and Inverse Written in Python

introduction and background

A monoalphabetic cipher uses fixed substitution over the entire message.

You can build a monoalphabetic cipher using a Python dictionary, like so:

monoalpha_cipher = {
    'a': 'm',
    'b': 'n',
    'c': 'b',
    'd': 'v',
    'e': 'c',
    'f': 'x',
    'g': 'z …
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Why does a Hash provide better message integrity then an Internet checksum?

Why does a Hash provide better message integrity then an Internet checksum?

Hash function and checksum function both return a value which cannot be reversed.

An Internet checksum (TCP checksum or IP checksum) is designed to detect common errors quickly and efficiently. An Internet checksum does not attempt to prevent …
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Symmetric Encryption vs Public Key Encryption

How many keys are involved for symmetric key encryption? How about public key encryption?

Suppose you have N people who want to communicate with each other using symmetric keys. All communication between any two people, i and j, is visible to group N. Only person i and person j can …

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Attributes of an 8-block cipher

Consider an 8-block cipher and answer the following:

How many possible input blocks does this cipher have?

How many possible mappings are there?

If we view each mapping as a key, then how many possible keys does this cipher have?

To find the input blocks of this cipher we raise …

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Reasons why some Internet entities might want secure communication

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What are the differences between message confidentiality and message integrity

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Today I lost a customer

Today I lost a customer.

I added some new code to LinkPeek to accept coupons and I didn't think of an edge case. This ended up creating an uncaught exception in my server side code which ultimatly served the newly subscribing customer an HTTP 500 error page.

The damage was …

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LinkPeek.com, webpage to image, was a by-product

tldr; When faced with pivoting or killing a project, take a good look at all possible by-products. Don't miss the hidden gem in a project's slag!

Last year I built yoursitemakesmebarf.com, a novelty web application which allowed anonymous link submission. The software would automatically take screenshots of submitted links …

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flash mob office meeting definition

Flash Meeting

In a office or cubicle environment a group of uninvited people gather and hover around your desk to talk to you. A meeting forms in immaculate conception as you sit bewildered at your desk.

Other names: Flash Meeting, Flash Mob Meeting, Flash Office Meeting

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LinkPeek.com Number One on Hacker News

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How to Incorporate Custom Configuration in a Pyramid Application

Note: This post shows an old way to modify the request object. I discuss a new way in my Pyramid add_request_method post.

Imagine that you have just built a wiki, blog, or cms web application that will be deployed multiple times by different people. You would like to provide the …

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Career development is a game of chutes and ladders

find out what is the ladder.

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I'm petrified of launching my web application


I'm petrified of launching my web application because I'm fearful that I won't ...
  • acquire users
  • support my users well
  • scale in a timely manner
  • react quickly to feedback
  • monetize the application

But most of all I'm scared that nobody will like me. I'm scared of failure.

Now that I got …

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Webmaster tools alerted issue turned out Pylon session files flooded inodes

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Occupy Wall Street Stack vs Queue

Occupy Wall Street contributors claim to use a "stack" to determine speaking arrangements.

I plan to explain how the term "stack" used in this scenario does not align itself with the mathematical or computer science definition.

The term stack means First In Last Out or "FILO". For example: a person …

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Adding inline image support to a gmail messages

Enable ability to insert images into a message body. You can upload and insert image files in your computer, or insert images by URLs. This lab will not work if you have offline enabled.

  1. Go to google labs: https://mail.google.com/mail/#settings/labs
  2. Search "images".
  3. Enable "Inserting images …
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Cell shading practice, A sketched skull, and an old wind mill photograph

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I cancelled my xbox live automatic renewal

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r8168 driver issues after Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade kernel linux 3.0

I had network issues after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 which has the linux 3.0 kernel.

I used this guide to compile the r8168 driver however, I needed to alter the Makefile to support for linux 3.0 kernel.

Edit src/Makefile:

#KEXT  := $(shell echo $(KVER) | sed -ne 's …
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A better way to show website backlinks

Early web pilgrims of the Internet fashioned search queries like
link:russell.ballestrini.net to gather backlinks for a domain.

I however advocate a revolutionary search pattern like -

"russell.ballestrini.net" -site:russell.ballestrini.net

to gather an improved representation of backlinks.

Click here to try now!

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CSS frameworks not rendering properly on all browsers

Read on for the one line fix.

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LinkPeek.com web address thumbnail api alpha release

Convert any webpage to an image.

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How do I calculate the M in my MVP?

Is my idea too minimal?

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New Baby Homecoming

family += 1

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Hacker Olive Oil Lamp Crafted From Home Materials

Really fast and clean design.

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A system administrators guide to installing and maintaining multiple python environments

Some operating systems depend on a specific version of python to function properly. For example, Yum on Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) depends on python 2.4.3. This version of python lacks support from many utilities …

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Deliberating the Viewers vs. Doers concept

America has succumbed to "spectatoritis".

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Python Image Grabber pig.py

Download all the images from a URI with this simple tool!

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Security Professionals: Yes we appear vulnerable but that attack vector will never happen

In loom of recent internet attacks many institutions have started scrambling in attempt to "strengthen" their security stance. I agree that auditing our systems and networks for potential flaws seems appropriate at this time to prevent getting "caught with our pants down". Incidentally, I have recently witnessed the introduction of …

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virt-back: restoring from backups

In a perfect world we should create backups but never need them. Although this statement holds truth, creating guest backups provides many more benefits.

The most common reasons system administrators restore from a virt-back guest backup:

  • recovering from data corruption
  • recovering deleted files
  • recovering from a virus infection
  • recovering from …
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Programming is like Alchemy

except instead of exchanging matter, we programmers exchange time.

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The Great Gist Heist

Please listen to my story before jumping to conclusions.

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a hack to gain 80 percent efficiency when creating github projects

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Add a Breadcrumb Subscriber to a Pyramid project using 4 simple steps

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Google Bot Attempts to Crawl Shortest Urls First

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ATT Uverse Residential Gateway Broadband LED flashes red intermittently

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Connecticut killed affliate marketing with Amazon.com

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Dropbox Encryption with TrueCrypt

The best security acts like an onion.

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Voice Over IP with TeamSpeak

This article will cover running a Voice Over IP service like TeamSpeak on a VPS.

Voice Over IP allows users to communicate using audio over the Internet.

When planning for this article I originally was going to cover ventrilo, but their download link was obfuscated behind a heinous php session …

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Porting the ChaosTheory Wordpress theme to Pylowiki

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virt-back: a python libvirt backup utility for kvm xen virtualbox

backup your virtual maching guests.

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Response to L-Theanine: a 4000 Year Old Mind-Hack

Solve problems and write code in your sleep.

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I just used Google to purchase Chinese food takeout for two

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Graphic Design Powerhouse: Wacom Bamboo, Ubuntu, and MyPaint

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How did Stack Overflow get initial traction?

Stack Overflow was a progressive and natural evolution of the standard clunky forum.

Using ajax it created a more fun and clean user experience.

Using badges and karma to gain responsibility allow forums post to become a game. People naturally like to see progression and growth, being able to watch …

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A homegrown python bread crumb module

I have placed bread.py, a python breadcrumb module, into the public domain.

The bread object accepts a url string and grants access to the url crumbs (parts) or url links (list of hrefs to each crumb).

Tutorial: Add a Breadcrumb Subscriber to a Pyramid project using 4 simple steps …

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four2go!: A new spin on an old classic

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The Barrymores stole my heart then crushed it

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© Russell Ballestrini.