Technitribe

While I’ve been gone from the blogging world I’ve still been working on projects. Mostly I’ve been working on documentation.

• Debian/Fedora Package Management comparison. Since switching my Slice to Fedora from Ubuntu I’ve picked up plenty of commands for managing packages. This is just a quick wiki page giving the roughly equivalent commands from Debian/Ubuntu to Fedora/RedHat.
• regexp basics is a brief tutorial on regular expressions. My roommate abutcher put it together for his WVU CS210 (Advanced File and Data Structures) course. The DocBook 5 sources are available in git.
• The biggest doc project I’ve been working on again (finally) is my Virtual Disk Guide aimed at power users and sysadmins. Currently it’s a rough draft and is constantly undergoing major changes and additions. It’s available as a single HTML document, chunked into multiple pages, and in PDF format. You can get the DocBook 5 formatted source to it through my GitHub account.

My Project Templates project has seen some much needed attention recently. The DocBook starter project has been completely redone. Here’s some reasons you might want to use it.

• Includes a basic starter document with most of the available informational tags present but commented out so all you need to do is uncomment the elements you need for your document.
• Inclues a customizable Makefile that can adapt itself to different operating systems (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RedHat, and Mac OS X) by just uncommenting the proper directory paths for the schema and stylesheet files.
• The Makefile has targets for: cleaning up, creating schema locator files for nxml-mode in emacs, publishing PDFs, and publishing chunked or single HTML documents.
• The comments in the Makefile also tell you what packages you need to install to get the schema and stylesheet files.

Using the Makefile for publishing only requires having xsltproc and dblatex installed. Both of which are available through your favorite package manager.

Often we get Nagios alerts letting us know that your kernel is about to panic and your server is going to crash and die because read/write operations are going to FAIL MISERABLY.

Obviously being a systems administrator it becomes your job to figure out what can go, what needs to stay, et al.

I’ve found that archived logs (logrotate) on a secure server often can be quite large. And on a low-end configuration with a server with only 40G it becomes a nuisance when you have a few Gb of data…
And you all probably know this, but Tim asked when I’d blog. So… I’ll make sure!
Having 40 or 50 files is a pain to manually delete. Sure, you could probably rm -f *.1 *.2 *.3 etc etc etc but that becomes too much of a pain.

On BSD systems there is an awesome counter called ‘jot’; it works exactly the opposite of the GNU command ‘seq’; so for a rudimentary example to remove all files it becomes a simple one liner–

• jot 6 1 |while read i; do rm -f *.${i};done
• seq 1 6|while read i; do rm -f *.${i};done

In Emeril fashion: BAM! You’re now out of the clear.

I wrote a basic GNU Screen tutorial a while back for my work place. I’m posting it here for the unknown masses to enjoy too.

And now I present, Using GNU Screen. (DocBook Source & Makefile)

Shaggy and I drafted this guide to setting up your OpenGL development environment in Apple Xcode for cs470 (Introduction to Computer Graphics) at WVU.  It follows you through installing Xcode and including the relevant frameworks for creating a stock C++ OpenGL project.  Shaggy formatted it in DocBook and I think the result is pretty sexy.  Try it out for yourself!

View the tutorial here: opengl-in-xcode

Andrew and I put together a small Linux 101 tutorial for new CS kids in our department. We collaborated on it using google docs for the outline and then google presentation to make the actual presentation.