John Borwick's blog

I haven’t yet figured out how to take this code:
#include <Python.h>

int main() { PyInitialize(); PyRunSimpleString(“print 2100″);}
And compile it. I’ve tried gcc -I${PYTHON}/include/python2.3 -o test test.c but I don’t know what library to use… or where to find it.

I’ve been eyeing TCP/IP Illustrated volume one. Seth has a copy, and it’s really useful.

Then I read a review of volume two:
Difficulty aside, this book alone will honestly make you a TCP/IP guru – now that I’ve read volumes 1 and 2, the networking administrators where I work come to me with questions about issues they can’t resolve. I’m literally comfortable saying that there’s nothing I don’t know about TCP/IP, and that’s not a statement I’d make lightly (feel free to test me). But more than that, I learned a lot about writing good, solid code… … Continue Reading

Lauren and I voted early at the Forsyth County Government Center yesterday. The polls were open from 10 AM – 1 PM. We arrived at 11:15 AM and waited two hours forty-five minutes to vote with electronic ballots.

While we were waiting, I asked the elections board why I’d never received my voter registration card. They had keyed my address in as “591″ rather than “541″. My actual address “541B Trade St” could not be inputted; we found out from Lauren’s registration that it must be “541B N Trade St.” Their computer program stores a … Continue Reading

Yep, I’m stealing links from Daily Kos. The Guerilla News Network has a copy of Eminem’s “Mosh” video. I recommend seeing the video; it’s apparently #1 on MTV.

While governor, Bush flips off the camera.

Wake Forest’s student newspaper, the Old Gold and Black, has two notable entries this week.
First, an article about the cultural diversity project contains a quote about why to take the class:
“Your mom made you eat tofu when you were younger, and you envied the kid next door whose mom let him eat all the Twinkies he wanted,” [William Hamilton, associate dean] said. “But when you got older, and you had nice teeth, and your neighbor’s teeth were rotting, you thanked your mom.”
Second, the “QWAKE” insert has a map of the legendary steam tunnels. Rock on.

The mac’s been running a little slow, so I looked into optimizing it.
I had an NFS export of “/Volumes” (scary) set up in NetInfo, so I removed that by using NetInfo Manager to delete the entry in “/exports”.
GPGMail had an upgrade; version 1.0 kept spawning new “GPGMEProxyServer” processes, fixed in 1.0.2.
Now I need to investigate replacements for iChatStatus, as the “SetiChatStatus” process uses 150mb of virtual memory (to keep my buddy messages in sync with iTunes).

I just updated my Mac OS X backup script and am in the process of copying my files to the external hard drive (“Off-Shore Banking”). I had to get rsyncx to copy the HFS+ forks for all my files.(Aside: My previous backups, I found out thanks to AEleen Frisch’s presentation about OS X, are invalid because they used a vanilla rsync, which doesn’t copy any HFS+ forks.)
Continue Reading

I’m trying out Weblog Poster as an alternative to Kung-Log/Ecto, because it’s free.

As of October 2004, here’s my list of essential system administration resources:

• Brother p-touch label printer
• cfengine and a local copy of the reference guide
• Google
• Perl
• The Practice of System and Network Administration, Limoncelli and Hogan
• printout of the SA-BOK: the System Administration Body of Knowledge. Use it to explain what you do and measure yourself.
• SAGE membership card and sage-users subscription
• fully automated install process of some kind

and those currently under deliberation:

• A USENIX (or IETF?) conference each year
• Net::SNMP
• Nagios
• Red Hat RPM Guide
• Python
• a wiki of some kind