SDP's Blog

It is really hard to type with this remote control thingy.

The blaughaspheer is hopping with this site which is apparently about actions that are obsolete and you will never have to do again.

I would just like to say (even if it's trying to be funny) that it is really dumb.  And not in that good way.

I just got through about 400 emails, and that is as good a reason to blog as any.

There is someone who I hold very dear.  A woman who looks after me and my child without a thought.  Who makes dinner for me, and puts up with my failings.  She gives me love, and helps me be a better person.

There is nothing in this world that I could have that would replace her.

Without her I would be a lonely starving shell.  She is deserving of every piece of my heart and I give it without a moments hesitation.  And for this St. Valentines day (1 day late I know) I ask, would you be mine?

Ok, so I've retooled my Blog several times, and most of the time I never ever update it.  But this time is different.  I swear.  First order of business get this thing to import some of these old entries...

And they're in.  Hooray for python crazy text formatting-fu. 

[Update 19:46] And I believe I now have at least the old Atom and RSS feed urls redirecting here, which means that everyone reading in aggregators can start picking up this data.

Note to old feed reading peoples, you should use the urls http://blog.sf.dasbistro.com/sdp/rss.xml and http://blog.sf.dasbistro.com/sdp/atom.xml now.

Garbled nonsense I wrote on my way home, of a horribly language geeky issue.

• Python really doesn't do circular imports.
  
  • There is only runtime no seperate load or compile-time.
  • Really like the (load ...) function in R5RS.
• PLT Scheme has units which are so much better. No one seems to have done the same for python.
• Most references say just don't do it (http://effbot.org/zone/import-confusion.htm for instance.)
  • Easier said than done.
  • Python in a Nutshell suggests wrapping names in a function that you call to initialize the module.
  • Lame.
• I just spent all of my Caltrain ride home mapping out the module, function, and class dependecies in a hastily constructed 1000 line program that I fear having to rewrite from scratch.
• Why can't modules be nice happy load time modules and not evil run time bitches.

---

I came into work this morning and my graveyard coworkers had a problem. They had four new servers installed in the data center all running the new $COMPANY approved version of Red Hat Linux, and they couldn't ssh to the machines. The problem felt familiar, and after trying to log in my self I was pretty sure I had seen this before, but I couldn't remember when or where. Was this something wrong with PAM or OpenSSH?

We've used this version of Red Hat on a few previous projects so I began looking around on our Wiki and starting the excruciating exercise of "Advanced" Find in LookOut. With in about two minutes I had found the answer on the Wiki. The standard $COMPANY sshd_config has some options off that we use.

So I had seen this problem before. In fact I had even documented the existence of this problem and how to fix it. THANK YOU WIKI.

After demonstrating that this problem shouldn't have taken eight hours to fix, one of the graveyard Systems Administrators (a term I use loosely) said that the documentation was "incomplete". I hadn't included that sshd needed to be restarted and how to do it. The reason I hadn't documented it was that if you were qualified to do this job you would know that this needed to be done.

At this point I almost lost it. Instead I went to get some coffee, and find a dart board.

---

Hiding on Caltrain.

---

Everyone loves babies! Here is the first in a series of babies on flickr.

---