Mattie B's blog

UPDATE: I'm fleshing this experiment out into a tool called brewdo.

I've been playing with Ansible's module for DigitalOcean as I work toward moving my site off the creaky old shared hosting and into The Future™.

My blog seems to be for posting talk slides lately.

Here are the slides from my bdist_rpm talk at GRPUG tonight.

$ keybase track trenton info: ...checking identity proofs ✔ public key fingerprint: 7E3C FC83 D64E 2A7B C124 5AC9 191A 0473 89DD 2A77 ✔ "trenton42" on twitter: https://twitter.com/trenton42/status/441778278521909248 ✔ "trenton42" on github: https://gist.g…

Here are the slides from my RPM talk tonight at DevOps West Michigan.

Ah, Animal Crossing.

I don't do cloud-scale work, but I do provision systems a lot, since I develop and maintain a custom Linux distribution that we sell on a box at Code Blue.

Some people, when their cats throw up in the middle of the night, go back to sleep.

This is my first post on the new zigg.com powered by Felix Felicis.

A Christmas tradition is developing in my house.

Much ado is currently being made of Google’s recent announcement that it will soon join the ranks of contemporary “social” companies and grant itself the right to construct ads using your profile and endorsement.

To disable hibernation in PolicyKit, create a file /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.zigg.disable-hibernate.pkla with the following contents: [Disable hibernate by default] Identity=unix-user:* Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate ResultActiv…

Disabling power management on a wlan device is easy in the one-off case: /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off However, pm-utils will re-enable power management when certain events occur, such as disconnecting AC power.

The Internet has really screwed up the notion of permanence.

This is "the end"—and I guess it's also a little bit of a test.

You may or may not have heard of Google's decision to shut down FTP publishing for Blogger-based sites, of which mine is one.

While everyone else is probably thinking this year about how to better themselves through laughable New Year's resolutions (a little tip from yours truly: to really commit to something, try not attaching it to an arbitrary date.

Back in September (I feel appropriate shame for letting the journal go for so long), I mused about the troubles I was having with Ubuntu Karmic.

Ever since I originally discovered Ubuntu—I think it was in 2007—I've followed every release, many early on.

I was about ready to give up on my beloved Palm LifeDrive—which was already a refurbed replacement for the original—as it had recently kicked the bucket, refusing to turn on just like the last one and many others I've heard reports of.

I suppose I've never made this confession here yet, but I'm a Palm addict.

Okay, so 70 KiB/s that's not as good as your broadband.

I think this is the first project I've ever actually abandoned—well, sort of—but I don't intend to do any more work on my previously-announced Nintendo DS Save Host.

I'm sorry I haven't been "writing" writing here lately.

Did I hear you say "I want a crc32sum application for Linux that can not only output CRC32 sums for a list of files, but also handle stdin if I leave its argument list blank, and I don't mind if it's hackish, so long as it works?"

Almost two weeks ago now, I uploaded the read-only code I had so far for the Nintendo DS Save Host (which I first talked about back in February) to SourceForge.

Lest you think my life is all excruciating torment...

Two months and thirteen days.

For Valentine's Day, I surprised my wife with one of the latest iMac models; specifically, the 20" 2.4GHz.

So, I spent a few feverish nights postponing paying contract work this past weekend to work on a little coding for myself for a change... something I really don't do much of anymore.

This is a continuation of the saga of my experiences with Dick's Sporting Goods' "No Sweat" extended warranty, which began with a delay-fraught diagnosis procedure and eventually led me on a bizarre journey through call-centerdom... all in the hope that I…

One of the code projects I've wanted to do for a little while now (at least since the release of Daigasso!

Our third (yes, third) WALL-E DVD arrived today, from Disney.

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I last posted about my experiences trying to get my exercise bike fixed under Dick's Sporting Goods' "No Sweat Warranty".

I've long suspected it was the case that Facebook applications were basically a backdoor to gather up info on you and your friends.

I rejoined Facebook the other day.

When I am signed in, there is no obvious button to take me into the bowels of the Blogger application to update my journal with.

In-between VPN hiccups and bills to pay yesterday, the N-Sider chat, as it is often wont to do, spurred a long-lost memory.

The last part of my holiday haul finally arrived on Monday: a set of Koss PortaPro headphones.

Last April, my $20-at-a-garage-sale upright stationary bike's pedal broke.

Well, in light of the fact that that last style-less template was pretty much a trainwreck to read (hello long lines!)

I thought maybe I'd take a few minutes here to talk about the ideal site-management software I've been mulling about in my head for years now.

Yes, I'm aware that at present, zigg/journal has become pretty much entirely unstyled.

I think I've finally got my Sansa Fuze up and running to the point I'm happy with it.

I promised (threatened?)

Part of my holiday haul included a 8 GB Sansa Fuze, something I didn't even really know I wanted till I saw it in the Costco Black Friday flyer for $50.

Ah, yes, the introductory blog post.