all posts in the 'Tech' category


Updating Crucial SSD Firmware From Linux

Some Crucial SSDs have a bug that causes them to be unstable. Fortunately there’s a firmware upgrade available. Even more fortunately, in addition to the usual Windows updaters, Crucual kindly makes a version available that’s an ISO image so it’s OS independent. Great, right? Except the ISO doesn’t actually work when you dd it to […]

DEFCON

It’s hard to understate how amazing DEFCON is. I met – or got to see speak – so many of my heroes. So many talks were mind-blowing and/or eye-opening. These people really are the best of the best. Nearly every talk I saw had merit and value, and most of them were incredibly engaging and […]

Heartbleed

I spent a large chunk of time this week dealing from the fallout of Heartbleed as a technical person who runs a variety of websites… but this weekend I spent a lot of time dealing with it as a user. It took a lot of time and I wanted to share what I did. Wait, […]

Native IPv6 On Comcast

Update 5/31/12: Scripts are now configurable and various bugs have been fixed. Update 6/07/12: Broken link to if-up script fixed, typo in script fixed. Update 10/30/15: Scripts moved to GitHub. They’re not advertising it, but Comcast is turning on IPv6 for all their California customers (and presumably others) who have a supported modem this week. […]

Technical Conferences and Anti-Harassment Policies

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about harassment and appropriateness at technical conferences. It’s been discussed before, of course, but recent events have brought it into the spotlight. It started when a friend of mine – and Apache board member – was the unfortunate victim of a sexual assault at ApacheCon. This was […]

Blog upgrade, part 2

So I recently had upgraded from 2.6 to 2.7. Then, two weeks ago, just before I left for Italy there was an unknown exploit somewhere in the WordPress world and WP blogs were getting pwnd left and right. With no details and no patches I took down the blog temporarily while I was in Italy. […]

SCALE Report

Well, SCALE 6x is now over! It was a great conference, as always. For those of you who don’t know, SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo) is a grass-roots, volunteer-run Linux and Open Source conference. [Disclaimer: I was one of the co-founders of the original SCALE. After the first one, I realized I couldn’t continue to […]

Spine, Provision, and Onall

A few weeks ago, we at Ticketmaster, silently open-sourced our internal system configuration software which consists of 3 pieces of software. I led the effort to get them open-sourced, so I’m particularly happy about and proud of this. In addition, I develop on all 3 pieces of software, and am the primary author of one […]

Last Harmony post here: version 0.10 released, website launched!

Today version 0.10 of the harmony software was released. In addition to a new version, we also have a website and project page! I’m very excited with the way this project is going and all of the progress we have made. I’m thrilled to be a part of it! Please note that all future announcements […]

Working Harmony code – on SourceForge!

As many of your know, we now have working code to program Harmony remotes in Linux (and even in Windows)! Well, now our SF project has finally got approved! Check it out at http://www.sf.net/projects/harmonycontrol/. All official releases are in CVS and tagged, and additional patches are also in CVS. The 0.9 release is also up […]

Harmony software for Linux is here!

That’s right, as promised, there is now (rough) code to program your harmony in Linux! I can’t take credit for making it work. Kevin Timmerman did all the reverse-engineering to make it work, so much of the code is his. My contributions have been cleanup, de-windows-ifications (the code works in Windows and Linux, but was […]

Writing a Linux driver for Harmony remotes

For the last few months I’ve been on-and-off trying to write a Linux driver for my Logitech Harmony 880. Thanks to a few friends with windows boxes, I was able to get some USBSnoop data – enough to be able to dissect about half of the communications that happen with the device. Once I got […]

A Perl guy’s honest look at Python

As some of you may know, I’m a huge perl person. I’ve written a lot of it, and I know it very well. That’s not to say there aren’t people who know it better than I do, but I know it well. Now, while I’m a big Perl fan, it’s worth noting I’m well aware […]

Who would ever need that?

We ran into a problem at work last night. A new version of the same model of a server had a very different set of hardware in it. To be specific, we have lots of Sun X4100 servers, and we were deploying some new ones… but these where the M2 series of X4100s. And instead […]

Go BBC!

Just a quick post tonight… Not only does the BBC provide some of the best news (or at least less biased than US news), but they now have a whole website dedicated to open source! That’s so fucking cool, go BBC! P.S. I’m adding a new “category” to the blog called “Tech” so those of […]

This week’s cool new tools

I discovered the following wonderful new tools this week: – gzgrep – chrpath – elfhack If you’re a unix person, I highly recommend looking this up. gzgrep is one of those great every day admin tools (grep gz’d files), and the others are more for sysadmins that deal with broken software or complex systems with […]