On July 3rd, I decided I was taking a break from social media. I deleted Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat from my iPhone, iPad and removed any links to them in my browser (I didn’t delete my profiles). A full month seemed like a good amount of time to detox from all of these and see what would change in my life without them. The first couple of days I was certainly fidgety, kept looking down at my phone and not knowing what to do with it.

Over the last 9 years, I’ve had a few things in my life that have benefited me both professionally and personally that have all tied back to Flickr. In 2003, Canon had released the first sub-$1000 digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS 300D aka the EOS Digital Rebel. The 300D paved the way for entry level consumers to get involved with the world of digital SLRs, previously the cheapest option was the Canon 10D, available at $2,000.

A couple years ago I was sitting at a poker table for my final interview for a sys admin position with . It had been a long day of mentally exhausting questions, and the interview was coming to a close. The person I was interviewing with sat for a moment and pondered his next question for me. “You’ve got a building across the street with a bunch of data on a server.

I predict cameras in the near future will begin shipping with wireless , 3G antennas or both. The cameras will be tied into social networking sites so that you can take photos of events and upload them as they happen. There will be a settings page in your camera to enter your Facebook, Myspace or Flickr account info. An option would be available to auto upload all photos taken or to prompt the user after each photo is taken for upload, and finally an option to just bypass that and worry about the uploading only when you are in review mode.

Before I had an iPhone, I had just your average flip phone, didn’t care if it had a web browser on it or if it did anything else besides just have a decent battery life. This summer I finally took the plunge and bought my first Apple product ever, the iPhone 3GS. I had been waiting for some time for them to come out with a version with more storage before I even considered getting one and 32GB was just good enough for me (64Gb would have really been the sweet spot).

Why is it, that I’m left with a taste worst off than the one I started with, after I chew a piece of gum? After the mint flavor wears off, I’m left dehydrated with a crappy taste in my mouth. Am I the only one this happens to?

When you put up a new house or building in the middle of a street, how do you determine what the address is?

For a hack week project at Chartbeat, I hooked my Philip’s Hue light bulbs into PagerDuty so whenever I get paged my lights will start flashing. Read about the hack over on the PagerDuty blog

Tonight I took the plunge to get back into some more C coding. In getting my environment setup I came across a useful debugging macro. This macro will output the filename and line number every time it’s expanded. I wanted to make sure I understood how the macro was working before just copying and pasting it into my source code so I’ve broken it down below for myself and others to understand.

I wrote a couple blog posts for work diving into what we learned optimizing our performance in EC2. You can read both parts over at http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/01/02/part-1-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/ and http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/02/12/part-2-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/

command[check_recent_core]=PLUGINPATH/check_recent_core.sh --file="$ARG1" --freshness=$ARG2$ Spot the error? I only wasted an hour of my life and another 30 minutes of co-workers trying to figure out why I kept getting a "NRPE: No output returned from plugin" error in Nagios. The issue? $ARG1 is missing a closing “$”. *slams head on desk*

For the holidays I got a new Canon 7D camera. I’ve been saving quite a few amazon gift cards over the last year that I was previously planning on using towards purchasing the camera but thankfully Santa delivered me one. My current lens collection consists of 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 70-200mm f/4 50mm f/1.8 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 (kit lens) The lens collection has been built over the last 4 years from when I first got my Canon Rebel XT and I’ve been fairly happy with them thus far.

Lately I’ve been reading up on Django a bit in an effort to get back into programming. It seems the preferred way of running Django is inside a virtualenv environment. I try to stick to packages when possible for installing applications and saw that the python-virtualenv package wasn’t too far behind at version 1.4.5, where the latest is at 1.5.1. This appeared at first to suit me just fine until I discovered the version of pip that gets installed along with python-virtualenv is at 0.

At $WORK I’m currently working on deploying a pool of Varnish servers to sit in front of some Apache servers running Pressflow. On our current infrastructure we’ve been running Squid for the past few years with very good success , minus a hiccup or two along the way, one involving memory fragmentation (thank you tcmalloc). Varnish has a few nice features that Squid lacks. The ability to PURGE objects using wildcards

A while back I found some notes on configuring the sensitivity of my trackpoint on my Thinkpad T43 and took the time to tweak the values to get it just right. The commands were /bin/echo -n 171 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity /bin/echo -n 119 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed In order to keep those values the same on reboot, I placed those commands in /etc/rc.local. I rebooted and… values got reset. After struggling a bit and just giving up on the issue, I ended up just making a shell script that I would execute on boot each time (crappy solution).

A quick way to check your network for IPs missing reverse DNS entries…. nmap -PE -sP 10.0.0.0/24 | awk '{if ($2 ~ /^[[:digit:]]/ ) print $2}'

Why is there no subdir inside .ssh called authorized-keys.d where I can just throw my ssh keys and easily manage them by file name instead of having to edit the authorized-keys(2) file? I need to do some googling on this , a quick search yields this debian bug report on wishing for support for one.

I somehow attract issues whenever I build a new computer or do a fresh installation on my desktop. I currently dual boot between Windows XP 64bit and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) which has served me well the last 3 years. My current setup is running atop a fakeraid mirror which at the time, was a PITA to get configured as it involved using a live cd and following a really long howto while crossing my fingers it would work.

Normally when a partition fills up, you remove some files, freeing up some space and watch your disk usage drop in df -h The first time recently I ran into a situation where that wasn’t the case. I had filled up my root partition and after removing some files and moving some others to another partition I noticed no change in my output of df -h Applications were crashing since they couldn’t write to the partition but I knew I had removed at least a few GB’s worth of data.

The past couple of weeks I’ve begun looking into an online backup solution as I start to realize I’d be really really really pissed if something happened to my data. Currently I’m running my desktop in a RAID 1 configuration using dmraid aka fakeraid, under Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04. The reason I ended up having to use fakeraid was because I still dualboot Windows XP 64bit for doing photoshop work and the occasional game play.

Don’t run Windows 2003 on Xen (open source version). That is all. Thank you

ssh-copy-id , I hate myself for only finding out about this command 2 days ago and painlessly copying my ssh key to hosts in such a crappy manual method. I’m embarrassed I didn’t even bother scripting the process before finding out about this command. From man page: ssh-copy-id: install your public key in a remote machine's authorized_keys

I’ll first start off by saying I think smokeping is a great program and Tobi Oetiker is a great programmer whose contributions to the community have been great and in no way could I ever create MRTG or RRDTool. But…. After downloading the source to smokeping today and trying to configure it to run, I was completely shocked at how poorly it was put together. It’s clear that Tobi did not bother with making his code easy to run on any other system but his own with constant absolute paths to his own home directories on his personal machine!

Anyone out there have any recommendations for managing zone files in BIND? It seems the general consensus is that people just end up using home grown systems. A lot of the web based projects out there are either abadoned or use strictly a database backend which is nice but it adds another layer of complexity, and a failure point. I’d like to be able to switch back and forth between using the management system and being able to do an inline search and replace if need be , on my zone files.

Added to .bash_aliases the following alias confgrep='egrep -v "^$|^#"' I find myself too often going through massive config files and only wanting to see what is actually in the config, instead of weeding through a massive amount of whitespace and commented out documentation. I think squid.conf is probably the worst offender of this and the default snmpd.conf has a good amount of spew in it as well. Literally all of squids documentation is located in it’s configuration file, while it is somewhat useful, it’s usually just means a bigger PITA to find what you are looking for.

I was going through some old code tonight from college that had my student id(SS #) in it and I wanted to strip out my SS # from it. I run into this situation a lot where I need to do a mass inline search and replace. I hope this command is useful to anyone else find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/MyIdentity//' {} \;

For the holidays I got a new Canon 7D camera. I’ve been saving quite a few amazon gift cards over the last year that I was previously planning on using towards purchasing the camera but thankfully Santa delivered me one. My current lens collection consists of 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 70-200mm f/4 50mm f/1.8 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 (kit lens) The lens collection has been built over the last 4 years from when I first got my Canon Rebel XT and I’ve been fairly happy with them thus far.

Lately I’ve been reading up on Django a bit in an effort to get back into programming. It seems the preferred way of running Django is inside a virtualenv environment. I try to stick to packages when possible for installing applications and saw that the python-virtualenv package wasn’t too far behind at version 1.4.5, where the latest is at 1.5.1. This appeared at first to suit me just fine until I discovered the version of pip that gets installed along with python-virtualenv is at 0.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been wanting to learn Python more seriously but really haven’t sat down and just done it. I’ve written a couple of various scripts for personal and work use but always felt they weren’t coded in a “pythonic” way. I’m now reading Learning Python (4th edition) from the beginning and making sure I learn things properly from the ground up. When I was writing my code in the past I wasn’t aware of what objects were immutable vs mutable or how generators worked.

I somehow attract issues whenever I build a new computer or do a fresh installation on my desktop. I currently dual boot between Windows XP 64bit and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) which has served me well the last 3 years. My current setup is running atop a fakeraid mirror which at the time, was a PITA to get configured as it involved using a live cd and following a really long howto while crossing my fingers it would work.

… has to be the biggest waste of space on the interwebs. Clearly Yahoo doesn’t give a shit about them since they are not policed in the slightest and riddled with spam, trolls, and crazies. There are absolutely no insightful conversations going on for any stock. I wonder why they even bother keeping them around.

Before I had an iPhone, I had just your average flip phone, didn’t care if it had a web browser on it or if it did anything else besides just have a decent battery life. This summer I finally took the plunge and bought my first Apple product ever, the iPhone 3GS. I had been waiting for some time for them to come out with a version with more storage before I even considered getting one and 32GB was just good enough for me (64Gb would have really been the sweet spot).

My checking account is part of Commerce Bank which about a year ago was bought out by TD Bank. Up until this summer their site still worked for all my online banking. The theme had changed on the site but all the same login functionality was there. Then September 20th rolled around and I goto log into my account to check on some things only to find that now is a search engine spam page?

I must finally reveal to the world my secret for the solution to help curb NYC sound pollution and hope someone out there somehow finds a way to get this done. The solution… ::drumroll:: is to track taxi cab horn usage and impose fines based on excessive horn use. I know , I know I’m a genius , stop it, please. In my ignorant mind about cars, it seems simple enough to create a device that would activate anytime the horn is pushed, record the datetime, and record the duration of the honk.

Do not wish me Happy Easter when I’m buying Hamantashen.

… has to be the biggest waste of space on the interwebs. Clearly Yahoo doesn’t give a shit about them since they are not policed in the slightest and riddled with spam, trolls, and crazies. There are absolutely no insightful conversations going on for any stock. I wonder why they even bother keeping them around.

My checking account is part of Commerce Bank which about a year ago was bought out by TD Bank. Up until this summer their site still worked for all my online banking. The theme had changed on the site but all the same login functionality was there. Then September 20th rolled around and I goto log into my account to check on some things only to find that now is a search engine spam page?

I must finally reveal to the world my secret for the solution to help curb NYC sound pollution and hope someone out there somehow finds a way to get this done. The solution… ::drumroll:: is to track taxi cab horn usage and impose fines based on excessive horn use. I know , I know I’m a genius , stop it, please. In my ignorant mind about cars, it seems simple enough to create a device that would activate anytime the horn is pushed, record the datetime, and record the duration of the honk.

I’ll first start off by saying I think smokeping is a great program and Tobi Oetiker is a great programmer whose contributions to the community have been great and in no way could I ever create MRTG or RRDTool. But…. After downloading the source to smokeping today and trying to configure it to run, I was completely shocked at how poorly it was put together. It’s clear that Tobi did not bother with making his code easy to run on any other system but his own with constant absolute paths to his own home directories on his personal machine!

Since moving into the city I’ve had to assemble a lot of furniture from ikea and other various places. Today while putting together snack tables from bed bath & beyond I believe I discovered my source of why I hate putting this crap together, the instructions. You see in order to save money on printing costs places like Ikea use picture only instruction manuals so they don’t need to translate every booklet into every language where they ship to.

What’s the deal with the leaner’s on the subways? You know who I mean, the dude who can’t be bothered to hold on the support poll, instead he has to lean against it. In order to hold on and keep yourself from falling all over the place, you have to wedge your fingers in between the poll and his sweaty back. I understand sometimes we all don’t want to stand on the subway.

You are kidnapped and dropped off in one of these stores with all name brands removed. Can you tell which one you are in? I believe all of these stores are too similar and would never invest in any of them for that reason and also there are just wayyyyy to many of them. If I see a CVS next to a duane reede, my only incentive to goto one over the other is which one is physically closer to me at the given moment.

THE PROBLEM The LIRR has a section of seats in each car that are 3 seats facing one another (see diagram to right). I always aim to sit in these set of seats due to the fact that I’m 6’5 and sitting in the regular seats hardly offers me enough leg room to sit comfortably for an hour long train ride. Of course this only works in my favor if no one sits across from me.

Situation: You have 5 minutes to make your train. You are about to enter Penn Station and you are presented with the stairs on one side and 2 escalators going down on the other. Which is faster? Optimal solution: The left hand side of the escalator , when sane people are riding it, is reserved for those who choose to maximize the escalator by walking down it. You fly down that sucker , lickity split, no shit.

….I can hear your music. It’s really loud. Me and the 4 other people around you aren’t staring at you cause we think your fake diamond earrings are kinda cool. Yea that new Timbaland song is kinda catchy but it’s 7:45 in the morning and well I’m trying to read the WSJ and the woman to my right was sleeping until you came on the train. Man you are totally feeling the beat right now, huge adrenaline rush I bet.

Web 2.0 has brought upon perhaps the silliest design trend to date, that even big media companies are doing. That is the addition of social networking links attached to articles. To the right is an example from nytimes.com. How many people honestly take the time out to bother clicking those links to ‘Digg’ the article or share it with their friends on facebook? Nytimes.com is atleast smart about it and saves on valuable screen space by making the list expandable, while some sit there giving you about 8 useless different ways for you to whore their article on your favorite social networking site.

My checking account is part of Commerce Bank which about a year ago was bought out by TD Bank. Up until this summer their site still worked for all my online banking. The theme had changed on the site but all the same login functionality was there. Then September 20th rolled around and I goto log into my account to check on some things only to find that now is a search engine spam page?

Doctor’s waiting rooms have so much potential for some sort of product to be placed in there to occupy peoples time while they wait for sometimes hours at a time to see a doctor. I went to a dermatologist about 6 months ago that actually had 3 computers setup for people to use while you waited, but I don’t see that working in a place where people are actually sick and spreading germs.

What happened today with Schering-Plough (SGP) is exactly why I have never bought a pharmaceutical stock and don’t plan to. I’ve always had this belief that every pharma company was one FDA study away from a 20% drop or worse and I had been meaning to write a blog post about this for a while. Of course on the flip side you could say with these stocks they always have a pop in them if they get approved for a new drug but the drug approval process creates so much volatility in these stocks as the FDA takes a very long time and creates many news stories causing lots of pops and drops on rumors of approval or FDA wanting more information.

You are kidnapped and dropped off in one of these stores with all name brands removed. Can you tell which one you are in? I believe all of these stores are too similar and would never invest in any of them for that reason and also there are just wayyyyy to many of them. If I see a CVS next to a duane reede, my only incentive to goto one over the other is which one is physically closer to me at the given moment.

…Most over used 2 words in newspapers this year. Searching google news for “credit woes” in the last day(Feb 29th 2008) produces 914 hits. Everyday the market is down I see the same couple of words in financial headlines over and over again. When the market is down we have a mix of the following words…. Investors, Credit Concerns/Woes, Fear, Inflation, Worries, Economic, Fall, Drop, Housing, Outlook, Profit Taking, Dollar Weakening, Write-offs, Pullback.

If you trade a stock on insider knowledge and you lose money, do you get your money back when the SEC prosecutes you?

In June of last year, PENN National Gaming Inc. (PENN) agreed to be acquired by a group of investors led by Fortress Investment Group (FIG) for $67 in cash for each share of the stock. At the time of the buyout announcement this was a 31% premium over the previous days stock close at $51.14. Right after the merger was announced the stock shortly dropped for 7 straight trading days. Normally after a buyout announcement stocks trade pretty close to their buyout price, say within 5% of the actual buyout offer.