Marco's Corner

I’m currently building Solaris IPS packages for Some Ruby gems. Yes, I know rubygems does a very good job of keeping everything together. But that does not work so well on backend systems where you don’t have a free internet access and where repeatability is important. So I decided to wrap the gems we need [...]

I’m using the OpenSource version of puppet, the system configuration engine to keep some Solaris systems in sync. For some modules, I wanted to know which zones are running on a given system. So I extended facter, puppet’s system fact collecting framework a bit. This little patch adds a list of zones and a mapping [...]

Update – Sorry, while the patch below works, it’s NOT needed to get that functionality!! GNU bash can do that without modifications. I don’t know why I missed that before:-( Simply add a ${VAR} into the single quotes when you define the PS1! $ PS1=’\u@${FOO}\$ ‘ marcow@YY$ FOO=XX marcow@XX$ Sorry for the confusion – Marco [...]

Audio books are fun. Downloading them legally and using  them on your systems should be as fast and as painless as possible. But that’s not completely true when you buy  audio books from Borders and try to use/handle them on Linux:-( Once you decide and buy your audio books, Borders adds links into your account [...]

OK, I spend most of most of Saturday and Sunday in San Francisco @ the local RHoK installation. I met some very interesting people, learned a lot of different thing about software projects and I hope my little changes will make a bit of a difference. I played with Ushahidi, an Open Source crowdsourcing platform [...]

It’s already almost a week since we made it back from our first stay in a really snowy Yosemite Valley. We started spending our Thanksgiving week up there something like five years ago. So far, all years had pretty good weather. Or let’s say mostly sunny & dry;-) Because the snowy weather was a lot [...]

So far, the weather was really nice here in central CA, but even so, winter is coming and with it the daylight leaves earlier. Maybe the little monkey to the left can give you a suggestion, what to do with those longer evenings;-) Find a good book, a warm blanket, and have fun;-) – Marco [...]

We manage a couple of Bugzilla installations. For some stacks, the Bugzilla admins manage many or even all products, but they still don’t have shell access to the backend servers. In order to make the live for those people a bit easier, I added a simple SQL edit form to the Administration page for those [...]

I just played a bit with the GlassFish gem for JRuby. But I realized that there was a new version for GF out there but the gem was not updated. A short search @ google did not show anything, and I had the build environment setup already. My Gem is here;-) So here are the [...]

OK, so it’s swim season again for the Tracy Tritons. And we are going to host a big meet with 700+ swimmers age 4 to 18 years plus their families. Our biggest concern is to make sure, everybody has updated information so that the meet can flow smoothly without much waiting for swimmers or volunteers. [...]