Bill’s blog

I’ve spent the last several months working on a solution to do Solaris OS installs, upgrades and bare-metal restores. Of course, in the Solaris world, automated installs typically means “jumpstart”.

Yes, there are add-on packages to allow you to do more things easier with Jumpstart such as JASS and JET, and likely more that I have not mentioned.

When I decided to take on the issue of doing system builds, I inherited a partly-done setup a contractor had put together with an older version of JASS installed, so I just ran with that.

My requirements were:

1. Standard partitioning scheme for all servers
2. All servers followed the company security standards 100% from the initial build with no admin intervention.
3. Third-party software installed and configured without admin intervention.

The following posts will show how I deal with these issues for initial installs.

I made an arcade-themed collage for a 3.5″ x 3.5″ cover for a notebook Jane was making for me. It looks okay as a background for your computer desktop, if that’s the sort of thing you are into.

You can download it by clicking on the icon.

I’ve had 5-6 people now come up to me at Full House Holdem poker shows and tell me they saw my reviews on Yelp because they were googling for a specific bar/restaurant’s information after deciding to play poker there.

So for your benefit, here’s the list of reviews I wrote for various restaurants and bars in Atlanta I have played poker at.

And courtesy of Yelp….

Poker in Atlanta

What’s this?

The latest 12-week poker season has ended, and I finished #9 out of 1763 players with points in this past season of the Atlanta Full House Holdem league! I’m extremely pleased with that, especially considering most of the people who finished higher got a lot extra points from various promotions (800 points to the final table, etc). All mine were earned in normal shows.

The top 100 players get to play in a tournament where the first place prize is a seat in the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event. The tournament is on the 21st…. cross your fingers!

I played poker at Fox and Hounds tonight.

Sitting in the big blind, 8 players at the table. Only one person calls the blind. Small blind folds.

I’m holding 4c-7c

Flop comes up 5c 6c 8c. DAMN.

pokerhands.com says that is about a 1:65000 occurrance. I’ve had a few straight flushes before but never right off the flop.

A laugh at the expense of the joke of a VP that McCainThe Cryptkeeper selected.

All you need to know about Sarah Palin, in 4 minutes

I already told Thomas, Ron, and most anyone else I know who thinks of something other than stones when I mention “ruby” that I am just going to use the internet and the little $10 O’Reilly Ruby pocket reference and teach myself ruby. I mean, I did it the same way with perl and that was back in 1995 when my home-based access to the web was text-only. So why not?

Well since I was up all night last night patching servers, that gave me the opportunity to finally begin.

I decided that I would tackle this by making sure I have a use for ruby like I have a million uses for perl…. by focusing on learning the ruby equivalents for the bits of perl I use the most. 

That means three things.

1. Simple file/process IO
2. Pattern Matching
3. Arrays and Hashes

The whole OO aspect is quite familiar from doing C++ in college a million years ago to the object-oriented programming I did on IgorMUD, maybe a half-million years ago. So that shouldnt be a big barrier though I still think the perl is easier, probably because I dont have to define a bunch of variables. I’m sure Thomas will tell me where I’ve gone astray. But I’m proud that after one night I can do what I have already.

perl code to find all my running processes:


open(PS, "/usr/bin/ps -ef|");
while (<PS>) {
if (/sirinek/) { print; }
}


The equivalent ruby code:


pat = /sirinek/
pipe = IO.popen("/usr/bin/ps -ef")
while line = pipe.gets
m = pat.match(line)
if (m) then puts line end
end


EDIT (15:42 EDT): Well, sure enough, check it out…


pipe = IO.popen("ps -ef")
while pipe.gets
if (/sirinek/.match()) then puts end
end


Several years ago when I first moved to Georgia, I was really into this website called Where’s George? Participants on the site would mark dollar bills with the site address hoping people who got the bills at some point in the future would come onto the site and register where they found them.

In the year or so I was a WG lunatic, I marked and entered around 5000 bills, mostly $1s. To this day, 7 1/2 years after I entered my first one into the site, the bills have surfaced in 46 states, as well as DC, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The only states I never managed to get hits in were Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Alaska.

But I’ve also gotten “george hits” in Japan, Germany and Ireland. Today, I got one in Poland.

I’ll only get a hit email every couple months anymore, rather than multiple times a day like in 2002, but its always exciting when I see one in my email.

It seems like just yesterday I bought it in South Carolina on the way to visit Jane.

A growing list of Things Younger Than John McCain

Includes “Nylon”, “Cheerios” and “Both of Barack Obama’s Parents”