The issue of overused words is a tricky one. For me, the problem occurs when I revisit my writing a few days later and make a few edits. I may find a word I would like to replace with a better match, forgetting that the same word was already used…Read More

What do I recall from my extensive overland trips in the past few years? Not much, to be honest. It was just a blur of driving, looking for gas stations, trying to reserve camping spots or motel rooms, and - yes - joggling camera batteries and SD cards. But I…Read More

Sometimes, I need to post longer videos on social media that are limited to a few minutes in duration. Manually splitting a longer video into segments is for amateurs.

The textmg is a cool little CLI tool written by jiro4989 - a systems engineer from Japan - that allows you to convert the color output in a terminal window to an image file. I find this very useful when sharing code snippets on social media and when writing documentation.

The installation and configuration process for AWS CLI is fairly simple. The package itself is installed with pip (yum -y install python-pip):

There are several tools you can use to verify access to a remote network port: nc, tcping, telnet. Unfortunately, nc from the netcat package has been replaced by the one from nmap, which lacks the -z option, making it useless for non-interactive applications.

This simplest of problems just never fails to find a new victim. For whatever reason you want to delete all hidden files in the current directory and subfolders. Without much thinking you just type rm -rf .* Here's a classic example of one developer giving another developer a terrile advise.

Just a quick command to double the size of the /tmp filesystem that uses tmpfs. This is  for those situations when you can't be bothered to think.

CollabNet VersionOne has released it's 12th annual "State of Agile" report. The survey involved more than 1,400 software professionals in various roles and industries over the fourth quarter of 2017. Only 12% responded that their organizations have a high level of competency with agile practices across the organization, and only…Read More

The other day I ran into the "Flexible Import/Export" article by Bruce Byfield in the March 2018 issue of Linux Pro Magazine and thought it could use some more detail. So here's some more detail.

An annual event produced by The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society since 1829 and hosted by the Pennsylvania Convention Center is a good place to escape boredom and shitty weather. Also, a place to photograph something other than the cat.

In a nutshell, TOPSIS - the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution - seeks out one of many options that is the closest to the ideal option while at the same time is the farthest from the worst possible option.

Unix shell scripting language is run by the command-line interpreter and, as such, can be read and understood by anyone with sufficient access and experience. Sometimes this is not a good thing. Sometimes you want people and applications to be able to run the script but not necessarily look under…Read More