Blog
“Saving Alan Idle” is now up at Escape Pod
WOOHOO! My story "Saving Alan Idle" is now available as both HTML and a podcast. I'm so excited! http://escapepod.org/2013/07/05/ep403-saving-alan-idle/ Thanks to everyone who helped me critique it, including, but not limited to: Gary David Henderson, Beth Dawkins,...
Nagios Event Handlers on Windows
Nagios event handlers are WHERE IT'S AT, BABY, YEAH! There are some services that I can just automagically restart without any problems. (WSUS, SQL Agent, etc.) This way, instead of notifying me, Nagios can just fix the problem for me and We Need Never Know. These...
A script for migrating to a new server
I stripped out a piece of company-specific logic, but... List the databases you want to move in a file named "control.txt." (To migrate the entire server, paste the output of "select name from sys.databases where name not in ('master', 'msdb', 'model', 'tempdb').")...
Nagios Twitter Notifications – working again!
Yeah. Twitter changed their authentication, and my old Twitter notifications (based on Ed Voncken's work) seized up and failed. I had to update the python tweepy library to get them to work. pip install tweepy --upgrade And they're back! I love Twitter notifications,...
“Digital Death”
The WisCON panel description: Who gets your ebooks when you die? Your Twitter feed? The baby book that mostly exists on LJ? Do you have an estate plan for all these intangible but valuable assets? When you go, do you want your pages taken down or kept up for all time?...
Fun with VLFs
Virtual Log Files. Your database's log file is made up of one or more virtual log files. Our databases have too many. Basically, our LDFs are fragmented. What to do about this? Well, Dave Levy has a script to reduce the number of VLFs, but it's to run against a...
Immortal Gifts invites readers to re-evaluate the meanings of things such as life, death, freedom, hate and love from the first page. Katherine Villyard manages to capture some of the most poignant questions we ask ourselves as we go through our individual lives. Is it worth being able to live forever if, in the end, we’ll lose the ones we love to mortality? Is Death really the ultimate enemy to life, or is death just life’s misunderstood old friend? To stop hate, do we need to restrict our freedoms? This book makes readers ask and answer tough questions not only about the characters and plotline, but about their own beliefs, understandings, and dreams.