Mostly Unixish
Every now and then, when using Python 2.7 < 2.7.9 and trying to access SSL resources, especially through the requests toolkit, which seems to trigger the issue frequently - but I've seen it on some combinations of pip inside virtualenv as well - you'
Ollivander
Each and every time I think about Parkinson's law, I think that Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a sort of genius, who could gain a great insight into people's heads. For the few that have never heard about it, it's as simple as: Work expands
Mostly Unixish
This is one very, very, very interesting piece of ancient wisdom. Suppose you need to change permissions for some directories. Maybe the permissions are too strict, e.g. something like 700 for directories and 600 for files, and you need to give access to some other group and not just
Mostly Unixish
I was tired of repeating the same old pattern. Send a kill signal. Check with pgrep. Did the process exit? Send a kill -9. Now all my knowledge has been permanently dumped here: Kill Me Softly on GitHub If you want to kill a process by letting it to exit
Mostly Unixish
A desktop freeze is something that's not so rare nowadays - that's not good, but we shouldn't get desperate about that. I like Compiz with Unity Desktop on my Ubuntu Trusty very much; I feel it's a step forward compared to traditional
Mostly Unixish
I seem very ancientwisdom-oriented these days. Sometimes you've got a system user on your linux server that's used to run a specific service; it's a good practice to employ those users to achieve privilege separation, since it limits the impact of many security breaches.
Mostly Unixish
This is another old trick, but I like to tell the world about such amenities. I often find people writing command lines such as: ssh arcane-system-user@someextremelylong.andimpossibiletotype.anderrorprone.hostname.com or, worse ssh idliketorememberwhichuser@10.20.30.40 or maybe it was ssh someuserimashamedof@1.2.3.4 yes,
Mostly Unixish
This is a very old trick, but I find many people doesn't know about it yet. If you're using sudo (and you definitely should), one minor complaint is that you need to re-enter your password quite often. One common pseudo-solution is to completely disable the password
Mostly Unixish
It might be high time to update to the latest Ubuntu 14.04. I think that the upgrade process that is provided by Canonical is slightly underoptimal: if you're using a local mirror which can provide a very fast download of all packages, they'll usually be
Ollivander
A bit of wrap-up after part 1 and part 2 Current state of the things I seem to have missed something: there's now a very active Python Packaging Authority which is trying very hard to push Python packaging in the right direction, so that we can have a
Mostly Unixish
UPDATED: 26th January 2015, with Tomcat 8 support. Today I'm gonna share something that I figured out some times ago: how do I keep my tomcat installation up to date on my servers? Of course I'm not willing to automatically switch majors, but I'd
Mostly Unixish
Sometimes you would like to use an http URL as the source file for puppet; while it's being discussed since long, no implementation has been created so far. Of course it would be better to periodically download the file from its http source to the puppet master, and