Law 24 The perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to …
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alphabet soup
Don’t ever work with the government – they change the names of agencies every few days. It’s kinda like African countries changing names: have all the letterhead printed and business cards issued? Change the name!
reviewing
I was contacted by Packt a few months ago to be a possible author of an eBook on the {{Raspberry Pi}}. As fun as that sounds like it would’ve been, I am in no way qualified to write on the topic, as I’ve both never used one, and don’t really have the time to play …
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one more chapter to go
We started in January of 2012. As of today, we have completed chapter 27. Next month, we will embark on the final chapter of Matthew in our small group men’s Bible study. It has been an adventure, a wonderful time of fellowship, and an amazing opportunity to go deeper into the Word of God. Thank …
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concentrate your forces – law 23 – #48laws by robert greene
Law 23 Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point. You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another – intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key …
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network install of centos 6
I wanted to try something different when playing with CentOS 6 recently, so I did a network install. Other than one very small detail, the install is identical to installing off a normal ISO. Here’s the difference: use the netinstall.iso (eg http://centos.datente.com/media/6/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.4-x86_64-netinstall.iso) when it asks for the URL to grab your image from, use something like http://centos.datente.com/media/6/os/x86_64 (make …
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programming again
It’s been years, but I am working on some new (small) programming projects again. First out will be an open-source app that’s a simplified (and slimmed-down) tool akin to Yahoo! Pipes. One of the things I had forgotten was just how hard it is to write code that doesn’t stink. Here’s hoping the first release …
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use the surrender tactic: transform weakness into power – law 22 – #48laws by robert greene
Law 22 When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose to surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane. Do not give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you – surrender first. By turning the other cheek …
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what should a professional services group’s goal(s) be?
Should it be as a revenue stream? Or can it be far, far more? Every place I have worked since getting into professional services back in early 2008 has viewed the goal of the organization as making money by performing services. Whether or not the customer was happy, something useful was delivered, whether a relationship …
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unsales
I am a huge believer in unsales. And not in the pharmaceutical industry sense. Because “shipping is a feature“, and because I intensely dislike the “do it for me, then hand me the keys” mentality, I routinely follow the unsales methodology. What is unsales? It is [almost] only selling what a customer can use today. I …
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a break from digitalia
Really enjoyed the break from digitalia this past week. I had one last year about this time, but hadn’t taken a good break before that since 2008. No electronics. No email. No mobile phones. It was nice 🙂 If you tried to contact me in the last week, please be patient. I’ll get back to …
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play a sucker to catch a sucker – seem dumber than your mark – law 21 – #48laws by robert greene
Law 21 No one likes feeling stupider than the next person. The trick, then, if to make your victims feel smart – and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives. –{{Robert Greene}}, {{The 48 Laws of Power}} (review)
there’s never enough documentation | there’s too much documentation
Documentation is vital. There’s never enough. And there’s always too much. In general, these are the areas I find documentation to fail: Not Enough Too Much/Many why-tos (instead of how-tos) tutorials on things you need architecture explanation design philosophy “how we got here” “why we are here” future plans / roadmaps deltas from standards recording …
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the value of face-to-face
I have been working from home for nearly 5.5 years. The benefits are myriad – not least of which is the minuscule commute and savings on fuel, eating out, etc. Sometimes I travel for work. This accomplishes many good things – a chance to put faces to names and voices, get a chance to read …
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new documentation should always augment the status quo
In my line of work, I often need to create documentation for clients. Documentation in general is a Good Thing™. But good documentation’s goal should always be to augment and improve upon what already exists – not to supplant, downgrade, or muddle what already exists. A prime example of this has come up with a …
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datacenter bandwidth charges can be crazy
Why are colocation bandwidth rates so crazy expensive? In an era of ubiquitous broadband to the home, why are connections in datacenters still so expensive? I see charges on the per-GB-transferred scale, or flat-rate charges per MB of bandwidth. I have yet to figure out why these rates can vary so wildly even in datacenters …
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on-demand, secure, distributed storage
In follow-up to a friend’s blog post on TrueCrypt, and in conjunction with some previous investigation and interests I have had, I am wondering how difficult it would be to run a tool like MooseFS in conjunction with TrueCrypt to provide a Wuala-like service as a plausibly-deniable data haven a la {{Cryptonomicon}}.
posting from google+ to other services with ifttt
I’ve been using If This Then That (best part? it’s free!) for several months, and wanted to share a simple way to post updates from Google+ (or any RSS feed, but I digress) to your other social media services. Currently I only use Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook – though I am sure this basic process …
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testing hardware performance differences
I’ve been attempting to understand how hard disk cache sizes affect performance recently (and whether it’s worth shelling-out about twice as much for a drive with 128MB vs one with just 64MB). What would be the best way to personally investigate the performance differences to help determine which is better (if there’s even a noticeable difference)? …
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100000 years ago tonight …
… in binary. Not sure how DST factors into it all, but my parents welcomed me into the world approximately 32 years ago now (at 2323 local time in 1981). It’s been a great first 25 years, and I can’t wait for the next 26!
always use verbose output when troubleshooting
In my eBook, Debugging and Supporting Software Systems, I wrote about several aspects of submitting good bug reports and support ticket, how to communicate, and more. If you’re ever troubleshooting a problem, it is universally helpful to enable the most verbose output possible in logging (stdout, stderr, and log files). You may not want it …
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do not commit to anyone – law 20 – #48laws by robert greene
Law 20 It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others – playing people against one another, making them pursue you. –{{Robert Greene}}, {{The 48 Laws of Power}} (review)
irony at olf2013 – the olpc and sugar
I played with the OLPC for a little bit at the Fedora table at OLF this past weekend. The Sugar desktop environment works on the metaphor of circles. It took me a few minutes to figure them out, but as soon as I was pointed at the right button (a dot, of all things), I …
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#moosefs @smartfile – distributed, redundant file management (#olf2013 talk)
As promised, some follow-up to OLF. Chris from SmartFile gave a great talk at OLF this year on MooseFS and how SmartFile leverages it to handle their rapidly-growing storage infrastructure. Specifically, he compared it to Ceph and GlusterFS. In short, MooseFS provides better configurability than either Ceph or {{GlusterFS}}, runs with lower overhead, and provides …
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olf 2013 in the bag
This past weekend I went to OLF with my friend Peter and a fella who’s now more than an acquaintance, Nathaniel – one of the lead devs for FreeIPA at Red Hat. Got to go to a variety of great talks and sessions, met some awesome folks, and just generally enjoyed the geek weekend 🙂 I’ll be …
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