Articles by Scott Hebert

1. Custom One-Line Log Output for Git and Mercurial

   Posted on November 25, 2015 in Programming

   The default history view in Git and Mercurial is optimized for completeness, not scanning. A compact one-line log is a better daily tool: short ID, subject, relative date, author, and branch or bookmark context. It does not replace a full graph; it makes the first pass fast enough that you …

2. Factory Reset Broken OnePlus One

   Posted on November 17, 2015 in voice

   This is a sad story. A few weeks ago, I set my OnePlus One down on a table outside so that it would not be in my pocket while I worked on the pool. I have done enough work on the pool to know that at any moment, I might …

3. [OS X] Disable IPv6 Address Privacy

   Posted on November 13, 2015 in Networking

   For those that are really into privacy, the Privacy Extensions defined in RFC 4941 are a really good thing. This extension circumvents SLAAC and has the result of randomizing your IPv6 address. Like I said, if privacy is a big deal for you, this is definitely something you want enabled …

4. What's Next? Using Chrome OS and Crouton For Work

   Posted on November 09, 2015 in System Administration

   It is well-documented that I am a heavy Google user. I use Gmail and Google Docs for just about everything. Additionally, I have used an Android phone since I got the HTC Dream (AKA T-Mobile G1) when it first came out.

   However, I have been using OS X full-time since …

5. [Pelican] Don't Let Me Publish Without Committing

   Posted on November 02, 2015 in Programming

   Although I use Git all day long, I actually prefer to use Mercurial for my personal stuff. When I started working on this project to maintain slaptijack.com with Pelican rather than continuing to use Wordpress, one of the things that really interested me was the ability to keep Markdown …

6. Redis: Better Session Storage for Magento

   Posted on October 28, 2015 in System Administration

   Out of the box, Magento has four methods available for storing session data: filesystem, database, memcached, and tmpfs. The default method is to store session information in the filesystem. I believe that storing sessions in Redis is actually superior to all of the aforementioned methods. Each of the four default …

7. Pelican: Insert Article Summaries into WordPress

   Posted on October 26, 2015 in Programming

   This is was my next project.

   Update: For now I've solved this problem by using FeedWordPress to pull the Atom feed for the Pelican-specific portion of the website.

   • Use this as a starting point for the XML-RPC bit.
   • It should first try to pull the article before committing a new …

8. Using Pelican's article.summary

   Posted on October 23, 2015 in Programming

   I'm using Jinja2 templates with my new Pelican-based articles. If you have Django experience, you'll feel right at home using Jinja2 templates. I decided early on that I wanted to create my own theme from scratch and keep it as basic as possible. (In fact, 'basic' is the name …

9. Getting Started With Pelican

   Posted on October 20, 2015 in Software

   I've been using WordPress on this site since 2007. After all this time, I've decided I want to try something new. So, I've decided to go in a completely different direction and start serving static content. There are three things driving my decision to change:

   • The existing site is really …

10. El Capitan Leads to More DNS Woes

    Posted on October 06, 2015 in System Administration

    Captures an El Capitan DNS-search-domain workaround while flagging the need for a current macOS DNS diagnosis and supportable fix.

11. Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license...

    Posted on September 21, 2015 in Programming

    Sometimes this pops up when you least expect it:

    Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
    

    This morning, I went to refresh one of my git repo's for work, and make spit that out. What the heck happened last night? Anyway, the …

12. nginx: Blocking Access to /xmlrpc.php

    Posted on July 31, 2015 in System Administration

    I recently ran into an issue on a Wordpress site running behind an nginx web server. The site was frequently being attacked by a botnet hitting /xmlrpc.php so rapidly, it would eventually force the FastCGI processes behind nginx to consume all available CPU. Naturally, this would cause all legitimate …

13. Goodbye, discoveryd. Hello again, mDNSResponder.

    Posted on July 07, 2015 in System Administration

    Great!

    Once again, Apple has made a change in how DNS is handled in Mac OS X. Originally, Yosemite (10.10) had replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd. This meant that all of those who had made a change to force mDNSResponder to always append search domains to DNS lookups had to …

14. UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019'

    Posted on May 22, 2015 in Programming

    Once again I was working on some Python code for EVE Online. This particular bit of code gathers a list of kills for a particular region and then summarizes that data in a daily report. Everything had been working properly, until one day...

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/Users …

15. Career Advice: Becoming a System Administrator

    Posted on May 01, 2015 in IT Management

    Recently, I got an email that went something like this:

    I have completed a BTech in Electronics and Communication. Now, I am working as a desktop engineer. How can I move my career to the network / server side?

    Career moves are hard for everyone. Personally, I've been thinking about making …