Had to restart a dead remote VM server this morning, and it gets its IP address from DHCP. I don’t have physical access to the machine and I needed to SSH into the VM to manually restart some services. My MacOS system was still caching the old DNS address,

This isn’t rocket science, more of a note to self. Found myself moving to a new work machine at work. Part of that involves copying dot files that Mac OSX finder can’t see. I really only want to move the ones I absolutely need, because I’m moving

I do a lot of my development work inside docker containers.  Recently I ran into an issue where, when connected to my company’s VPN network, the docker containers on my local machine running Fedora would lose the ability to connect to external resources.  Eventually I discovered the issue was

I’m a pretty happy user of Playstation Vue, especially since they recently released an AppleTV app.  But I can’t help but be tempted by the value proposition of DirecTV Now, particularly with their introductory offer, so I decided to sign up for the seven day free trial. For

After experimenting with Android phones for about the last year and a half, I decided to switch back to iOS. I have no desire to engage in fanboy flamewars.  Android and iOS have their pros and cons, but for me, the applications I use regularly and the ecosystem I work

Compared to when I used to download 3.5″ install images to set up Slackware on my machine, Linux has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of usability.  The majority of things seem to “just work” these days.  However, every once in awhile I run into some kind of

Adding SSL to a website sure is easier than I remember.  I’ve been vaguely aware of the fact that free SSL certificates were now available from Let’s Encrypt.  I’ve been spending most of the day geeking out with AWS server stuff so I decided now would be

Every so often I need to deal with some exported database id’s that come in the form of a CSV file.  The trouble is, instead of having the id’s one per line, I really need them on a single line, comma-separated so that I can use them in

Just a quick note, mostly to myself, but maybe this will help out somebody else doing a google search down the road, because I sure didn’t have much luck finding anything. Today, for the second time, I got bitten by Janrain’s poor diagnostics when it comes to error

In an effort to cut costs, I decided to switch my cell service from Verizon to Straight Talk.  I would have done it sooner had I realized that I could use my existing Verizon phones with a Straight Talk SIM card.  I had assumed since Verizon was CDMA, and not

I’ve got a lot of stuff lying around that I no longer use that I really need to get rid of.  Instead of using eBay or Craiglist, I decided to experiment with selling 3 items on Amazon using their “Fullfilled by Amazon” program.  One reason it really appealed to

Pisser of a day.  Discovered around lunch time two of my bikes were stolen out of my garage.  As far as I can ascertain, nothing else was taken, including my wife’s bikes.  Which makes me suspect it might have been a couple of people who took what they could

I have a Windows 7 VM running on my primary Mac notebook that I use mostly for one single application on a regular basis, and for occasional browser testing or other random tasks on rare occasions.  I have an ESXi server running on an old desktop machine, and I thought

Recently Comcast announced they were going to be doing some testing of data caps in certain markets, including mine.  I’m a cord-cutter and I’ve been very happy with Comcast’s speed and reliability, but when you view a lot of streaming video (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, iTunes)  and

I keep running into this.  For various reasons I need to use password-based authentication on some test boxes that are regularly rebuilt which makes using key based authentication difficult. Ordinarily I set up an alias like this: alias ssh1="sshpass -p secretpassword ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null"

Posting this short note to my blog in the hopes it may help someone else, as I had a hard time tracking this info down. Debian provides a package (sun-java6-jdk) for installing the JDK, but when you have a situation where you need to do an unattended installation (aka “silent

Regular expressions are one of those things that I understand but don’t use often enough to have really mastered. I use them even less in my Java programming. Today I found myself banging my head into my cubicle wall trying to parse out a file that looked something like