I keep hearing about developers who, when interviewing for potential jobs, consider coding tests to be “a waste of time”, “insulting”, or “beneath me”. The logic seems to be: Once you’ve risen to the level of Senior Developer (or some similar title), people should realize that yes, you really do know how to write simple [...]
Tag Archives: system administration
Why I’m Ditching Slackware
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 – 1:37 pm
I went to find a package to install Git. The page at http://www.slackware.com/packages/ still says that the Slackware Package Browser has been moved to http://packages.slackware.it/ — it’s said this for years, and I keep wondering when they’re going to move the package browser back onto the main Slackware site. But this time, when I followed that [...]
Alert: SpamAssassin’s Year 2010 Bug
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 – 9:17 pm
If you haven’t been getting as much email as usual this past week, the culprit may be SpamAssassin. It turns out that SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (the current version, released in June of 2008) has a Year 2010 Bug. The problem lies in the core configuration file 72_active.cf, which contains a wide variety of “currently active” rules. On line [...]
Launching SSHblock
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 – 11:59 am
My latest software project is now available… where “latest” means “the latest thing I’ve launched, even if I actually wrote it over a year ago.” The story is simple: I was tired of seeing “failed password” messages from sshd cluttering up my logs. I was also annoyed at the constant flow of dictionary attacks, even [...]
When Have You Accomplished Enough?
Sunday, May 10th, 2009 – 5:36 pm
Okay, let me see if I can take stock of the day: I started off by getting my /etc, /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin, and /var/named directories under version control. That’s good. Plus I think I’ve got things set up to where I can upgrade WordPress plugins on my local setup, then reliably push the changes through [...]