I installed a new hard drive in my work computer, and I'm taking this opportunity to do a clean install of OS X. And I'll be documenting that here, both for myself and because my choices may be instructive to some of you.
I have a Mac Pro from 2006 …
One of the most important parts of setting up a new computer (for a geek like me) is getting the Terminal set up right. I spend a lot of time there. I wrote about this in 2006, and I think it's time to update my Terminal setup notes for Lion …
I've been moving many posts from past websites I've had into schof.org, so schof.org will be the unitary place to get my writing on the web.
In going through the old posts, I was shocked to find out how many links I've posted are no longer valid.
I …
One of my clients (a Mac-based computer consulting company here in Los Angeles) had a BASH script they wanted me to look at -- a couple of things weren't working the way the client thought they should be working.
The client's issues are resolved, but I noticed something in the script …
I recently finished The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande, and the short version of the review is this: you should read it.
For those few still reading, I'll go into a little more detail about the book. Atul Gawande is an associate professor at the …
I was listening to the A Little Bit of Python podcast and heard them discuss the difficulty of logging with the standard Python logging module. I was a little surprised, because I don't think it's THAT hard to use. The logging module, quite frankly, requires a lot of boilerplate code …
What is management? It's a question someone asked me recently, and I find the topic fascinating. (If your eyes have already glazed over, please bear with me -- I promise I'll never use the word "paradigm" or tell you what you should be thinking in or out of.) I'm passionate about …
A client had an OS X server with tens of thousands of files in a directory tree, and wanted to move some of them based on their creation date. I put together a Python script that worked perfectly on my test system, but failed in production. (I put in a …
I just reimaged my laptop, and discovered that the "apropos" command had nothing in its database. (You use "apropos" to look up man pages related to a topic. It looks through an index to find appropriate pages to list, and the periodic maintenance tasks had not created the index.) OK …
This is the sort of thing that's second nature to a command-line geek, but I thought it was cool enough (in its little way) to share.
The problem: I have a process that runs on a remote server for quite a while. I wish to be alerted when it completes …