Author: Cody

Tonight I was looking for my floppy drive device to use with dd on my macbook. OS X is based on Darwin which is a BSD port but apple has changed up the /dev device names from the usual BSD ones. The easy way to find out a /dev/devicename entry is to open System Profiler and to find the device listed and click on it.

For example, my usb floppy drive was listed under Hardware > USB > USB Floppy. Once I selected that the information window lists all kinds of details about the device, including the “BSD name” which in my case was disk2. So the dev entry for my floppy disk is /dev/disk2. It’s a lot easier than guessing!

For some reason sun wanted to make the hostname in solaris as difficult as possible to change. For reference (my own and others) here is the list of files that have to be modified to change the hostname in solaris.

/etc/hosts
/etc/nodename
/etc/hostname.*
/etc/net/ticlts/hosts
/etc/net/ticots/hosts
/etc/net/ticotsord/hosts
/etc/inet/ipnodes

After which you should reboot to test out the new hostname.

I have switched from my trusty dell laptop to my macbook laptop for my primary workstation. I use parallels and boot camp to get my windows fix for the apps I just can’t replace but mostly I run in OS X all day. Recently I’ve wanted to archive my many gigs of photos to DVD.

One annoying thing that the mac finder doesn’t do is provide a size summary of selected files in the bottom title bar like windows explorer. This makes selecting exactly 4.7 GB worth of files for burning kind of annoying. Luckily I’ve found a cool free app that allows me to backup my photo folder to multiple DVD-R discs simply by dragging the files onto the app. It’s made my life a little easier. It’s called DVD Spanner and it’s free! Thanks Matt Sergeant!

Speed kills, more appropriately, lack of speed kills my desire to load a web page. Flickr is one of those self proclaimed web 2.0 web sites that everyone seems to use for their photo hosting. I think the site is great, lots of features and a large active community. My only real gripe with the site is the fact that’ it’s so slow it’s almost unusable.

Flickr was bought by online media giant yahoo in March of 2005 so it obviously has some serious bank in it’s back pocket for infrastructure upgrades. So what’s the problem yahoo? Flickr has been unusable for several months, yahoo needs to make flickr quickr or users will pickr someplace else to go. With other media companies like google (who seem to have the capacity problem solved) breathing down yahoo’s neck I would figure that they would be on top of these problems.

Oh well, there are lots of other photo sharing sites out there, I’m sure someone will step up.

I’ve been in the industry since 1998, in that time I’ve only worked for 3 different companies. Sure I’ve done consulting for many more than that but I’ve really only hung my hat at 3 different businesses. The first place I worked for was a small computer shop in my home town. I worked there for 2 years and loved it, I still remember how hard it was to give my 2 weeks notice. The second place I worked was an e-commerce company right after the dot-bomb. I stayed there for 6 years but it felt like a lifetime. We worked many long nights figuring out how to make e-commerce work. After six years I decided to move on and try something new, which lead me to my current company, one of the largest business VOIP providers in Canada. My team was able to deploy an advanced network with POP’s across Canada in 90 days, definitely trial by fire.

Well, it’s come to that time again, I’m moving on once again. This time to my first large (7000+ employees) company. Part of me is excited to get in there and learn, the other part is scared of change. I will be part of a small Unix team running a variety of UNIX/Linux systems, most notably a Linux rendering farm.

I guess I’ll have more updates as I get into my new job.