I’ve recently started diving into home automation stuff, and of course immediately ran into issues. I purchased a z-wave water sensor and planned to use Home Assistant to monitor the sensor and send me alerts (via pushover) if it detects…
Author: AndrewL
I’m a Linux Administrator for a web hosting company near Dallas, TX. For my first job I worked as a computer technician at CompUSA, then when they closed I moved over to Best Buy. Luckily I was able to get a job doing as a Level 1 Tech for a web hosting company. I moved up through the ranks and now I’m an admin.
I use to play EVE-Online and was known as Andrew Gunn, I even got to fly up to Iceland to be a commentator for one of the Alliance Tournaments.
Lately I’ve spent my free time working on my personal business, which does consulting, hosting, web design, custom application development and soon gameserver hosting.
Please, follow me on Twitter. Or send me a message on AIM, my screen name is “aceat644″.
“Smart” Guns – Dangerously Dumb
Recently on NerdAbsurd we discussed “Smart” guns, in which I took up the task of refute the an article on Slate.com written by Farhad Manjoo. When Virginia first sent me a link to the article asking my opinion, I knew I would have more than a…
Mail Checker Minus; Or Why Are You Maintaining a Chrome Extension?
Update Feb 3rd 2011: I am no longer maintaining the Mail Checker Minus extension. I recommend switching over to Jason Savard‘s Checker Plus For Gmail. He’s already done a good bit of work cleaning up code and adding new features.…
Conversation with a Spam Bot
Today, while I was working on the inventory system for the Dallas Makerspace I received a message from an unknown person via AIM. This is not an unusual event for me since I have had the same AIM screen name for over a decade,…
Dallas Makerspace Open House
A while back I became a member of the Dallas Makerspace, which is basically the only hackerspace in the Dallas area. I met a lot of cool people and now I have access to a lot of really cool tools…
Compiling Bitcoin on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)
In case you don’t know, Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency or as the site says a “peer-to-peer network based digital currency”. While most people have been content to use the pre-compiled binaries available, some of us prefer to compile the…
5 Tips On Being An Effective Linux Admin
Earlier this week someone did something very bad, and it got me thinking about what are some of the simple things that make someone an effective Linux admin. While I will not tell you that following my advice will make…
FAIL: Why you should ALWAYS use visudo
It’s time for a short rant about proper Linux administration. Someone, who shall not be named, manually edited the /etc/sudoers file and broke it on a critical server. In case you don’t know, on Linux sudo allows you to run…
Firefox 3.5: Impatiently Waiting
In case you have been living under a rock, Firefox 3.5 came out today (well technically yesterday). I’ve noticed a lot of people wondering how they can get it running smoothly on Ubuntu. Never fear, after much trial and error…
Tweaking Nagios For Performance
The company I work for has about 3,000 servers that need to be monitored in our Dallas datacenter. For the past few years we’ve been using a fairly standard Nagios setup. If you don’t take the time to really learn…