Antispin

In my previous post, I outlined how I manage the collection of logs across our infrastructure at a high level with Logstash and Elasticsearch. I also touched upon viewing and searching through the data with Kibana, a Javascript frontend. In this post, I want to cover an important interim step if using the packages in the ElasticSearch repos is unfeasible or if you are running legacy servers that the repos don’t provide packages for. ...

Hello, I’m a sysadmin. I manage servers for a living. About a hundred of them, at last count. One of the biggest challenges in my job is keeping tabs on what’s going on inside my infrastructure. Was the last email sent to dave.mcUserface@example.org delivered? What’s the busiest nginx host in the network? Which vhost gets the most traffic? What was the average load across the entire infrastructure at 04:53, three days ago? ...

I’m still getting the hang of shooting with my reversed-lens setup without a tripod. The great thing is that suddenly a lawn becomes incredibly interesting once you can get down to that level of detail.

I’ve been looking to practice more calligraphy of late, so I’ve been on the lookout for short passages to transcribe. Here’s one. Original credit for the text goes to Eric Tortora Pato

Because all girls are drama-prone harpies. Everyone knows this. sigh

The first frost of the year has hit and mornings are the perfect time to capture some macro images of ice crystals!

This morning is quite foggy and the excel centre looks all mysterious and menacing..

Dear Microsoft, If you’re selling a product to, presumably, existing windows users (windows 8 is hoped to gain widespread use in the enterprise), marketing it as ‘easy to get the hang of’ is an admission of just how alien the UI is to most windows users.

I returned from a trip to Canada not too long ago. Now, in the past, every time I’ve hung out with Katelyn, I’ve had a hundred and one poi ideas to share with her. And, invariably, both of us would forget what I did. So this time, when I started showing her things, she stopped me and made me get my phone out so she could video what I did. ...

Fuck yeah.

If I ever become a parent, I will do my damndest to do this. Other humans’ lives are not mine to control. I can provide advice, describe what worked for me in the past and offer a stable, safe space to return to when shit hits the fan. However, dictating what other people, especially any potential kids of mine, do to the extent of “you will have sex when I say it’s OK for you to have sex” is abhorrent. ...

Amanda Palmer has been making beautiful music. Having signed on to a record label with her band, they recorded an album and it sold around 20,000 copies. The record label called that a “failure” and walked away. Here’s the story of how it happened and what happened next. There’s an NSFW moment at around the ten-minute mark. 

Cross-posted from here: https://tinyurl.com/ya2fd8v and well worth a read. Gentlemen. Thank you for reading. Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. ...

This is grand. It’s recorded by way of a series of snapshots of Google Street View

This has been doing the rounds online, but it’s nonetheless rather amusing I present for your amusement: The Gentleman’s Guide to Amputation