Recently, my Mac greeted me with a kernel panic (an unusual occurrence for most people). It seems that one of the RAM modules in my Mac failed. It shouldn’t have been terribly exciting. Things like this happen. My Mac had two SO-DIMMS (2x4GB) so it shouldn’t have been a problem. Regrettably, when the RAM module…
Recently, Mike English and myself needed to set up a rather simple network share which could be used for storing and sharing documents, image artifacts, and large binary files. This was to replace our previous network share solution which I inadvertently rendered unusable after a system software upgrade. We intended the network share to be…
Mike English and myself have been preparing to deploy Puppet to help manage our infrastructure. Puppet is a Ruby-based server automation tool for *nix systems which uses a declarative language to express a system configuration. The Puppet master distributes a catalog which contains configuration information to Puppet agents which then execute various changes on managed…
Occasionally, a subversion repository may start to become too large and cumbersome to work with easily. If the repository contains a large amount of data, it may take a great deal of time to perform certain operations, such as checking out the entire repository at once. It may make sense to split the repository to…
Recently, ICANN, the entity responsible for managing the top-level domain space, approved the creation of a new top-level domain (TLD). A TLD is at the ‘top’ of the domain name system hierarchy, and is used in the domain name system for the Internet and website addresses. For example, the .com in www.google.com is a TLD….
As blogged about previously, the SME Toolkit has a feature which allows integration with telephone companies to send SMS messages via the SMPP protocol. Recently, we experienced the challenge of needing to communicate SMS messages to a telco utilizing the 7-bit GSM Default Alphabet. The challenge arose from the fact that, internally, the SME Toolkit…
Atomic Object is looking to hire a professional problem solver to join me as part of a support team with the company. What does a professional problem solver do, you may ask. What sort of job is that? Good question. I’ve been trying to find a good way to describe it. I really shouldn’t be…
Manipulating large amounts of data can often be a challenge, especially when the data utilizes complex character encodings or requires a change of character encoding. Fortunately, certain text editors such as Vim are well suited to handle this type of work. Vim supports many character encodings, and provides enhanced functionality to work with some of…
It happens countless times for many reasons. You attempt to start or restart your MySQL server after a small configuration change and MySQL stubbornly refuses to start. Or, if it does start, some important functionality, such as InnoDB support, is missing. Most Linux users will be familiar with the following pleasant response:
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object