The "What?" and the "Why?"

I've been a fan of the MultiMarkdown for quite a while now. I keep all of my important notes in this format, which is easy to write with just a simple text editor.

I wanted to be able to copy or sync my *.mark files to my web server and have them automatically be rendered as XHTML. I looked into a couple of ways of doing this. One of which is the Text::MultiMarkdown::ApacheHandler Perl module Apache handler. The downside is that this handler doesn't work out of the box in Apache2.2.

Read on to see my solution. I've also seen a cgi based apache handler done by reppep as chronicled here. The only problem is that he's using the original Markdown. I've long been a fan of the extended syntax, and output formats I can get from MultiMarkdown. So I've build a similar script to what reppep has done.

This year I'm not going to be able to make it to the Utah Open Source Conference. This makes me sad. So to get everyone excited. I'm FINALLY blogging about the videos which were taken of my presentation at last year's event.

You can watch an interview which I gave for OpensourceTV here:

The first part of my presentation on Virtualization here:

and the second part here:

I'm doing a presentation for ALE Central this Thursday

Here's the blurb

In our professional lives we often spend a great deal of time in one sort of presentation or another. A PowerPoint slide show for work, a story to our children at bedtime, "selling" your boss on your next big idea, or simply "selling" yourself as an entrepreneur.

A properly created presentation can be extremely powerful. It can mean the difference between getting that new contract with the Johnson firm and spending the next four months trying to find new customers. Perhaps your sub-par presentation is all that's keeping your small business from catching the eye of some big venture capital firm.

Presentations are a big part of being involved in the Open Source movement. Conferences, user group meetings, etc. Being a proponent of open source gives us quite a few opportunities to present.

Come an learn how a proper presentation is more than "not putting everybody to sleep". We will cover everything from preparation to handouts, PowerPoint decks to no slides whatsoever, handing "that guy in the second row" to "Wowing the room. You might even learn what a "bathroom review" is.

I promise you won't be disappointed.

And here's the important stuff

Date and Time

Thurs April 17th 7:30pm to ~9:30pm

Location

Gambrell Hall Classroom 1C

Emory University School of Law
1301 Clifton Road
Atlanta, GA 30322

I had a great idea

I've been a big fan of the TED talks for a while now and listening to them just inspired me to do something new.

Every so often I will post to this blog one of the great quotes I've stumbled across during my day.

Sir Ken Robinson on creativity

Taken from his TED Talk.

If you are not prepared to be wrong; you'll never come up with anything original

Hope you enjoy this new feature of my blog.

EDIT: 2008-03-03 14:00

Fixed my links. Sorry

I work in an office with four other people. This is a good thing when it comes to communicating and working together. However it can be a bit detrimental when it comes to entering into "The Zone".

To combat this, I've been listening to music through headphones... There is a bit of a problem with the solution I have noticed, not all music is conducive to entering "the zone".

Here's a list of artists whom I've decided are great for "Hack Music". Artists whose music is great for reducing ambient noise, while not distracting you too much.

• Muse
• Blue Man Group
• Thievery Corporation
• MC 900ft Jesus
• Daft Punk
• Basement Jaxx

What is your favorite "hack music"? Post a comment and we'll make a big list for everyone's enjoyment.

I've just racked and installed my newest toy at the datacenter: a Cisco Catalyst 4948 switch .

Prior to working here I have never had the experience of working with a Cisco switch other than to plug myself into it and run on the network it provides.

I'm keeping this log to document how I've set up my switch.

Let's start out with what I've done up to this point.

Using the libvirt tool virt-clone is pretty simple to make a new guest image.

virt-clone -o ORIGINAL_GUEST -n NEW_GUEST_NAME -f /new/guest/disk/file

There's not much more to it.  Virt-clone takes care of all the unique stuff (uuid, mac address, etc).

I have two Debian servers, One is the old one, running on hardware that dell is no longer supporting (without us shelling out again) in a couple months. The other -- the new one-- is a virtual instance I have just installed on top of Citrix XenServer. Both are running Debian 4.0 "Etch". 

The application we have running on the old server has quite a few dependencies, and the Operating system hasn't been re-installed in quite some time. As a matter of fact, it is running an image which was based off an image which was based off an image.  In other words, I needed a quick and dirty way of installing all the packages which are needed on the new server, without using the old image.

Here's what I did:

First, on both servers I made a list of the packages which were installed. I did this by running the command:

root@oldhost # dpkg -l > packages.old

and on the new server:

root@newserver # dpkg -l > packages.new

I then combined the lists using text tools such as 'cat' 'sort' 'uniq' etc...
Then I used vimdiff to find the differences between the two servers and make choices as to which packages I wanted installed.  All in all I ended up with a third list which was my cleaned list of packages.

After copying the clean list to the new server, I ran this command:

perl-01:/tmp# for i in `cat packages.final` ; do dpkg -l $i &>/dev/null && echo "found package: $i, doing nothing" || apt-get install $i; done

This command will install a package if it's not currently on the system, and output "found package $foo, doing nothing" if it is already installed. You have only to sit at the prompt and answer any of the dpkg-configure questions which may pop up.

Cool, no?