I am pleased to announce the release of the 4.0 edition of our family distribution, code named “Ryan Timothy”. 9 months of effort has gone into this release, with the final product weighing in at 7lb 6oz and measuring 20″, and with no known bugs at release time! Development Lead Caron made several significant commits through the night, with QA support from Release Engineer Matt. The team is holding on any further commits for a while, and is doing quite well. Ryan joins previous releases (codenamed “Marie Caron”, “Brianna Theresa”, and “Amber Grace”) in a full Long Term Support life cycle, with Extended Lifecycle Support as needed.
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Email Productivity Tip: Differentiate email sent “to” you, “cc”‘ing you, or including you on a list
Do you receive hundreds of emails per day, with varying levels of relevance and criticality? Do you already apply mail filters to route certain lists or senders into folders, but still suffer with trying to triage email that doesn’t come from a one of these predefined origins?
There is no magic bullet, but I noticed a simple pattern that has provided me more gains than the low effort it took to implement:
Mail addressed directly to me, where my email address is explicitly in the “To” line, is generally more important to me than email in which I am only in the “CC” line. Similarly, email received as part of a distribution list, where I do not explicitly appear in either “To” or “CC”, is generally of lower importance.
<
p>So, I have implemented a very simple set of filters to capitalize on this pattern. Note that I have done this in the past with Thunderbird, Evolution, Outlook, and most recently with Zimbra.
- Email where I am in the “To” field and the sender is one of a very specific set of VIPs (such as my wife or boss) gets highlighted a very bright color, like Yellow or Light Green
- Email where I am in the “To” field gets highlighted a bright color, like Red or Blue
- Email where I am in the “CC” field gets highlighted a lesser color, generally a pastel
- Email where I am in neither the “To” nor the “CC” gets reduced color, such as light gray.
<
p>At a glance, this helps me determine what I should look at immediately, versus what can wait till later and doesn’t need to distract me now. YMMV, but I figured I would share.
Next meeting of the Greater Hartford GNU Linux Users Group
The next GHGLUG social gathering has been scheduled for 2/20 at the Corner Pug in West Hartford, and the next meeting on 2/26 at Axis901 in Manchester. If you are in the Greater Hartford area, and have a personal or professional interested in Linux, please check the Meetup page and join us!
http://www.meetup.com/GHGLUG/
One of those “D’oh” moments: chown .*
UPDATED: Repair process below
Want to change the ownership of all files in a directory to a user named ‘foo’? Think this is a good way to do it?
chown -R foo * .*
Yeah, don’t do that. In one of those awesomely awful “D’oh” moments, I did that. Remember: “.*” matches “..”. So that will traverse up one level, and then recursively back down.
And of course …. I ran this in /mnt . It took me about 5 seconds to realize what I had just done, before hitting ^c. Yeah, my system is b0rked. 🙁
Resolution provided by Simon Sekidde at Red Hat:
On Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and derivatives), there is an easy way to re-initialize the ownership and permissions of RPM-installed files:
for i in `rpm -qa`; do rpm --setugids $i; rpm --setperms $i; done
Make sure to use –setugids before –setperms; if the order is reversed, changing the ownership with –setugids will reset any suid/sgid bits set by –setperms.
Greater Hartford GNU/Linux Users Group
Are you in the Hartford area, and have an interest in Linux and FOSS, and want to meet a group of like-minded people? Come join the Greater Hartford GNU/Linux Users Group!
I attended for the first time last night (2014-01-30), and will look to attend regularly (monthly). Checkout the Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/GHGLUG/
One Year
Today marks the completion of a full year at Red Hat. It has been an incredible year! I find myself positively challenged daily, working with some of the smartest people I have ever met — both my colleagues within Red Hat, and the customers I get to work with. I get the privilege of being able to work with Open Source technologies, and bring them to a great variety of enterprises. And I have even found my niche within Red Hat’s Identity Management space (imagine that!).
I do miss my team and other friends at UConn. UConn gave me great opportunity, both to gain strong technical skills, and to experience leadership, both formally as management, and informally as a mentor and vocal innovator. I place great value in those first 13 years of my professional career, and I look forward to achieving similar gains in my next 13 years!
Cameo on Gordon Haff’s Cloudy Chat Podcast
(Warning: Shameless Plug)
I recently had the opportunity to join Gordon Haff ( Red Hat’s Cloud Evangelist ) and Ellen Newlands ( Red Hat’s Security and Identity Product Management) for a discussion about Identity Management and Cryptography. Check out what we had to say (audio or text) on Gordon’s Cloudy Chat Podcast .
Timestamping your Bash History
Great post titled Remember when you issued that command…? by Mitch @ UConn on how to include the date/time of each command in your Bash history.
My preference is for ISO8601 time formatting, so I am using:
$> echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%F %T "' >> ~/.bash_profile
But of course, any ‘date’ formatting will work ( see “man date” for more information ).
Need to deploy a quick JASIG CAS demo? Try jasig-cas-quickdemo!
My development activities on mod_auth_cas have significantly reduced over the past couple of years. In trying to reinvigorate my development cycles around mod_auth_cas, I needed to deploy a CAS server. Deploying CAS is already pretty straightforward — install Tomcat, generate SSL certs, deploy the CAS war, and enjoy. However, I wanted to automate this process to make it easier to repeatedly redeploy a completely clean environment.
So, I have just posted jasig-cas-quickdemo to GitHub.
jasig-cas-quickdemo is a Maven project that does the following:
- Downloads and builds the JASIG CAS project,
- Uses the Maven Tomcat plugin, download deploy Tomcat 7,
- Generates an SSL cert for HTTPS access, and exports the public cert in PEM format for use by CAS clients,
- Launch CAS on the local Tomcat 7 instance, with the default username=passwored authenticationHandler,
- Grants access to the ‘admin’ account for the Services Management interface.
Try the following on Fedora 19+:
$ yum install maven git $ git clone https://github.com/forsetti/jasig-cas-quickdemo.git $ cd jasig-cas-quickdemo $ mvn integration-test
Then just point your browser to https://localhost:8443/cas , and you should see the default CAS login screen.
Check out the README for more information.
qif-util
I’ve just posted the first (and likely only) release of qif-util .
qif-utils is a very small set of small tools to manipulate QIF files, written sloppily in a very small amount of time.
Having used Gnucash very happily for a decade, I’ve always been irritated by the manual method I needed to perform to map transactions to accounts. qif-util was written to automate some of that process, and has been posted in case anyone else can benefit from it. However, do not rely on this code for anything significant — only about 20 hours was put into development, most being spent tweaking the output process to give me something usable.
qif-util currently provides 3 command line tools, written in Python – see the README for more information.
- qif-augment inserts account name and type, and an initial transaction representing the opening balance of an account
- qif-csv converts a QIF file into CSV (with columns hardcoded into the code)
- qif-rules accepts a file of rules describing how to assign a category (“L” QIF code) to QIF transactions, based on matching fields in the transaction. See the sample rules file for more information.
Why post such a trivial and unsupported set of tools? Well, we are entering tax season in the U.S., QIF is still the most common financial export format out there, and I work for the best open source company out there and fully believe in sharing with the community. So, if you find value out of these, please drop me a comment here.