Other articles


  1. Appfirst monitoring

    Quite a long post today I'm afraid !

    Over the last few weeks we've been kicking the tires on the AppFirst monitoring service, and I thought it might be helpful to others to document my thoughts here. I didn't see many such posts when we set out on the task and …

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  2. Announcing hiera-subnet

    I'd like to announce the availability of hiera-subnet, a new backend i've put together for looking up hiera facts from puppet by using the subnet location of the machine.

    This means that, for instance you may have a fact as one thing for all machines (similar to common.yaml), something …

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  3. convert kiwibank xml into csv for spreadsheet

    If xml xslt isn't possible, here's a little snippet of code that takes one argument, an xml file as provided by New Zealand's Kiwibank, and converts it into a semi-colon delimited output. Useful for spreadsheets such as libreoffice calc

    Usage: kiwibank-parser.py [xml file path] > output-file.csv

      
    #!/usr/bin/env …

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  4. bash progress bar snippet

    little snippet of bash that produces a progress bar

        #!/bin/bash
        # A simple progress bar that overwrites itsself in place

    function print_progress_bar {
        cols=`tput cols`
        jobName="$1"
        doneNum="$2"
        totalNum="$3"
    
        jobLen=${#jobName}
        doneLen=${#doneNum}
        totalLen=${#totalNum}
    
        barLength=$(($cols - ($jobLen+$doneLen+totalLen+14)))
    
        percentDone=`echo "scale=1; ($doneNum …
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  5. Move pointer to middle of screen, multi-head.

    Short script (in python) to shift mouse pointer to middle of screen, useful to save time on low acceleration pointing devices. Works for multi-head setups.

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # Small script to jump pointer to middle of given screen number
    # Run with [scriptname] [screen number]
    import os, sys
    
    modelines = os …
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  6. Projecting co-ordinates onto a round surface.

    Little snippet of handy code (in perl), how to adjust 2 dimentional latitude / longitude co-ordinates for plotting on a sphere.

        rotAngle = 0;       # Rotational offset
        padX     = 0;       # Initial padding on Y axis
        padY     = 0;       # Initial padding on X axis
    
        posX = 0;
        posY = 0;
    
        posY = 0.5 * log( (1 + sin(lat)) / (1 …
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  7. ftp auto-banner

    Need to ban people who hammer your ftp, but dont want to or cant install fail2ban ? This may help get you on the right track:

        #!/usr/bin/env python
        import popen2, re, datetime, time, os, sys, logging, syslog

    timeLimit = 300  # in seconds (== 5 minutes)
    failureLimit = 5 # X number of fails …
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  8. Chord Finder 1.0

    Chord Finder 1.0 is available for general download. I've tried to come up with an rpm format that installs in some sort of a standardised way without breaking too many taboos about file placement. There's a few minor bugs but i'm going to leave it a while for feedback …

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