Inspiring a Sense of Ownership

By Stuart Colville in Work on

Former colleague Mike West talks about how inspiring a team's sense of ownership around a project is the key to great things happening: http://mikewest.org/2008/11/the-inspiration-of-ownership. Quality stuff.…

Checking tarball contents before extraction

By Stuart Colville in shell on

When you are about to unpack a tarball you didn't create it's a good idea to run the -t flag instead of just assuming it's been packed in a sensible way. tar -tzf foo.tar.gz This lists all of the files in the tarball so you can be sure…

Bash: Resolving Symlinks to Shellscripts

By Stuart Colville in bash on

Here's a way to resolve symlinks that call a bash shellscript. The Problem I like to be able to use something like this in my bash scripts: SCRIPTDIR=$(dirname $0) Which is great for a reference to where the script is, but it suffers from the problem that if you…

Ubuntu: change editor globally

By Stuart Colville in ubuntu on

I found the update-alternatives on my travels and very handy it is too especially when on a bytemark box by default the editor is set to "joe". From the man page: update-alternatives creates, removes, maintains and displays information about the symbolic links comprising the Debian alternatives system. It…

Linux: Changing UIDs and GIDs for a user

By Stuart Colville in Linux/Unix on

Just had to do a quick switch over of UID and GIDs for a couple of users. I'm using Puppet to manage server configurations and it's got some nice features for automating the set-up of users. Unfortunately when I initially set-up the puppet directives, I overlooked setting the UID for…

DjangoCon 2008

By Stuart Colville in DjangoCon on

I though it about time I put together a write-up of the First DjangoCon held at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, I enjoyed it immensely and look forward to Euro DjangoCon. Whilst we were out there our trip co-incided with a YUI 3 event so we thought it would be…

VMware Server: Convert Fixed Disk-images to Growable

By Stuart Colville in vmware on

Quick tip if you ever want to convert from a fixed disk image to an expandable one then the following command should do it: sudo vmware-vdiskmanager -r source.vmdk -t 0 expandable.vmdk Just replace "source" and "expandable" with your disk image file names. For more…