Mac Journal was included in the latest bundle. It’s “shocking” a journaling software that might just allow me to post more blog posts.. so I am testing it out, yes, atypical for a mac fan.

So I recently found the All Mail folder on my gmail account, it had a crazy 30+ thousand messages.  Here is the quick fix! 

I’m going to link this to macosxhints.

I admit it, I have an iPhone, and I love it, but I hate the ear buds that come with it.   So the other day I was talking to the great Shane Lowry and he had mentioned that he picked up some z.buds.   I was in the market really for a new blue tooth head set since I have been doing a lot of driving, I have been using the Apple ear buds with the built-in mic, and they have been at best “ok”.    So going on the advice of Shane, and a 35% coupon, I picked up the z.buds.  I’ve had them officially 2 days, they are noise canceling and the sound out of them is A-W-E-S-O-M-E, don’t go spending $99 on the Bose earbuds, when you can get a better sound, with a mic, for much less. 

ZAGG

I got fed up and decided to try something, I would delete the Envelope Index file. The file was around 30mb in size, not huge, but decent size.
When I started mail.app back up, it had to understandably rebuild each of the mailboxes I have configured. When it finished, it is now only 10mb in size, you think there might have been some corruption?

Know what you want to monitor.
I create most of my plug-ins in bash scripts and perl scripts. (other languages supported, those are just what I use)
Know your exit codes.
Your plug-in output should be helpful and informative.

Exit codes are simple, and key to your plug-in success.

0 – OK
1 – WARN
2 – CRITICAL
3 – UKNOWN

Now those look family don’t they, they are the states or status of a service. i.e. my disk space is in OK state because I have 120GB free space.

here is a sample code snippet:

if [ $space -ge $CRITCAL ] ; then
echo "DISK SPACE CRITICAL - 90% disk space used [10GB free on /]"
exit 2;
fi

Need Nagios/Monitoring consulting? Maybe I can help, I am currently working on, as project lead, one of the biggest Nagios installs, for a Wal-Mart and Novell.

Assume knowledge = 0, start from there.. 

-Mohammed Shakir Ali

Boil the Ocean

The phrase “”Boil The Ocean” describes an attempt at something that is way too ambitious, effectively impossible. The first time I heard the term was several years ago from an IBM developer. I thought it was an IBM-ism but I’ve been hearing it more and more outside of IBM.  When asked by a reporter what to do about U-boat sinkings during World War I, Will Rogers is said to have responded: “Boil the ocean”. “But how would you do that?” the reporter continued. Without a beat Rogers replied, “I’m just the idea man here. Get someone else to work out the details.”

http://www.comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf

Hard stop in xx

I could open up a term, and  type ssh -N -p 22 -c 3des jhigley@XXX.dnsalias.com -L 6667:XXX.dnsalias.com:6667 each time I wanted to open up an ssh tunnel for IRC, but instead I open up STM and it auto connects each of my tunnels for me. 

 You can get it here.

Recently I started consulting, I’m on the road a lot now.  Mostly between 4 different locations:  Home, Office1, Office2, Hotel.   This application, call MarcoPolo allows me to define a few location, by probability, i.e. the wifi ssid I connect to is “Hotel” then I’m probably at the location Hotel, or if my ssid is guest and I hook my USB drive up, I could be at office1.  After I define my locations and what happens at those locations comes the fun stuff, MarcoPolo kicks into gear, I can define rules, so I can say at office1,

• turn off iChat
• turn off sound
• open an SSH tunnel

Or when I get to the hotel, I wanna relax, 

• start itunes, and play x song
• load mail.app
• load irc and iChat

I recommend getting this app, it’s worth the download, best of all it’s free!

See more about it here.

On your mac goto:  ~/Library/Mail/ and you should see a file called: Envelope Index, note the size of that file.

Now, exit mail.app (command-q)

open Terminal

go to “cd ~/Library/Mail”

and run “sqlite3 Envelope\ Index”

now inside of sqllite, type “vacuum subjects;”  this will vacuum the bloat out of your inbox, for 1 the size of Envelope Index should be a lot smaller, and for 2, your mail.app should be a lot faster!