This Greasemonkey user script inspects the state of an F5 BigIP device and makes the state text large and red if the device is in STANDBY mode.

You’ll want to edit the script so that it will activate when you browse to the BigIP devices in your environment.

Why is this important? I’ve made changes to a device in STANDBY mode one too many times, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

Giles Bowkett emphasizes the importance of picking tools that have export formats in his Time Management for Alpha Geeks video. I can’t agree more. Web connected make my data available most everywhere I go, but I get nervous when I can’t back up with a local copy. Web services come, and web services go.

I have used Don’t Break The Chain for 9 months. It tracks 9 different habits for me, and I hope it continues to run for a very long time. To ensure that I will never lose my data regardless of DBTC’s continued operation, I wrote an export script. It logs in to the service and outputs chain data as a CSV. It will optionally export to JSON as well.

If you use Don’t Break The Chain, you should download my dbtc_exporter to save a local copy of your chains.

I pushed a new project up to github. It is called svgcsvimg, and it generates a series of PNG images from an SVG template and data provided in a CSV file.

I built this tool because I was too lazy to manually create intro slides for a series of videos. I made the slide template, put all of the video metadata into a csv file, and then spent two hours hacking out this little project. It’s true: I could have manually created all of those slides in that time, but then I wouldn’t have this code to give away.

My general rule of thumb is to do something manually once. If it comes up a second time, I will manually complete the task and write down the steps with an eye toward repeatable automation. Then I’m ready to write up code when that third time comes around. I had twenty slides to produce, so I jumped straight to step three for this project.

I used Inkscape to create the template, and the SVG rendering was done with a combination of Pycairo and RSVG. Read more

Using Jokosher? Are you getting the error message “You do not have any LADSPA effects plugins installed” when attempting to add effects to an instrument?

Do this:

rm -rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10/registry*

If you want more information, you can find it in the GStreamer FAQ. The bug is now closed, but this is still an issue in Ubuntu 10.04. Once Ubuntu updates their GStreamer packages this post should be obsolete.

I drove to Waco, TX for PyTexas 2010 this weekend. It was fantastic, and that’s even accounting for the 20 hours I spent behind the wheel. We had a great turn out, and a lot of good talks.

A huge “thank you” to Bill Chipman and Josh Marshall for volunteering their time, talents, and gear to the recording effort. In typical fashion I figured I’d lug a bunch of gear down I-35 and things would just work out, but it wouldn’t have gone nearly as well if I had to tackle three rooms all by myself.

A hard drive with the raw files will ship to Bill later this week, and I think we can get them ready for upload within the next week or two. Stay tuned for more updates!