I’ve been reading a lot of back and forth between atheists and theists regarding the Atheist Bus Campaign, and I feel like the major idea behind the campaign is being lost. This isn’t about being anti-religion or pro anything, it’s about letting people know it’s ok to not have a belief in god, that you’re not evil or immoral if you don’t have a dogma.
Most people are afraid of being left out or disowned by their families and friends if they don’t at least say “I’m christian” or “I believe in Jesus”. People don’t really feel a connection but they say they do because they’re afraid, and eventually it turns into just another bad habit that they pass along to their children. You don’t need to believe in anything to feel alright with the world, or to be moral, god doesn’t make decisions for you and that’s ok.
Read more…
Current Mood: 
moody
Abi Rendon Personal religion
If you’re using SLES or any other Suse variant you might be wondering why your Splunk installation is constantly in a loading loop unless you browse to it using Internet Explorer. After lots of hacking around, reboots and google searches I emailed the splunk team about my problem. At first they didn’t seem to understand my problem but they did suggest I take a look at this article in their troubleshooting documentation.
http://www.splunk.com/doc/latest/admin/UnableToGetAProperlyFormattedResponseFromTheServer
Read more…
Current Mood: 
accomplished
Abi Rendon Sysadmin linux, splunk, suse, syslog
I’m sure most have seen this by now but this project is still growing and you should see it every couple weeks to see the progress.
GoonCity
This project was started by a goon (Ryan Allen) with lots of artistic talent at the SA forums, and it immediately snowballed. The idea is similar to previous projects such as the blue ball manipulator and goontower, essentially goons of all shapes and sizes put together their collective talent and made this awesome city.
After getting dugg a few times and in general slammed by tons of sites they had a problem paying their bills so I offered to help them out with their bandwidth. Here’s what it looks like since I’ve started helping, it’s declining but I’d love to see it hit the front pages yet again.
Read more…
Abi Rendon Projects bandwidth, goons, sa, servers, wtfserve
As many may have noticed I now have a brand new layout and I’m really digging it. It didn’t come with it’s share of problems though and I’ll point them out here.
I started with the base layout, it’s called Aeros it was put together by Joe at thebuckmaster.com.
I didn’t change too much but I did make some changes that I think make this layout a cut above the original.
Read more…
Abi Rendon Code css, design, html, php
I have been working as the Senior Systems Engineer in the operations group at a company called Airbiquity for the past year or so.
As part of my daily job I come into contact with many new and interesting products and things that help me do my job better.
Firstly, how often do you find that you need to constantly debug several machines at one? Tailing syslogs on each box can become a nightmare when you have more than one machine to look at. Consider these options…
- Configure your systems with syslog-ng to forward to a centralized syslog server where you can “tail -f” your problems easily.
- Buy expensive products such as SolarWinds syslog and snmp trap collector.
- Use a free (500mb/day) syslog collector and search utility called Splunk
After messing with the SolarWinds products for a while I decided to move against it towards open source and free/cheaper options.
At Airbiquity I configured all of our servers and network equipment to send their syslog requests to a centralized syslog server. This was great for work debugging but I had trouble letting my boss have an easy utility that they could search with.
This is when I setup Splunk, it’s easy to install and while it can be load intensive it was a lot more intuitive and easy to use than the SolarWinds offering. So far it’s been great and we’re going to start looking into AD integration and clustering to support our multiple data centers.
Read more…
Abi Rendon Sysadmin splunk, syslog, work
So as some of you may know, I’ve been looking for a new job. If anyone knows of any job openings just let me know.
So far I’ve applied to a few but due to the holiday season only a couple have gotten back to me in a timely manner. I hope to get some word back come the new year, otherwise I’ll be posting from a much more homeless place.
Abi Rendon Labor work
So I received my blackjack yesterday, so far I’d have to say it’s pretty neat. I’m enjoying it a lot. My only issues is the battery life, also moving my contacts over was a little more time consuming than I’d have hoped.
I still haven’t tried to write any applications for it but after I’m all moved I’ll give that a try.
Abi Rendon Technology phone
NetRiver is officially using Joomla as a CMS solution. Because of this I’m working on a way to automate installation and templating from our development team. Currently it takes me about 3 hours of modification to successfully template a Joomla install.
I’m working on a way to automate most of the process and basically get those 3 hours of my time back to put towards other things.
So far I’ve made a base SVN trunk for our Joomla installs. The trunk has a default basic template and a set of our “supported” modules. We currently have a similar setup for our Chambergate product and I’m going to be maintaining our joomla base install. Hopefully the way I’m doing it will make it easier to roll out mass updates for people and also allow us to document a set of static features.
You can check out my default install here
Abi Rendon Labor joomla, php, work
I was recently contracted to do work for a fellow goon over at the something awful forums, so far it’s going pretty great.
The project is called “I Heart Chinese“, it’s a really neat idea. Teaching Chinese with online flash animations, it’s online learning but in a fun and easy way. So far I’ve been working on the base system, the base system is built around my own database abstraction layer working with ADODB. It’s also using the smarty template engine, no particular reason other than it helps keep the code managable.
I’ll be updating as I write more, but so far it’s hard to show any recognizable progress.
Abi Rendon Labor php, work
Recently I’ve started a new marketing idea for NetRiver, we moved into our new facility and I’m tired of it being mostly empty so I’ve taken it upon myself to help fill it up. I have connections all over so it shouldn’t be too hard to bring clients the only hassle is going to be the countless hours it is taking me to fill the content and design the website.
If you want to track my progress (anybody actually read this?) check out http://netriver.nr-dev.com.
Abi Rendon Labor work
