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wherein mauricio gomes writes about life, work and design

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Aug
18th
Mon
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For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
— Hemingway’s famous six-word novel that his friends bet him he couldn’t write.
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Fonolo

Fonolo is a startup with a different take on contacting big companies with large, complicated phone trees.  The company has written software to spider phone trees and create a web-based picker tool. 

Once you traverse the web-generated tree, Fonolo will dial that company, follow the path you set up and then wait on hold for you.  Once your call is connected, your callback number is dialed.

It’s still in closed beta, but very cool thus far.

Aug
11th
Mon
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Why is there a ‘w’ in answer? That’s kind of like respbonse…
Aug
7th
Thu
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I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
— Ernest Hemingway
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Aug
5th
Tue
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FYI Design Studio

I just received the new Burton catalog and in it was an awesome story (p89) about FYI Design Studio who is responsible for Burton’s [ak] clothing line. The studio is situated in the middle of the mountains in Pemberton, British Columbia.

Inside the studio they surround themselves with state-of-the-art equipment and the finest fabrics to produce the most innovative products.  They then test all of their gear by going outside and snowboarding down the mountains.

Tom Routh, one of the studio’s chief designers says,

One of the most important things in life is to be where you want to be, then make it work from there.

He goes on to say that the move to the eccentric location didn’t make any business sense at all, and that is precisely why it has succeeded.

Very awesome.

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Parsing Free space Output

Here’s a really short regex that can be used to parse free space output and verify each mounted disk has at least 89% free space. This comes in handy if you do any of your own systems monitoring that include *nix boxes.

So let’s say you have this output from various machines:

db:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
47G  3.1G   41G   7% /
/dev/sda1              99M   16M   79M  17% /boot
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm

www:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
76G   16G   56G  22% /
/dev/sda1              99M   17M   78M  18% /boot
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm

email:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              13G  4.1G  9.0G  32% /
udev                  1.9G  116K  1.9G   1% /dev
/dev/sdb1             241G   15G  214G   7% /var/data
/dev/sdc1             241G   15G  214G   7% /var/backup

This regex will do the trick:

/([9]).%/

It can be integrated into a Ruby statement as follows:

IO.popen(“cat /path/to/freespace_output 2>&1”) do |f|
while line = f.gets do
lowdisk_systems += 1 if line =~ /([9]).%/i
end
end

In this case, lowdisk_systems gets incremented for each line of “/path/to/freespace_output” that is 90% or greater.

This example by itself is extremely limited in scope, but if integrated properly it can be useful.

Aug
4th
Mon
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On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, ‘Okay, this is the limit.’ As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.
Ayrton Senna (Greatest F1 driver of all time)