by Katherine Villyard | Jul 5, 2013 | short fiction
WOOHOO! My story “Saving Alan Idle” is now available as both HTML and a podcast. I’m so excited! Escape Pod 403: Saving Alan Idle Thanks to everyone who helped me critique it, including, but not limited to: Gary David Henderson, Beth Dawkins,...
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 28, 2013 | monitoring
Nagios event handlers are WHERE IT’S AT, BABY, YEAH! There are some services that I can just automagically restart without any problems. (WSUS, SQL Agent, etc.) This way, instead of notifying me, Nagios can just fix the problem for me and We Need Never Know....
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 22, 2013 | scripting
I stripped out a piece of company-specific logic, but… List the databases you want to move in a file named “control.txt.” (To migrate the entire server, paste the output of “select name from sys.databases where name not in...
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 14, 2013 | monitoring
Yeah. Twitter changed their authentication, and my old Twitter notifications (based on Ed Voncken’s work) seized up and failed. I had to update the python tweepy library to get them to work. pip install tweepy –upgrade And they’re back! I love...
by Katherine Villyard | May 25, 2013 | about me, cons
The WisCON panel description: Who gets your ebooks when you die? Your Twitter feed? The baby book that mostly exists on LJ? Do you have an estate plan for all these intangible but valuable assets? When you go, do you want your pages taken down or kept up for all time?...
by Katherine Villyard | May 17, 2013 | scripting
Virtual Log Files. Your database’s log file is made up of one or more virtual log files. Our databases have too many. Basically, our LDFs are fragmented. What to do about this? Well, Dave Levy has a script to reduce the number of VLFs, but it’s to run...
by Katherine Villyard | Apr 24, 2013 | monitoring
I like using non-email notifications, especially when monitoring, you know, email. So I have notifications going out via twitter and google talk. Of the three, the order of speediness is: Google Talk Twitter Email So I was really sad when the google talk...
by Katherine Villyard | Apr 12, 2013 | web
I used to do web development. In Cold Fusion, a lot of the time. Cold Fusion is a language with tags that usually start with CF, like “<cf_query>”. We had a customer who kept asking for the text to be bright red, huge, and blinking. (Not for the...
by Katherine Villyard | Apr 2, 2013 | sale
“Ondine’s Curse” will appear in an upcoming issue of the ever-awesome Electric Velocipede. Squee!
by Katherine Villyard | Mar 12, 2013 | geekiness, powershell, scripting
I went to the Atlanta PowerShell Users Group tonight. The topic was tips and tricks. My trick was this script, which task scheduler reads to me in the morning. Assuming you use Hiveminder–and you should, because it’s awesome–you only have to edit...