thwartedefforts

The limited contact one has with co-workers means they can end up thinking of you in ways you don’t have control over. First impressions are important, but impressions continue to develop over time. However, the way Rob Warmowski has classified me is a new one. As someone who is used to the moniker “asshole”, his classification scheme is refreshing.

So this makes me want to know exactly how many “Andys with root” Rob actually knows, or plans to eventually know? Is he forever cursed with being under the authority of system administrators named Andy? Or have system administrators named Andy made a distinctive, hopefully good, impression upon him? Is an Andy themed song in order? Or do these Andys share a common culture and style that is best communicated through apparel? I’m specifically thinking of my continued (verbally silent) claims of No, I won’t fix your computer, and the constant threats of reading your email (but why bother? your email is god awful boring).

It’s more secure to use public/private key authentication with ssh and to disable password authentication, but it’s not secure to store the same private key on every machine that you may be sitting down at. I have two machines I use regularly, a desktop and a laptop, and I, well, my accounts, on them should have the same “identity” no matter which one I’m using and how I’m getting to the various accounts on servers I need to maintain and that I develop on.

I didn’t appreciate the power of the openssh agent until recently. For a long while, I wanted to have a single private key on a removable drive that I can carry around with me, but the disadvantage of having to mount and unmount the drive, and figure out its device name, when I just wanted to read for a few seconds it was more trouble than it’s worth. On top of that, some of the systems I have put the home directories in different places (/home/users, for example, ugh!), so it wouldn’t be as straight forward as just issuing the same mount command every time.

This can be done by using autofs though, in a machine independent manner — the only thing that needs to be customized on a per-machine basis is files in your home directory.

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The problem: a number of people are working on the same (set of) CSS file(s) for a web site, and strict class and id naming standards have not been created and enforced. This has led to a proliferation of somewhat meaningful but overall ambiguous labels for CSS ids and classes and selectors. Some of the selectors conflict with each other, and these overlapping declarations are causing unexpected results in the page rendering. Your task is two fold:

• create a list of the selectors of all CSS rules from every CSS file
• find out which declarations possibly conflict with each other so they can be examined manually to see if the conflict can be resolved and/or the CSS file can be optimized by consolidating declarations

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