Posts with keyword: automation

4 entries

A Facebook of Things

Wed Sep 21 15:02:00 2011

When we talk about social products and services, the question that naturally arises is: what will be the Facebook of Things look like? Here are my thoughts.
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Auto Importing iPhone Pictures to iPhoto

Thu Jun 3 16:22:00 2010

One of the things I hate about syncing my iPhone is that it fires up iPhoto everytime there's any pictures that need to be imported. That's a pain. I'd rather that the photos got automatically imported and deleted off the device. Today I figured out how to do it. Note that these instructions assume Snow Leopard. First thing to know is that Image Capture is your friend. You can use it to determine what happens when you plug in a device that looks like a camera on a device-by-device basis. For our purposes, there's a little
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Infrastructure Automation Increases Operational Efficiency

Sat Dec 27 15:59:00 2008

Last week Jeff Atwood wrote a piece about why throwing hardware at a problem makes sense in some situations. He's careful to avoid the trap of thinking that throwing hardware at a poorly designed program will do more than buy you a little time, but makes a good point: Clearly, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Whenever you're provided an opportunity to leverage that imbalance, it would be incredibly foolish not to. From Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are ExpensiveReferenced Sat Dec 27 2008 15:42:36 GMT-0700 (MST) Riffing on that, Gordon Weakliem makes a related and somewhat
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Velocity 08: Puppet In-Depth and Hands-On

Tue Jun 24 18:10:00 2008

The final talk of the day (hope I make my flight) was by Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs on Puppet. Most automation tools are based on SSH and as a result, they suck. The problem is that the intersection of administrator and developers is very small. Luke wanted Puppet to be so good it was like bringing a gun to a knife fight. The goal: manage lots of machines with very little effort. Luke makes an analogy about the transition from assembly to C and moving from commands and files to "resources." Resources are abstract and portable. Abstraction is
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