Category Archives: Computing

SREcon Americas 2023, a report

Posted on 2023-03-28 by Garrett Wollman

Attention conservation notice: 6,200 words about conferences you didn’t attend and idiosyncratic constraints that make it unlikely I will attend again any time soon. My apologies that this report is so long, but it would take much too long to … Continue reading →

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The Twitter That Was

Posted on 2022-11-14 by Garrett Wollman

Attention conservation notice: 6,000 words about the decline of a social-media platform, none of which are particularly original or well-informed. Since Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October, like many people I’ve had to ponder a … Continue reading →

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A big PostgreSQL upgrade

Posted on 2022-01-11 by Garrett Wollman

I don’t write here very often about stuff I do at work, but I just finished a project that was a hassle all out of scale with the actual utility, and I wanted to document it for posterity, in the … Continue reading →

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Automatic generation and validation of train schedules

Posted on 2021-04-28 by Garrett Wollman

Passenger railroads throughout the world have mechanisms to generate timetables for both service and capital planning purposes. The way I’ve done this in the past is with the Mk. 1 eyeball: you come up with a schedule, maybe draw some stringline … Continue reading →

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Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1

Posted on 2020-01-13 by Garrett Wollman

Now here’s something more like what I was originally expecting the content on this blog to look like. I’m in the process of moving all of our FreeBSD servers (about 30 in total) from 11.3 to 12.1. We have our … Continue reading →

Posted in FreeBSD, ZFS | Tagged , | 9 Comments

My decade, 2010–2019

Posted on 2020-01-01 by Garrett Wollman

Attention conservation notice: about 8,500 words about me and what I did for the past ten years, what I previously wrote about that, and how I feel in hindsight. Minimally edited, rather disjointed, and jumps around in time a lot … Continue reading →

Posted in Administrivia, Books, Computing, Food, sports, States of mind, Transportation, travel | Tagged , | Comments Off on My decade, 2010–2019

In preparation for writing my end-of-decade review, I wanted to get a quick, plain-text listing of my posts on this blog, so I requested an export from WordPress — but then I realized that the export was in a modified … Continue reading →

Posted on 2019-12-30 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on A little XSLT hack for extracting titles from WordPress exports

What’s Wrong with Metcalfe’s Law?

Posted on 2018-02-12 by Garrett Wollman

In a recent Medium post derived from a talk he gave at private invitation-only event for the IT industry, Dan Hon presents one view of Metcalfe’s Law, the theory espoused by Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe that “the value of a … Continue reading →

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Trip report: Usenix Large Installation System Administration Conference 2017

Posted on 2017-11-08 by Garrett Wollman

Hi folks, it’s time for some work- and computing-related stuff. I just recently got back from the 2017 edition of the Usenix Association‘s annual system administration conference, LISA’17, which was held in San Francisco. I’ve gone to most LISA conferences … Continue reading →

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One more day in 2016 for charitable giving

Posted on 2016-12-30 by Garrett Wollman

If, like many people in the United States and elsewhere, you give money to charities at the end of the year, you have only a few hours left. (Note that for tax purposes, a gift made using a payment card … Continue reading →

Posted in Broadcasting & Media, FreeBSD, Law & Society | Tagged , , | 4 Comments