Increasing A Standup Freezer’s Usable Storage

I like my stand up freezer in general, but I have always felt like its shelves were inefficient. Because the contents of the freezer (especially meat) often don’t stack well, it feels like only about half of the shelf’s storage area is usable. Adding baskets is the obvious choice, but every time I look for baskets I find them to be over-priced and inefficient (the sides are usually sloped, and they are never the exact right size). This fall, while surfing for a basket solution again, I had an epiphany.
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Deleting PTR Records Containing Upper-Case Characters In Microsoft DNS

This morning I noticed that some of our network elements are using IPs that have more than one PTR associated with them. This isn’t a huge problem, but it was exposed to us because the DNS record in our monitoring system would just randomly pick a PTR when the element was rediscovered. Because these other PTRs were often just out of date cruft, having the old names show up in monitoring was confusing. I took this as a quick project to run through the IPs and resolve the duplicates. The fact that I’m now writing a blog post about it is a pretty good spoiler that it wasn’t as simple as I thought it was going to be.
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Rhythmbox Python Bindings Documentation

I have an itch I want to scratch in Rhythmbox, and I’ve been looking at the Python bindings for writing plugins. It’s clear that you can do a lot of stuff, but there is no documentation specific to the Python bindings. There is the Plugin Writing Guide, which is conceptually useful, and there are the C-specific development docs, but there’s a piece missing.
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Patch: Allow id3v2(1) to Include Colons in Comment Fields

After a disagreement with Rhythmbox about how ID3 comments on my music collection should be handled, I went looking for a more fine-grained tool to manipulate them. A quick browse through aptitude later, I chose a tool named ‘id3v2’, a frustratingly un-googleable name. The official distribution is available from SourceForge, and I’m using the Debian package locally. The tool worked well, but it was unable to properly handle comment text which contained a colon (:).
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Prevent nxrancid “show env power” Line Oscillations

Just came into managing a rancid install for the first time in a couple of years. It immediately became apparent that the email notification feature was worthless and likely being ignored by everyone. There was one specific Nexus7000 C7010 (NX-OS 5) that was almost constantly reporting false positives in its “show environment power” output, resulting in a “boy who cried” wolf situation.
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Removing Comic Sans From Messages in Outlook Rules

I started a new job this week. In completely unrelated news, I was strongly motivated this evening to figure out how to remove Comic Sans from inbound email automatically. It turns out that it’s actually pretty simple. However, much like Picasso spending 50 years to learn to do a sketch in 30 seconds, it actually took me a bit of digging to understand how this “simple” solution is put into place.
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Adding An Icon To The “Edit With Sublime Text 2” Contextual Menu Item

As mentioned elsewhere I’ve totally fallen in love with Sublime Text 2 as an editor. One of the issues I’ve had switching to using it on Windows, though, is the muscle memory I’ve developed for selecting the “Edit With Notepad++” contextual menu option. I think part of the reason I’m having trouble switching is that the Notepad++ item has an icon and, by default, the Sublime Text 2 item does not. Several weeks ago I figured out how to add an icon to the Sublime Text 2 item and it has definitely reduced the number of times I’ve accidentally chosen Notepad++. Better write it down before I forget how I did it…

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Getting Up To Speed With Sublime Text 2 – Notes For Notepad++ Users

I recently started a love affair with the Sublime Text 2 text editor. Looking around the web, I’m certainly not alone, and there are many great tips and tricks posts. I probably can’t write anything better than what’s already out there, so this post is really just an attempt to document for my future self my own customization decisions and the logic behind my choices.

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Example TestLink XMLRPC Clients in Perl

There are not many good examples floating around of Perl clients for TestLink’s XMLRPC API. There are two examples included with the 1.9.3 source, but they are very brief. I wrote two scripts to support a first-blush attempt at automated test running, and while they will get a lot more refinement over time, I thought abstracted versions of them might be beneficial for others trying to write Perl clients (or in any language – they perl samples were so sparse I largely based my script on the python example).

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