Cosine Jeremiah and his Musings

One thing that I learned in five years of working for an FDA regulated company: policies are usually written to address fears instead of to solve problems or provide a return on investment. Often when one challenges the usefulness of a troublesome policy the answer is that Something Bad might happen if we did not […]

One of the things I coded in Perl a while ago that I was planning to port to Ruby at some point was a little port forwarding utility called portforw (GPL license). I provided a link to download it here because perhaps you may find it useful, too, if you also need such a utility. […]

I came upon a startling realization today after reading some feedback from an anonymous source regarding my previous post: Your complaint about being unable to write code the way you’re used to with Ruby when picking up Perl for a hours seemed pretty thoughtless. Of course it’s harder for you in Perl — you don’t […]

In my day job I spent a few hours today working in Perl. Having been using Ruby for over six years now I am quite familiar with how lacking Perl is in comparison. However, once again I was floored by how much less intuitive things are outside of Ruby. Even though Perl is a great […]

Know what Capistrano is? I did a presentation on it in February, so I know a little about it. At the time I was investigating it as a hopeful candidate that could assist with configuration management for general systems administration for an environment of about 150 Solaris systems. I discovered that Capistrano is a fantastic […]