Aaron Parecki

Apparently raid arrays don't like it when you kill power to the machine. We've been doing remodeling in the house, and I've been turning on and off breakers. Apparently I forgot which breaker the servers were on, and turned it off accidentally a few times.

I recently discovered an excellent tutorial on setting up Postfix and Courier to use virtual users read from a MySQL database. This caught my attention because it is a much better setup than having real system users for all email addresses, as it allows much more flexibility. I finally set aside some time to set up a real mail server.

I was working on a website today, and I stumbled into a problem of needing to compute the brightness of a color, so that if it is a background color, I know whether to show white text or black text. My first thought was to simply add up the RGB components of the color and use that value. It turns out that is completely wrong, since pure green looks much brighter than pure blue:

I spent about an hour bashing my head against a wall with this one.

I didn't realize it before, but the subversion server running without tunneling over ssh doesn't actually send the password in the clear when authenticating users. From the subversion book: