Jordan Sissel (semicomplete.com)

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Projects, articles, tips, and experiences on topics ranging from AJAX to Network Security.
URL: http://www.semicomplete.com/blog
Updated: 1 hour 30 min ago

Disabling battery/power management in Ubuntu

November 5, 2012 - 4:04pm
I have some ubuntu VMs. VirtualBox's guest tools provide a way for guest OSs to see battery and other power states.

The problem is that Ubuntu 12.04 will always suspend itself when battery is low. What is "low"? Something not tunable. Can you change the 'low battery' action? No, the setting panel for it says "Perform action on critical battery" or something and the dropdown box is blank.

When Ubuntu decides it's 'critical' time, OSX (the host os, here) claims usually 20% battery remaining. Critical, eh?  read more »

TF2 performance on wine+linux

November 5, 2012 - 1:11am
I recently gave up windows 8 (which is horrible, by the way) to install Fedora on my workstation at home.

I wanted to still play TF2, so while I wait for the steam linux/tf2 beta, I figured wine would work.

I used the fedora wine packages as well as 'winetricks' to install steam (winetricks is awesomesauce.). Basically, with winetricks, you just do 'winetricks steam' to install steam. Bam!  read more »

MITRE's CEE is a failure for profit.

September 12, 2012 - 1:34am
I wrote this post a few months ago, but never got around to publishing it.

Anyway, someone mentioned 'project lumberjack' and I found it was based on CEE: Common Event Expression. CEE is a sort of comedic tragedy of design.

The effort is owned by a "non-profit" (MITRE), but the complexity and obfuscation in CEE can only drive towards one thing: consultant profits. I had a go at explaining what I describe in this post on the 'project lumberjack' mailing list, but I did it quite poorly and got a few foot-stomps in response, so I gave up.  read more »

Growing logstash's value

July 30, 2012 - 2:00am
I spent a while today thinking about nerdy stuff - logstash, etc. I want to grow logstash in terms of performance, use case, deployment instances, happy users, and community.

While musing about on my mental roadmap of logstash, I found most things boil down to costs and returns on investment, even with open source software. Money, time, energy, and patience are all costs. Just because something doesn't cost any money doesn't mean it won't consume any time or energy.

I see two distinct groups of users, with respect to cost. New users and current users.  read more »