Michael T. Halligan, the story of a wayward Infrastructure Architect

Oakland Police Department Almost Killed a Systems Administrator Last Night.

Last night Scott Olsen, a veteran of the Marines who served Iraq war veteran, and a Systems Administrator is in critical condition at Highlands Hospital in Oakland after suffering a skull-fracture during last night's Occupy Oakland protest. He was shot at point blank range with a shotgun equipped to launch tear-gas canisters by either a member of Oakland Police Department or San Francisco County Sheriff's department. 

Watch this video and pay close attention. At around 0:37 a group of protesters run to Scott's aid. At 0:39 you see a black object lobbed by the police into the middle of this crowd where Scott was laying unconscious. A second later the object, a flash-bang grenade explodes in the middle of the aid group. These are our friends and our colleagues. These aren't just hippie kids in drum circles, this is a man who risked his life for our country, building a career for himself as a systems administrator.

As if it isn't hard enough being a systems administrator, now we have the police trying to kill us for exercising our first amendment rights.  :(

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TextMate for the modern Sysadmin: Adding bundles for Git, Chef, & Puppet

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As a decades-long VIM user, I’ve resisted gui editors or IDEs since so many vi commands are now just muscle memory. As I’ve gotten more into Ruby, Rails, and Puppet, I’ve eventually given into the dark side and have started turning TextMate into more of a habit. Syntax highlighting for Puppet and integration with Git have become crucial for my daily activities, which is facilitated by a couple of useful open-source bundles. While setting up my new environment today at PagerDuty, I wrote this quick script to install these bundles, as well as the Chef bundle since there’s a bit of an existing Chef presence here.

mkdir -p /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
git clone git://gitorious.org/git-tmbundle/mainline.git Git.tmbundle
git clone http://git.gitorious.org/git-tmbundle/mainline.git Git.tmbundle
git clone https://github.com/masterzen/puppet-textmate-bundle.git Puppet.tmbundle
git clone https://github.com/drnic/Chef.tmbundle.git Chef.tmbundle
osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'