SaltStack is a great open-source, cross-platform automation system. It lets you configure servers using declarative yaml files and python. You can create custom “states” during yaml/python, and then say “make server X have state Y”. There’s a lot of plumbing involved which I’m not going to delve into, but it’s pretty neat stuff and doesn’t […]
Category Archives: python
making SQL Server backups using python and pyodbc
Thursday, August 26, 2010
I have a set of python scripts to help me manage a few SQL Servers at work, and one of the things I do is take database backups using BACKUP DATABASE and BACKUP LOG. I’ve been using pymssql to connect, but today tried switching to pyodbc. pymssql seems to be having momentum problems, so I […]
What learning lisp taught me about other languages
Sunday, March 30, 2008
For the last few years I’ve been learning and using Lisp more, and here is a disorganized, poorly-worded dump of how Lisp changed my opinion about other languages. Static Types (as implemented by C# and Java) are oppressive. I spend most of my time in C#, and it always feels like I’m toiling in the […]