Lists are one-dimensional arrays and dicts are associative arrays or hash arrays.  This means we can do the same thing we do in other languages, with syntax to match Python’s object-oriented data structures.

import pprint

# Define the list
somelist = []

# Do add some elements to the list
somelist.append({'key1':'value1', 'key2': 'value2'})
somelist.append({'key1':'value1', 'key2': 'value2'})
somelist.append({'key1':'value1', 'key2': 'value2'})

# Print it out
pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=4)
pp.pprint(somelist)

Will give you:

[   {   'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'},
{   'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'},
{   'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}]

Before we get started, if you have a personal calendar, Google has a quick how-to here. The Google tutorial only covers basic calendars.  This tutorial will cover both personal and shared calendars.

Google Calendar is neat and pretty much every phone and app has some sync system that works with it… except Thunderbird with the Lightning Add-on.  Actually it does, it’s just not intuitive.

NOTE: If you use the Sunbird stand-alone calendar client, the steps are essentially the same, but some menu options may be different.

What you need:

Thunderbird (2.x works, but >= 3.01 is better)

Lightning Add-on (.9x for Thunderbird 2.x, >=1.0b1 for TB 3.0.x)

A Google Calendar or access to a shared Google Calendar.

What to do:

1. Add the Lightning Add-on to Thunderbird and fire it up.
2. In the left column your calendars are listed.  Below them right-click and click New Calendar
3. Select On the Network, click Next
4. Select CalDAV
5. Put in your calendar URL
   The URL of your calendar takes this form:
   https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/[Google Calendar ID]/events

   In the case of  a personal calendar, the ID is simply your gmail.com address such as this:
   https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/BigTurnip@gmail.com/events

   In the case of a shared calendar the ID is fugly, like this:
   https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/utqisjt6b9hoot6i9o2jk1k9qg%40group.calendar.google.com/events

   To get that string, log in to your Google calendar and go to the calendar settings.  Down by the XML, iCAL and HTML links there is something like this:
   (Calendar ID: SomeBigNastyStringOfJunk@group.calendar.google.com)

   That’s your prize!

6. Click Next
7. Give your calendar and name, color and an email address.  Click Next.
8. Click Finish.
9. If it doesn’t seem to work, close and open Thunderbird.  There is a bug that may cause new network calendars to fail to display right away.  If it still fails, check the URL from step 5.

Happy calendaring.

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If you’ve fought the fail of corrupt ESX snapshots and missing -flat.vmdk files (once the -flat.vmdk file is gone, so is your data), you’ve experienced the joy of hoping you have a backup somewhere… anywhere.

Max has a nice collection of resources to monitor snapshot removal, check progress, recover from corruption, kill a hung VM and generally give you a better tomorrow.

While there is no easy way out, you may still survive.

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If you have a file that begins with a hyphen (one of these: -) you’ll have a tough time removing it unless you remember something simple from Command Line 101. In most CLI environments, your shell has two ways to access a file: relative path and absolute path.

See, all I had to do was type that and 90% of you just went “Durr!” and removed your file.

For the rest of you, just refer to the file by it’s full path. Example:

/tmp$ ls -la|grep ^\-
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 0 2009-10-28 12:50 -somefile

Oh look, I have a file in /tmp called -somefile. What ever shall I do to remove it?

/tmp$ rm -somefile
rm: invalid option -- s
Try `rm ./-somefile' to remove the file `-somefile'.
Try `rm --help' for more information.

Oh my! That didn’t work at all! The rm command thinks I’m passing it a flag called -somefile. Conveniently, rm knows I’m not very bright and tells me how to remove it!

/tmp$ rm ./-somefile
/tmp$

Well blow me down! Alternately, you can refer to the file with the full path:

/tmp$ rm /tmp/-somefile
/tmp$

The key is to remember that the shell knows where you are, but doesn’t know what you want. If you imply that you want to delete something, the shell does it’s best guess. In this case, it guesses wrong because rm command flags take precedence over arguments. If you are explicit in what you want, the shell does not have to guess.

Of course, being fully explicit means issuing the full command for rm:

/bin/rm /tmp/-somefile

But you have to know where rm lives. You can guess, or you can find it with which:

$ which rm
/bin/rm

But how do you know where which is?

``/usr/bin/which which` rm` /tmp/-somefile

Ok, that’s dumb. Go remove your file.

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prtconf -pv | more

look for
device_type:  'network'

Near the network device you’ll see model and name, similar to this:

model:  'SUNW,pci-qfe'
name:  'SUNW,qfe'

In this case your device is a qfe card.  You can get it up and running with
ifconfig qfe0 plumb

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1. Connect to the IIS manager.
2. Manager -> Machine -> Web Services Extensions
3. Check the window at right.  If WebDAV is not enabled, it should look like this:

If your IIS manager shows it as “Allowed”, you can disable it by clicking on it and clicking the “Prohibit” button to the left.

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1. Before changing apt sources (They should be etch)
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
4. reboot if kernel upgrades
5. Now change your apt sources  (Lenny or Stable)
6. apt-get update
7. apt-get upgrade
8. NOTE: At this point lvm2 is probably held back.
9. Reboot if the kernel upgrades
10. NOW do your dist upgrade
11. apt-get update
12. apt-get dist-upgrade
13. NOTE: At this point lvm2 is probably still held back.
14. Reboot
15. apt-get update
16. apt-get install lvm2
17. Reboot

TADA!  You have to reboot a couple times, but you never have to touch the configs or the mapper.

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join EXPR,LIST
Joins the separate strings of LIST into a single string with fields separated by the value of EXPR, and returns that new string. Example:
$rec = join(':', $login,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$gcos,$home,$shell);

From the code example, you can make CSV output and all kinds of goodies, but what the doc misses and the example doesn’t show is that combining join() with a print statement makes writing lists to STDOUT or a file handle a snap. This is where join() really shines.

Example:

Code
@names = ('Mark', 'Jim', 'Bob','Mary','Steven','Gomer');
print join("\n", @names);

Output
Mark
Jim
Bob
Mary
Steven
Gomer

Note that this will NOT print a final or beginning string. Join() concatenates the elements, meaning it puts the string value BETWEEN the list elements.

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How do you fine duplicates? What if I want to know where the duplicates are?

The trick is to use count() and compare it to an integer.

SELECT count(*), locations.* FROM locations GROUP BY number HAVING COUNT(*) > 1

That will select a count of unique instances of a value from a table called “locations”, group them by a field called “number” where the count is greater than 1. In other words, it will return all the fields where there are more than one instance of the same value in the column “number”.

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