Monday, December 28, 2009

Antihistamines while Breastfeeding

After scouring the web and coming to the same conclusion, I found this quick chart on Lactation Guidance for Antihistamines: Claritin and Zyrtec should be fairly safe to take.

Some charts, like kellymom, are more generous, but since diphenhydramine can cause drowsiness, it's not the best for baby. I'm going with the more conservative version ...

Tagger

The best utility software is so transparent in use that you don't even notice you're using it. I'm a fan of OpenMeta tags, so I started using Tagger:

Tagger is a small application for OS X that can be used for quickly adding arbitrary textual [OpenMeta] tags to files.

I only noticed it this morning when I clicked on the "Update available!" button. One of the updates is to use Sparkle for future updates, so I won't even have these minor reminders that I'm using it anymore! So now's the time for a shout-out while I remember. This is such an easy way to tag files ... Between Tagger and OMSavePanel (no, I haven't installed Snow Leopard yet, so I'm not using Save Panel Extender), most of my newly created files are now tagged.

Monday, December 21, 2009

A Calorie Is NOT Just A Calorie

For some lucky people I know (I married one), body weight comes down to a simple calories in-calories out measurement. Myself, I see a big difference in my weight between eating spaghetti (on refined carbs like pasta, my weight goes up no matter what) and eating beans and rice (I can eat lots, but as long as I exercise a little, my weight goes down). So I agree with this post, A Calorie Is NOT Just A Calorie:

You’ve certainly heard “a calorie is just a calorie.” Meaning, if you stick to say, a 1500 calorie per day diet, it doesn’t matter if those calories come from potatoes, salad, or cheeseburgers. Wrong-o!

My addition: if refined carbs make your weight skyrocket, look for diabetic-friendly recipes.

Eat healthy!

Friday, December 4, 2009

LooperNG: no go

I love the feature list for LooperNG:

  • SNMP Trap forwarding, exploding and rewriting (enhancing).
  • Event generation for demos, debugging, troubleshooting etc.
  • Event Enrichment and Escalation.
  • Intelligent routing, re-routing, and processing of events and alerts.
  • Monitoring logfiles, syslog events, intrusion events, etc.
  • Forwarding alert history to databases, logfiles, etc.
  • Centralize alerts in a LooperDB database.

The bitter reality is that the simple configuration we tried at work didn't properly handle its own logfile, and we ended up getting alerts that we were running out filespace in /var (thank goodness logs were partitioned away from the kernel!). The only way to recover space in /var was to quit Looper NG. So as much as I loved the feature list, this is not the software for me to use at work on a production server(s). I'm not even sure how to phrase this as a bug report since I know Dustin Marquess is professional enough not to use software that slams /var. But I know when to move on, especially when I have trap forwarder and I only wanted to explore more powerful alternatives. Test over, not using this software.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

The Engineer

I just took an online personality test, and it says I am INTP or "The Engineer" which I find amusing since my most recent degree is in Engineering, and I self-identify as an engineer. So a large dose of I knew that. The first description worked for me.

INTPs are relatively easy-going and amenable to most anything until their principles are violated, about which they may become outspoken and inflexible. They prefer to return, however, to a reserved albeit benign ambiance, not wishing to make spectacles of themselves.

However, most of the other descriptions made me want to argue with them, so don't trust cheesy short online tests over common sense.