Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by the engineers of the company [...]

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 12:42 | 0 comments
Categories: Entertainement, Linux
Tags:

Copying a disk image onto a CF card using Unix dd is a trivial task (unless you make a mistake when specifying the output file (the of= option) — recovery from that kind of mistake can be a bitch. )

dd if=disk.image of=/dev/da0

dd starts copying with a default blocksize of 512 bytes.
Copying a 4 [...]

Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 15:59 | 2 comments
Categories: BSD, CLI, Linux
Tags:

Martin's GhettoPush, which I talked about recently is being heavily used here. So much, that I've implemented some changes, that Martin has kindly merged back into his master repository.

The two additions I submitted to the code are both very similar — almost identical. They enable us to exclude certain e-mail messages from being Prowl'ed. You [...]

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 20:49 | 0 comments
Categories: CLI, IMAP, Linux, MacOSX, Mail, Mobile
Tags: ,

Prowl is a Growl-like client for the iPhone which accepts notifications from your computer (Mac, Windows) using push. UNIX and Linux systems are also supported via a third-party API that you can use to build your own applications. Installing Prowl is easy enough, and doing so in conjunction with Growl is well explained.
In order to [...]

Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 21:15 | 0 comments
Categories: CLI, IMAP, Linux, MacOSX, Mobile

Many of my past hacks, involved systems that needed to know the TCP/IP address of a client workstation, and I've generally used one of two methods for doing so:

a program on the client initiates a HTTP request to a PHP or CGI resource, which records the client's IP address from an environment variable passed to [...]

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 21:55 | 1 comment
Categories: CLI, Internet, Linux, MacOSX
Tags: , ,

Not a lot of magic is needed to create a proxy autoconfiguration file (PAC) for use in a Web browser, and there is plenty of reference material on the net. Since I didn't find a cheat-sheet at the time, I thought it would be good to have one, and set about writing one over a [...]

Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 20:27 | 0 comments
Categories: Apache, DNS, Linux, MacOSX

You know grep, don't you? Then try ack — you'll adore it.
ack is a bit like grep: it uses the full power of Perl's regular expressions to find things in files, but ack does "the right thing" usually by default. Consider the following example:

You'll notice colored output, ack looked recursively for the files itself (no [...]

Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 17:03 | 5 comments
Categories: CLI, Linux, MacOSX
Tags: ,

We make heaving use of a Web caching or proxy server for outgoing HTTP requests, and squid is our preferred tool. I implemented squid a number of years ago, and its squid.conf configuration file has historically (or histerically) grown out of reasonable proportions with all manner of access control lists (ACL) strewn throughout. (If you [...]

Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 23:47 | 0 comments
Categories: CLI, Database, Linux, MacOSX
Tags: , ,