I generally don’t jump on boycotting bandwagons, usually because they are severely misguided and misinformed, and they’re usually interested in spreading FUD more than just reporting the issue at hand. However, on December 29th, 2011, I will be transferring all of my 15 domains away from GoDaddy, because they support the SOPA and Protect IP [...]
If you’re an IRC junkie, and spend hours a day in Irssi, then this post might be useful to you. It’s all the rage these days to shorten URLs with fancy URL shortening services. Heck, even I have one. They are certainly nice to have, when links are exceptionally long, such as search result URLs, [...]
I’ve seen on the internet, and elsewhere, that when there are too many arguments for rm(1) to handle, that the following command will suffice: % find /path -exec rm -rf {} \; While certainly functional, it’s not optimal. If there are thousands of files (as is often the case at my job), this command is [...]
I have been familiar with steganography for a number of years. In fact, back when I was in middle school, I developed a fascination for encryption, and hiding messages, mostly so I could pass notes back and forth to classmates during class. It wasn’t long before I found “invisible ink”, which is a form of [...]
There is this burger shop near my home that makes the most amazing burgers, fries and shakes. Bar none. The burgers, of which there is quite the variety, each have their own “secret sauce” that gives each burger its own unique flavor. The fries also have various dipping sauces you can order, each of which [...]
In mutt, you can setup multiple accounts, and use account hooks (complete with key bindings) to change to those accounts. I have a Gmail account and a work account. In my Gmail account, I use goobook to access my Google Contacts, and I can successfully tab-complete the addresses when composing mail. But, I have not [...]
Someone is purchasing our house, and we have to be out by the 28th of November. We will not be in our new house until Dec 3rd, at the earliest. During that week, I don’t know where to host my server to maintain a constant connection. Hopefully, I can find a solution, but worst case [...]
If you have an Android device with a camera, you can install the ZXing Barcode scanner [1] which supports the following method. It is my understanding, however, that other barcode scanners do not support this, so as cool as this is, it may only serve a very limited audience. The ZXing app doesn’t even support [...]
From http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/greater-choice-for-wireless-access.html: We’re introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with “_nomap.” For example, if your SSID is “Network,” you’d need to [...]
Some of the roles I fill at work are: storage architecture, cloud engineering, system administration and backend coding. When approaching my tasks head on, it’s always important to me that standards are adhered to. From PEP coding style to adhering to an RFC for mail server. Unfortunately, I think I’m a dying breed, or something, [...]
I’m a fan of all things microblogging, but let’s face it: until URLs become part of the XML, and not part of your character count (which is ridiculous anyway), shortened URLs are going to be a way of life. Unfortunately, those shortened URLs can be problematic. They could host malicious scripts and/or software that could [...]
Posted to my Google Plus account (https://plus.google.com/115784859563110525602/posts/cwwMBdh4iPL): Let’s talk browsers. Specifically, Opera 11.51, Firefox 7.0.1, Safari 5.1 and Chrome 14.0.835.163. I don’t have access to Internet Explorer 9. Ordered best to worst. JavaScript standards compliance: http://test262.ecmascript.org (lower failures is better): Firefox: 191 failures Chrome: 425 failures Safari: 832 failures Opera: 3,750 failures HTML5 standards compliance: [...]
I created a Debian package for Salt, doing my best to adhere to the Debian Policy. You can find it at http://mentors.debian.net/package/salt. If you’re not familiar with Salt, head over to http://saltstack.org and check it out. From the author’s website: Salt is a powerful remote execution manager that can be used to administer servers in [...]
Too often, I see the recommendation on forums, IRC, and elsewhere across the internet to use improper tools for creating ISO images. For example, consider the following two commands, both of which are not the correct way to build a CD/DVD image: $ dd if=/dev/scd0 of=cdimage.iso # NO! Or worse yet: $ cat /dev/scd0 > [...]
This post comes from BashFAQ/081 on Greg’s Wiki. He argues why you should not be using which(1) to determine if a command is in your $PATH at the end of the page. I’ll put that argument at the front: The command which(1) (which is often a csh script, although sometimes a compiled binary) is not [...]
