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+++ Update to the Slerm Phlogging Engine +++
Monday, August 29, 2016 at 09:05
This is a small update fixing selector line endings so they are RFC
1436 compliant. Someone left a comment on my phlog noting that I was
outputting \n, instead of \r\n as per the RFC. Now, in today's day
and age, this probably makes no difference, but it is possible that
an older client could make assumptions about line endings. So,
fixed! Read on for details on how to download slerm v1.7.
Continued...
+++ The Days of Dialup are Ending +++
Sunday, July 03, 2016 at 09:12
July 1st came and went and with it my annual dues notices. I donate
to support a wide variety of SDF's services, MetaARPA of course, but
also VPN, VOIP and dialup. I've been a dialup member for a while, I
joined SDF in 2007 so it was 2008 or so. For all of those years
through this one, I lived in a house in New England with copper
phone lines, so dialup made sense as a backup internet for power
outages. I also used it while traveling, for example in Vermont
where cell service was spotty and the internet unrelaible. But I"ve
recently relocated to Quebec - no copper phone lines where I am,
power is reliable, internet is also quite reliable (but expensive,
at least moreso than I was used to in the US). Anyway, I was sad to
do so, but I finally cancelled my dialup membership, I just don't
see a need for it anymore. During any extended power outage (a
couple of days or more), I would not have a phone line anyway, since
it is provided via the cable line. I also don't travel as much, but
even when I do, most everywhere has decent wireless internet now.
Continued...
+++ Moved to Canada +++
Saturday, July 02, 2016 at 11:20
I noted before that I was planning to move my family to Canada
[0]. Well, we finally did it in June of this year, and are settling
in to the new home in southern Quebec.
Continued...
+++ Slerm is Back! +++
Wednesday, December 16, 2015 at 16:45
This is a first post under my newly-revamped phlogging engine slerm
(now v1.6), you can read about slerm and even comment below:
Continued...
+++ Low Tech +++
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
I enjoy reading the weekly posts over at The Archdruid Report [0].
Very thought-provoking. Last week's post [1] was on the aggression
and anger many face by admitting to eschewing a "modern" way of life
in favor of simpler, older technologies. The comments to this post
are full of interesting anecdotes.
Continued...
+++ Dumb Phones +++
Monday, November 16, 2015
I've noticed lately more and more people buried in their mobile
devices in public or even while they are in supposedly social
situations. While the former is understandable (the phone has taken
the place of books or magazines in waiting rooms and airport
terminals), the latter is downright rude.
Continued...
+++ Journaling +++
Thursday, September 03, 2015
I've kept a hand-written journal twice before for short periods.
Once when I was 20 and on a NOLS excursion in the North Cascades,
that was for 31 days. More recently, I had a written journal for
four months in 2013, but never kept up with it. Reading through both
recently made me realize the value such a journal can hold, not only
for selfish reasons, but for future generations of family members,
who might be interested in the personal details of their great-
grandfather's life, say.
Continued...
+++ Moving to Canada +++
Friday, June 05, 2015
Last year I discovered I was a Canadian citizen under their 'new'
(2009) citizenship act. Although I was born in the US, my father was
born and raised in Quebec. The new law allows citizenship by descent
for the first generation born abroad to a Canadian parent. So my
kids are not Canadian citizens, but I (and my siblings) are, retro-
active to birth. I received my Canadian citizenship certificate in
March of this year, and my passport in May.
Continued...
+++ RIP +++
Saturday, February 28, 2015
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not
preserved, except in memory. LLAP -Leonard Nimoy
Continued...
+++ Slerm - it's Alive +++
Friday, January 16, 2015
With the switch to Gophernicus as the SDF gopher server, gopher
moles became possible again. I talked about this before [0], but
recently found the time to update my old dynamic phlogging software,
slerm, so that it worked with Gophernicus. I am testing it and will
release another tarball hopefully very soon. Here is the list of
features from the original README [1]:
Continued...
+++ Everyman's Library +++
Friday, December 19, 2014
I've recently discovered "Everyman's Library" - a publishing house
that specializes in high-quality hardcovers of classic authors. I'm
not a book collector by any stretch of the imagination, but I do
love to read and like the feel of a nice hardcover. You can get
these in the usual brick & mortar bookstores, or online - they are
reasonably priced and have sewn cloth bindings, acid-free paper, and
a built-in bookmark. I put some pictures of 'The Stories of Ray
Bradbury' in my SDF gallery [0].
Continued...
+++ Higher Order Perl and Free Books +++
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
I wish more authors would come to their senses, particularly with
technical books. I purchased the dead-tree version of Higher Order
Perl years ago, it is an amazing book and recommended reading for
any programmer. Luckily, it is free to download [0].
Continued...
+++ Time to Re-visit Dynamic Phlogging +++
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
For a few years SDF used the Bucktooth gopher server, which works
fine but had some security issues that were very hard to fix given
that server's design and the difficulty of testing.
Continued...
+++ Ending the Old-School D&D Campaign +++
Monday, September 15, 2014
So I ended the old-school D&D campaign today that I had been running
on the bboard (board CAMPAIGN) for the past year or so. Posting
frequency of the participants was at about once every few weeks, so
clearly the interest had waned. It was fun while it lasted, though!
Continued...
+++ Back to Slackware +++
Sunday, September 14, 2014
It's been a while since I updated the phlog/blog. Funny how things
like this tend to go in spurts, at least for me. I can write
regularly for a while, then lose interest but always come back at
some point.
Continued...
+++ Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey +++
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
As a long-time fan of Carl Sagan's works, I am happily gobbling up
the recent Cosmos remake on Fox with Neil deGrasse Tyson (NdT). It
is very well done and NdT was definitely the right person to host
the show.
Continued...
+++ Adventures of a Sysadmin, Fun With cPanel Edition +++
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Oh, how I loathe cPanel. It completely takes over your linux
servers. Once installed, there is no uninstalling it, it has hooks
into every part of the OS. Once infected by the cPanel virus, you
must make all changes to the server configuration through cPanel, or
cPanel's highly intuitive collection of command line utilities.
Everything.
Continued...
+++ 2600 Magazine's Ebooks +++
Saturday, January 18, 2014
I've been a subscriber to 2600 magazine for about four years, and
while the technical content is of varying quality, I enjoy reading
the opinions, letters, 'hacker perspectives' columns and fiction. I
also like reading the older 2600 magazines - from the 80s. This is
when I got my start in computing, so there is definitely a bit of
nostalgia there, but I also enjoy reading about the computing
history of that time.
Continued...
+++ SDF Dialup +++
Friday, January 03, 2014
I'm typing this over a dialup connection into SDF. I've had an SDF
dialup account since I've joined, but seldom use it anymore. I do
like to keep it around as a last-ditch internet access method, so I
test it from time-to-time. It *has* come in useful before during
extended power outages.
Continued...
+++ Trisquel GNU/Linux 6.0 Meets an Old Laptop +++
Friday, November 29, 2013
I recently acquired an old laptop (A Dell Latitude) from a friend
that was throwing it out. I love old laptops, they tend to be built
more solidly and have much nicer-feeling keyboards than 'modern'
ones. The lack of horsepower doesn't bother me, as my mostly non-GUI
needs don't require lots of memory, disk or CPU.
Continued...
+++ Cool Gopher Phlog to Blog Converter +++
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Our very own Echosa has made a very nice gopher phlog-to-blog
converter, complete with disqus comments. I like it - simple, clean
and has the advantage of only having to update your phlog/blog in
one place.
Continued...
+++ NYC Scary +++
Friday, November 22, 2013
Last month I was in NY city for a few days on business. Since I live
in Connecticut, I am able to take the train into Penn Station. On
the way home, my train was delayed and I stayed in Penn Station for
a bit longer than I wanted to. It was...interesting, to say the
least.
Continued...
+++ Learning Morse Code +++
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
I've had my ham license for about 5 years, but never done much with
it until recently, when I bought an Icom IC-718, put an antenna up
over my garage and started learning morse code. Why morse code?
Local 2M repeaters don't really interest me, and I have little
desire to actually chat via phone/SSB/AM with anyone. CW seems so
much _cooler_ somehow, despite it still being just another form of
communication. It may be the minimalist nature of CW that appeals to
me - a low-power battery operated transceiver, wire antenna and key
are all you need.
Continued...
+++ Homeschooling Update +++
Friday, September 20, 2013
I noted back in April that my wife and I were considering home
schooling our kids, ages 9 and 12. We did end up doing this, and it
has been generally a positive experience during the first
month. We're learning the best ways to do things as we go along,
using whatever free or low-cost resources we can find. For example,
we make regular trips to the town library for textbooks or fiction,
use the Khan Academy website, and various online sources of
documentaries and educational shows (Netflix, Discovery, Youtube).
Continued...
+++ Role Playing Games by Bboard and Gopher +++
Saturday, August 17, 2013
I and some old-school D&D enthusiasts started a bboard/gopher Swords
& Wizardry campaign [0]. Coming from some recent play-by-post or
forum-based games, I had some reservations, but I must say it's been
working quite well.
Continued...
+++ TV's Everywhere +++
Friday, July 26, 2013
I've noticed lately that more and more public and private venues are
installing large, flat-screen TVs. They are always on, tuned to CNN
or Fox News, or some sports channel. I'm not sure if this is the
same in other parts of the world, but it seems most Americans
tolerate or perhaps even want this, or why else would businesses
install them?
Continued...
+++ Comments on Textfiles +++
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
Over at jstg's phlog [0] he laments the lack of plain text files on
the internet. He is not alone in that sentiment, the 'modern' web is
more about looks than actual content. There are ways to cope,
however.
Continued
+++ Jefferson Quote +++
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013
Here's a quote from a founding father you don't see very often. I think we
can all agree on his sentiments towards banks:
Continued...
+++ Micro-managers +++
Monday, April 29th, 2013
I had just started troubleshooting an issue on a production server the other
day, when one of the managers got wind of the problem and wanted to hop on a
IM session with me so we could both figure out the problem as it was
'critical'. Please, no.
Continued...
+++ Consumerism +++
Saturday, April 13th, 2013
I was at a local Staples today grabbing some office supplies. While there, I
took a look at the laptops they had on display. Universally overpriced with
loads of crapware/adware and all with a highly visible 'Windows 8 installed'
sticker. The usual bait-and-switch with a sticker price in a large font and
the admission in a tiny font at the bottom edge of the tag that the actual
price is higher, unless you send in for a mail-in rebate. Rather than tout
how worthless it all was and how a decent text editor was nowhere to be
found, stickers touting the latest version of Office for just $50 more, and
some sort of kiosk display with prominent Facebook and Netflix icons. No
mention of the required anti-virus software, I guess that's just assumed
nowadays. How can people use these to do anything useful, I thought to
myself? The answer is they can't, and they are not intended to be useful,
merely to enable consumption.
Continued...
+++ The Problem With Public Schools +++
Wednesday, April 03th, 2013
My wife and I have been discussing homeschooling our two children (ages 9
and 12). Public school in the US seems to be completely concerned with
teaching kids how to do well on state standardized tests, and less about
learning.
Continued...
+++ Expensive Cloud +++
Tuesday, April 02nd, 2013
I was recently surprised to learn that large disk arrays can be much cheaper
if you self-host them versus, well versus pretty much any "cloud" storage
provider.
Continued...
+++ Killing Caps Lock +++
Friday, March 29th, 2013
The dreaded caps lock key. Never has a key been so useless yet so
ever-present. As a heavy emacs user, I keep myself sane by turning it into
an extra control key. Various linux distros and desktops have their GUI apps
for changing keyboard layout, but I found some simple commands that work
pretty much everywhere.
Continued...
+++ Ebooks are Still too Expensive +++
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Sigh. It seems the publishing industry has not learned from the
mistakes of other, dying industries and is still clinging to quaint
business models.
Continued...
+++ Gopher Automation +++
Tuesday, March 26th, 2013
I used to have a few gopher CGI (aka gopher mole) scripts on my SDF gopher
site. One displayed the latest weather for my area, one was my phlogging
script slerm, and one generated a random Firefly quote every time it was
loaded.
Continued...
+++ THE WEBSITE IS DOWN +++
Monday, March 25th, 2013
Ugh. Why is it that people still feel the need to WRITE IN ALL CAPS in
email? What, is this 1996 (of course, I am posting this on a gopher
server...)?
Continued...
+++ Public School is Boring +++
Friday, March 22nd, 2013
I went to a parent-teacher conference at the local elementary school with my
9-year old daughter yesterday. She does fairly well, but tends to be
inconsistent, probably due to the ebb and flow in her interest level. This
was evident while discussing reading.
Continued...
+++ Prophetic Carl Sagan Quote +++
Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
Carl Sagan is one of my favorite authors. His book, 'The Demon-Haunted
World" is a classic, and is essential reading for the budding skeptic. A
quote from that book is eerily prophetic:
Continued...
+++ Phlogit - The goPHerLOG helper--
Monday, March 18th, 2013
I recently converted the 'mkgopherentry' shell script that many here at SDF
use for their phlogs to perl.
Continued...
+++ What Router? Adventures of A Freelance Sysadmin--
Sunday, March 17th, 2013
The ringing phone interrupted Nalo's concentration, his eyes glued to the
terminal window, his fingers tapping at the keyboard. He glanced at the
caller-ID. Minicorp. Crap, not again. He paused his nethack game with a
control-z.
Continued...
+++ Musings on Network Security +++
Monday, September 10, 2012
As a sysadmin, I have always thought simplicity should be a key
guideline when securing Linux or Unix servers. That sounds rather
meaningless by itself, so an example is in order. Anyone who spends
time looking at the log files on an internet-facing server or
firewall will notice the almost constant barrage of SSH brute-force
attacks. SSH is indispensable as a remote administration tool, so it
is likely to be installed on every such Linux or Unix system. Some
admins like to install automatic analysis and blocking tools (e.g.,
fail2ban), but I dislike such tools because they are just another
way of "enumerating badness" [1]. So I secure SSH with a set of
simple changes:
Continued...
+++ Unsubscribe Me Madness +++
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
For some reason I was getting marketing email from Barnes & Noble,
several times per day. I must have inadvertently missed a checkbox
labeled 'spam me' during my last online purchase. Anyway, I finally
followed the 'unsubscribe' link and dutifully selected that I no
longer wished to receive ANY email. This is the response I got after
submission:
Continued...
+++ Ebooks Cost Too Much +++
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Some time ago I read the dead-tree version of the book Daemon, by
Daniel Suarez. A very good book, and one I was glad to see now had a
sequel. I was less pleased when I went to the Barnes & Noble website
to see how much the ebook would cost (I have a 1st gen nook) -
$9.99. Just out of curiosity, I checked the kindle price, and it was
the same. I'm sorry, $9.99 is way too much for an ebook. I'm willing
to pay more for physical books, but not an ephemeral digital
version, even if it's in an open format like epub. I can't be alone
seems to me publishers are losing money by jacking up ebook prices
(I've noticed authors selling direct through Amazon or B&N to
tend to charge less, it's just the publishers trying to hang on to
an obsolete business model). In the end, I picked up an almost-new
hardcover for $1.93 on half.com (just under $6.00 with shipping),
and I have the physical book.
Continued...
+++ WTF is Tracker and Why is it Using All of My Memory? +++
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Recently, I updated by Debian testing XFCE desktop. Nothing unusual
there, I've been using Debian for many years and after the gnome3
disaster, have pretty much settled on XFCE. This update brought in a
surprise, however. My desktop with 3GB of RAM was sluggish, and
'top' showed I was using all my RAM *and* 500MB of swap. Hmmm...
Continued...
+++ Argh, No Snow +++
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
This time last year we had two feet of snow on the ground, now
none. In fact it hasn't snowed appreciably in the northeastern US
since mid-December, not at all normal for a New England winter.
Most people are pleased by this turn of events, but my wife and I
enjoy cross-country skiing. We have only been able to go out twice
this winter, and then only by traveling north to Vermont during a
lucky week in January where they had six whole inches of snow.
Continued...
+++ Alt.sysadmin.recovery Manpages +++
Sunday, February 19, 2012
More sysadmin humor, the alt.sysadmin.recovery [0] manpages.
Continued...
+++ Don't Mess With the Sysadmin +++
Sunday, February 19, 2012
A funny reminder not to mess with your sysadmin [0]. Reminds me of
the BOFH stories [1].
Continued...
+++ WTF: Ubuntu, Debian and Gnome +++
Friday, February 17, 2012
After my rant on Ubuntu a few years ago it actually improved quite a
bit. You still had loads of mysterious processes running, but at
least they advanced things to the point of not slowing the desktop
down (or maybe hardware just caught up), all the while keeping the
same basic interface. I suppose they had gone just too long without
messing things up, so in comes Unity (or Gnome3 if you are running
the current Debian testing default desktop), and things are back to
slow, clunky and unusable. At least for me - I tried it and
abandoned it after a few days. Worse, the interface is radically
changed, with no fallback. But hey, it looks good!
Continued...
+++ Perl CGI Programming, the Right Way (redux) +++
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Argh! The excellent Perl CGI course I first mentioned here is
offline. Archive.org to the rescue.
Continued...
+++ Hurricane Irene +++
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
We've had an interesting few days since hurricane (really tropical
storm) Irene hit Connecticut. We lost power Sunday morning, and
finally got it back Tuesday. This wasn't really an inconvenience for
us, as we had a generator and 20 gallons of fuel. That would last
almost two weeks - the trick is to realize that you don't need 24x7
power to be comfortable, assuming you are prepared (more about that
below). We ran the generator about six hours a day - two hours each
morning. afternoon and night. That was enough in 80-degree weather
to keep the fridge and freezer cold enough so there was no food
spoilage. While the generator was off, we relied on stored water
(both potable and rainwater for flushing toilets), a propane stove,
various solar lights, battery-powered flashlights and oil
lanterns. Since it was late August in New England, we did not have
to worry about heating the house, although we have a wood stove if
it had been necessary.
Continued...
+++ Slerm Phlogging Script - Updates +++
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
I've updated slerm to fix an issue where embedded gopher links of
type 1-9 were not recognized. I've also added 'bookshelf.txt', meant
to be a list of what you are currently reading, displayed just below
the site header.
Continued...
+++ Ideas for Improving Slerm +++
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
There are some ideas I've had for improving the slerm phlogging
engine [], the main one being adding full-text search. In fact, this
seems to be a drawback to gopher itself - although the Veronica and
VISHNU searches [1] are useful, they index only selectors - not
full-text [2]. For a lightweight, text-based protocol, this seems a
big weakness. It means you have to hunt around gopherspace for
interesting tidbits, since selector names aren't always that
descriptive. It appears WAIS was meant to address this limitation,
although only for locally connected gopher servers via a special
client (think pre-internet).
Continued...
+++ Remote Access +++
Sunday, May 22, 2011
I setup VNC access to a desktop for a client recently, which they
promptly b0rked by replacing their router and with it all the
firewall/port forwarding settings - without telling me. In trying to
get access to try and fix it, I explained how I would first need the
IP address for the new router. I received this helpful email in
response:
Continued...
+++ Mail Clients and Editors +++
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
My favorite mail client is mutt, and my editor-of-choice is GNU
Emacs. The two play quite nicely together, and I still use them for
personal mail, via a console SSH connection. This line in .muttrc
does the trick:
Continued...
+++ Using Old OSes On Servers +++
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Of all the linux distros or BSD's to choose from, I would say Fedora
ranks at the bottom for me as far as production server use. It's
really meant as a testing OS, to test new ideas before they get
incorporated into RHEL. While there are issues with any old
operating system as far as community or vendor support, Fedora
releases in particular have a very short lifespan (Fedora Legacy,
which had been providing support for old Fedora releases, was shut
down in 2007). I mention this because I have a client that contacts
me every few months for help with some intractable server
issue. From just a security perspective, this is scary, FC5 was
released in 2006:
Continued...
+++ Hacker Wanted +++
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Like most in the tech industry, I get emails from recruiters from
time-to-time. Most I file in the bit-bucket pretty quickly. But one
I received the other day was interesting for the wording used in the
job description:
Continued...
+++ Slerm Phlogging Script - Updates +++
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
I've updated slerm to fix an issue where users could leave 'orphan'
comments (comments not attached to any post) by forgetting to type
the name of the post before the comment text. Now an error page is
displayed, with instructions on what to do.
Continued...
+++ Slerm Phlogging Script +++
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
I've added some more updates to my version of the excellent 'germ'
phlogging script as created by wt@sdf, and renamed it 'slerm' to
differentiate it. The main change from the previous version is the
ability to receive email alerts on post comments.
Continued...
+++ Highly Annoying Habits of Non-Geeks +++
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Posted without comment, annoying habits of the non-geek:
Continued...
+++ Slide Rules +++
Thursday, August 19, 2010
[This post disappeared from the SDF bboard for some reason, so I'm
posting it here]
Continued...
+++ This Server is a Tad Overloaded... +++
Monday, August 02, 2010
A server I do development work on...yikes:
Continued...
+++ Project Work and Crazy Expectations +++
Friday, May 14, 2010
I've never been a fan of detailed or formal requirements docs for
software or other projects, as I've found the customer's needs
always change and sticking to a pre-made list is impossible. But
there has to be *something* to start with, something reasonably
detailed enough to make an estimate (and I recommend doubling that
before telling the customer). I got an email from a potential client
recently:
Continued...
+++ Partitioning Woes +++
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Who partitions servers like this? A braindead hosting provider,
that's who.
Continued...
+++ HTML Tag Removal Utility - unhtml +++
Friday, April 16, 2010
I updated 'unhtml' [0] today and copied it into /sys/sdf/bin so
others could use it. Unhtml is a command-line utility to strip tags
from HTML source. I'm using it to convert pyblosxom posts to gopher-
suitable text.
Continued...
+++ Some More Light Reading... +++
Thursday, April 15, 2010
I like the Forgotten Realms novels so much, I've been reading all of
them. Right now I'm reading the Paths of Darkness Collector's
Edition [0]. So far all of RA Salvatore's books in this series have
been great, although I'm guessing you'll like them better if you
were or are into D&D.
Continued...
+++ Some Light Reading... +++
Thursday, January 07, 2010
I'm taking the family on a long-overdue vacation up to Vermont next
week. In anticipation of doing lots of reading, I picked up two of
R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms trilogies, 'The Dark Elf' [0] and
'Icewind Dale' [1]. If the reviews on Amazon and bn.com are any
indication, they should be quite entertaining.
Continued...
+++ Kickin' it Old School #tags Palm,Ebooks,Ereader,Plucker +++
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Continued...
+++ Text Adventures and Get Lamp +++
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
I still remember playing Zork happily for hours in my youth. For
those that played them, text adventures encouraged logical,
deliberate thinking that rarely exists in modern games. Poking
through Jason Scott's blog ASCII [0] last night, I saw a note about
Get Lamp [1] and put in a pre-order. If it's anything like BBS [2]
it will be great. It's set to ship in March of 2010.
Continued...
+++ Viewing the Top-Ten Worst SSH Attackers +++
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
If you must maintain an 'open' SSH server, this might come in handy.
This is a quick way to view the top ten worst offending SSH
attackers in your secure log. It works on Red Hat-based Linux boxen
(e.g., CentOS, Fedora), but it can easily be modified for other OS's
by just changing the pattern or logfile.
Continued...
+++ Make Great Money Now as a Freelance Developer... +++
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Well, I'm so glad the person posting this job [0] put a plus sign
after the number '10' for an hourly rate, because as a 'Senior
mod_perl programmer' with 'lots of application development
background' who is used to dealing with 'Difficult code with poor
documentation' in 'Very large applications developed over many
iterations', I would never even consider applying for this at just
$10/hour - the plus sign makes all the difference!
Continued...
+++ Squirrelmail Error +++
Saturday, October 03, 2009
I came across an obscure error using Squirrelmail recently. The
error was just the text "ERROR : Connection dropped by imap server"
after attempting to login with a newly-created user - less than
helpful, and the server logs were no help (I'm using the Dovecot
IMAP server). I was thrown off by the fact that I had recently
migrated this client's installation to a new server, and thought
everything should have worked as it had before. The key turned out
to be that this was a brand-new user account, and that user's
Maildir folders were missing. The easy fix is to create the maildir
folders:
Continued...
+++ Observations on Teaching Newbies to Use a Shell +++
Saturday, September 26, 2009
I've been teaching Linux/Unix Fundamentals courses recently, and
thought I'd share some observations about students - some that
surprised me. The course I teach is very command line intensive;
while the individual student workstations are setup with graphical
environments (KDE), the course can be taught and the concepts
learned from a console.
Continued...
+++ Using Rlwrap to Keep Your Commandline Sanity +++
Sunday, September 13, 2009
After many years of commandline use, I've gotten spoiled by the
pervasiveness of GNU readline in shells and other shell-like apps,
like the MySQL shell. When I do sit down and try to use an app
without such support, the result is a fairly painful mix of cursing
and visible control characters (Oracle's sqlplus interface is
probably the poster child for miserable CLI experiences, with no
convenience facilities whatsoever).
Continued...
+++ Perl CGI Programming, the Right Way +++
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
One of the best resources for learning Perl CGI programming online
used to be Ovid's CGI Course. I was disappointed to find it no
longer online, but glad to see it in updated form, now maintained by
the Perlmonks community [0]. It always distinguished itself from
other CGI tutorials with its early attention to security and taint
mode [1]. Well worth the read.
Continued...
+++ No Kidding...Really? +++
Friday, September 04, 2009
This [0] falls under the Master of the Obvious department. Glad my
taxes didn't pay for this study.
Continued...
+++ RCS Misery +++
Friday, August 14, 2009
While I am definitely old-school, and still use RCS for things like
personal config files and documents, I would never consider using it
on a development project where lots of developers are working on a
shared codebase. I had to do just that recently for a contract I'm
working on with several other developers. Absolute misery. Even
worse, this version of RCS is hacked so that the VC metadata is not
local, meaning I can't use Emacs' VC-mode to make life easier.
Imagine locks that someone always forgets to release ("You done with
that file?"), no merging, branching or private repos - so no way to
test your changes without possibly breaking stuff other devs are
doing. Sheesh.
Continued...
+++ When Mutt Thinks Mailboxes Always Have New Mail +++
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
On SDF the non-inbox user mail files are accessed via an NFS mount.
Mutt [0]has a hard time figuring out when an NFS mbox file has been
modified in some circumstances. So when you press 'c' in the index
view, your mailboxes always appear to have new mail. Highly
irritating. The fix is to add "set check_mbox_size=yes" to your
'.muttrc' (apparently this works only in more recent versions of
mutt, the one on SDF is 1.5.19. Older versions [pre 1.5.15] can use
a compile- time option "+BUFFY_SIZE").
Continued...
+++ No, It's Not the Onion +++
Monday, August 03, 2009
Via the Linux Gazette [0] - a series of command line tutorials in
video format [1]. Yes, that's right, video format. I hesitate to
even link to them. I can only imagine that this is some vain attempt
to grab new subscribers to a dying format by appealing to the
Youtube generation.
Continued...
+++ Happy Sysadmin Day! +++
Friday, July 31, 2009
Happy Sysadmin Day [0], and thanks, smj! That is all.
Continued...
+++ Oh My +++
Friday, July 31, 2009
Posted without comment [0].
Continued...
+++ One More Nail in IE6's Coffin +++
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
So YouTube and some other sites are phasing out support for IE6 [].
It's about frakking time. Developing web apps assuming IE6 support
would be comical if it weren't so painful. No built-in PNG support?
Are you kidding me? One very large company I contracted for still
used IE6 as its standard corporate browser. Yup, that's right, in
2009. Die, IE6, die.
Continued...
+++ How Not to Send a Marketing Email +++
Monday, July 06, 2009
Sigh. I got a marketing email from a vendor today, along with 1538
other people whose email addresses were plunked right into the 'To:'
header. Microsoft needs to put an idiot dialog in Outlook that pops
up when you click 'Send' with more than five 'To:' addresses [0].
Continued...
+++ Contract Programmer WTF +++
Friday, July 03, 2009
I've done contract work through Guru.com in the past, and I still
take a look around there from time to time. While looking through
open projects, I'll sometimes visit a contractor's profile that was
given bad reviews. This customer review was priceless:
Continued...
+++ Random Cool Emacs Hack +++
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
If you spend a lot of time in Emacs, you'll invariably end up with
multiple buffers of the same name hanging around. It's sometimes
irritating to discern between them while switching. Check out the
very useful elisp function that will kill all other Emacs buffers of
the same name, courtesy of Trey Jackson at "Life Is Too Short For
Bad Code" [0].
Continued...
+++ WTF, Ubuntu +++
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Um, seriously WTF, Ubuntu? I must be getting old and intolerant, or
something. Ubuntu (and the current crop of Linux distros) all seem
to be trying to out-Windoze one another. The bloat and propensity to
hide everything from supposedly clueless users has gotten really
irritating.
Continued...
+++ A Sysadmin's Lament, or why cPanel Sucks +++
Saturday, May 23, 2009
I've been wrestling with cPanel [0] on and off for years - more
lately, and it always reminds me just how much it sucks. It can be
convenient if you don't know how to maintain Linux servers and the
various associated Internet services (Apache, BIND, etc.), but there
really is no playing nicely with it from a command line sense. Once
installed, it takes over your system, rendering it impervious to
standard sysadmin tricks. What's more, its convenience is really
it's downfall, because when something goes wrong with it, two things
are true:
Continued...
+++ Cool Emacs Hacks +++
Thursday, May 21, 2009
I'm an Emacs-guy, have been for a long time. As much as I use vi
from time-to-time, I never could get into modal editing. Despite
having used GNU Emacs as a programmer for years, I still learn cool
Emacs-fu all the time. Here are a few recent findings:
Continued...
+++ Google is the Internet +++
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Apparently, Google has become synonymous with the Internet. Everyone
panicked today because Google search and apps were down [0]. I got
an email from a client during the outage asking what could be the
cause of the "slow internet". Google really has become the Internet
for most people.
Continued...
+++ Clueless Admins +++
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Some people have no business maintaining Linux servers. I recently
had someone ask me to fix his non-working LAMP web app. He gave me
the contact details of the web host admin. So you can be spared the
pain I went through, here are six warning signs you might be dealing
with a novice Linux admin:
Continued...
+++ Where Did My Content Go? +++
Saturday, May 09, 2009
I realize businesses need to make money and advertise, but why must
I be bombarded with advertising 24x7? Tell me why I should pay good
money to watch commercials on cable TV? Shouldn't I get commercial-
free TV if I pay for it?
Continued...
+++ Scary Code Department +++
Thursday, May 07, 2009
What could possibly go wrong with this snippet of PHP code from a
web-based CMS? Ignore the lack of error checking...
Continued...
+++ Linux is Boring, or Saved by the Slack +++
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
I've always thought that Linux would be less popular with hard-core
geeks once it became mainstream - that the initial attraction was
Linux's unpolished installation and configuration, how it let you
get your "hands dirty". I started with Red Hat Linux back in 1995,
and spent many long nights configuring and tweaking to get a usable
system. The thrill was in the learning. I've recently found myself
bored with Linux, I think mainly for the reason that there is no
challenge anymore, no sense of accomplishment. Much of the user
experience is now hidden beneath layers of graphical abstraction. I
certainly do appreciate this, and use Ubuntu myself on my work
boxen, as there are times you just have to get stuff done. But I
still like to tweak and fiddle. There are also times when things go
wrong, and simplicity rules.
Continued...
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