Idling User

Gentoo is a great distro and, despite what many think and say, it’s easy to maintain if you have the right tools. And, well etc-update just isn’t quite the right tool for maintaining your config files. Its too clunky, error prone and not very forgiving at all. I’ve been using dispatch-conf for […]

I’ve been back and forth between tabs and spaces for code indentation in recent years. My exposure to Python lead me down the path of spaces, while in the past I had stuck to tabs in my PHP, Perl & Java. When its my own code it’s fine to use whichever I feel is […]

I’ve been running MySQL 4.1 on Gentoo on my dev machines for a little while now without any major hangups. A few people have asked me how to get it emerged because they got hungup by the masks in Gentoo whic prevent them from emerging 4.1 and they gave up after the usual ~x86 […]

Patrick Lagacé’s Conntrack Viewer is a really handy little Perl script that formats the contents of /proc/net/ip_conntrack. It came in handy today trying to figure out what our firewall was up to. It’s definitely going into my permanent toolkit. I surprised I hadn’t found it sooner.

QIV has been my image viewer of choice for Linux for at least 4 years. It’s very fast and very bare bones, with some on-the-fly read-only image manipulation (brightness, gamma, contrast). Don’t expect thumbnailing, cataloging or any features like that out of it. My favorite feature is attaching scripts to the 0-9 […]

Groklaw has posted a document that discusses the use of Linux in the Department of Defense. One reader’s comment points to an 1992 mailing list post indicating some use of Linux at the DoD very early in the Linux’s history. It’s great to see published support like this, even if it is from […]

A few years ago I set out to get logrotate to email log files as compressed attachments rather than emailing log files in pieces across multiple emails. I made a quick patch back then and mentioned it in this post to the NYLUG list but never got it up online for everyone. Over […]