linux

I've been hosting my email over at Fastmail for years, and for the most part the service is great. The company understands privacy , contributes back to open source , and is incredibly reliable. One of the main reasons I…

There was definitely a lot of hate around systemd in the Linux community over the last few years as all the Linux distros moved over to it. Things change all the time, and I personally never understood this one. It…

Over the past few weeks I've been tweaking my emacs configs, and writing some new modes to help with OpenStack development. Here is a non comprehensive list of some of the emacs integration I'm finding useful in…

Working from home is great. No commute. Really good coffee 50ft away. Being able to get started as soon as I wake up. Being able to break for exercise / food / etc when it fits in my natural flow, instead of having to…

Forget the Bulb I have replaced most of the traditional lights in our house now, with a plan to purge the rest over the next couple of months. However, for new lighting in the house, I'm starting to look into LED native…

Beyond normal screw bulbs in our house, we've got a bunch of florescent tube lights. The primary lighting for the family room, workroom, and garage are tube lights, and are old enough that their flicker and hum is…

Apparently the way my fathering nesting instinct kicks in is through home improvements, as I've had a brand new motivation to plow through a ton of things while at home for paternity leave. One of the large projects has…

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a pretty important communication medium for a lot of Open Source projects nowadays. While email is universal and lives forever, IRC is the equivalent of the hallway chat you'd have with a…

For someone that used to be very vocal about hating shell scripting, I seem to be building more and more tools related to it every day. The latest is caller (from "man bash"): caller [expr] Returns the context…

Better Bash Scripting in 15 Minutes. The tips and tricks below originally appeared as one of Google's "Testing on the Toilet" TOTT episodes. This is a revised and augmented version. via Robert Muth: Better Bash…

Note: this is in reference to the Generation 1 X1 Carbon which was available in 2012/2013. The new Gen 2 X1 Carbon has enough different hardware that this may not apply. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is Lenovo's stab into the…

In early December I finally decided it was time to move my primary email out of google. There were a few reasons to do it, though the practical (reaching the limits on their filtering) largely outweighed the ideological.…

Saturday was a rainy day, so I decided to deal with switching out the root disk on my home server with an SSD that I purchased a couple weeks ago. It's part of my quest to get all the root disks of my machines off…

Last week I bought myself one of the Samsung Arm Chromebooks. My theory is that when at conferences this is a nice form factor, light, with a good keyboard for taking notes (interactive etherpad is a key piece of…

In late 1999 I claimed my last name as a domain, and have had various email and web solutions hanging off of it ever since. This past weekend I migrated off of self hosted email to Google Apps for Domains. My email…

One of the things that happened once getting to Ubuntu 12.04 was that gnome-do started acting up on me. Given that it's a very minimally maintained project, I decided it was time to move on. Ubuntu's dash provides a lot…

Last night our MHVLUG meeting was a Desktop Shootout, where people showed off their Linux desktop environments what they liked and what they didn't. I went last, presenting Unity, and got a few good questions and…

Raspberry Pi , the $25 / $35 Linux ARM computer, launched yesterday, with 10k units through 2 distributors. The distributors were crushed within minutes, their websites down for hours. There is now just sign up forms to…

I love having a duplexing color laser printer at home, and thanks to my friend John for the recommendation on the Brother HL-4150 . However, in the last few months I found that print quality was way out of whack from…

The default CSS mode in emacs does very funny things with indentation if you like leaving the brace on the same line as the definition. As with everything in emacs, this is fixable with a few lines of config. In this…

I'm doing my 3rd and 4th upgrade of machines to Ubuntu 11.10 today. The early results on my laptop have been very good (Unity seems way less crashy now), so I'm upgrading a number of other systems I've got. When first…

A question came up in our Linux User Group IRC channel about the seemingly random mess that is your bash command history. As I googled around for the answer to what was going on I came across this snippet of pure joy.…

As soon as I went to work the home network dropped off the internet, wouldn't you know it. It turns out that was the time the old lease ran out, and it wanted my router to ask for it again. As I'd configured it to static…

I realized last night at our replacement MHVLUG dinner that I was the only one there who was still using Firefox on Linux. Everyone else was on the Chrome bandwagon. And that's where I thought it would stay, until Chrome…

I finally got around to installing my own wireless router on my FIOS network, a Linksys e2100L with dd-wrt installed on it. After the router is setup (that's beyond the scope of this post) there are 2 tricks to make this…

AIM spam seems to be on the rise again, I finally started getting hit with it the other day. If you are using pidgin you can change a privacy setting to make it go away.

This is an old joke, but increasingly one that people haven't seen. Given that I stuck a vi/emacs question at the end of the mhvlug survey, I thought it would be worth reposting for posterity. The original version is…

This is really neat, and possibly represents an interesting transition for desktop computing. Alexander Larson has a first prototype of Gtk rendering that converts to HTML5. The demo video shows the Gtk test app being…

Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list…

Problem: you want a fixed host name to connect to your home network on some residential ISP service. You don't have a static ip, so it could change at any time, and you want it to stay up to date. There are a lot of…

The default fonts for git gui (aka gitk) in Ubuntu are down right horrible. Even Ubuntu 10.04 defaults to tk8.4, which doesn't support font smoothing. Fortunately there is a simple way to fix this and make a whole bunch…

Back of the envelope math is good to do. I'm currently working to upgrade my raid array, but due to a lack of ports on the home server, I'm using a second box to build and initialize the new array. 1.2 Terrabytes / 100…

Yesterday I learned something about the new Ubuntu 10.04 release. I doesn't like to start correctly when applied to a 8 year computer, that has a 11 year old second video card sitting in it. This is the desktop under my…

Ubuntu 10.04 introduces a change on the default placement of the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on windows. This is a clone of where the Mac folks have had them over recent years, and a design that I remember…

Livnat Peer just posted an interesting look at converting a large source base from C# to Java. This was done because when Red Hat aquired the company that wrote KVM, they also got a huge .NET management application that…

When google decided to create their own web browser a year ago, I was both sceptical and annoyed. Did the world really need another web browser? Couldn't they just put that effort into Firefox? What I hadn't realized at…

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has been around for just about ever. In the 90s it was used for chat rooms and warez sites mostly. For the past decade it's become one of the key pillars of communication for the Open Source…

From this morning's updates on ubuntu. Version 2009n-0ubuntu0.9.04.1: * Add argentinas-dst-2009.diff: Disable DST switch for Argentina tomorrow, as the Argentina government decided yesterday. Careful planning is boring.…

If you had told me the biggest community Linux event in the United States took place in Columbus Ohio, I don't think I would have believed you before this last weekend. But Ohio Linux Fest blew away all my expectations,…

Years ago when I was using the Ion window manager. Ion had many very nice features, not the least of which was goto window by name, which you could do from an interactive console or script into other tools. I created an…

As it turns out I'll be giving 2 talks at the Ohio Linux Fest , coming up on Sept 26th in Columbus Ohio. OpenSim: Open Source 3D Worlds For OpenSim folks seeing this in the planet (or elsewheres), I'll be giving an…

A curious thing happened yesterday, a thing that had been feared for years, Microsoft code started down the road to be included in the Linux kernel. But, unlike the fears of old, it wasn't slipped in in the middle of the…

I'm quite impressed by how agressively the Cannonical team is getting when it comes to cloud computing. They're integrating eucalyptus into Ubuntu 9.10, which is open source software that lets you build your own…

<Note: thanks to Buffy Miller for giving me a much slicker solution here> Often I want to post a PDF on a web page, but would like the cover of the PDF to be the clickable element. This just makes things look…

A long time ago I used the built in ftp support for emacs to be able to remotely edit files on another system. This gave me all the convenience of a local editor (especially on slower links), with the ability to do edits…

Because I've moved into the more elegant waters of Ruby and Mono, I sometimes forget just how power Perl can be. Sometimes 8 lines of perl is all you need to solve a problem. The Problem So, I've gotten back in to Blood…

I can't even remember the last time I had a coworker that was co-located with me in the same town. Within IBM the other software developers that I typically work with are in: Minnesota, Texas, Germany, Great Britain,…

Last month I saw a new botnet based force attack on one of my machine. Here are some log snippets (it's a lot, but to fully notice the pattern you need to see the data). April 13 Error in PAM authentication:…

I've now migrated my work laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), which went pretty smoothly. I played some games to use internal mirrors, but still use the graphical update process (instead of just dist-upgrade), which all…

Using libconcordance and congruity , you can access the logitech website directly , then hit the update file and let congruity process the 2 hex files (it will hand them to you in the right order) to update your remote.…

First off, animations actually seem to work in Open Office 3. Not like in Open Office 2 where they seemed to just randomly fire, or not, depending on sunspots. Secondly, if you have, say, 27 pieces of text that you want…

Push finally came to shove, and I've now entered the 21st century by making Thunderbird my email client (I actually tried Evolution for a day, but after 20 crashes gave up. But that's a different story.) Previously I was…

From Napa, CA

I found that Liferea (my rss reader) was starting to get really slow. Hitting space bar to go to the next article was getting somewhat painful levels of delay. The Fix Liferea uses sqlite to store it's information. Over…

Things that I spent too much time figuring out again today with OpenOffice Tools -> AutoCorrect .... - to turn off all those replacement tables which make your Unix commands in a presentation all go funny OpenOffice…

Through dave hansen's blog I found the CHDK project , which creates custom Canon camera firmware that adds a lot of features to existing cameras. While I've only had this loaded for a day, I'm really psyched with the…

I've always felt the root of the emacs vs. vi holy war (which is one of the longest standing holy wars in free software) basically came down to the following key point: When you first were learning Linux / Unix, did your…

The whole OLPC goes windows debacle has been going on for months now, creating incredible polarization on many fronts. A huge part of what actually excited many of the XO laptop volunteers was the chance for a Linux…

Yesterday seemed like as good a time as any to actually do the upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop. A series of wireless card crashes got me fed up to the point that I had to do something. The upgrade, via update…

Having been at a Web 2.0 conference for a chunk of the week, I figured I'd finally download an try Adobe AIR , as they announced a Linux version last week at the Linux Collaboration Summit. I am massively underwhelmed.…

Unfortunately no one has made ubuntu packages yet, however here is a script that I built based on Dirk's post to automate mono 1.9 installation onto Ubuntu environments. #!/bin/sh # This is needed to pick up our built…

I definitely don't have this anywhere near I like it, but I did manage to just dump out a bunch of info from my thermostat and turn off the fan with this script: #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'thermostat' require…

Like all previous years, this year probably isn't any different, and it won't be the break out year for Linux on the Desktop. But... (there's always a but). Something interesting happened over the last year. People I…

Content was low on this site last week for a reason, I got sucked into EVE Online, which has a Linux client (though the advanced shaders don't work on Linux so it doesn't look quite as cool as that screen shot). EVE is…

I was reading Matt's blog over the weekend and found out there was supported Linux version for Eve Online . Eve Online is a MMOG in deep space, with 5000 solar systems in the environment. You start off with a little…

While I appreciate the environmental gains from every Linux system I've used in the last couple of years defaulting to double sided printing, this gets a bit annoying when you need single sided pages for doing code…

Rule #1 - don't do a wordpress upgrade when jet lagged after a 20 hr flight from India Having violated rule #1, I was very happy to remember that I'm doing nightly backups of that environment with backuppc . 60 seconds…

Key bindings for the Mutt email project that I should have known a long time ago, but only recently figured out: D - delete messages matching some term T - tag messages matching some term These make it a lot easier to…

Not all that exciting, but I did do a wordpress update today. Everything looks good to me, but if anyone sees something off, a comment would be appreciated.

Since my dbus post last week , I've been playing around more with dbus whenever I get a few minutes. The modern Linux desktop is pretty good, but with minor tweaks, you can make things even better. ( all this code is now…

*Note to Interwebs:*If you are looking for man pages for built in functions like printf , they aren't in the manpages package, but instead in the manpages-dev package. Go figure.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with Dan about my one great annoyance with Pidgin : it takes up to 15 minutes to realize that it's network connection isn't valid any more and to automatically reconnect. With…

While looking for a solution to my VMWare / USB issue, I came across a Linux.com article: Developer crafts Linux support for Logitech Harmony remote controls . Instead of using the Windows GUI to program the remote, you…

While I don't run windows on any physical hardware, I have a VMWare windows xp guest on my laptop that I use for a couple of applications. One of which is the programming software for my Logitech Harmony remote. In my…

After reading cote's blog post on the chumby , I got intrigued. The chumby is a small linux device, specifically designed to run flash based widgets, served up from the chumby servers. It looks like and interesting…

Just over a week ago I completely my conversion to Ubuntu (my laptop was the last machine over). One of the reasons for doing this conversion was to get the benefits of some of the gnome stack, like dbus, which are very…

Love it when you find packages with a sense of humor. :) Package: sl Priority: optional Section: universe/games Installed-Size: 132 Maintainer: Kenshi Muto Architecture: i386 Version: 3.03-14 Depends: libc6 (>=…

I have to give the debian/ubuntu folks some credit for their packaging of nagios . While the mandriva configuration was pretty straight forward, you had to normalize things a lot yourself, otherwise you were adding 20…

In the last month I decided to switch my primary Linux distro from Mandriva to Ubuntu . It will take me until the end of the year to fully switch over, mostly because my work laptop can't really afford the downtime, and…

These days my car stereo functionally has three modes: WAMC (our local NPR station), XM 84 (Electronica), AUX in for Drunk & Retired podcast (I've gotten into the 40s on the backlog of episodes). Usually when I have…

Something funny occurred to me the other day. I was one of the last folks locally to switch from Mozilla to Firefox (I still call it Mozilla). The big "complaint" everyone had with Mozilla was "it's so big…

From sogrady's daily links post (which I tend to find one new gem in every other day), I found that Google has a set of online repositories for just about every Linux distro out there. What a great way to make sure…

As I slowly started to upgrade my Linux systems between distros I found that my man pages started looking really bad. Basically, the magic color formatting codes were being escaped, so I would get pages like this:…

I was just doing my morning catchup on RSS feeds with trusty Liferea , and ran across ingimp in my freshmeat feed, which has a rather interesting idea. The standard method for usability testing in proprietary software is…

I was attempting to find a useful podcast tool on Linux so that I can get This American Life as a podcast, instead of my normal method of timeshifting our local NPR station. After a few attempts I found Castpodder, which…

Pidgin 2.0 just released, which has given me a chance to start looking at IM plugins (which I wasn't going to do during Gaim's 2 year beta cycle where that interface was always changing). Pidgin 2.0 has some nice changes…

Apparently madwifi has been nice to me of late. I just realized that my locale change which is going to require a reboot hadn't taken affect yet. So I checked my uptime. dargo:~ > uptime 07:49:58 up 70 days, 8 :26, 1…

For the third time I attempted to get a paper in for OSCON , however, unlike the last 2 attempts, this one was accepted. :) The paper is entitled "Easy as Pie: Making Graphical Desktop Applications with Perl and…

I just came across two-mode-mode when looking for some xemacs extensions for editing ruby on rails code, and it is awesome. The basic problem is one that anyone editing PHP, or even HTML with embedded CSS or Javascript…

Last night my MediaGate MG-35 arrived. This is a small front end device for playing back video, audio, or picture content off of a central server. I've got an xbox solution for this in the main living room, but with…

If you are a Linux user, and you have ever had to give presentations, you probably used OpenOffice Impress to do it. OpenOffice Impress is a reasonable clone of PowerPoint, though certain things like Animation, work very…

I had some time this weekend, as well as some motivation, to add a couple more things to ExifTagger . One of the things that took longer than I expected to sort out was how to change the cursor to a watch prior to doing…

The Bad Dear Open Office, Why can't you insert a table? All I want is a simple table. Tables are good ways to organize some information. No, I don't want to embed a full spread sheet, that uses entirely different fonts,…

As president and founder of Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group , my name is associated with the group in many directories in which MHVLUG is listed. As we all know, having your email address all over the interweb is how…

I upgraded my OpenWRT firewall/router/wap last night, as traffic shaping broke on my previous build a couple weeks ago. I learned a couple of things in the process: While ipkg looks like apt-get, openwrt isn't really set…

I've decided that I'm going to start giving a synopsis of the MHVLUG meeting just happened, so people that don't make it, may get an idea of what they missed, and hopefully start coming around. Main Talk - Build Your Own…

While visiting friends of Susan's over the weekend, I had some downtime to spend with ExifTagger and work in a few features that I'd been contemplating. More importantly it meant a critical break through in mentally…

I've gotten ExifTagger, my program to edit comment and location exif tags in images, to the point of usefulness now. I just finished tagging all the images from the photographer at the wedding, and it was so much faster…

For the record, I have OpenOffice a fair shake, trying to use it for our wedding guest list. Had I known going into it that I'd be unable, in any way, to export the data into flat text, I never would have tried. That's…

This weekend I finally built my new home file server (been meaning to do this for most of 2006). The impetus was that last weekend I noticed Seagate 320 GB SATA2 drives priced at $95 / per on NewEgg, and just couldn't…

Every once in a while I love to look through my spam folder just to see what makes spamassassin mark something really high. Here is one that got 49 points: * 4.5 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary *…

Well, it finally happened, the wireless driver got wedged on my laptop meaning I was done with wireless and suspend until a reboot. Final uptime was: 07:22:01 up 52 days, 18 :27, 1 user, load average: 4.67 , 13.07 ,…

dargo:~ > uptime 22 :02:50 up 47 days, 9 :08, 1 user, load average: 0.13 , 0.11 , 0.09 Ok, I'm at a month and a half on my laptop now. I'm torn between trying to get leap working again with wireless, and seeing how long…

It appears that there is an AMD price breaking coming . This is great news, as I had almost decided on getting another bare bones system over the weekend to use as a home media server, but now will hold off until after…

After months of false starts due to a faulty DIMM in my old desktop machine, I finally got succeeded in installing Mandriva Linux 2006 on a Magnia SG20. I can now ssh to the box, and do all the basic things one would…

dargo:~ > uptime 21 :52:01 up 39 days, 8 :57, 1 user, load average: 0.29 , 0.35 , 0.24 Now I'm really starting to wonder how long this streak is going to run.

My Mandriva 2006.0 install on my T40 Thinkpad laptop now has 30 days of uptime, yay! dargo:~ > uptime 20 :05:51 up 30 days, 7 :11, 1 user, load average: 0.47 , 0.78 , 4.51 This is a personal record for my laptop, and a…

I'm sitting in Stewart airport at the moment, happily connected to ye olde interweb over my Sprint PCS phone . While this might not be exciting to most folks, this is the first time I've gotten around to trying to make…

I really wish that Firefox set WM_URGENT when a new tab or window loaded. I need to look into what it would take to make that happen, as my use of Ion would end up being nirvana after that. Click on a link in an…

Funny and quick. My laptop has 7 days uptime (my month of uptime was killed by iwpriv ath0 mode 2 while doing wpa_supplicant things. 3rd time I've done that, 3rd time I've gotten killed on it). Even though wipes out much…

Ok, I think I'm now sold on the Ion approach to window management. It isn't all flowers and puppies, but at the Mutt folks say "... it sucks less". The good points Centralized Alerts from urgent windows - this…

One of the reasons I really like Mandriva Linux is that it sets up a lot of Linux applications very nicely out of the box. One of the stellar examples is the way that it sets up CUPS for printing. For instance, when I…

I just pushed out version 0.2 of rpm2rss , which I need to announce on FreshMeat still. This is an idea I came up with last month, as I maintain a number of Mandriva RPM s in a number 🔗💀 of locations . Honestly, most…

Over the weekend I finally got around to actually finishing the openwrt install on my Linksys wrt54gs that I first modified back in June. This means I finally have both 802.11g in the house, and I have traffic shaping on…

Last night when my fiance came home, I was quite surprised when she handed me a rather large envelope with the question "Who would have sent you something from Switzerland?". I was equally confused, until I…

After the last update to the madwifi-ng driver core Revision: 1396 , the driver no longer causes a kernel panic when used in conjuntion with ipsec. This is great news, as I can now use my vpn for work on wireless again.…

I got a little more progress done on TuxPlus over the weekend, my attempt to build a Linux recording program for the PlusDeck . I stopped being a complete retard, and started using the Device::SerialPort perl module for…