Maine Linux User Group, Northern Chapter

All Blog Posts (12)

Slackbuilds

I moved my post from the forum to here, because it turns out it probably should have been put here in the first place. Sorry! I was installing the Catalyst developer framework in Perl using Local::Lib the other day, and i could not help but notice an annoying sounding warning stating that my version of Perl, 5.10.0, which comes with the Slackware 13.0 GNU/Linux distribution, has the "Unknown error bug". Which makes fuzzy errors or doesn't report anything at all if there is something wrong with… Continue

Added by Brian Hodgins on September 22, 2009 at 5:59pm — No Comments

Local emerge --sync Mirror

I'm up to three Gentoo machines around me and one elsewhere, and I've been seeing the use for nightly syncing. I've been syncing by hand about once a week, but experience shows that I tend to miss a week if I'm unusually involved in something, and there's far too much chance that the week I miss will be the one when some attention requiring upgrade hits stable. This leaves the choice of picking the simple upgrades out by hand, which uses much more time, or raising the priority of the complex upg… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on April 21, 2009 at 11:44am — No Comments

Simple Image Editing

Unless you're superhumanly careful, if you have computer knowledge, you'll end up being the go to person for someone's computer questions. And sooner or later, they'll get a camera or a scanner and an account on Facebook or Myspace, and they'll want to rotate, crop, and resize an image before uploading it for all their friends. All the users who can handle The Gimp will probably have found it and won't be asking the question, but what to do for the ones who can't handle its complexity? S… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on November 21, 2008 at 5:30pm — No Comments

Full Image Title Tooltips

Fans of the web comic xkcd (warning: sometimes not safe for work) who use Firefox 2.0 are familiar with the frustration of viewing the source to read the entire title tooltip behind the comic image. Firefox 3 fixes that, but before it's released and hits stable in distributions of choice, there is the Long Titles extension. (Thanks to… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on May 28, 2008 at 10:47pm — No Comments

Efficient Backups Using rsync And An External Disk

I was fixing my backups the other day, went looking, and discovered rsync --link-dest. With it, rsync substitutes hard links for files that haven't changed. The result:

tria tria # du -hs backup-*1.7G backup-2008-03-1982M backup-2008-03-20
40M backup-2008-03-21
40M backup-2008-03-22
76M backup-2008-03-23
37M backup-2008-03-24
63M backup-2008-03-25
206M backup-2008-03-26
42M backup-2008-03-27
101M backup-2008-03-28
70M backup-2008-03-29
52M backup-2008-03-30
64M b

… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on April 2, 2008 at 1:00am — No Comments

1200x900

For some time I've been running my monitors at 1152x864. I picked it because it was a standard resolution (although uncommon) and the next one down from 1280x960 which was slightly too fuzzy. Unfortunately, it leaves me about ten characters short of three xterms across each monitor. Today I switched to 1200x900. That three xterms across has made my world a much happier place, and you know, anything that cares about resolution is going to want 1024 or 1280 anyway. Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on March 10, 2008 at 5:57pm — No Comments

XmlStarlet: XML from the Shell

While the religious fervor surrounding XML is dying and JSON is saving us from some of the more painful uses of XML, if you use the shell much, sooner or later you'll want to quickly scrape something out of a web page or other XML like document.

XSLT has a good set of functionality for this but its smallest size is a file and that's five lines long. For the shell, the smallest size must be a couple short paramete… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on November 28, 2007 at 11:19pm — No Comments

How to Generate a Summary of Gnuplot's Palette Formulae

Sometime late this morning I decided to fix a small visual artifact in a 3D plot produced by Gnuplot. That was a mistake.

After spending something like nine hours wandering around the web, poking through Gnuplot's horrible help interface at its built in documentation, rethinking my problem, rethinking my data, rethinking my goals, trying something, building a test case and trying again, and repeating the process, I am back to where I started plus o… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on November 15, 2007 at 9:37pm — No Comments

Wide Finder I

This is the first in my series of posts on Tim Bray's Wide Finder meme. It covers solving the basic problem with classic Unix shell code. Future posts should cover the "wide" part, parallelizing the problem arbitrarily.

A bit of background: As Moore's Law slips and the internet's growth does not, more and more people are interested in problems bigger than any one processor or machine can handle. So everyone had… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on November 4, 2007 at 10:55pm — No Comments

One Printer Per School, Really?

Wayan Vota writes, "A Missing OLPC Product: One Printer Per School". I wonder. Think about when we use paper:

When we're accustomed to reading on paper. The target children don't have decades of reading paper to readjust from.
When we want to read on the beach, etc., and our computers can't handle it. The OLPC is portable, sand and water proof, and sunlight readable.
When w

… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on September 15, 2007 at 5:34pm — No Comments

A Unix/Linux Command Cheat Sheet

Jill Lattin posted a link to an excellent looking cheat sheet for Unix/Linux shell commands.

Note that while it isn't mentioned on that sheet, modern versions of GNU tar auto-detect file type so both these work:

tar -xf file.tar.bz2
tar -xf file.tar.gz

While there are lists of b… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on August 13, 2007 at 3:51pm — No Comments

RSS and rawdog

Why RSS?

With mailing lists, news groups, and web forums, you read whatever anyone who can get access considers on topic. The result is an incredible mix of good content, flames, trolling, and even just low value posts. But if you observe who posts what, you'll find that quality correlates very closely to author.

Unfortunately, the quality posts are quickly lost as they expire from archives, are buried under the unsorted flow, and suffer… Continue

Added by Seth W. Klein on May 21, 2007 at 10:05pm — 1 Comment