October 2005

Racism Issues and Perspective

by damonp on October 25, 2005

in General

I watched the movie Crash this weekend. The story examines the different sides and varying degrees of many different racial backgrounds. The story was gritty and intriguing.

America is an experiment. The first truly multi-cultural experiment in history. History shows us countless examples of multi-cultural societies as a result of war and colonialism. Where is one that was founded purposefully on the basis of ‘All men are created equal’? Even though the phrase ‘All men’ has evolved significantly in the last 150 years, the beauty our founding fathers installed in our constitution was the ability to grow.

Crash shows us we still have a lot of growth to embrace.

Popularity: 1%

{ 0 comments }

Less vs More

by damonp on October 25, 2005

in SysAdmin

Less and more are two Unix command line tools for paging through large files, viewing the output from commands, searching logfiles, viewing man pages, etc.

Less can do everything that more can plus it can do more and it can do it better. Its like more v2, better thought out. Not only with more features, but better implemented base featues. Both can page through files forward (f) or backward (b). Both allow searching and some form of regular expression matching.

Less can read some binary files, like tar archives and RPMs (try a less somefile.tar.gz to see a listing of the filenames contained in the archive).

With less you can pass a text file directly off to vim at the current line for a quick edit and then back less when complete.

To use less as your default pager (for man files etc.) add this to your .bashrc:

export PAGER=’less’

[click to continue…]

Popularity: 1%

{ 0 comments }

Kill a Specific Process of a Specific User

18 October 2005

kill -9 `ps -aux | grep user | grep processname | awk ‘{print $2}’`

Read the full article →

RPM Tricks

16 October 2005

List all installed RPM packages rpm -qa Search for a specific package rpm -qa | grep searchterm Search for a package with a name starting with searchterm: rpm -qa | grep ^searchterm Get information about an installed package, including all installed files: rpm -qil packagename Find out what files have been changed from the original [...]

Read the full article →

DLoads Pepper Version 0.5

14 October 2005

DLoads Pepper v0.5 is released. Changes: Added better 404 support Added check for is_dir Added urldecode to support spaces in filenames Full information at Pepper DLoads. Download DLoads-v0.5.zip

Read the full article →

Party Shuffle iTunes Scripts

14 October 2005

Two scripts to add tracks to party shuffle. Grabs tracks from the currently playing artist: Random Tracks by Current Artist to Party Shuffle Grabs tracks from the selected artist: Random Tracks by Artist to Party Shuffle Thanks to Doug Adams for the original scripts to hack up.

Read the full article →

Welcome to My Life

14 October 2005

A system admin’s life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards! -Michael O’Brien

Read the full article →

Remove CVS and SVN Directories

14 October 2005

These two little scripts remove CVS and .svn directories from a full directory tree. I use when preparing a application for release. remove_cvs.sh remove_svn.sh

Read the full article →

Play Fetch with Mutt and Maildirs

13 October 2005

Mutt defaults to the mbox format. Tell it to use the Maildir format by adding the following to ~/.muttrc set mbox_type=Maildir These will set the default folders: set folder=”~/Maildir/” set mask=”!^\.[^.]” set record=”+.Sent” set postponed=”+.Drafts” To open a specific Maildir: mutt -f /full/path/to/Maildir

Read the full article →

Nagios and thttpd

13 October 2005

Nagios defaults to running check via supplied IP address instead of the hostname. If virtual hosting with thttpd using only the IP address will give 404 because it doesn’t make it into the virtual hosting subdirectories. Below is a check command that can be added to the Nagios configuration to correct this. This should also [...]

Read the full article →