random neuron misfires

I’ve always been Linux and Open Source developer, supporter and user for as many years as I can remember. I’ve always sought to unify my personal space and environment starting with the tools available in the OSS community because they tend to fit my needs a LOT more than most of the proprietary vendor tools. […]

This one almost looked legitimate, and I actually replied to his email. What made me sure this was spam was that my reply back to him was met with an exact duplicate of his original email, sent back to me. The original email started out like this: I was looking at websites under the keyword […]

I have two Windows machines here that I use for those tasks that don’t quite lend themselves to Linux or Windows-in-VMware. I thought they were updated to current with all latest versions, service packs and updates… until I stumbled on a tool called Personal Security Inspector by Secunia. PSI is a tool that will scan […]

This weekend was just as busy as the week at work. It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m still going… Reconstructing Maildir from Backups Moments ago, I found that my archive of the Coldsync mailing list in Maildir format somehow became corrupt, so attempts to copy those messages to Gmail failed using my Thunderbird trick. I found […]

I use a lot of VMware images in my day-to-day work (community and otherwise). Snapshotting, adding software, removing software and testing various packages tends to create a VERY fragmented virtual machine. Since these are basically multi-gigabyte files, thrashing the virtual disk because it gets fragmented, plows performance into the ground, so I tend to try […]

I run kernels directly from Linus’ git tree on my Thinkpad T42p laptop. As such, things like wireless drivers (madwifi-ng in my case), VMware modules and TrueCrypt require patching of the various bits of code to get it all working. A lot of people are having trouble building TrueCrypt on 2.6.23, 2.6.24 and later kernels… […]

If you’re like me, moving to the latest 64-bit hardware has made an ENORMOUS difference in my productivity. I’ve moved all of my personal machines and servers to AMD64/4600+ machines with a minimum of 4gb of RAM. The problem is that not everything moves over so seamlessly; case in point: prc-tools. The problem with prc-tools […]

My shiny new Thinkpad T42p came with an UltraBay Slim DVD-RW drive, which is nice and fast. Unfortunately, it also came with a 60gb primary IDE drive, which isn’t enough to hold my source, documents, projects and all of my VMware images for development and testing. On my Thinkpad T23, I had always used the […]

Recently, I’ve been offered a job working as a Solaris system administrator, answering “tickets” from a queue, writing up documentation, business procedures, and other similar things for a local company about 5 miles away from where we live. The opportunity looks fun, but my Solaris experience is a bit rusty. I’m great with Unix in […]

I Am Not a License Nazi (part I) Saturday morning, I decided to get back to some wine testing, in an effort to get the new Palm Tungsten Simulator working, so I could test some applications in and against it. (Curiously enough, there are two simulators for these two Palm models, one is modeled after […]