Blogs

I have a headless LINUX server (CentOS 5.5) attached with a serial cable to a Windows client and I want to use PuTTY to connect to the console on the LINUX host.  Here are the file modifications I made.

I recently installed CentOS 5.5 on an old Celeron-D with a TrendNet TEW-623PI Wireless N PCI adapter.  It took some poking about on google and centos.org to figure out how to make it work with my access point.  Here's the list of modifications I had to make. To give credit where credit is due, some of this is based on "http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/WpaSupplicant".

These are my notes from my experience installing support for NTFS in CentOS 5.5 (x64).

1. Add RPMFORGE to the YUM Repository database
   1. Install the repository's key
      1. cd /tmp
      2. wget "http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt"

So I have this VMware guest running Windows XP on a x86_64-based CentOS VMware Server 1-based host.

The clock on the guest was gaining - between 5 and 10 seconds every minute or something ridiculous like that.

Finally I figured out what to do after reading this thread (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/51781?start=0&tstart=0).

On the host:

I just finished reading the Java Language Specification (3rd edition).  I don't think I've read anything else related to Java that has been more educational.  A lot more of what I was struggling with fits now and I have a lot more confidence in my ability to do something productive with Java now.

On to Beginning J2EE.  Oy.

This is just a basic histogram program. The maximum frequency is 30 just to keep it simple (I mean, jeeze, how many words are longer than 30 characters?). I know this is pretty elementary but after 16 years of not thinking algorithmically, it did stretch my brain a bit.

This exercise wasn't especially interesting except that it's the first C code I've written in about 16 years!

I have some files that need parsed and the fields assigned into variables using only bash and other builtin UNIX commands (not Perl).  The file is colon delimitted and has the following columns:

Perl has a nice little construct that lets you do something like this:

I frequently find myself wondering "what package does such-n-such a file belong to"?

My favorite rpm command comes to the rescue.
<br />rpm -qf &lt;file&gt;

For example, what package does the 'which' command belong to?

I'm gathering data about how my company uses LDAP and need to peruse some rather large chunks of the schema + data and turn it into information I can use to build an extraction routine to use with SAS.

I've decided to use Perl to write a dump routine to spit out data to a file. Data::Dumper seems like the right place to start, especially if I want to reuse the dumped data in more Perl code. So, I started out learning about Data::Dumper.

Recently, I and some coworkers ran into a problem with ssh where it would prompt for a password even though we had created a private/public key pair and had distributed the public key into the authorized_keys.

So, I've been fiddling with Emacs for a while now, and I'm starting to actually learn some Lisp.  Now I want to get Emacs to play nicely with Perl including with perltidy and perlcritic.

I found the following two Emacs (Emacs Lisp) programs:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/perltidy.el

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/perlcritic.el

Processing a list with one argument per line

(such as a list returned by find . -name "<pattern>")

In my experience, there exists in IT a dichotomy between the two main types of users:

1. Technical Users (truly technical) users who understand programming, networking and at least some hardware

and

Be careful what you assume!

You see, an assumption is just one of those pre-conceived ideas upon which people make faulty judgments. Without knowing all the facts, people presume to know enough about a situation to be able to speak and act - unfortunately, they're speaking and acting according to an incomplete picture.

What a beautiful, snowy March 1st morning! It sure is hard to believe that the climate is warming and we'll all fry soon!

Completely inadequate IPCC models produce the ultimate deception about man made global warming

I don't know why I am still amazed at how easily the governments of the world and their hooker-agencies can continually deceive mankind. I guess people are just too tired to care. I can only think that one day, when the economy is entirely in shambles and unemployment, poverty and crime are running rampant across the globe, the people will again begin to care - I dread that day because when mass-hysteria begins to take control and the mobs begin to riot and the military starts to intercede, then the innocent will suffer and the culprits will escape in the confusion that ensues.