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Computers, etc.

Being not very skillful at mathematics, being an introvert and having a short attention span, my life as a IT professional has been interesting to say the least. Being a writer and not being good at expressing myself orally, I find that I am able to convey my thoughts much more readily and accurately through writing. Combine that with my love of programming and you have my Computer Science Blog.

  • Enabling a serial console in CentOS

    Mon, 05/09/2011 - 16:32 — Nathan

    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.

    [root@linux etc]# diff inittab.201105081915 inittab
    18c18
    < id:5:initdefault:
    ---
    > id:3:initdefault:
    42a43,44

  • Configuring a TrendNet TEW-623PI in CentOS

    Mon, 05/09/2011 - 16:09 — Nathan

    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".

  • Installing NTFS support in CentOS 5.5

    Wed, 04/06/2011 - 07:57 — Nathan

    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 &quot;http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt&quot;

  • Windows XP VMware Guest Gaining Time

    Fri, 09/17/2010 - 14:48 — Nathan

    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&amp;tstart=0).

    On the host:

  • Just finished reading the Java Language Specification

    Mon, 06/07/2010 - 17:03 — Nathan

    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.

  • Chapter 01 Exercise 1-13

    Mon, 03/29/2010 - 11:40 — Nathan

    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.

  • Chapter 01 Exercise 1-8

    Fri, 03/26/2010 - 11:47 — Nathan

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

  • Assigning to a List of Variables in Bash

    Wed, 03/24/2010 - 07:47 — Nathan

    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:

    {group}:{gid}:{host}

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

  • My Favorite rpm Command

    Mon, 02/15/2010 - 16:16 — Nathan

    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?

    [root@localhost ~]# rpm -qf /usr/bin/which
    which-2.16-7

  • Perl Data::Dumper Module

    Fri, 09/18/2009 - 08:21 — Nathan

    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.