October 9, 2007

LDAP+ Sudo +TLS fix

For those of you who can’t get those three to work together, make sure you specify both TLS_CACERT tls_cacertfile- I didn’t and it caused me grief.

October 7, 2007

Intro to Vim Tip #5 (Recording)

Search and replace is a great feature in most text editors, but what happens when you want to do more? Vim has a solution- recording macros. Suppose you have the following output from some ancient program that needs to be tweaked: X1222 22323 2A22 3303 0000 3334esss test 123 X2222 22353 2A22 3303 0001 3334esss tacd 456 X3222 22383 2A22 3303 0010 3334esss fals 789 X4222 22393 2A22 3303 0011 3334esss true 012

September 2, 2007

Epson Perfection v350 on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Ok, I’ve done it twice now, I think I’ve figured it out. Get the source files from Epson’s linux website; I don’t recall the url but these are the files you need (or newer, no idea what the future holds): iscan-2.3.0-1.c2.i386.rpm iscan-plugin-gt-f700-2.0.0-0.c2.i386.rpm Use alien to convert them to debs (normally bad, but acceptable this time around). Install both newly created deb packages with dpkg: dpkg -i iscan_2.3.0-2_i386.deb iscan-plugin-gt-f700_2.0.0-1_i386.deb Install sane, sane-utils:

August 31, 2007

Chaos is gone

We just took her to the Humane Society. I am a sad monkey 🙁 Bye bye Chaos, I’m sorry it had to go down like this. 2004-2007

August 25, 2007

The Lesser of Two Evils…

Because it’s not nearly as gaudy as myspace and doesn’t have horrible music playing in the background. I figure if I’m gonna get roped into one or the other, it might as well be the one that annoys me the least.

August 20, 2007

Saying goodbye to Chaos

There’s nothing worse than seeing a pet go away; be it death or being forced to give it away. This weekend Jackie and I agreed that we’re going to take Chaos to the shelter this week. For those unfamiliar with Chaos, here’s the story. Jackie and I had been married for less than a year, and living together with her cat Toby who was 9 years old at the time. Toby had always been around other cats, but when Jackie brought Toby up from her father’s house, Toby became lonely, and would cry in the middle of the night, often waking me up and pissing me off.

August 6, 2007

Spell checking only *.txt files in Vim

So vim 7 has native spell checking- which is great if you remember to turn it on. Enabling it in your .vimrc is fine if all you view is written text files, but annoying when it’s running while working on code. That’s why I created this little snippet of sunshine: add this to ~/.vimrc: au BufNewFile,BufRead *.txt call ConfigureTxtFile() func! ConfigureTxtFile() setlocal spell spelllang=en_us set wrapmargin=80 set textwidth=80 endfunction I also use it to set my text width and wrap margins.

August 4, 2007

Dissappointing state of LDAP support in Ruby

So I’ve been working on a new project called Ruma(more on it later), and I’m beginning to get frustrated with the LDAP support. So far I’ve found * ruby/ldap, ruby-ldap, ldap-ruby by ian macdonald, last release 8/2006 * net-ldap, Net::LDAP by Francis Cianfrocca, last release 8/2006 * ruby-activeldap, ActiveLDAP-ruby by Will Drewry, last release 5/2007 ldap-ruby appears to be the frontrunner, but hasn’t been updated in a year- the forums appear to think it’s been abandoned.

July 24, 2007

Why I would buy an XBox360 before a PS3

So those of you who know me, I’ve never really been a fan of Microsoft- so much so that I refused to buy an XBox on general principal. I’ve not really been a fan of Sony, either, but I still own and loved a PS2. So why the change on this new generation of consoles? Well, Sony has pissed me off quite a bit recently. The following is a list of reasons why I won’t be buying a PS3:

July 22, 2007

Supporting Standards vs. Supporting all Testcases

So I’ve been working on a side app that connects to remote servers. While writing validation code for inputs, I came across an interesting dilemma. I’d like to validate an address input to be valid- be it a hostname, domainname, or ip address. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as it sounds. According to the domain name RFC, section 3.5 domain names must start with a letter, end with a letter or number, and can have letters, numbers or hyphens in between.