February 24, 2006

While I’m at it…

I’d just like to state, for the record, that I will never, EVER, E_V_E_R buy anything from the spam that I get in my inbox. So spammers, if you’re paying attention, you can remove every single account @morgajel.com because they all come to me and I’m not buying anything. So leave me alone and quit sucking my bandwidth.

February 24, 2006

Kiss my ass, linksys

I remember, back in the day when Quality was more important than looking pretty… well, not really- marketing droids and slack-jawed fools always choose shiny and useless over plain and useful. take, for example, the links WRT54G router. When I first got it, the firmware was buggy and ugly, but I could use it in lynx, a text browser. no pretty colors or images, just straight text. Using lynx meant I could edit my router config remotely to add/remove ports as I needed them.

February 23, 2006

Useful Utility: screen

Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but needed to shut down your laptop and bring it home. You could ssh into the machine and simply start the compiling, but the compilation would stop when you broke the ssh connection by shutting off the laptop.

February 23, 2006

The Weave

I ride a shuttle bus to work every day- the type with a driver and passenger seats, then 2 rows of 2 seats stretching the length of the bus, with a door on on side of the first row of seats. Every day, I watch people scramble to be the first ones off the bus- they’re smart enough to stay seated until it’s their row’s turn, but then they start jockying to get out before the people across from them.

February 23, 2006

Review: iAudio M5 (day 4)

So I’ve been using the M5 for the last few days and have been pretty impressed. I missed a few days due to a long holiday weekend, but the last few days I’ve been on it. I still haven’t read the manual- I need to check the CD tonight. It’s still broken on their site… Actually, I could just check google’s cache of the iAudio M5 mamual. I think I’ll do that now.

February 21, 2006

Useful Utility: dig

No, not the popular social new site, the dns utility. Dig stands for Domain Information Groper (get it, DIG?), which fills the same niche as nslookup. As a matter of fact, dig is the successor to nslookup.Â Unlike nslookup however, the primary use of dig is non-interactive mode (which makes it ideal for scripting). Dig can also read batch files for more advanced executions, although I’ve not used this functionality myself.

February 21, 2006

Useful Utility: wget

Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner. There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you can get all sorts of wild behavior by mixing and matching those flags. The most straightforward use is this:

February 17, 2006

Review: iAudio M5 (day 1)

Since my music collection is 100% legitimate and ripped in Ogg Vorbis, finding a portable audio place that can play my music is a bit tough. There are 3 major players and a bunch of minor ones- the Neuros, the Rio Karma and the iAudio series are the leaders however. The Rio Karma is very difficult to find these days since it went out of production. I purchased a Neuros about a year ago and it was such utter crap I returned it (which broke my heart since I was looking forward to it).

February 16, 2006

LPIC prepping

I’ve been wanting to take a linux certification for some time now. It’s been a goal, but I don’t feel I’m ready. Lately I’ve been studying a lot, trying to prepare myself and took a few practice exams. The first pre-exam I took was a Linux+ pre-test from skillsoft, which I got a 92% on, which made me fell pretty good. The next one I took was an LPIC test out of the back of my LPIC Exam Cram book.

February 16, 2006

Useful Utility: cut

This is the first of a series of entries I’d like to do. Each week I’m gonna discuss a simple linux utility that you may or may not be familiar with. First up is cut. Cut can be used to shape data that is piped to it. for example, lets suppose you wanted a list of the real names and user names from the /etc/passwd file where you actually have a real name.