Category: tech

Fun with Unix: Cowsay
09 May 2007
Another in the “Fun with Unix” series (see the one other post so far on mesg), today’s episode covers a little trick that goes alongside messages.

Here it is:
```
 _______
< hello >
 -------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
```
The code to output the above is:
```
echo "hello" | cowsay
```
You can tell …
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Damn Small Linux for a Damn Small Laptop
08 May 2007

Tied up with the various issues we’ve had recently with houses, I’ve got a new project. Its to turn my (mother’s) very old laptop into a dumb terminal we can have in the basement in the new house. The kitchen is in the basement and I’m …
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Fun with Unix: Writing Messages
01 May 2007

This is the first in a mini-series of articles about using Linux/Unix to do things other than view logs and edit files. I’m 26 and find that many of my peers weren’t exposed to Unix servers at university, so they miss out on this. If you have …
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Mouselessness
29 April 2007

Not to be confused with houselessness which I have also been doing a lot of recently, today mouselessness is the name of the game. Inspired by this recent post on Coding Horror here are my thoughts on using a computer without a mouse.

RSI Risk

I posted a while back …
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public/private key SSH on ubuntu
23 April 2007

Here are a few notes I made when changing SSH acces for an ubuntu server over to using public/private key authentication. These instructions are for commands run on the server to generate keys which are then used to access that same server from elsewhere.

On the whole the process …
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Process Email Queue by Waving Mouse
18 April 2007

Today I had a problem with a development server. A little, low-traffic thing that I was testing some PHP-sends-email pages on. The emails wouldn’t send although I could see them sat in the queue.

The story gets better but there’s a techie bit between here and the punchline …
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Tabs in Vim
16 April 2007

Tabs seem to be out of fashion in the programming world, there are perfectly valid arguments on both sides or the tabs vs. spaces flame war, illustrated with examples from every programming language and text editor combination ever made. You can read any or all of these if you are …
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SQLPlus for MySQL
11 April 2007

Until recently I spent a lot of time working with Oracle from the command line (via ksh on AIX, in case you’re interested). A change of job means a change of platform and I find myself working with MySQL on a daily basis. I like MySQL – like most PHP …
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Kbuntu Add Programs
05 April 2007

I’m just getting started with running a linux machine as my main computer at work (yay!), setting everything up today. My tip for installing linux the first time is to get the repositories of software added so you can install more things though “adept” (the program that runs when …
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Form Name ID and Label Tags
30 March 2007
Just a quick one, but something that confuses me often.
```
<input name="input_name" id="input_identifier ....
```
name is what the POST request will see the field called

id is what the label tag will use to figure out which field it belongs to.
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Can blogging get you killed?
27 March 2007

I’ve just spent the last two hours reading through (this is a disturbing link, you have been warned) Kathy Sierra’s post about the death threats she has been receiving.

Death threats.

One of the most talented and inspirational writers of our time is currently locked inside their house …
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Want to Meet Mantis?
26 March 2007

Bug trackers are great. Keeping track of lots of little niggly things is tedious and hard to do even if you have pink post-it notes, which I do. But for a software development team there is no subsitute for a decent bug tracker [1].

That’s why I’m trying …
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