Things that have more than zero impact (on my live)
I recently got a Bresser BioLux NV microscope. Of course it is quite cheap and you get what you pay for. I'm still very pleased with it because it is a fun toy, and I'm not afraid to destroy something by not treating it properly. I'm also happy that the cam works well with Linux.
Continue reading 'Using BioLux NV microscope in Ubuntu Linux' »
I recently bought a cheap Samsung NP-R540 with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500.
Ubuntu 10.10 installed smoothly. I encountered two problems:
Usually I prefer to rant about the oddities of ruby but this time it's python.
Continue reading 'True is False' »
I recently had a problem with my website zimmer69.de. Some not so nice fellow told his opera browser to reload a 300k page every 5 seconds, moved it to some tab and forgot about it for weeks. He caused 2 Gb of traffic per day. Time to implement some cache control.
Continue reading 'Auto reload and poor man's http caching in PHP' »
This post describes how to encrypt the home directory of your users on GNU Linux with the help of TrueCrypt and PAM using the login-password as encryption key.
I wrote about Automatic encryption of home directories using TrueCrypt before. This time we'll use TrueCrypt 6.2a. Futhermore we'll use Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope and we replaced pam_mount by pam_exec. For convenience this post will be selfcontained (ie. I copy redundant parts from the old one).
Continue reading 'Automatic encryption of home directories using TrueCrypt 6.2a and pam_exec' »
Recently, I was trying to move some stuff from RCS to mercurial. There does not seem to exist a converter and since it was only a few revisions, I decided to do it by hand. The problem arose how to set the commit date manually and google yielded a nice blog post that answered my question (refering to the formidable but less searchable hgbook).
Continue reading 'Usage of hg commit –date (mercurial)' »
This entry was originally submitted to Debian Package of the day, but rejected because make is well known.
In is used to produce InterM that is itselfOut. Therefore Out depends directly on InterM and indirectly on In.I agree that most programmers and administrators know GNU make. Sadly, it is ignored by most others. GNU make solves a very common problem that everyone faces when processing more than one file with more than one programm. It keeps track which file has been changed and which files have to be regenerated.
Rails offers a nice function called constantize. It is easy to rebuild this (to some extend) in python. But the price is too high.
Continue reading 'Constantize in Python' »
This post describes how to encrypt the home directory of your users on GNU Linux with the help of TrueCrypt and PAM using the login-password as encryption key.
I wrote about Automatic encryption of home directories using TrueCrypt before. This time we'll use TrueCrypt 6.0a which is a bit different from 4.3a used last time. Futhermore we'll use Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron instead of Debian Etch. For convenience this post will be selfcontained (ie. I copy redundant parts from the old one).
Continue reading 'Automatic encryption of home directories using TrueCrypt 6.0a' »
The String#constantize method is a feature that makes rails fun to code with. This method converts a string to the constant that the string contains (or throws a NameError if there is no such constant). It makes it easy to store class-types in databases as strings and to code controllers that work with classes of the same duck type.
Most people know that eval on user data is dangerous, but noboddy seems to care about constantize. Beware, it is also dangerous and you should constantize with care!
Continue reading 'Constantize with Care' »