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.
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Year: 2009
Automatic encryption of home directories using TrueCrypt 6.2a and pam_exec
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).
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Usage of hg commit –date (mercurial)
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).
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Makefiles for LaTeX
This entry was originally submitted to Debian Package of the day, but rejected because make is well known.
Figure 1:The file
In is used to produce InterM that is itselfused to produce
Out. 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.
Constantize in Python
Rails offers a nice function called constantize. It is easy to rebuild this (to some extend) in python. But the price is too high.
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