Lunch With Larry Wall

That’s him, the legendary TimToady.  Larry Wall is personally responsible for one of the greatest joys in my life: Larry created Perl. Perl has remained a core staple in my toolbox of awesomeness since 1999, when I discovered it as a younger developer/engineer just starting out my career.  Over the years, Perl has been been a… Read More »

Load Balancing With Round Robin DNS

…Even Google does it.  I’m talking about load balancing via DNS.  If you find yourself in a situation where one server isn’t cutting it anymore and you would like to easily distribute load across several servers with identical configuration answering to the same backend, one way to accomplish it is to use round-robin DNS.  It’s even easier… Read More »

Show what users are running processes on your Linux system

Typically the w command will show you who is logged in.  So do the users and who commands.  With the advent of Ubuntu’s unity and the lightdm desktop session manager, these commands don’t tell the whole truth. Moreover, users don’t need to be logged in to a terminal (or pseudo terminal) in order to run… Read More »

Encrypt Your Clipboard

Friends, you should encrypt. So, search for a nice tutorial about how to set up GPG for yourself and get to it. If you prefer to start out easily without learning to use gpg from the command line, Ubuntu/Mint/Debian all provide great GUI tools, such as the built in "Passwords And Keys" utility, easily found… Read More »

Allow An Unprivileged User To Run A Certain Command With Sudo

First, you’ll need to use the visudo utility… sudo visudo This command safely opens up the /etc/sudoers file for you in your default editor. Let’s say you want to allow a user named “joe” to run a given command. You just need to add a line like this below (customize for your needs) joe ALL=(ALL)… Read More »

If VNC Shows a Gray Background

…Reinstall it! sudo dpkg remove –purge vnc4server && sudo apt-get -y install vnc4server That has always fixed the problem for me when I’ve had such troubles.

In-Line Search And Replace With Perl Regular Expressions.

Go ahead and skip right to the examples if you’re in a hurry 😉 perl -p -i -e ‘s/change this/to that/g’ file1 file2 file3… Got Regexes? Regular Expressions (also known as regexes, regexen, and regexps) open up a world of new power tools to you when you need to automate text analysis or manipulations such… Read More »

My Ever-Evolving Bash Profile

Please feel free to experiment with the following ~/.bash_profile goodness of my own, and save away to yours what tasty morsels that you find useful. Exactly what each line does below is left as an exercise to the reader 😉 but to summarize— these aliases speed up common tasks, keep embedded timestamps in your history,… Read More »