Geek Stuff

Xvfb As A Service

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

sometimes it’s useful to run a a X app without a display to batch process something, but the app won’t run without an X server to connect to. That’s where X Virtual Frame Buffer Xvfb comes in. It’s everything an X server should be except actually displaying anything. It’s just missing one nicety, by default [...]

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Stop Motion Video on Linux

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

I needed to make a cutesy video to give a quick overview of the products the startup I’m working with wants to make. Here is how I accomplished this on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install luciole luciole is an interesting project written for a french animation festival (you’ll want to run those links through google translate, [...]

Tags: animation, linux, stopmotion, video

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Installing 32-bit Citrix Reciever on 64-bit Ubuntu

Monday, October 25th, 2010

I recently picked up an HP Mini 210-1041nr laptop and painlessly installed Ubuntu 10.10 from USB. I needed one more thing to make it usable for work: Citrix. Citrix kindly makes Debian packages available, but only 32-bit. I googled around and found some directions, but they seemed a bit overly complicated. Here is what I [...]

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Five uses for a soon to expire RSA Token

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Lottery ticket number generator Toddler toy Hammer testing device Wobbly table leg shim Blog post fodder

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48 hours with the G1

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

In order to silence Ben’s nagging, here are my thoughts on the G1 after about 2 days. Pros: Browser works well. No multitouch, but the interface is quite usable. No flash, but embedded youtube videos can be opened in the youtube app from the browser. I wrote this blog post in the browser. Hardware. Feels [...]

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Android Ponies

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

I’m really liking what I’ve seen of Android, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have one by November. Everyone seems to have a list of the announced apps they want to use but I’d like to find replacements for the following apps I’m pretty happy with in the Windows Mobile world. SSH client. right [...]

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Proliant Blade running RHEL5, you’ll need a cma.log rotation script

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

No one seems to have written a log rotation script for the Proliant Support Pack logs that are stored in /var/spool/compaq/cma.log, so I thought I’d throw mine up here in case someone else needs one. put this in a file called “cma” in /etc/logrotate.d/ /var/spool/compaq/cma.log { compress missingok size=100M postrotate /sbin/service hpasm restart 2> /dev/null [...]

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mysqld failing to load after changing default locations

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

I just solved a problem at work that google was no help with. I’m posting this in hopes some other poor soul who has the same problem finds this post. After an OS re-install (Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4) we were changing the default location of data used for application into a different filesystem [...]

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Ubuntu from Dell “Day 2″ impressions

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

As mentioned earlier, Meg’s new computer is a Dell with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. Overall, we’re still happy with the system, but I wanted to mention a few “gotchas” i’ve found since being able to poke around the system a bit more. First, Meg’s system came with a widescreen monitor. X windows was only configured with [...]

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region free DVD player hack

Friday, June 15th, 2007

The portable DVD player we’ve been using on the upstairs TV hasn’t been dealing with the heat lately, it kept locking up and it has been having trouble reading discs with my other player reads without problems. We decided to replace it with some of our remaining Target gift cards. I found a small (but [...]