Life is too short to deal with filing (paper or electronic) very much. We all have better things to do with our time than waste it on excess organization. The goal is to locate a receipt or statement fast enough. Nobody is watching your filing – there is no test later. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I usually need to find a single document every year, no more. Minimal effort for maximum return is the goal.

At my day job, I’ve been doing some Android development. Due to the nature of the application, we’d like to connect the device to larger screens both directly using HDMI and by streaming through a DLNA client/server connection.

Anyway, I ordered a 10 foot HDMI cable off Amazon last week and it arrived today. After connecting the Android tablet to the TV and pressing “play”, I was happy to see the same thing displayed on the tablet show up on the 37 inch HDTV here. Pretty sweet …. until ….

A few times every week, we all get offers from the local cable company or telecom that has a low-low-low price in a 48pt font. The price is so low that we open the letter and read a little. I’m staring at an offer from AT&T right now, but it could be from the cable company just as easily.

$29/month for U-Verse TV +
HD-Ready DVR Included +
No Equipment to Buy!

Wow! That sounds like a great deal. How can I possibly pass it up? Then I read a little more, you know, the fine print.

For Six Months

So what’s the price after 6 months? Will they say?

I was reading an article on Lifehacker about adding fancy effects to a Linux desktop. Of course, they showed how to do it with 11.04 Ubuntu – which is unstable on my systems. Should I be without the wobbly windows? No! You shouldn’t do without either.

If you want smaller image file sizes at the same resolution, but files that still display nice. Check out the ImageMagick tool convert.

The size reductions can easily be 50% to 90% without a noticeable loss in quality.

Since this is a technology blog, I figure some of you may be interested in a major change that happened out of necessity here today.

This is the very first blog article on our new physical server, running in a completely different virtual machine. For the next week, everything here is a test.

Due to some sort of outage issue earlier today, I was forced to upgrade everything involved with this blog. I had attempted to perform this upgrade previously and failed. As you can see, this time, there was success. Nobody was shocked more than I.

Updated 10/2015 – just the minimal length suggestion, not the speed or GPU costs.

The ladies have always known that size matters. We need to apply that knowledge to passwords. Password security experts know that

1. a longer password is better
2. a password with as many different types of characters is important – call it a large alphabet
3. a password that cannot be found through a dictionary attack
4. a password that hasn’t been cracked before

These rules seem to be conflicting with the most important things from a user’s perspective. A user wants:

1. a memorable password
2. an easy to type / enter password

So what’s the solution? A long, but easy to type and easy to remember password. Below is how to get all 6 of these requirements, easily.

If you are like me, you are always running low on disk storage. After all, a hard drive that isn’t nearly full isn’t living up to the full potential. About every month, I need the find the largest files and clean them up – taking me back to 75% full on the “temporary storage” HDD.

Here’s a little script to make finding the largest files on your system easy. I call it hogs.sh.

$ find /home -type f -size +2G -exec ls -lh {} \; | cut -d" " -f5,8 | sort -t" " | tee ~/hogs.txt

May I suggest:

• Drop these commands into a bash/sh file
• Call this from the root crontab weekly, perhaps 3am Mondays
• Redirect the output into a file for later viewing as needed
• Overwrite the file with every run

The script isn’t perfect. The sorting fails but does group files nicely. It also takes awhile to complete, so running it at 3am is nice. Tweak the directory and files-larger-than parameters for your location.

It seems that all the software developers are using git DVCS these days. I haven’t done serious software development in many years, so I’ve been using RCS all this time for my system admin scripting needs. With my new development work, I need to upgrade my toolset to a DVCS – Distributed Version Control System. There are many reasons to do this even if you don’t want to publish all your code on the internet. Below I’ll show how to setup an internal git server that can be shared inside a company or just between friends on the internet.

I’ll assume:

• Your git server will be on a Linux/Unix system someplace where
• all the developers will have ssh connection access.
• You have git installed on the server and the clients already.
  Those server connections may allow full shell access or be limited to support just git. Regardless, setting up ssh-keys – Ssh Config Setup – is a good idea between the client(s) and the server computers.

Keep reading to learn about Git setup.

For years scripting languages like perl and add-ons like perl modules were supposed to be installed as part of the OS. This worked when the server administrator was the primary programmer on the system who could control all that stuff. In these days of role-based administration, the users and the administrators are hardly ever the same person. Administrators have different needs for systems than users or programmers and often those needs conflict.

How do we solve this problem for Perl scripts? Perlbrew.