etbe - Russell Coker

I have just read an interesting post about Gear Acquisition Syndrome [1] as applied to the guitar industry. Apparently it’s common for people to spend a lot of time and money buying guitar equipment instead of actually playing a guitar. I think that this problem extends way beyond guitars and to most aspects [...]

A common question is how to compare Fedora [1] and Debian [2] in terms of recent updates and support. I think that Fedora Rawhide and Debian/Unstable are fairly equivalent in this regard, new upstream releases get packaged quickly, and support is minimal. They are both aimed at developers only, but it seems that [...]

After dealing with Optus phone support [1] in regard to a routine request for a password change I have been thinking about better ways of managing password changes for a large ISP. The first criteria is that the user must have a password that is difficult to brute-force attack at all times. Changing [...]

A fairly common request is to be able to duplicate a Xen instance. For example you might have a DomU for the purpose of running Wordpress and want another DomU to run MediaWiki. The difference in configuration between two DomU’s for running web based services that are written in PHP and talking to [...]

A significant problem with the old-fashioned media is that as a general rule they don’t cite references for anything. Some of the better TV documentaries and non-fiction books cite references, but this is the exception not the norm. Often documentaries only cite references in DVD extras which are good for the people who [...]

I’ve found a reasonably good free spider for checking for dead links, www.dead-links.com. When I told it to spider my main site www.coker.com.au it worked well and informed me of several dead links that I fixed. When I told it to spider my blog it reported an error 404 and didn’t give any [...]

I previously posted about Interesting Ideas from George Monbiot, one of which was to establish individual emissions trading.
Gyros Geier disagrees with this and cites the current emission trading schemes as evidence. There are several fundamental differences between George’s idea and the current implementations of emission trading.
The biggest flaw in current emission trading schemes is [...]

World News Australia reports that Police forced three tourists to delete photos of a fence. Apparently the officers in question believed that such photos would be a threat to security.
It’s interesting to note that the first sentence of the World News Australia report is “Officials say police who forced three tourists to delete photos [...]

I have just given my parents a new computer, and part of the upgrade process lost their email passwords (which were stored in KDE preferences - this seems to happen every time KDE is upgraded). The only password that is not under my control is the password for their Optus account. So I [...]

I’ve been having problems with one of my Xen virtual servers crashing with kernel error messages regarding OOM conditions. One thing I had been meaning to do is to determine how to make a core dump of a Xen domain and then get data such as the process list from it. But tonight [...]