A few days back I blog'd about my .screenrc and what it could do etc, something to get people interested in screen and start using it. But in order to really use 'screen' properly, dont forget the 'screen -xRR' in your .bash_profile. That will make sur… more »

I've been looking into the idea of collaborative mind mapping. Think wiki, but in a mind map. The aim being to create a knowledge pool around some very specific areas, that multiple people could contribute into. Specially areas where there might be a lot… more »

I totally subscribe to the idea of email being a fantastic communication tool, way better than anything the web has put out as yet, and because its async and works with priority tagging its automatically better than any form of synchronous communication.… more »

Running dstat normally gives you something like this : # dstat --nocolor ----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system-- usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read writ| recv send| in out | int csw 3 0 97 0 0 0| 820k… more »

If you need to remove large amounts of data from a table ( specially when you need to remove *all* the data in a table), remember its faster to drop the table, and recreate it rather than doing a 'delete from tablename;'. eg: this is against a postgre… more »

# rpm --qf "%{name}.%{arch}\n" -qp hpacucli-8.0-14.noarch.rpm hpacucli.i386 # rpm -qpi hpacucli-8.0-14.noarch.rpm Name : hpacucli Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 8.0 Vendor: HP… more »

Do not try this at home. Just use 'sed' to change data stored inside a running mysql db. And it worked too. Saw the change data come through within a few seconds. Wonder what the internal mysql process did when it realised that data on the filesystem… more »

This via Graham: If you havent seen the original Erlang movie, you need to! - KB more »

I looked and found nothing for this, so wrote this quick fact for puppet. # centos_version.rb Facter.add("centos_version") do setcode do %x{/bin/rpm --qf "%{version}\n" -q centos-release}.chomp end end Once its in your facts/ you can… more »

I've just been looking at Thunderbird 3.0Alpha and it cant sent email when smtp login is required and 'secure authentication' is selected... wtf! Many people will jump and point out that smtp isnt meant to be a secure transport, however since pretty… more »

So, following up on my last blog post about editing text areas using an external editor I remembered that in the past there used to be an addon that could do view source in external editors / viewers and checking again, it seems that you can now edit tex… more »

Everyone has an editor of choice, and when it comes to editing text areas, like wiki content or even just generic contact forms and doing posts in forums or blogs its quite irritating to not get access to that editor. The only way to get access to tha… more »

If you ever get stuck in a situation like this, when anything you do with rpm reports errors in the Lock table, or in the database. eg: rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries error: db4 error(22) from db->close: Invalid argument Tha… more »

In case anyone is interested in getting beryl / compiz going on CentOS-5 with an nVidia graphics card - here is the xorg.conf that I am using. The beryl packages are from centos.karan.org CentOS-5-Testing repo. Section "ServerLayout" Identifier… more »

How many different scm repo's did you commit into today ? Here is my list for July the 9th, 2007. cvs ( yay! ) subversion Mercurial Git Perforce -- Karanbir Singh { http://www.karan.org/ } more »

Hi Guys, There seems to be a rumour going around that there will be no CentOS-5/Beta. I just want to state this officially that the rumour is wrong! There will most certainly be a Beta and even a Release Candidate before the Final is released. Anot… more »

Just finished installing the first distro tree for what will become CentOS 5 x86_64. And I have to say this - it rocks! There are a lot of new features that are going to be loved by everyone out there. But first, a few words about what is going on. Ra… more »

Folkz, is it just me, or is it slightly odd that the OTRS website [http://otrs.org/] uses bugzilla as their own ticking system ? [ref: http://bugs.otrs.org/index.cgi] Looks like someone needs to go have a word with their product branding people.… more »

Trying to generate a date range on the shell ? try something like this : #!/bin/bash for f in `seq -f"%f" 1153699200 86400 1164067200 ` do date -d "`python -c \"import time; print time.ctime(${f})\"`" +%Y%m%d done -- Karanbir Singh {… more »

you decide whats the story behind this : (click the image for a a full screen grab, note the timestamp on the top right corner) Ok, so this is from the Oracle Enterprise Linux download site, taken earlier today. As far as I can make out, its Oracle… more »

If you are trying to build an rpm from a packed source, where the unpacked source expandes into a non %{name}-%{version} format, you can use the -n option in the %prep section of the .spec to tell rpmbuild to look in the right place ( eg. %prep -n %{name… more »

hey everyone, specially those useing rsync to get at the centos.karan.org repository. A few paths are going to move around, so consider this a heads-up of sorts. There is a small change to bring in the EL5 extras ( which are also building, now ) - and… more »

The ftp mirror I had running at rpm.karan.org for all the packages at http://centos.karan.org has gone away for the time being. I am going to try and get something else setup asap, in the mean time, if you need rsync access for local / offline storage, g… more »

Would someone *please* write an Ignore Thread option for Thunderbird ? P L E A S E ? ? -- Karanbir Singh { http://www.karan.org/ } [ Music : Snoop Dogg - Drop it like its hot ] more »

Comments are back on this blog. I finally spent the 20 minutes it took to write the moderation code. It works by sending out an email to me, everytime a comment is posted on the blog, a crm114 instance then looks at the comment and if its not SPAM, is pa… more »