I just learned about the Linux Hater's Blog via Miguel De Icaza's blog. Super funny and super true. Users need software that works. I guess that's why the only companies run by programmers make software for programmers.

Recently I've been doing a decent amount of debugging a database conversion process and looking at log files on the Red Hat servers at work. This has meant looking at some rather big (10 or so megabytes) log files. Normally I just fire up vim when looking at text files but opening a text file in a text editor that is a number of megabytes is a no-no since pretty much any text editor will load[...]

Many people who are new to Debian might be thinking that Debian stable releases are slow. You are right. Many do look at this and turn to Ubuntu because of their relatively quick releases. It's true that Ubuntu does release "stable" versions more often but I would encourage people to sit back down and give Debian another try. Especially with the cool feature of Debian's packaging system, apt,[...]

I wanted to have a simple incremental backup system I could use on my machine to backup to an external drive so I came across this post on Benno's blog. Basically it involves using rsync with the --link-dest option to compare files you are backing up against an previous backup and only create new copies when the files have been modified since the previous backup. The rsync command would look [...]

I have been reading the OLPC News blog for a while now and frankly I'm kind of tired of hearing about how American geeks are complaining that it's hard to get an XO or that it has taken a while for them to get their XO laptop or that the box was empty when it arrived. Here's a clue for those who are wondering why OLPCs service is sub-par. The XO laptop is was not made for American gadget addi[...]

Is it just me or has the behavior of cp in linux distributions changed recently? cp is non-interactive by default so a lot of people, myself included, set an alias to include the -i flag so that cp was interactive by default. > alias cp=cp -i But I used to enjoy the fact that if I set this alias it would prompt me when overwriting files but if there was a situation where I wanted it to be n[...]

I just read this post over at the One Laptop Per Child News site on the user interface that they use with the OLPC called Sugar. It's a GUI designed to work on the OLPC X0-1, which is what they call the laptop, and also be user friendly for 3rd world children. No crazy complicated explanations about why you don't have enough memory or swap space or whatever, just a nice little circular bar th[...]