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Monthly Archives: February 2007

Review: PaperbackSwap.com

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

PaperBackSwap.com is a website for people who want to trade paperback (and other) books. It allows you to post the list of books you have available to send. When somebody sees a book they want, they send you a "credit" to mail it to them. You can then use the credit to order a different [...]

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Refilling laptop batteries!

Saturday, February 17, 2007

The Li-Ion battery in my IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop has been getting a bit long in the tooth. Rated at a 4.4 AH capacity new, /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info told me that it was only holding 1.8 AH now that it was a few years old. (This is normal for Li-Ion batteries, which degrade over time, even without [...]

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What if the highways were a subway system?

Monday, February 12, 2007

www.chrisyates.net has a very nice image of the interstate highway system map simplified like a subway system.

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Changing timeout time for mounting encrypted partitions on Mandriva

Sunday, February 4, 2007

If you have an encrypted partition in Mandriva 2007, by default on boot-up the system gives you only 5 seconds to say you want to mount it on boot-up, which can be very easy to miss. If you edit the /etc/sysconfig/autofsck file to change the AUTOFSCK_CRYPTO_TIMEOUT= variable to something longer (such as 45) it will [...]

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Search and Replace a string in many files recursively on unix

Thursday, February 1, 2007

find /net/hc287/summetj/research/dist1 -name "Root"
-exec perl -pi.bak -e's/summetj\@flux.cc.gatech.edu:/summetj\@wilks1.cc.gatech.edu:/g' {} \;

The above command line will find all files named "Root" recursively under the  /net/hc287/summetj/research/dist1 direcotry and execute perl to replace the string "summetj\@flux.cc.gatech.edu:" with the string "summetj\@wilks1.cc.gatech.edu:"  It also keeps a backup of all the changed files as Root.bak, just in case….
The {} is replaced [...]

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Google error message

Thursday, February 1, 2007

This is the first time I've ever seen an error message from any google service. I was browsing Google News and opened a news story in a seperate tab. Aparently, the google click-tracking (that forwards you to the news story) was having problems. As you'd expect from their homepage, the error message is very simple [...]

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