mikas blog

I assume you already know grml, the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users. Besides booting via CD and USB there’s one further method worth knowing: booting via network. That’s where grml-terminalserver is showing up. Using grml-terminalserver you can boot grml via network. If your computer(s) is/are able to boot via PXE all […]

One of the tools you probably already have on your system but might not be aware of: at. at(1) reads commands from standard input or a specified file which are to be executed at a later time. Some usage examples (notice: you’ll get the <EOT> by pressing ctrl-d, you know): Download something at a given […]

Not a software tool but something for sysadmins to think about: The Admin Zen. The goal of this cheat sheet is to provide ~100 concise ideas, concepts and rules for sysadmins. Reading them takes a few minutes. Practicing them takes forever. Grab the PDF printout from adminzen.org, send it to the printer and think about […]

If you are using Irssi, the terminal based IRC client, you might be interested in a nice script by Florian Ragwitz: backlog completion. Quoting from the script: backlog completion: enter a word prefix and press TAB – and the prefix will be expanded from all the words on the current channel on everything that was […]

clive is an open source command line tool to extract videos and to bypass the need to use Adobe Flash in order to view user-generated content available on video-sharing websites. It supports Youtube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Guba, Metacafe, Sevenload and Break. Its usage is as easy as: % clive ‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goTaNrLsny8’

moreutils by Joey Hess is a collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago. These tools are part of the moreutils suite: combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output isutf8: check if a file or standard input is […]

If you want to become a Zsh poweruser you should make sure to effectively use keybindings. First of all: use ‘bindkey -e’ to to enable emacs style or ‘bindkey -v’ for vi style. If you don’t know what you should prefer: use emacs style. Execute ‘bindkey’ to get a list of currently active key bindings […]

dstat is a versatile resource statistics tool. Whereas you might know top (dynamic real-time view of a running system) mpstat (report processors related statistics), iostat (report Central Processing Unit (CPU) statistics and input/output statistics for devices and partitions) as well as vmstat (report virtual memory statistics) and slabtop (display kernel slab cache information in real […]

Emacs provides functions for working with rectangles. You just have to set the mark at one point of the rectangle (either C-Space or left click), go to another point of the rectangle (or right click) and then execute a rectangle function/command, like: C-x r k Kill the text of the region-rectangle (kill-rectangle) C-x r y […]

grml release delayed through a CBS commedy series. News at 11<Rhonda /> There we go: there’s a new grml release (you know, the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users). The release with codename Schluchtenscheisser and version number 2008.11 is available in different variants. The 32bit versions grml, grml-medium and grml-small as well […]

Someone asked me to provide Zsh tips as kind of an advent calendar in my blog. I like the idea but don’t want to restrict it to Zsh only but instead provide hints that might be interesting in general for the readers of my blog. So there we go… Of course let’s start with the […]

Eine Lernkurve beschreibt den Erfolgsgrad des Lernens über den Verlauf der Zeit. Die Lernkurve wird über den Quotienten aus Lernertrag (Stoffmenge) und Lernaufwand (Zeit) berechnet. […] Je steiler die Lernkurve ist, desto größer ist die Effizienz beim Lernen. So steht es in der Wikipedia im Artikel Lernkurve zu lesen. Den Artikel habe ich gelesen, weil […]

Das englischsprachige Buch slide:ology von Nancy Duarte (ISBN: 978-0596522346) ist heuer im August bei O’Reilly erschienen. Auf den 274 Seiten geht es dabei um: Creating a new slide ideology Creating ideas, not slides Creating Diagrams Displaying Data Thinking like a designer Arranging elements Using visual elements: background, color, and text Using visual elements: images Creating […]

Das Buch “Darum nerven Japaner” (ISBN-13: 978-3492251822) mit dem Untertitel “Der ungeschminkte Wahnsinn des japanischen Alltags” mit seinen ~170 Seiten ist ein kurzweiliges Buch für Zwischendurch. Das Buch stammt von einem Deutschen, der nicht nur japanisch spricht sondern auch in Japan lebt. Um die Webseite vom Verlag zu zitieren: Christoph Neumann, geboren 1967, lebt seit […]