mikas blog

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 […]

During a discussion with friends the following question came into my mind: which software, which feature or which concept within software is innovative for you? Innovative meaning that it caused something like a “Wow!” effect. Something you really liked when exploring it. No matter which operating system, software, license (OSS, proprietary),… – everything allowed. Just […]

Steve Kemp decided to fork GNU screen. His fork is known as tscreen. Among the changes are support for virtical split, storing the layout of the splitted windows so it can be restored after detaching/reattaching, improved source primitive, tilde expansion and an improved screen primitive. Quoting the tscreen homepage: tscreen is a fork of GNU […]

If there’s something that I was missing in Zsh compared to Bash I’d say it’s bashdb – the Bash Debugger. But thanks to Rocky Bernstein we have zshdb – the debugger for Zsh scripts! :) The command syntax generally follows that of the GNU debugger gdb, and as zshdb just entered Debian/unstable (needs a very […]

AK just released the first official release of tuitest. Quoting the README: tuitest is a tool to create an run automated tests of text user interfaces. It is meant as a complement to the widespread use of unit tests, and uses concepts known from GUI testing tools with the difference that it applies them specifically […]

[…] if (len < sz) name[len] = 0; else die(“Your parents must have hated you!”); […] if (len > sizeof(git_default_email)/2) die(“Your sysadmin must hate you!”); […] if (!pw) die(“You don’t exist. Go away!”);

Last weekend Linuxweekend 2008 took place at the Metalab in Vienna. Lessons learnt: ooo_as_text from the OOoPy suite (modify OpenOffice.org documents in Python) for getting the text from an OOo-File is nice (thanks to Rene and Ralf) Mserv (a jukebox-style music server designed to play mp3, ogg, etc. files (configurable) based on ratings of users […]

% cd /grml/git/linux-2.6/ % cd .git/objects/pack % file * | grep -v data pack-0c3a88aa2f3c6b5cfea224b66906fa0cf07bc7fc.pack: Quake I or II world or extension pack-3ebc40fbd41ac05dbfa05f20aaa99169d71fdef7.pack: Quake I or II world or extension pack-42664a36f606adcf0698aa649a5d6d34ddab3c94.pack: Quake I or II world or extension […]

For the last few days I’ve been in the city Badajoz in region Extremadura of Spain at the FAI developer meeting. Check out the Linex Euronews Video at youtube to get a short impression of Linux in the region. Lessions learnt: debcommit is great, it generates a commit message based on new text in debian/changelog […]

My targus wireless multimedia presenter seems to be broken so I needed a new device. The Logitech Cordless Presenter won the match. The Kensington Presenter is nice, but Logitech provides the best presenter stick I’ve ever seen. :) Karl wrote a nice overview already so I’ll just add the notes regarding Linux. What the device […]

Update: just noticed that the power button is the USB part of the device. So just plug in the USB part into the presenter device will turn the device off. Tricky but nice. :) The Kensington Wireless Presenter just works. The keymapping when using on Linux: top/laserpointer: keycode 71 (being “F5”, which starts the presentation […]

Update on 2008-05-22: check out http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/announcing_the_sun_presenter_console – the presenter-screen extension is available for current OpenOffice 3.0 beta version now (thanks for pointer to Stefan Weigel) Besides some other issues (not being relevant for the topic I’m blogging about) OpenOffice Impress ("the Powerpoint of the free Office suite") has one major drawback: lack of reasonable dualhead […]