We have been using kUbuntu for about 3 years now and have always been slow to upgrade to newer versions, fearing the impending bug, broken configuration with hardware, or grub issues. So when 8.04 rolled out, having been using a 'fairly' stable 7.10, we were quite hesitant to change. However, we had finally decided to upgrade this past weekend, and to our suprise, everything was smooth....well somewhat....

Need to grab material from a site that uses basic authentication? We will show you a quick example of using URLLIB2 and Python to do such.

Use tail and grep (egrep) to monitor your webserver logs and include some crude colorization.

Sometimes you just have to post some tidbits you find in the middle of the night. This one is one of my favorites I always forget...so straight from wikipedia...SysRq method of fixing a bad freeze...

Shooting in RAW format is great for the photography buff. However, when it is time to share with others, post on your photo gallery, or print at the local photo printing shop, you want something more portable. Here we'll look at converting RAW photos (specifically Canon's CRW format) into JPEGs using a batch command-line approach in BASH.

This is a start in our adventures of exploring some automated backup solutions. We decided to go simple and homebrew for the first method and used a shell script tied to cron to run mysqldump to backup the databases and rsync to backup some critical directory trees.

As you might have noticed, we are attempting to do a little tidying up in preparation for some new features and more active postings. So please bare with us while we make some changes to various visual aspects of the site.

As you probably know, we have setup openfire as an xmpp chat server. We use spark by the same people for a nice little client to interface with the server and chat with other users. However, in Linux, clicking links sent by users would not work. Read on for the quick fix.

The Slackware team has released some kernel patches to fix the local root exploit you have probably read about recently. It seems that the updated kernel was available yesterday, but a lot of people, including us, did not receive the security advisory email due to some recent work on the mail server.