Sean’s Obsessions

This article over at Linux.com complains about combing RPM with custom code. I do it all the time, and if done properly, there should be no problems. In this example, I customize the Webalizer package while still maintaining the software under version control.
Webalizer has a feature that counts /index.* as /, since they […]

I’m just finishing up Linux Server Hacks. Even with a few years of Linux experience under my belt, I found several handy hacks.
O’Reilly’s Hacks Series bill themselves as “Clever solutions to interesting problems”, which I’ll agree with. The topics presented in the book aren’t generally introductory topics, instead they’re solutions to specific problems […]

My wonderful wife got me Gear for your Kitchen by Alton Brown. If you enjoy cooking, it’s got great advice on how to shop for the right gear, not to mention great recipes. The only downside is that now I have the desire for more kitchen stuff (KitchenAid Stand Mixer cough cough!)
If you […]

I got a couple of 2×24 LCDs on eBay a few weeks ago, and have been trying to put a simple “Hello, world!” onto them from a PIC. Not sure what the heck I’ve been doing wrong up until now, but I finally did it. Small victories
Using the code here

I’d like to keep track of a few pages and be notified when they are changed. Since they aren’t news sites themselves, nor do they offer RSS, I figured it would be pretty easy to build an RSS feed myself. Code here.
Create a file called “checknewpages.cfg” with a list of sites and point […]

I’ve been running SpamAssassin for a while, ever since I wrote this article. Last week, I enabled a couple new features such as Bayesian filtering and auto whitelist.
Auto whitelist was easy enough to set up, I simply added ‘-a’ to the procmail command in my .procmailrc. This FAQ entry explains the feature well, […]

Updated: Apparently, what happened is that someone registered bell-nexxia.net (as opposed to bellnexxia.net) and then had ARIN change the reverse pointers to the new machines.

$ /usr/sbin/traceroute bell.ca
traceroute: Warning: bell.ca has multiple addresses; using 198.235.69.11
traceroute to bell.ca (198.235.69.11), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 24.76.8.1 (24.76.8.1) 18.182 ms 24.737 ms 29.504 […]

Red Hat has some assessment tests available, designed to see what courses you should take on your way to the RHCE. Entertaining, and a bit on the educational side. Good luck!

Here is the Perl Advent Calendar, a tutorial on a perl module for every day. The first one is on CGI::Untaint, which helps you to process form input in a CGI. There is also a series of RSS feeds.