Sean’s Obsessions

I love these reference cards. A double sided page, three columns, with just the essentials for quick reference.

Test::More
mod_perl
Template Toolkit
CSS 1
CSS 2
MySQL

Most of these are from Refcards.com
Not sure if it helps you, but print with double sided, landscape, and flip on short edge, or the pages will run in opposite directions.
Updated: Found some more reference [...]

A friend suggested I try out the SURBL, a DNS based blacklist of URLs that appear in spam messages. The theory is that most spam is trying to pitch something via a website, so if you keep track of the websites, you’ll have a good idea if the message is spam by checking the [...]

This book just landed on my doorstep, and I can already tell you it’s a great resource if you want to obtain your LPI certification. How? I was one of the technical editors!
It covers both exams necessary for LPI level 1. I really enjoyed the author’s laid back style, plus the breadth [...]

One common thing in systems administration is “fiddling with knobs”. You know, some value that has to be changed, that affects results. One approach is to randomly try values, the other is to use a systematic approach.
I use the excellent picprog software to burn PIC microcontrollers on occasion. One day, after not [...]

I found this article about a perl script that downloads True Type fonts from http://grsites.com/fonts/. Looking at the script, it’s about 100 lines of fairly dense, comment-less code that’s quite tied to the web page and url structure that it’s scraping. I rewrote it using WWW::Mechanize in 33 lines including comments and it [...]

Fedora uses Apache 2 and mod_perl2, which is completely incompatible with Movable Type. Even under Apache::compat, there are a lot of problems which I got tired of debugging.
Since I’m using it for SmokePing, I already had CGI::Speedy installed, and figured I’d try it with Movable Type. The only thing to change is the [...]

Well, not quite, but we’ve been there with both Fax numbers and email addresses.
Bill Reid gave another presentation at the EPIC technology day today on VoIP and the Asterisk PBX. Between the presentation and an earlier discussion with him, he brought up the notion of Fax as a change in how we communicate, and [...]

What’s the difference between the bzImage and zImage targets when compiling a kernel?
If you said that the former used bzip2 compression while the latter used gzip, then read on for the real reason.
I ran into this one a few years ago when I was digging into RPM and some custom kernels. A couple of [...]

Jeff Pulver made a mention of the CRTC’s notice about Voice over IP. While I don’t have much of the background on telecommunications law, the CRTC is saying that they feel VoIP carriers should be subjected to the same regulations that the Bellheads follow.
My layman’s view of this is that it’s a bad idea. [...]

In case you didn’t know, I’m running this website and email domain on my cable modem. A few weeks ago I upgraded the box, which also resulted in a new address.
Now, dealing with a dynamic address is easy enough, I use Zone Edit for free DNS hosting, and ddclient to automagically update the records [...]