http://earlruby.org this must be the place Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:09:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'd recently made a bunch of changes to my company's server build scripts, making changes that automatically generate system builds for a variety of operating systems and CPU architectures. We use PXE Boot to boot servers, then install images from a central install server which is running OpenSUSE 11.1. After I ... http://earlruby.org/2010/08/eliminating-pxe-boot-missing-parameter-in-config-file-error-messages/ What do you do if you want to kill malarial mosquitoes and you don't want to use insecticide? Nathan Myhrvold and his group of engineers use off-the-shelf parts to track and shoot mosquitoes out of the sky, one at a time, using a laser. This high tech bug zapper can ... http://earlruby.org/2010/05/nathan-myhrvold-shoots-mosquitoes-with-a-laser/ If you need to run Oracle's CSSCAN utility to check a database prior to converting to a new character set, you may have problems getting it to run "as sysdba". There are a number of articles on the web that explain how to do this, and most of the explanations ... http://earlruby.org/2010/04/running-oracles-csscan-utility-as-sysdba/ I recently added an external eSATA drive to my home computer so I could back up critical data from my home network to one drive. I bought a Western Digital 1TB "green" drive and a Thermaltake external hard drive enclosure with eSATA and USB connectors. ... http://earlruby.org/2010/02/adding-an-external-encrypted-drive-with-lvm-to-ubuntu-linux/ I was Googling around tonight to find an answer to a question I was asked about purple-remote and duplicate status messages in the Pidgin Instant Messaging Client and I ran across many, many people posting messages that they couldn't get purple-remote to work. They had no problem running purple-remote from ... http://earlruby.org/2009/11/pidgin-purple-remote-and-solving-the-no-existing-libpurple-instance-detected-error/ I've been using these one-line commands for over a decade. They're a really easy way to do a search and replace across many files using a Perl regular expression. This example replaces all instances of the word "old" with the word "new" in "myfile", saving the old file version as "myfile.bak": # ... http://earlruby.org/2009/09/one-line-search-and-replace-command-using-perl/ A web application project I'm working on uses YUI widgets for the user interface and CVS as the version control repository. We needed to keep separate versions of YUI around for development, testing and production, so we separate the versions by their release numbers. Adding a new YUI build tree to ... http://earlruby.org/2009/09/add-an-entire-directory-tree-to-cvs/ Want to make free phone calls using Skype? Running Ubuntu 9.04? Want to make sure that Skype stays up-to-date with the latest security patches and updates once you install it? Here's how: On the Skype Download for Linux page Skype lists Ubuntu 7.04-8.04 as the only supported versions of Ubuntu. You ... http://earlruby.org/2009/07/installing-skype-on-ubuntu-904/ I had started an application using Ruby on Rails and I wanted to try out ActiveScaffold as a replacement for standard scaffolding. I'd seen ActiveScaffold in action before but I'd never used it. I knew that ActiveScaffold dynamically generates application pages using a standard format, and if you change the ... http://earlruby.org/2009/06/getting-activescaffold-to-work-under-ruby-on-rails-23/ I spend a fair amount of my time administering large databases and trying to squeeze the maximum speed out of computer hardware. The types of databases I work on are typically in the 1-2TB range and the disks that they run on have to support a mix of bulk writes, ... http://earlruby.org/2009/03/samsung-ssd-drives-achieve-2gbs-write-speeds/