Chronicle HelpLine guru Jay Lee challenged readers to list their top ten utilities. His were all for Windows, and were mostly of the anti-virus and anti-malware sort. I’m a little late to the game, but here are mine, all for Fedora Core 4:

A Fedora Core rescue disk.
Getmail
Procmail
The CRM114 Discriminator
Squid
mdadm
Samba
OpenSSH
Gnuclient from XEmacs
VNC

(I’m working up a post [...]

I spent most of the weekend doing the final build of my new server, the final step in the process of replacing my old server. Over the past couple of weeks I did the “interim” build, in which I did most of the real work: I assembled the components into a temporary case, I installed [...]

Sending out fake invoices is a common ploy among spamsters. They think you’re going to say to yourself “Oh dear, someone has sent me an invoice. This must be a very important email and I should look at it immediately!” Nothing could be further from the truth. Putting “invoice” in your subject line is like [...]

Csoft.net, the people who host my web page, suffered a hard drive crash the day before yesterday. They have recovered operations, but the weblog databases were recovered only to September 7th. I’ll be searching for a way to recover the lost content, but the prognosis is not good. This will teach me to keep my [...]

Friends and family: here’s a hypothetical question for you… let’s say you have an old computer that you want to sell. You’ve found a buyer and agreed on a price. What, if anything, do you do to the computer before you hand it over to the buyer? Do you: (a) do nothing; (b) erase all [...]

The rumors of an Internet meltdown have been greatly exaggerated. Gmail came back online last night. Pobox was still down the last time I checked late last night, but is up and running this morning.

So I discover this afternoon that my outgoing email is not getting off the local network; a bunch of it is getting queued up on the qmail server I run in the closet. I check this, and I check that, and eventually I discover that the problem is that the server can’t establish a connection [...]

Looks like more bad weather is on the way. We’ve been seeing lightning all evening, but now radar shows the storm front is upon us. We’re hearing thunder, and Rudy is barking. Should make for a rollicking evening.

Judging from what we’re hearing so far, this storm is more about rain and wind than lightning and [...]

Something I discovered last night in playing around with Ruby and Rails is that the CGI has a very long startup time, on the order of several seconds. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s extremely annoying, especially when you’re trying to test changes to your code. I knew that the Fast CGI mod for [...]

A severe line of thunderstorms is moving through the Houston area. Thunder agitates Rudy; she runs around barking it it. If we let her out, she’ll run up and down the fence barking. Hubble takes a more laid back attitude, but even he has been barking at this one.

The power keeps going out, but my [...]

A Time-Warner representative called the house Friday morning, just a few hours after I put in my trouble report. She said that some of their people had been working on the problem, and wanted to know if our connection was back up. Wendy, who was at home to take the call, checked and verified that [...]