Articles

About:me Firefox addon - View a visual pattern of your Internet activities

Written on April 13th, 2011 at 01:01 am by shredder12

So, after the about:memory url, I started looking for more about: URI scheme options in Firefox and came across an addon which adds an “about:me” URL. This addon, "about:me", makes use of the browsing and downloading history data to give our browser usage pattern a visual representation through graphs and pie charts. Its actually pretty good. You can see a list of most visited websites, your hourly browsing pattern, kind of files you have downloaded and daily download pattern too.

SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 hits Release Candiadate

Written on April 5th, 2011 at 01:43 am by shredder12

The release candidate of the upcoming release of SuperTuxkart, version 0.7.1, is available for download. The RC brings some significant changes from the version 0.7, released last december. The additions include - particle and weather affects, a smoother multi player setup, new shiny suburbs track, many tracks have been renamed and a lot more small changes and bug fixes.

Use the lscpu command to get CPU/Processor information on Linux

Written on March 20th, 2011 at 20:37 pm by shredder12

There are a lot of ways to get information about your system’s cpu. You can either dump the contents of /proc/cpuinfo file, lshw or my recent discovery "lscpu". This utility gathers all the data from sysfs, /proc/cpuinfo file as well and shows it in a human readable format.

Fun with Linux - Changing the root user name

Written on March 2nd, 2011 at 01:32 am by shredder12

So, here is the crazy thing that I have been doing lately - changing the root username! It may seem absurd to some and simple/straightforward to others, but it was one of the most fun and learning times I had with Linux for a long time. In this post, I’ll tell you how I approached the issue and screwed up badly multiple times until I finally got it right.

Before we start, I want you to keep a few things in mind.

Firefox 4 Beta 12 - The final member of the herd has been released

Written on February 27th, 2011 at 04:14 am by shredder12

Fighthing with the roadmap and nasty bugs, the 12th beta of Firefox 4 is finally available now. Probably this is the last one of the long beta streak. Over this period, beginning right from the first beta, developers have fixed nearly 7000 bugs. With Firefox4 getting into its final shape, this release brings overall stability and performance improvements to the browser in addition to some usability changes.

The history of the origin of grep command

Written on April 5th, 2011 at 22:44 pm by shredder12

Grep is one of the most important tools for a shell user. When it comes to retrieving required data from a bulk of text, grep is your best bet. Its very flexible, powerful and as I came to know today, has an interesting story too.

It all started a long time ago. With the increasing popularity of regular expressions, the text editor “ed” included a functionality using which one can print the lines, in the currently edited file, which matches a regular expression.

Correct your habit of incorrectly typing "ls" using the program "sl"

Written on April 4th, 2011 at 23:25 pm by shredder12

Almost everyone of us would have made the mistake of incorrectly typing “sl” or “LS” instead of a simple “ls”. Seriously! how difficult could it be to type those two letters? But we keep making the same mistake over and over. In order to correct this problem, there is a wonderful program name “sl”. It shows a small animation of a steam locomotive(abbr. sl) every time we type “sl” or “LS”.

How to exclude a set of files from disk space usage calculation using du

Written on March 8th, 2011 at 01:17 am by shredder12

We have already discussed the most common options used with du - a tool to check/calculate file space usage. In its most basic form, du tells you the size of all the files in a given directory. Using -s option it sums up the total size of a directory, but what if we don’t want to include a set of files while calculating the utilized space.

Sudo Logging Feature - helps in multi-admin Linux environments

Written on February 28th, 2011 at 16:51 pm by shredder12

I have been using sudo for more than two years and recently when I started working on RedHat based systems, I realized that I actually prefer a root shell(don't confuse with gui login) while performing administrative tasks. I am more careful - thinking twice before running a command, here than with sudo. But there is something about sudo that makes it a fantastic tool for multi-admin environments. I am talking about its logging capability.

The history of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files

Written on February 27th, 2011 at 02:16 am by shredder12

So, I learned something important today. When you don't have an Internet access but have still got work to do, may be with a heavy heart, but you eventually end up in a library. As it turns out, reading a howto from a book is fun too. I was looking to do a crazy thing on my system(lets leave that story for some other day ) and while I was looking for something related, I came across a wonderful write up on /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files.

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