Blogs of the Giant Dorks

Got thousands of tar archives being transferred from various machines to one repository. Found that some of the archives are bad, either because the networ… more

The split command is one gem of a Giant Dork tool, but it expects to be given the number of lines to split a file along. It's easy enough to fire up a calc… more

Had to setup an FTP server at work (yuck), guides I found elsewhere didn't do exactly what I was after, so it took some trial and error to achieve the setu… more

If you aren't using StartSSL for your SSL certificate needs, you should take a hard look in the mirror and ask if the outrageous prices aged established Ce… more

The largest democratizing force in technology is the falling costs.  Moore's law (and others) established that we can count on increases in performance… more

Boxee folks helpfully host an APT repository (http://apt.boxee.tv/), but, as of this writing, only for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and 8.10 (Intrepid). But if you… more

I'm really excited by all the new Ultra Low Voltage laptops.  They use either Intel's Core based chips designated by the SU prefix (such as the Core 2 SU… more

On CentOS 5.4, the vnstat cron job generates an error:

Error: Unable create database backup "/var/lib/vnstat/.venet0".

By default, vnstat cron jo… more

I liked Jason's solution of passing a file list to du via xargs to produce results sorted by size in human readable format, but wanted ability to limit fil… more

When syncing files over a trusted network, where speed matters more than someone's ability to see contents of the transfer, might want to run rsync as a da… more

Dec 09 was the first month I had achieved 100% spam catch rate since I started filtering my own mail a few years ago. Thanks, SpamAssassin Bayes plugin! Me… more

Let's say you've got a file with the following lines:

cat file.txt leave me alone leave me alone comment me out leave me alone comment me out al… more

It was time to renew a couple of certs and it turned out that the CSR I had originally used was generated with a 512 bit key. Dynadot, who, by the way, off… more

Once again I did something that changed the host key (like rebuild the host). Now I'm trying to SSH to it and get the usual warning from SSH that the key i… more

I guess I must have let the battery on the iPhone completely discharge, as I found it motionless and unresponsive last night on my desk. Plugged it in, sti… more