As the unix-savvy among you probably know, there is One True Way to tell the time: the number of seconds elapsed since midnight on January 1, 1970 +0000. It’s an extremely convenient way for computers to represent the time, since it’s just an integer that goes up. There’s no parsing to be done, and arithmetic [...]
Archive of posts tagged technology
sietchtabr reboot
I have a VM slice that I use to run DNS, a bzflag server, and a few other incidental things. This is what I see on it right now: % uptime 12:05:13 up 450 days, 15:17, 5 users, load average: 1.93, 1.35, 0.60 It’s currently running Debian lenny, but I decided that I wanted to [...]
Linix Tip of the Day: SystemTap
The other day, one of my co-workers, Evan, presented an interesting problem to me. Every day, at some point, a file named ] gets created in his home directory. He assumes that it is being created by a script with a typo in it… somewhere. But how to find out? It’s a hard thing to [...]
Firefox 4 and Vimperator 3
I’ve been using Google Chrome’s dev channel for the past year or so as my primary browser, but between some questionable aesthetic decisions and Chrome’s tendency to segfault every hour or so for the last few dev releases, I decided that it’s time to give up on the faster browser in exchange for the usable [...]
*nix Tip of the Day: Waiting in Scripts
Scripting is what makes Unix-like operating systems great. Every *nix, be it Linux, BSD, OS X, AIX, Solaris, or whatever other random distribution you can come up with, comes with a capable shell (or three) and a good set of basic utilities. Where a Windows administrator has to either fall to the horror that is [...]
