Techie

Most likely my favourite addition to my otherwise untouched BASH profile is the calc function. From the shell on my Linux box I can simply type “calc 2*10+10/1” and be presented with a result. Having been on a Mac with spotlight the past 3 years, this is something I truly missed. Additionally I missed a universal extractor that was easily accessible. File-roller works sufficiently in the GUI, but I wanted something quick from the CLI. Now I can type “extract archive.tar.bz2” and away it goes… ...

Simulating WAN links used to be a difficult process. I would load FreeBSD with a dummynet driver and play with the settings to tweak where I needed it for the activity. OpenBSD with ALTQ made this a step simpler with the ease of bridging adapters. On a recent project for Spec Ops Technology, I needed to simulate a WAN with latency, loss, and randomness. I decided I needed to dig more into the netem work included in most recent linux distributions. Netem has matured to the point of being a very potent utility for setting up quick testbeds. Additionally with most any modern Linux distro you are online in minutes. I will post a very quick script to get you online: ...

Microsoft Lync is prevalent through the corporate world. Honestly its a pretty decent product on a Windows machine. On Linux and Mac though it is really a half-baked product of varying working status. On Mac the official client burns through your battery due to requiring the Nvidia graphics card on my Retina Pro?? I am a big fan on Pidgin (or Adium on the Mac) and have been struggling to get Lync support working on Mac/Linux using this client. Today I was finally able to connect. ...

—- Cross Post from the Spec Ops Technology Blog —- Spec Ops Technology prides itself on taking difficult problems and providing practical engineering solutions. Quite often this real world experience is born of a real world problem we personally faced. There is a passion we look for in our engineers that breeds a team that, by nature, develops creative fixes. As the United and Lufthansa ticket counters can attest, I spend a lot of time on the road. In today’s connected world I depend on a secure and platform agnostic internet connection. There a few major hurdles that make this difficult: ...

Apple must have been reading my blog when I wrote-up how to use two locations for Time Machine. Now in Mountain Lion it is built in and is much more seamless than my band-aid hack. Backups were always such an elusive concept for people, but Apple has really done a great job here. If you own a Mac and do not use Time Machine…shame… The two locations here are a Whole Disk Encrypted external FW drive and a Debian file server with an encrypted volume. ...