Posts

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… ...

I started my day with a run and was lost in the writings of Norman Angell. A month or so ago I read his book, Great Illusion, and was awe-struck on how much pre-WWI Europe mirrors our own world today. He makes the case that globalization in those times would prohibit the tinderbox from catching fire due to the inter-dependencies. I see those same arguments today (article from The Telegraph) and feel a sense of misery from past mistakes being forgotten. ...

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: ...

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” This year alone I have been in 12 countries and accumulated over 500k miles of travel and want to share my tips and tricks to make us better citizens of the globe. I want to provide some tips from my many days on the road. It is my hope this transforms you from clueless tourist to world citizen. **Learn the basic language – **The quickest and easiest way to make connections with people is to approach them with their native tongue. You will be surprised after being a few places how easy it is to pickup “Hello and Goodbye” and “Please and Thank You” ...

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. ...