Makura no Soshi

This is a nice idea and proof of concept: spreading malware in BibTeX files.

Probably every TeX-User knows the advocacy about how powerful the language is… but do (or can) you proofread everything before you compile it?

Recently I replaced my office’s filtering network bridge which still ran on an old FreeBSD 4.11 box for the last eight years or so. The new system is based on a Soekris 5501, and because it took some time to choose the right software I decided to publish my notes on the tested BSD firewall products.
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I like the new logo for Mailman.

Recently I had to work with SQL dumps to recover a database server and to update a MySQL installation. Because complete SQL dumps are too big to handle them with diff and vi (with enough memory vim actually works on large files, but it is really slow) I needed more traditional tools to compare them and to extract only the parts I needed.

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Names and numbers are important but invaluable resources in IT (e.g. URIs, IPs, e-mail adresses). Their consideration nicely distinguishes techies (for lack of a better word; everyone with certain technological experience and proficiency) from non-techies (e.g. management :->).

Non-techies see these resources as abundant and dirt-cheap because they do not cost any money. – Whereas techies regard them are scarce and expensive because no amount of money can completely revert a bad allocation.

A quick reminder: the application deadline for GSoC2010 is this friday.

I highly recommend to participate because it is a great opportunity to get the experience of working with a mentor in a large open source project.

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Just to preserve it, here’s a useful shell command line to print a histogram of frequent log events:
grep -h 'expr' files | cut -d ' ' -f 1,2 | uniq -c | awk '{step=5; bar = ""; for(i = $1; i>=1; i = i-step) bar = bar "#"; printf $2, $3, bar; }'

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