Author: Bobby Rockers

Blogging Bloggers

For anyone who likes reading political blogs: here is the third Annual Warblogger Awards.  The wards are presended by Right Wing News; but the list makes for some interesting reading. Is pretty good, whichever you political affiliation.

Disk Imaging

Ghost 4 Unix (aka g2u) is a disk imaging tool for Unix OSes. Basically its a custom FreeBSD distro on a disk with local and network disk writing tools. It supports both IDE and SCSI; and work with every known x86 operating system. Work on same-to-same size disks and smaller-to-larger size disks.

15,000 Words

Its been a while but I finally updated and added pics to my image gallery.  One of my favorite additions is this picture (subtle but funny.)  I also added a new image gallery that consists of just desktop screen shot pictures. I love looking at some of my old desktop configurations and seeing which applications I used to use. You can see the gallery by clicking on the sidebar link under the VAULT STUFF category; or you can click here.

Seeing Red

Command line colorization is a useful tool for working on the Unix CLI environment.  Here is quick tutorial on how to customize your bash environment colors.  The example is set to work just with your command prompt, but the same technique can be used to colorize anything in the Unix bash environment.

Linux Command #1

Here is a Linux command that I am always trying to remember.  It checks to see which applications/services are using/keeping busy a given file system.  Its particularly useful when you want to find out why you cannot unmount a given file system.   If, for example, you want to check and see why you cannot unmount your USB pen drive from /mnt/usb you would type:

/usr/sbin/lsof +D /mnt/usb

Dresses and Antique Furniture

Ok, after months of reading this book on my bathroom breaks I have finally finished Cryptonomicon .  This book was wonderful.  If you are a tech minded programmer, network administrator, mathematician, a cryptanalyst, or a plain old computer nut; you will find yourself laughing out loud during parts of this book.  I loved Neal Stephenson’s writing style which often goes off on wild tangents, and long metaphors, that are as entertaining (and sometimes even more-so) the the plot itself. 

The book is basically short on plot and long on story. I found his “techy” descriptions as accurate as any I have every read in a fiction book.  While covering the life of the three main characters you will also run into such storied jems as how to eat Cap’n Crunch, why men wear beards, cards as a crypto-system, discovering what really turns married couples on, and many many more. Great story, great writing… great book.