scadblog

I’m too lazy to look at the man page for this find command I use often. It will find the text ‘leaves’ in any file located in the path /home according to the example below.

find /home -type f | xargs grep leaves

The site has been moved to WordPress from MovableType. It came as a little after-hours upgrade I’ve been contemplating for a while. I also grabbed a nice template from Alex King’s Styles page to add a touch of class. The interface will allow me to keep the look of the site fresh but spend a minimal amount of time to do so. What’s more, I can have all sorts of users and user level accounts which you can register yourself for. So if you’re interested in adding to the SCAD content and conversation, click on the Register link in the lower right corner of the page!

If your users are experiencing crashes on their Linux desktops during an impressive screensaver display, it may be due to the fact that you do not have hardware excelerated graphics drivers installed. Since some distros ship some graphically intensive screensavers that require 3D and beyond, it may save you a heap of trouble just turning off the screensavers upon install. With Xscreensaver, all you need do is change the mode: line to read blank and the screen will go blank after the designated time rather than display the savers. Save yourself the walk over to their machine to change the setting GUI-side…

Attention firewallers! Likely as part of this upgrade and outage your wireless clients may be getting 140.180.0.0/16 addresses now. That’s right. If you want to be assured your wireless users will be able to get through and you like to use subnets at some level you’re going to have to let those numbers through. Look familiar? That’s also dormnet.

I’ve been a consumer of web hosting services in the past, and two of the three outfits I’ve dealt with have used a program called cPanel in order to dole out their services. What is cPanel? From the site:

cPanel is designed for the end users of your system and allows them to control everything from adding / removing email accounts to administering MySQL database.

It likely that the webmasters of these web hosting services were likely using cPanel companion program, Web Host Manager, to watch over customers like me. Again, from the cPanel page:

WHM allows you to but is not limited to administering individual accounts, reseller accounts & performing basic system & control panel maintenance via a secure interface.

Why am I bringing this up here and now? Because an EDU license is free free free! Check out the license page for terms and conditions of course … then grab yourself a copy for eval.

Aqualibrium, a software package for systems containing water, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and light hydrocarbons and in use in my department has one of those annoying contact forms should you want to download the trial version. However, the form just provides a readily accessible link to a download location. Should I or any of the Civil Engineers under my watch need it, the 3.0 trial can be downloaded here.

Little annoyances really start to stack up as major time-drains. Case in point: I’ve had multiple instances of insistent IE users with fully patched machines contract the trojan Startpage-DU as of late. It changes the homepage of IE and Outlook, and locks the user out of changing the setting back to its original state. It also deposits a few in-use, system locked files onto the hard drive and in one instance its the only thing I can attribute the disappearance of a user’s profile data to (directory remained intact).

At the very least, these instances convinced users otherwise stubborn about their unsafe computing practices. For all of the logical arguments that have been levied, there’s nothing like an hour of scanning, copying, moving and deleting the slight damage done to their machine that makes them worried of things to come, and willing to do anything to prevent it.