Anthology of Ideas

First test: fail. it left the “temporary” post on the page.   Bad windows live, and here I went and gave you a chance after the Linux blogging tools failed me.   Bah, and here I thought I might actually get a case of OS-envy. Nope, not this time.

The following is part of an open letter I wrote to an university committee that was surveying students and faculty on the feasibility and desirability of providing discounts to students for popular and expensive software packages. This discount would have been provided by basically sharing the cost among all students by purchasing a large number of licenses and then reselling them at a lower price to interested students. Obviously, I thought there was a better alternative.

It continually surprises and impresses me, in a good way. As a little background: I’ve used Linux at a moderate to advanced level for a few years now: I’ve never written a bash script longer than 6 lines and never hacked the kernel, but I’m not afraid of the command line and have no problems editing my xorg.conf, grub.conf or any other system files using nano. The command line is my friend, but I still like a GUI admin panel sometimes.

This short bash script will randomly select a screensaver and display it in your background window, so you can have a random screensaver background instead of having to select a particular. Obviously you will need to have Xscreensaver installed for it to work. !/bin/bash files=(/usr/lib/xscreensaver/*) # Look for files in the XScreensaver folder n=${#files[@]} # For aesthetics "${files[RANDOM % n]}" -root & # Choose a random screensaver and execute it in the root window.

If you haven’t already seen this: the original Star Wars ASCII animation can also be accessed from telnet by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl. Use the following in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I recently moved my /home folder to its own partition, but in doing so, I broke MySQL. The full error I got was: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) To fix this you need to create the file and make sure that MySQL has access to it. (All commands need to be run as root) Create the directory (if it doesn’t already exist). sudo mkdir /var/run/mysqld/ Create the file by “touching” it.

First test: fail. it left the “temporary” post on the page.   Bad windows live, and here I went and gave you a chance after the Linux blogging tools failed me.   Bah, and here I thought I might actually get a case of OS-envy. Nope, not this time.

The following is part of an open letter I wrote to an university committee that was surveying students and faculty on the feasibility and desirability of providing discounts to students for popular and expensive software packages. This discount would have been provided by basically sharing the cost among all students by purchasing a large number of licenses and then reselling them at a lower price to interested students. Obviously, I thought there was a better alternative.

It continually surprises and impresses me, in a good way. As a little background: I’ve used Linux at a moderate to advanced level for a few years now: I’ve never written a bash script longer than 6 lines and never hacked the kernel, but I’m not afraid of the command line and have no problems editing my xorg.conf, grub.conf or any other system files using nano. The command line is my friend, but I still like a GUI admin panel sometimes.

This short bash script will randomly select a screensaver and display it in your background window, so you can have a random screensaver background instead of having to select a particular. Obviously you will need to have Xscreensaver installed for it to work. !/bin/bash files=(/usr/lib/xscreensaver/*) # Look for files in the XScreensaver folder n=${#files[@]} # For aesthetics "${files[RANDOM % n]}" -root & # Choose a random screensaver and execute it in the root window.

If you haven’t already seen this: the original Star Wars ASCII animation can also be accessed from telnet by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl. Use the following in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I recently moved my /home folder to its own partition, but in doing so, I broke MySQL. The full error I got was: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) To fix this you need to create the file and make sure that MySQL has access to it. (All commands need to be run as root) Create the directory (if it doesn’t already exist). sudo mkdir /var/run/mysqld/ Create the file by “touching” it.