Vault

These were actually commands that a co-worker wanted to know today:

• lsof - Command to list files currently open.
• fuser - Displays the process ID’s of applications using a specific file.

• who - Show who is logged into the system currently.
• last - Show a listing of the last logged in users. Searches through the /var/log/wtmp log file.
• lastlog - Formats and prints the contents of the /var/log/lastlog login file.
• faillog - Formats and prints the contents of the /var/log/faillog log file. This file lists all failed login attempts.

Surface rust is a common problem with owners of old Jeeps.  Now, if you are looking for good tutorials on restoring your Jeep; the best place to look is at hot rod’ers and their websites.  Which gets me to this link.  Its a simple and effective tutorial on removing surface rust with some hard work and a product called “Navel Jelly.”  NJ come highly recommended to me; so this tutorial covers the bases for me on its effective use .

• /etc/issue - Pre-login message file.
• /etc/motd - Message of the day. Post-login message file
• /etc/shells - List of (and path too) valid login shells. For a shell to be used in /etc/passwd is MUST be listed in /etc/shell.
• /etc/default - Folder location of default settings for useradd, passwd, nss, and rmt. (Suse specific?)

• finger - Prints user information in a human readable format.
• pwconv - creates a shadow entry for an existing passwd user. Even if shadow entry is missing. Check out grpconv, pwunconv, and grpunconv for related functionality.
• pwck - Check integrity of passwd file.
• hwinfo - Program generates and displays a list of specific information about the devices installed on your system. (Suse specific?)
• iostat - Display CPU and IO system statistics.
• id - Print UID and GID information.
• cut - Remove sections for each line of a file. (ex: cat /etc/group | cut -d: -f1,3)
• newgrp - Log into a different group. UID stays the same but rights are changed to reflect new group membership. User must be a member of said group or a group password must be set for this to work. sg is an alias to the newgrp command.
• passwd - Make changes to a users password. Actually this is a commonly used (i.e not misc) command but two options it has that I didn’t expressly know about. -l will lock a user account (when issued as root) and -S will display users password information (expiration date, warn before lock days, maximum number of allowed days with same password, etc.)
• chage - Print or change a user accounts password information (expiration date, warn days, etc..)
• wall - Sends a message to all system users. Root messages are the only ones displayed if user has blocked user-to-user messages.

Ok, I have had these links waiting to be posted for a couple days now hoping I would find something to “match” them with. Unfortunately it seems like it will not be.  So without further excitement.  Here are three totally unrelated links:

1. Database Normalization - A great introduction into relational database normalization and the normal forms.  It is fairly common that I tell people about our database structure and I am amazed at how often they don’t understand normalization.  This is here to help explain it.
2. 71 CSS/ AJAX Tools - Who wants to re-invent the wheel.  Here are 71 commonly used CSS and Ajax interface elements for web development.  Think you need Flash to do anything useful in web design, check this out.  It uses NO Flash and is entirely XHTML compliant.  It is 100% text indexable.  It requires no plugins and it even will degrade gracefully on text only browsers (it shows up as a list of links to the photos.)
3. RPG Inspirational Posters -  I think Jason will love this one.  It is a gallery of motivation posters (think Successories) for roll playing games. This one and this one are probably my favorites.

Looking through the old digest articles from the Hoover Institution has uncovered this article by Thomas Soxwell titled “When Fairness Is Unjust.” My personal history has a strong educational influence; both from an educators perspective as well as an administration one. “Fairness” as a scholastic idea has been one of the most destructive forces in education, especially for the unprivileged and poor. Yet for some reason that continues to defy logic; the public school system (in many places) has continued to pursue a policy of “leveling the playing field.”

Here are a couple facts for those who have not experienced life. “Life” is NOT fair!  It will never be!  And if you attempt to make things “more fair” by expecting less of people; you will get it.

So, what exactly are Klingon programmers like? The answer is: amazingly similar to our own!

I need a place to store these links.  We are using mailman at work to do anouncement mail-lists and wanted to extend it to auto-generate RSS feeds for those same announcements.  These are a couple of examples of that functionality that other people have already done:

• mailman RSS feeds - Usage and description.  Quick and dirty Perl script.
• mailman RSS feeds - the script.
• RSS export - Live patch to update mailman to issue RSS feeds on archive.
• RSS export - original source of previous post.
• Generate RSS summary - Sourceforge project to include RSS in future mailman version.

An application developer for Dental online has created a Flash installer wizard for Konqueror.  I had considered doing this same thing myself; but it never made it off my to-do list for KDE.  Check out the website for a couple other useful KDE patches.

Sun has a 10 week, comprehensive AJAX course.  The online classed (with course material and flash video classrooms) cover everything from learning AJAX to advanced AJAX designs.  The textbooks are already available with the first video classroom starting Aug, 4.

This link is probably one of the most sought after I have blogged. It is the example model listing for Database Answers a website devoted to database modeling and design. The site provides “base” designs for many of the most common database layouts based on usage. While it may not be interesting to non-programmers/developers/DBAs; it is undoubtably something that we, those of us who fall into those catagories, have all searched for a generally come up empty.

Remembering names is a skill I have long respected but never had.  If there was a single skill that I could magically obtain (like a brain dump out of The Matrix) it would be the ability to control people with my mind… but my second pick would be to a photographic memory with respect to people I have met and their names. Two articles I found provide some hints to those of us who lack this skill.  The first article is specifically catered to name recollection.  The second article is a more general memory “HOW-TO.”

My brother Adam, had his third child last Monday. Today, he finally sent me pictures. What a beautiful family.

I am in the process of incorporating a half a dozen changes to the website.  Most are behind the scenes but a couple of them affect layout and page management.  As such, some elements are not displaying correctly.  Please be patient with me.