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Last week I saw a documentary about the German mathematician David Hilbert. This very interesting documentary had some nice mathematical problems that seem impossible to solve, but when thought through there always was a little loophole.

A very nice one is The paradox of the Grand Hotel

If you are a bit into maths, this really is stuff to read.

The prove of The Last Theorem of Fermat is my next goal… :-)

I’ve been using IceWM on and off for many years now. And because we used it in our UNIX/Linux education environment I did create some patches for IceWM. Some of these patches are now part of the mainstream version and (of course) some are not.

My patch files can be found here.

These patches are mostly focused on window management such as (This list is not complete): _~ + win_allowRestore + win_allowMove + win_allowSize + win_allowMaximize + win_allowMinimize + win_allowHide
win_allowRollup + win_allowRaise + win_allowLower + win_allowLayer
win_allowMoveto _~ and some are focused on system control (reboot and family)

A couple of days ago I posted that I was converting to git. Well, that was not the completely truth. I already had switched to git.

But what I didn’t like was the fact that git doesn’t support keyword-expansion and therefore there’s no way of knowing what version of the file you are editing. I do like this in CVS and SVN, so I implemented it in a script called vigit.

Some time ago I decided it was time to change from subversion to git for my version control system. The advantages where obvious. git is distributed and so I can code on my laptop without being connected to my home server. When I do get home I just sync the repositories and everything’s OK.

But, how to do this. I took the easy road and created an user on my home server and made sure I could login with SSH key authentication. After that I did:

When using a MySQL database, it’s often very useful to create backups of the databases. This can be done with the MySQL dump command, but this does not allow for separate week, month and year backups. On the web I found the tool automysqlbackup and that did almost what I wanted. I changed it a lot and my version can be found here or here.

In my daily working routine I do create a lot of shell scripts, LaTeX source and whatever. I always try to keep things simple and consistent. This not always being easy, so I wrote a Perl program that generates a standard template for a lot of standard code. This could be e.g. Bash shell, Perl, RPM spec file, LaTeX source, C source, etc.

The only thing this program needs is Perl and a file in your home directory called .name.info. This file should contain a tag and the value on a single line. An example:

Last weekend I decided it was time again to completely update my eeePC. So I ran the command tantrum everybody knows:

and that gave me 287 new and updated packages.

After that I needed to reboot because I got a lot of new stuff.

Well, there the trouble began. No X, no network, no mouse, no USB etc. It was in a terrible state.

Digging around and repairing the odd stuff, I got X running, but still no mouse and no network. I thought that there had to be a general problem, because it looked impossible that everything was broken without some major hickup. Digging further and further I suddenly noticed that I did have a lot of files with the name ending in dpkg-new. That gave me the clou that these where new configs and new scripts that didn’t update the original ones. why wasn’t clear, first get the thing up and running again.

Live’s good and the problem is simple. Having a Linux server at home with two virtual machines running within VMware server, I would like to have a tunnel to the host OS and forward ports for smtp, imap, rdp and maybe some others.

I thought this could simply be solved with IPtables, but that turned out to be a big pain in the *ss. It didn’t work as I wanted, I locked myself out several times and still it didn’t do exactly as I wanted.

Searching for shell builtins to speedup Nanoblogger, we stumbled across a very charming and nice way to implement a tail function in the Kornshell.

This works in KSH93 and newer.

The new redirection operators, <# and ># are used to seek. For example,

will seek to 36 bytes before the end-of-file. You can apply this along with any redirection so that