dkg's blog

Articles in the misc category

1. libasound2-plugins is a resource hog!

   I run mpd on debian on "igor", an NSLU2 -- a very low-power \~266MHz armel machine, with no FPU and a scanty 32MiB of RAM. This serves nicely to feed my stereo with music that is controllable from anywhere on my LAN. When playing music and talking to a single mpd …

2. set default margins for OpenOffice as a sysadmin?

   I'm maintaining a lab of debian squeeze machines that run OpenOffice.org (i'm considering upgrading to LibreOffice from squeeze-backports). I'd like to adjust the default page margins for all users of Writer. Most instructions i've found suggest ways to do this as a single user, but not how to make …

3. Error messages are your friend (postgres is good)

   Here is a bit of simple (yet subtly-flawed) sql, which produces different answers on different database engines:

   0 dkg@pip:~$ cat test.sqldrop table if exists foo;create table foo (x int, y int);insert into foo VALUES (1,3);insert into foo VALUES …

4. more proprietary workarounds, sigh

   In supporting a labful of Debian GNU/Linux machines with NFS-mounted home directories, i find some of my users demand a few proprietary programs. Adobe Flash is one of the most demanded, in particular because some popular streaming video services (like Amazon Prime and Hulu) seem to require it.

   I'm …

5. KVM, Windows XP, and Stop Error Code 0x0000007B

   i dislike having to run Windows as much as the next free software developer, but like many sysadmins, i am occasionally asked to maintain some legacy systems.

   A nice way to keep these systems available (while not having to physically maintain them) is to put them in a virtual sandbox …

6. Compromising webapps: a case study

   This paper should be required reading for anyone developing, deploying, or administering web applications.

   It's also interesting to read the perspective of the folks operating the compromised webapp (details are in the section titled "Digital Vote-By-Mail" on pages 34 to 38).

7. Adobe leaves Linux AIR users vulnerable

   A few months ago, Adobe announced a slew of vulnerabilities in its Flash Player, which is a critical component of Adobe AIR:

   Adobe recommends users of Adobe AIR 2.6.19140 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux update to Adobe AIR 2.7.0.1948.

   [...]

   June 14, 2011 …

8. unreproducible buildd test suite failures

   I've been getting strange failures on some architectures for xdotool. xdotool is a library and a command-line tool to allow you to inject events into an existing X11 session. I'm trying to understand (or even to reproduce) these errors so i can fix them.

   The upstream project ships an extensive …

9. the bleeding edge: btrfs (poor performance, alas)

   I'm playing with btrfs to get a feel for what's coming up in linux filesystems. To be daring, i've configured a test machine using only btrfs for its on-disk filesystems. I really like some of the ideas put forward in the btrfs design. (i'm aware that btrfs is considered experimental-only …

10. Please use unambiguous tag names in your DVCS

    One of the nice features of a distributed version control system (DVCS) like git is the ability to tag specific states of your project, and to cryptographically sign your tags.

    Many projects use simple tag names with the version string like "0.35". This is a plea to ensure that …

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