Since man's first forays into the written word, his dreams and aspirations have centered around the weakest link in the compositional process: the interface between mind and matter.  Great writers, like great carpenters or engineers, never blame their to… more »

I've been having some weird kernel lockup problems when using the authenticated WPA2 network at RIT.  Since I can't effectively bring my kernel bug troubleshooting tools to campus, I decided I needed to bring the wireless network home.  This meant conver… more »

We use Asterisk 1.4 for our home telephone system, with FreePBX 2.7 as the front end.  This allows great flexibility to do strange things, although a home PBX is certainly a little overkill for a two-person, three-bedroom urban house. Recently, I decided to give Google Voice a spin for voicemail processing… more »

Recently, I was tasked with installing a Drupal environment on an existing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid) server.  This release is the first Ubuntu release to ship with PHP 5.3.  Unfortunately, while the Drupal core is reasonably happy with PHP 5.3 as of late,… more »

This morning, in my quest to get caught up on my RSS feeds, a discussion about the best lifehacks mentioned in the daily best-of tldr reddit caught my eye. I consider myself a bit of a lifehacker, but it's mostly that engineering mindset coming through:… more »

Very often, I find myself needing to quickly host a file, somewhat temporarily, for use in a forum post or on IRC. My usual approach has been to mount a directory from my web server on my desktop, over ssh. However, I recently started using Dropbox for more »

I still run Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) on servers, since I'm willing to trade some newer features for package stability. Alas, once in awhile, this stability becomes a problem: the standard whois client uses a set of compiled-in mappings to determine how t… more »

I can tell you're delighted to hear of the state of dehumidification in the basement. Winter is here, which is known for being bone dry. Thus, the dehumidifier's going to be taking it easy much of the winter, but it will still be ready to act when snow… more »

I originally wrote this howto for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) a few months before Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) was released. I happen to have a spare system lying around, so I figure I might as well update this for 9.10! Enjoy. FreePBX is a popular front end for… more »

I do stupid things sometimes.On a Linux system (and most other Unix-like systems), the /etc directory holds most of the fundamental system configuration files. Within its hierarchy lies a number of very important nuggets: /etc/passwd and its… more »