geekosaur

2,991 reputation

710

bio	website	geekosaur.dreamwidth.org
	location	Akron, OH
	age	48
visits	member for	2 years, 2 months
	seen	May 14 '12 at 2:50
stats	profile views	118

Twitter: geekosaur

(back online although still looking...)

I'm an old-time Unix/Usenet geek; you can get a good idea of my checkered past by searching for my name in Google Groups. (Include the first name, though, or you'll get my cousin Russ (http://www.eyrie.org/~rra)....)

Presently I am unemployed and looking at jobs in the Toronto area. Most recently I was a senior system administrator for Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology half of CMU. Most of my work is infrastructure — the stuff most people don't notice unless it's broken. My job is to make sure people continue to not notice it.

I have been suffering from gradually worsening sinus problems for the past 10 years, and I was recently diagnosed with dysphoric bipolar syndrome. A fair amount of this journal is about the latter. More recent items are tagged so they can be avoided. I may at some point go back and fix the earlier ones.

In the 90s (that is, before the dysphoric bipolar got bad enough that I had trouble focusing in projects) I was involved with a number of open source projects. I'm starting to find my way back into the open source world now that I'm regaining reliable control of my faculties.

	2,991 reputation	bio	website	geekosaur.dreamwidth.org	visits	member for	2 years, 2 months
710 badges		location	Akron, OH		seen	May 14 '12 at 2:50

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65 Comments

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May 11	comment	keep getting an annoying aw snap! on ubuntu 12.04 google chrome why is this happening can it be fixed please? How about just a little detail on what you're doing, what URLs, etc.?
May 11	comment	rc.local runs .sh file in wrong directory Why would you assume that?
May 11	comment	“rm” doesn't accept internal command as a paramter @Izkata, that (and a number of similar issues) is what I meant by the comment about looking at the actual output and bulletproofing.
May 11	comment	When automount ntfs partition, all file were marked “Allow executing file as program” Is there something to "fix"? NTFS has no conception of execute bit; nevertheless it is entirely possible for executable files (scripts, Unix executables, even Windows EXEs if you have Wine configured properly) to be present.
May 5	comment	Route all traffic through SSH tunnel or equivalent? Did you follow the link on "VPN"? The Ubuntu Wiki gives example installation recipes for a number of configurations and versions; for your setup you probably want OpenVPN (VPNC), not PPTP or Cisco.
May 5	comment	Is there a way I can record when the stderr is printed to a log file? stackoverflow.com/questions/1507674/…
May 4	comment	~/.bashrc changes have no effect? If that's what it looks like, you changed the middle of an unrelated variable expansion in a way that won't do anything visible to normal accounts. Do you normally change random stuff in random ways in your dotfiles, ignoring the possibility that the wrong random thing might leave you unable to log in or unable to open a terminal?
May 4	comment	Grep for contents between two markers with newlines `grep` and `sed` are both line-oriented. `awk` can use an arbitrary delimiter in place of newline, but still needs some kind of delimiter. What exactly are you looking for? You may be going about it the wrong way (for example, none of these tools is really appropriate for HTML/XML, and not ideal for JSON).
Apr 28	comment	How to add right click menu item to create a launcher in Gnome 3 This is not Canonical Support, it is a forum for Ubuntu users. Complaining to us is worse than useless, since it makes people think something useful has been done when Canonical pays no attention to stuff here.
Apr 27	comment	How can I disable Apper? By updating? It's doing that for a reason.
Apr 22	comment	installing gnome-shell gives me gnome 2 instead of 3 If GNOME 3 thinks your system isn't up to it, it will degrade to a GNOME 2 setup ("fallback mode").
Apr 13	comment	Using tar, the entire folder structure is including, I don't want that C and F both want pathname arguments. They don't mean the same thing, so you'd kinda like to know which name goes with which option, yes?
Apr 13	comment	After executing a command in the terminal, I sometimes can't execute another That suggests `node.js` is reading from the terminal for some reason. I would not know the details there, I don't know what it's running.
Apr 13	comment	After executing a command in the terminal, I sometimes can't execute another Not from the terminal; but the point of `disown` is precisely when you don't want the terminal to be involved with it any more. You would have to use some other mechanism to keep track of it; for example, for the `node.js` service you would note the job's process ID that the shell prints when you start it, and could use that to `kill` it from a different terminal. (Better for that case might be to have your service use a pidfile, or have some protocol command that tells it to exit.)
Apr 12	comment	Using tar, the entire folder structure is including, I don't want that That command doesn't look right; as written you have told it to use archive `~/path/to/asdf.tgz`, then change directory to `asdf/`, but no files to add to the archive (which should produce an error message).
Apr 8	comment	Environment variable blank inside application How are you starting the program? And right, Ubuntu changed its display manager and doesn't use that session config any more :/ unfortunately it looks like the rules are different for different Ubuntu releases which is not helpful. (Some read `.profile`, some `.gnomerc`, some want `.pam_environment`, some use that session file, some require editing files under `/usr/share/xsessions`, etc. Consistency is not for Ubuntu users, apparently.)
Apr 8	comment	Xprograms over ssh, nothing happens `ssh` is case sensitive. `-X` or `-Y` (you want `-Y` as I already told you) turns on X11 forwarding. `-x` as you gave it turns it off.
Jul 1	comment	Can't echo $CATALINA_HOME I would guess they're set right by whatever starts up Tomcat, but not for anything else. But I don't know Tomcat so it's just a guess.
Jun 29	comment	How to run a command before the machine automatically shutdowns? So, as `man 5 init` tells you, there are several ways to define an `upstart` job for this: it could be a `script` triggered `start on shutdown`, or more accurately `start on stopping mountall`. Or you could `start on started mountall` and `stop on stopping mountall`, and use `pre-start` to create, `mount`, and populate the ramdisk and `post-stop` to save and `umount` it.
Jun 21	comment	How do I get Calibre to fetch news? The system ones won't be in your home folder. Again, I would have to dig to find out where they are on Ubuntu, but it will be under `/usr` somewhere for an Ubuntu package and under `/opt/calibre` for the standard install. As to the proxy, the other possibility is that it uses the environment, which indeed will require logout/login if your window/desktop manager isn't smart enough to update its own environment when the proxy settings are changed.