A screen within a screen within a screen session

If you every have a screen within a screen within a screen session you will quickly find it very frustrating to detach the sub-most screen. Luckly I found a post on here on how to detach just the sub-most screen session. You must be within that sub-most screen you want to detach before you hit "Ctrl-A a a d". It is quit a mouth full but it gets the job done.

Senior Project moved to CVS

Now that I have the hang of CVS I have moved my old senior_proj folder to CVS as SeniorProject. It has been some time since I last worked on this project so I'll make a little note to myself for future reference.

cvs project name: SeniorProject
Vendor Name: Spring2004WBSCSS
Tag: ALPHA

The next tag will be Release1.0 when it is ready for production use.

picoFreeBSD

I never thought FreeBSD could fit on a single floppy. This reminds FreeSCO back in my high school days.

FreeBSD right off Press!

For the latest in FreeBSD press articles.

Get Java Plugin to work with FreeBSD with this link

Found this link on the web, for getting the java plug-in to work with FreeBSD. I have not tried it out yet but I may need this in the future as I have had problems getting the java plug-in to work in the past:

URL: http://archive.pilgerer.org/mharc/html/freebsd-stable/2004-07/msg00280.html

VIM takes forever to start!

Wow!! I just made several changes to my .cshrc file and later found out that for some strange reason, VIM was taking its own time to start. Apparently, VIM was trying to connect to the X server to get additional information.

After searching on Google I found that the -X options to vim would fix this delay and it did. Now vim starts up lightening fast like it used to.

It was probably enabling the DISPLAY variable in .cshrc, which triggered this slow effect.

Ruby, please stop Core Dumping...

It has been a while since I last ran cvsup on my ports collection. To my surprise I ran into a bit of a jam when I ran: cvsup -g -L 2 /etc/stable-supfile. I received a hideous error which looked something like this:

root@:/usr/ports> portupgrade -ar
[Updating the pkgdb in /var/db/pkg ... - 472 packages found (-1 +0) (...)/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:467: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-07-29) [i386-freebsd4]

Garance Alistair Drosehn made a post to lucky.freebsd.ports newsgroup, which in my opinion was the best result I found after searching for solutions to this fix. This post was as follows:

Try adding the following two
lines to /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf :

ENV['PKG_DBDRIVER'] = "bdb_hash"
ENV['PORTS_DBDRIVER'] = "bdb_hash"

Add them down where other environment variables are set, such as
ENV['PORTSDIR'] ||= '/usr/ports'

I must also mention that issuing:

root@:/usr/ports> pkgdb -fu

worked wonders and fixed the problem, now no more core dumps on portupgrade. I wonder what caused this problem.

Two editors deleted, another blog created! :)

I should have done this first, create a separate blog for OOD instead of adding my partners to my blog. This will just save a lot of headaches in the future.

Instead I created oodwithbaliga.blogspot.com and invited my two partners, Dave and Steven. :)

Two Editors added for OOD

I would like to humbly welcome Steven Peterson, and David Grochowski to My Almost Daily Blog (MADB). These individuals were added as a result of group formations for Object Oriented Design for Fall 2004. We are to use this blog to keep track of our projects logs, including the first project. In addition, since I will also be using the blog to keep track of what I learn as it pertains to computers I extend this option for you two as well. Feel free to post information of your daily learnings.

Fo' Shizzle

Yo.

List the 10 largest files in a directory

Taken from "BSD Fortune".
du /partition_or_directory_name | sort -rn | head
-- Dru

Free Virus Protection for Windows

http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php
http://www.avast.com/

Desktop Printing w/ FreeBSD

Whew! It is getting late and I need some sleep. I will read this article either tomorrow or within the next week. Since my LPT port is broken I will have to try out the examples in this article on another computer. Petes computer will be the best pick since more computers are networked to the server I setup. This will come in very hand when it is set up.

The article URL: http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=321

Encrypt GAIM Conversations

This works with Gaim-0.81 and provides transparent RSA using NSS.
More information on this later after using it for some time.
URL: http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/

Brief Notes from Poul -Henning Kamp on GBDE

I am new to this GBDE (GEOM Based Disk Encryption) for now so I am just going to jot down information I find interesting or did not know about for later personal research.

These notes are from http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcan-04.slides.gbde.pdf

GEOM - The framework for classes which perform transformations on disk I/O:
- was developed under DARPA/SPAWAR.
- Is filesystem independent and works at the disk level. The good thing is that these encrypted disk/partitions look just like any other disk. Better yet, GEOM works with UFS1/2. Since I am using FreeBSD-4.10 Stable I may have to upgrade to 5.x if I want to use GBDE. I am really comfortable with 4.10 right not, but I know eventually I will upgrade. For now I will just read up on GBDE.
- Many other filesystems can be used with GEOM, including but not limited to FAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and many more.

How Good is GEOM?:
Well, it is said that unless AES is broken GEOM can not be cracked! That sounds good to me.

Another Good News Source

http://www.newsforge.com/ I found while reading a Slashdot post on the new GBDE-GEOM Based Disk Encryption for FreeBSD. This is something I will look into later.

Protect the USB PenDrive at all Cost!

This is something I fear most. Losing my USB pendrive! Not only will my data be gone, but who ever comes across it will have my data. Why not just encrypt it?

This article from BSDNews.org talks just about that.

Convert to Hex in VIM

Just recently, I realized my favorite Open Source Editor (OSE), VIM, has a built-in "hex editor". Well, it is not really a Hex editor, but rather a conversion option. I realized this while playing with the pull-down menus in VIM for windows.

While in VIM issuing the following will convert the current screen to hex:

$> %!xxd

To convert back do:

$> %!xxd -r

I thought this was pretty neat!

Hotmail in FreeBSD (gotmail)

Found a new toy, gotmail (/usr/ports/gotmail). This is a console application which downloads mail from hotmail.com or msn.com to either a local folder or it can be configured to forward mail to another email address like gmail!.

1and1 Linux Hosting Setup

A client of mine just purchased hosting services from 1and1.com and wants me to do web development for him. Initially he signed up for the MS package, but I requested that he change to Linux. The MS package was nice, it came with .NET and all that good stuff, but I am on the go most of the time and every machine I sit at will not have VS.NET waiting for me. The ability to SSH is avaliable on most computers I do work on. This for me will be the best option for now as I can just ssh from where I am and do updating.

Manually I had to transfer all the files from the MS host (the initial service) to my machine which will be transerfed to the Linux host (the new service) once I have my ssh account customized the way I need it.

I need the following files:
- .cshrc
- .vimrc
- .screenrc

I need the following directories:
- phpMyAdmin/
- Backups/
- home/

Just realized this is going to be annoying!!! I HATE how this HOST does not allow you to change their cryptic usernames! I have to use usernames like 34asfa243asf! And their passwords look just the same!

Created one out of three databases to make sure database creation works like I expect. The same problem here even the names of the database created look like password and cannot be changed. The best thing for me to do is just create a log file on the server and document which database I am using and for what reason/application.

-Downloaded phpMyAdmin to work with the one out of three databases only.
-created an .htaccess to protect the database