Computers
After googling around a bit for a tutorial for a friend and failing to find a sufficiently succinct one, I decided to write my checklist here so I don’t forget. If you want to do passwordless authentication to an SSH server using SSH keys, these are the steps you should follow:
Well, I have a computer architecture exam in six hours and can’t be bothered, so I figured I would realize a lifelong dream of mine, and make a program that prints “Hello world!” using curve fitting techniques. Enlisting the help of a good friend with numerous mathematical papers under his belt (ostensibly because he could not afford a tighter belt), MATLAB and a longing for procrastination, we embarked on this perilous journey.
As you may know, I bought a Macbook some two months ago, and the trackpad was broken. The pointer accelerates way too much when I move it, and that makes pointing at stuff really hard. Combine that with the keyboard-unfriendliness of OS X, and you have one big Mac hater in front of you. I sent it for service to the official Greek Apple distributor, Rainbow, but I was a bit worried that they wouldn’t do anything about it. My worst fears came true when it came back.
I recently got a Macbook after my last laptop broke, and I wanted to write about my impressions (well, after using it for a few days and past the initial “omg nothing works like in other OSes” shock). First, the good:
- The GUI is really pretty and feels consistent and robust. Windows (whenever I mention Windows I mean XP, I don’t like Vista at all) is quite a bit uglier, but is also rather consistent. Linux is somewhat pretty (especially with compiz et al) but lacks consistency and robustness.
Recently I found out that mail I sent from this domain (poromenos.org) was being flagged as spam by Gmail. That is odd, because I have (correctly, I believe) defined the SPF records for this domain and it should be recognised as legitimate. I researched a bit, and came to a conclusion that other users have come to as well:
Gmail flags as spam Google Apps emails coming from Google’s SMTP server. I set up a new account and sent emails from Thunderbird and from Google Apps’ web interface, and surely enough, the Thunderbird one got marked as spam.
If you want to mount samba shares with Greek filenames under Linux (Ubuntu, in particular), here's the magic command:
sudo mount -t smbfs //server/share dir -o username=guest,password=,codepage=cp737,iocharset=utf8
It took me a while to find, so here it is for posterity and for others who might need it. Ubuntu displays filenames correctly through the network without any configuration, but if you want to mount a share yourself, you need that. Same options go for fstab as well, it works the same way.
I just got a new PC which, after many MANY woes, just started to run OK. In case you are interested, I got an Asus P5B-VM DO miniATX motherboard whose onboard soundcard was crackling, and installed my Audigy on the one precious spare PCI slot, and it was popping. I finally relented and got a Gigabyte P35C-DS3R which is just awesome (not as many features as the Asus, but it works great).
As you already may know, newer phones support SIP. SIP is a VoIP protocol supported by most programs/devices (except Skype), which means that you can use your phone to make free calls to other PCs and very cheap calls to landlines from anywhere, depending on your data plan. My data plan is not unlimited but my phone supports WiFi, so I get free calls at home/work.
This is how to use SIP with the Nokia E65 (and most other new S60 Nokia phones, they should be similar):
I recently moved to Slicehost because of their VPS hosting, so now I have a server all to myself. Unfortunately, I managed to screw it up quite badly when I upgraded it to Feisty. Apparently, the latest apache2 has a penchant for spawning 200 processes and eating all the memory, crashing the server. I am trying to figure out how to stop this from happening, but until then this site will crash a lot :(
If it’s down, please try later… If anyone knows what causes this and how I can fix it, please please post a comment, thank you.
Okay, so I have a WRT54GL running DD-WRT. Many people have those. The problem, however, started when I moved my desktop PC from wireful to wireless. For some reason, My laptop (also wireless) could not reliably access windows file shares. It would access some of the folders some of the time, and most of the folders none of the time.
