Tyler Oderkirk's Blog

Computer Virtualization is once again taking a tremendous leap ahead1 . It’s fascinating to watch the field’s developments, especially the technical ones. Anybody up for a trip to Spain in late August? VHPC ’08 sounds amazing. Airfare looks to be ~$600 per person. Of course, virtualization isn’t just intriguing to us systems programmer types. Here’s [...]

Here are some pics from a recent hike I took in Bristol near Stid Hill.  Thanks to Paula for giving me some route advice. I took a Nokia N770 and GPS reciever with me and logged my return trip. Be sure to view the “Terrain” and “Hybrid” map types. Big kudos to John Costigan for developing [...]

I’ve been writing a lot of shell scripts recently in emacs. I used to go to a shell to `chmod u+x` the new scripts, but now I do it within Emacs: Do `M-x dired` from the buffer editing a new script. I’ll give you a Dired buffer rooted in that script’s directory. `C-s` to find [...]

While searching for a lighter to give as a gift this Christmas, I discovered that there are a wide range of lighters available on the internets: from a $5.00 lighter shaped like a shower head to $599 palladium-plated Dunhill lighters. I’ll probably end up buying a Sarome lighter – they’re Japanese-made products of apparently very [...]

For a period of at least 3 years I used an odd little blue chair with a Z-shaped frame that I found in a dumpster at RIT as my computer chair. It was in good shape and fairly comfortable. Well, comfortable for short spans of time. After scoring a sweet articulating Humanscale keyboard/mouse tray on [...]

Did you know that you can use an existing non-privileged instance of Emacs to open files as root? Yep, Emacs includes a module called TRAMP which can use sudo to read and write files. As is usually the case, I had to work sweat a little to make it work. My problem was that my [...]

Time Warner recently cut off our RoadRunner cable service because one of our computers was blasting spam out onto the internet. To find out which machine it was, I ran the following command in a GNU Screen session on OpenWRT on my WL500gP router: tcpdump -n -X -s 96 -tttt -i br0 port 25 This [...]

I use pwsafe to store passwords on Ubuntu. It’s a *nix command line port of Counterpane’s Password Safe which uses twofish to store passwords in a database file. You can find it in the Ubuntu universe repository. If someone somehow managed to get ahold of my shell’s history file, they’d get a lot of juicy [...]

Have you ever seen someone in a movie and thought to yourself “Hey, weren’t they in movie Y too?” This happened to me last night when I was watching ”Casino”. The parking lot attendant from a certain scene looked just like a character from ”Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. To the *nix shell, Robin!</Bruce [...]

I just got back from a long weekend which included seeing Daft Punk at Coney Island and camping with my Dad and Grandpa in Old Forge in the Adirondacks. On Thursday at Noon I jumped on a Jet Blue flight bound for JFK. One hour and one hundred dollars later I was waiting at JFK [...]