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I’ve been watching all of the hype about downloading and running the latest Google creation, ChromiumOS this week so yesterday I decided to take a stab at it myself. I did not however want to simply grab a VMWare image and run it. I’m a software engineer for Pete’s sake! I should build it myself. [...]

Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements. It features several interviews with prominent hackers and entrepreneurs (and hackers-cum-entrepreneurs), including Richard Stallman, Michael Tiemann, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Frank Hecker and Brian Behlendorf. The film begins in [...]

Many people use the MySQL open source relational database server. Mostly for websites, but I’ve also seen it used elsewhere. One problem that I recently ran into with my local development installation is… “what was my root password again?” Aaaggghh!
OK, sorry. Don’t panic; it can be recovered. A quick survey of the internet and I [...]

In my first posting on this topic I outlined a manual method by which you could code Bash scripts to check to see whether or not an instance of the script was already running. This is very useful in scripts that might cause adverse affects if more than one instance runs at the same time. [...]

Have you ever wanted to be able to process an arbitrary number of command-line arguments in your Bash scripts? Well, fear not! It is actually quite easy. All you need is one of the special built-in variables of the Bash shell. The “$@” variable gives you the parameters passed on without any expansion and seen [...]

I thought I’d share another one of my personal scripts. This one is a script that I use to backup this website including files and the MySQL database. It is very simple and straightforward so I won’t bother with long explanations. If you have any questions about it please feel free to comment. On tip [...]

As per my last couple of blogs I have been having some problems using my PC… I can’t use it. I have been receiving the error “A problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license for this computer. Error code 4: 0×80090006“. This is one of those elusive problems that has many postings on [...]

Well, the saga of the broken PC continues. I’ve tried running Windows recovery console from my Windows XP disc, but have not been able to get back up and running. The computer still boots fine and I can see all of my files there at the console, but no login in normal Windows mode. I [...]

Well my PC took a huge dump this weekend. It’s an odd sort of problem as you can actually boot the computer up. There are a few unknown exception errors that popup as the login screen appears. Then when I try to login it gives me some strange error about validating my Windows license and [...]

A lot of times I have to write Bash scripts that get scheduled to run over and over again. These scripts can also take a while to run depending on the task I have for it. There could be a huge problem if I crank up multiple versions of the same script on accident and [...]