Alphatek - Steven’s Tech Blog

A friend told me to look at the “Why do people laugh at creationists?” videos on YouTube. It’s amazing how these creationists (aka Intelligent Design) can be stupid by mixing religion and science. The scary thing about these people, is that they use pseudo-scientific explanations that uneducated people could easily believe, everyone with a little knowledge should fight them.

Ok, here is one video of the series…it’s depressing. Why is the media covering these people in the first place?

A guy pointed out a very funny and geeky website on the fedora-fr forum today: xkcd: a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.

Prepare yourself to lose the next 2h of your life on this website

Because the price of electricity rose by about 20% in my part of Switzerland during the last months, I was searching for a low-power backup solution for some servers. The Linksys NAS 200 seemed to be the perfect solution: a small box with an open source firmware based on a Linux 2.6.9 kernel. So I ordered one with 2 500GB SATA disks, planning to run it as an rsync server.

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A simpe and short post to announce that the Beta of Fedora 9 is out, grab the ISO’s here and read the release notes here

I have seen this link on a forum: http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml

It’s called “Unix Toolbox”; a page listing the most used UNIX commands, classified per category: System, Processes, File System, Network, SSH SCP, VPN with SSH, RSYNC, SUDO, Encrypt Files, Encrypt Partitions, SSL Certificates, CVS, SVN, Useful Commands, Install Software, Convert Media, Printing, Databases, Disk Quota, Shells, Scripting and Programming.

As a sysadmin, I find this handy, and it’s a really nice reminder

A very useful and nice thing in Apple’s OS X, is that you can print to a PDF file from any program. This can also be achieved under Windows with PDFCreator. At its core, it’s “nothing more” than a virtual printer. I use this feature a lot, so how can this be done in Fedora 8? How hard can it be?

Well, it’s easy, fire up a terminal as root and type:

• /etc/rc.d/init.d/cups start : the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) service needs to be started if you wish to have the pdf-printing support. I recommend that you start it automatically at boot time.
• yum install cups-pdf : installs the pdf-printing component for CUPS
  

You’re done, now you can print to the CUPS/CUPS-pdf printer from almost any program, including Firefox. Neat to save web pages.

If you ever made a cron job, or a script that executes something and produces an output in the console, you are probably familiar with the fact that piping it to /dev/null 2>&1 can silence it

But do you really know what this command is doing, or what the 1 and 2 mean? I found a damn good article on a blog just about that: explain pipes, standard in, standard out and errors to human beings.

It’s on http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/06/06/what-does-devnull-21-mean, a must read!

This morning, I stumbled across an interesting post about OpenJDK, the Open Source implementation of Sun’s Java JDK. It should soon be available as a simple to install rpm in Fedora, which is GREAT news for all the Java developers out there. This is precisely one of the features that I need to completely stop using Windows: NetBeans with a solid JDK and an easy install process.

Enough talk, head to http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/14310.html and get the info from the source

A very frustrating thing in Fedora 8, is installing PostgreSQL 8 via yum. It all starts in a very nice way:

yum install postgresql postgresql-server and yum install phpPgAdmin if you want a nice web interface to manage your database.

But now what? Where the hell should I look to find further documentation on what these rpm’s just did? Did they create a default database user, what password to use then? It’s not clear at all for the novice user.

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Hi all,

After a few months, I finally decided to convert the old alphatek.info (which was in French) to a more personal blog about Linux. I often come across interesting articles and howtos when I have to solve problems for my work, and some of these tricks are worth sharing.

So this blog will act as my very own personal shoutbox when it comes to Linux related things. I’m personally using Fedora as the main OS on my laptop, and CentOS on the servers I manage, so I will be focusing on the RedHat world a bit more than on the rest.