Code Retard

Think this is impressive? Want to play StarCraft on your PS3 as well? It’s definitely possible. The requirements? You need to take advantage of your PS3’s little known capability to run Linux. Linux you ask? Yes, because that’s the only way to run Windows. Since StarCraft came out way back in the day when Windows 95 was king, that’s all you need to install on top of Linux through an emulation layer. Fortunately, the PS3 has enough horsepower to run Windows 95, even via software emulation, so StarCraft is actually playable. Just imagine it, playing StarCraft on your big screen TV! Read more »

Not sure how long this will last, but if you use Linux regularly, you may be interested in Ramesh’ Natarajan’s eBook Linux 101 Hacks which is currently available for free download from his website at www.thegeekstuff.com. The password to get in is “linuxrocks” and the eBook itself is in PDF format. Subtitled “Practical Examples to Build a Strong Foundation in Linux,” the book is filled with detailed explanations on a variety of useful Linux commands and command options that you may or may not have heard of and “hacks” to make ones you use regularly more effective like a true Linux veteran.

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Dircmp is a great Linux tool that allows users to compare the directory contents of two similar directories in order to spot differences in between subdirectory structures or file content. However, dircmp is not a luxury afforded by all Linux distributions. CentOS, for example, does not include the dircmp tool and the source code is not easily available. Plus even if it was, who would want to spend time to build it when you can do the exact same thing with your trusty friend: diff.

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For users who using Ubuntu Linux or are considering switching to this popular distro, this free pocket reference guide is available for download in PDF from the book’s website. While the print edition is available for $9.94 from Amazon, The Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference PDF is practically identical to the print edition except that it’s absolutely free. The book covers Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, 8.10 and beyond and doesn’t require the reader to have any Linux background. In fact, it’s particularly useful for Microsoft Windows users who are switching to Ubuntu. Linux gurus will still find it useful since it will save them from having to wade through tiresome documentation just to look up a few commands.

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If you don’t have direct physical access to your Linux box but have the root password, you can easily remotely reboot Linux by executing this simple reboot command. Note that while you can ssh onto the remote Linux host just by itself, you can also send remote commands via ssh as well and this is what we’ll use to execute the restart. This is great if you don’t have direct physical access to your host (or are too lazy to get up out of your seat) but have administrative root privileges to execute a remote shutdown. The command is simple but requires ssh (secure shell) service which should be installed and running standard on just about any Linux distribution. You’ll need to know your Linux machine’s IP address or machine name just as if you were to remotely login to that machine, but instead you’ll execute a remote reboot command.

From any Linux terminal shell, execute:

% ssh root@remote-linux-host rebootor % ssh root@10.11.12.13 reboot

Then the host will reboot automatically, and if there are users still logged in they will be warned as the machine shuts down and powers back up gracefully.

Image/Flickr/Biappi

Whenever you execute a command in Linux, the command actually returns an exit status code which is useful when you need information on how the execution went like if it failed or succeeded. An exit status code of:

• 0 means the command executed properly without any errors
• 1 means the command executed but there may have been some minor issues (think of these as warnings)
• 2 means the command executed and there was a major problem (think of these as errors)

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I like to type and have found Vim to be the best editor suited to my style. Although traditionally a Linux text editing tool, it’s been ported to Windows and is a great alternative to match the likes of TextPad, Notepad++, or my fave, Crimson Editor. However, it is missing one basic but major feature that all the other editors have: no tabs! Tabs make it easy to navigate multiple files open at the same time in the same window. While you can split the screen vertically and horizontally, it still doesn’t make up for the lack of a buffer explorer tab (buffers = files in Vim).

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Pidgin is my preferred all-in-one chat application. One of its features is the ability to log your chat sessions to text or HTML format. The problem with that is the Pidgin chat logs are saved to some undisclosed location on your computer which varies depending on your operating system platform and unfortunately cannot be set through any Pidgin setting.

Formerly known as gaim, Pidgin is a completely freeware chat program and simultaneously connects you to all the major chat networks like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and Google Talk to name a few. I like it because of its easy usability and no-nonsense interface, very much unlike Trillian which I loathe (disclaimer: I have not looked at Trillian since I last used it seven years ago, it may have changed since, but it sucked in 2001). It’s cross platform so it runs on everything, but requires GTK which is a slight hassle for Windows users who have to install it as well. Fortunately for Mac and Linux users it is usually installed.

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If you’ve used Linux at all, you may have come across ’sed,’ short for "stream editor," which is a powerful little utility to modify streams like console IO, files or text. I was using it recently to do a simple search and replace operation in a few files. However, a curious problem arose that I had not encountered before. I’ve used ’sed’ many a time to perform a find and replace on text within a file, but I’d never included the slash ‘/’ (also known as "forward slash") character in my search text with sed. As you may know, sed can easily perform a search and replace on all *.txt files in a directory with this command:

% sed s/text_to_replace/replacement_text/g *.txt

Note how forward slash "/" is used as part of the regular expression to separate the command options and search text. Naturally, since I had text that I wanted to replace with forward slash characters, my sed command contained escaped slash characters and looked like this:

% sed s/file:\/\//http:\/\//g *.txt

I wanted to replace "file://" with "http://" text so in order not to confuse the delimiter with the text, I escaped the forward slashes with backslashes like so \/. Unfortunately, sed didn’t like what I gave it and gave and output like:

sed: -e expression #1, char 10: unknown option to `s' Read more »

I was happily tagging away my just-released source code on my Cygwin Linux for Windows emulation layer using the good old fashioned Cygwin command prompt with the good old fashioned ‘cvs’ command when my tag aborted suddenly and spit out this error:

cvs [tag aborted]: cannot rename file /my/cvs/repo/,userguide.pdf, to /my/cvs/repo/userguide.pdf,v: File exists

…Much to my horror since it was in the middle of a CVS tag operation. This occurs because of a permissions problem, namely that the file cannot be renamed because you don’t have write permissions for it. This is a peculiar anomaly on Windows only, since I certainly did not have userguide.pdf open anywhere. It turns out that WinCVS, like Cygwin, has this problem as well. It seems to occur because the file doesn’t get closed properly for some reason on Windows. If you’re using WinCVS, try shutting it down and restarting it again. Hopefully it will properly close the file. On Cygwin, there’s not really any way to “restart” anything except your entire OS. To get around this, I simply executed the CVS tag again from a proper Linux terminal. On Linux you won’t get this sort of problem. The tagging operation then resumed seamlessly without any problems, even though it had quit halfway on Windows. Or if you must use Cygwin, restart the OS as I mentioned earlier.