from the desk of stinkpot

argh, i wasted about an hour the other day trying to parse an excel file in perl. i thought i could just save the file as a “tab-delimited” file and load the .txt file in perl. things didn’t work out however, as perl (and the unix command line) thought the .txt file was just one […]

first, if you’re just updating slimserver, backup your convert.conf file. then, to install the slimserver rpm file on a debian machine, run: alien -iv slimserver.X.X.X-X.noarch.rpm

i’ve always wanted music in the shower. and not just some dinky little radio, but a real jukebox, with access to my music collection and playlists. after some google-searching, i’ve put together a system that does those things and more. for instance, i can play any song from my music collection in multiple rooms of […]

to make your terminal display color coded files and directories when you call the ls command, run: sudo apt-get install fileutils (have to have fink installed first if you’re on the mac) then add to your .bashrc or .profile: eval “`dircolors -b`” alias ls=’ls –color=auto’

if you’re having difficulty killing recalcitrant jobs or programs, try this short but sweet script. note that this will even work for the mac; just use the terminal.app. i find this to be even faster than the apple-option-esc shortcut. #!/bin/sh #end recalcitrant processes ID=$1 kill -9 `ps ax | grep -i “$ID” | awk ‘{print […]

how to see how much free space you’ve got left: > df

in unix, when you’d like to make another group, go with: sudo groupadd [groupname]