Posts from ‘July, 2010’

I have a Hawking Printserver, model number PS12U.  I had already set its IP address using the Windows software (it should be noted that you can ARP the printserver from Linux if need be; google for more info).  However, in order to set it up as a printer on my Linux machine, I needed the [...]

Have you seen this spuriously: Ops, no RSA or DSA server certificate found?! You have to perform a *full* server restart when you added or removed a certificate and/or key file in your ssl error log (and of course your Apache didn't successfully start: ps -aux | grep httpd | wc -l is zero…) when you [...]

In Microsoft Internet Explorer >= 5, a DNS error (asking for a hostname that doesn't exist) causes IE to pull an evil stunt and feed the requested URL to http://search.msn.com/dnserror.aspx , where it is used to search MSN and logged for who knows what nefarious purpose.  Rather than being opt-in behavior, this is opt-out, and rather [...]

I was getting a weird artifact in my logs.  A daemon process that was in charge of keeping an ssh connection open to a remote host was restarting ssh every two hours eleven minutes: myuser 15208 0.0 0.0 0 0 Z 02:01 0:00 [ssh <defunct>] myuser 15511 0.0 0.0 0 0 Z 04:12 0:00 [ssh [...]

If you have written any Perl of moderate complexity, and especially if your Perl of moderate complexity has included CGI and Database interactions, (or any time you have to deal with undef or NULL vs. a blank string, and you might have either of the two), you have run across warnings like this (maybe to [...]

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a neat tool for people with needs too casual or cheap for PhotoShop, but too much for various paintbrush type tools. However, if you install the GIMP under Windows 2000, like me, EPS or PS PostScript files will not open properly, instead barfing with: Error opening file: C:tempmyfile.eps [...]

[warning: see updates below] Between Class::DBI 0.94 and 0.95, something changed causing my classes that override db_Main() to set the db connection (instead of, e.g. using set_db) to stop working.  Specifically, when their sequence functions were invoked, I got an error of:   Can't locate object method “select_val” via package “DBI::st” (perhaps you forgot to [...]

With a fresh install of Red Hat 9 on a Dell Dimension 4600, the only video mode that would work with XFree86 was 640 x 480, which is ludicrously big on a decent-sized monitor.  Changing the config didn't do anything, even though the config was well within my monitor's limits. The solution was to go [...]

You are not crazy. It is not an infinite recursion in your logic. Your code doesn't take that long to execute. If you output to STDERR (in Perl, this means Carp or warn or the venerable print STDERR among others) from a CGI script under Apache 2.0, and you end up dumping more than approximately [...]

Having had a not entirely satisfactory experience in the History and Science department at Harvard, I have been making notes ever since on how things might have been improved, and on things I wish I'd known before starting out. Prospective concentrators in the department of History of Science at Harvard may want to check my [...]