Benchmarking Apache web server(s)

If you are not a systems administrator, you likely may never need to benchmark individual servers on which your applications are running. But if you are, odds are good that you already identify with the importance of knowing which parts of a system under your control are under-performing, causing bottlenecks, and plainly not coping [...]

Paste Mode: Pasting text (and indenting it) in Vim

Pasting a block of code copied from elsewhere in Vim is a nightmare, unless you know how to do it right. The autoindent (and, possibly, smartindent) features of Vim go crazy when you yank and slap a block of text. How do you do it right, then? This is not a new [...]

grep and regular expression revisited

Yesterday, while helping Laiq figure out the pattern he wanted to match against his data set, I bumped into grep’s odd behaviour with respect to regular expressions. Later that day, I went over the man page for grep at length to find out why grep behaved differently than I expected it to.
In the man [...]

VMware, 64-bit processors, and Virtualisation Technology

Attempts to set up a 64-bit guest operating system using VMware workstation on a 64-bit Intel processor machine running Windows 2003 R2 Standard 64-bit Edition failed miserably this past week at work. As Chaz6 and larstr subsequently pointed out in #vmware on irc.freenode.net, the particular Intel processor in the machine being used does not [...]

Telling Vim not to create swap and backup files.

It should come as no surprise to those who know me that I rely on Vim almost nearly always for any sort of text editing tasks. If you have used Vim before with little more than passing curiosity, you will have noticed and been annoyed by the swap file Vim creates when opening a [...]

[BASH] Quickly deleting empty files in a directory.

I thought up of the following BASH one-liner half an hour ago to remove lots of empty or zero byte files from a directory. I have prettified the presentation of the one-liner below, but you may safely pull all the lines together into a single line and use it on BASH. Do note [...]

UseDNS resolution and OpenSSH

Ever wondered why sometimes it takes an awful lot of time for the password prompt to show up when trying to SSH into a system running OpenSSH on the local network? I have. And I have always suspected it must have something to do with DNS resolution.
It turns out there is a setting [...]

Mid-week nightly Perl useless magic and fun!

Last night, I was sitting at my desk, watching text scroll by across an IRC session open in a terminal screen set in black, when my eyes came to halt at Pixelized on ##slackware on FreeNode soliciting help with a particular use of grep. To cut the rather overly technical story short, what Pixelized [...]

Spoofing MAC address! (I be very bad)

The cable-net connection I am using as a backup link is different from the mass of desi cable networks available across the city. All I have to do to reach out to the byte world is plug in the patch cable, wait for the DHCP client to request a lease, and that’s it. [...]

Yakuake: The Quake-style terminal emulator

For all KDE lovers, Yakuake is a must have. The moment you launch it, it hides into another unseen dimension on the screen, and when you hit F-12, a scintillating shell drops down out of nowhere from the top of the screen. Hit F-12 again, and poof, it disappears.
I have yet to find [...]