Category Archives: HOW-TOs
How to check RAID status on an Intel board
I don’t want to dwell on how many hours I just wasted trying to get the status of an embedded RAID controller on an Intel S3420GP board running openSUSE 11.3. The solution is to avoid the dizzying array of software … Continue reading
How to combine/concatenate mp4 videos
In a project similar to the Blender Defender, I am using a Linksys WVC54GCA webcam to monitor my devious cats. The camera has built-in motion detection, and can automatically FTP video files of detected motion to a location of your … Continue reading
Solving openSUSE 11.3 mail server problems
Rather than follow an upgrade path, I painstakingly migrated the mail server configuration from an openSUSE 11.0 server to a fresh install on an openSUSE 11.3 server. Here are the problems I ran into and how I solved them: Problem: … Continue reading
How to recommend movies to friends on Netflix
Do you remember when Netflix used to have a Netflix Community feature where you could add friends and recommend movies to one another? I was just now about to make a recommendation when I realized I could no longer find … Continue reading
fdisk problems with large partitions
I recently upgraded my 3ware 9550SX-8LP RAID5 array from 250 GB drives to 1 TB drives. After the lengthy RAID initialization process, I tried to create a partition using fdisk. Unfortunately, fdisk seemed to only create a partition size of … Continue reading
Image resolution in pixels vs DPI
When working with the print shop to create a poster out of a 3174 x 2153 pixel digital photo, I managed to get completely confused about DPI (dots per inch). I read a blog post called The Myth of DPI … Continue reading
How to compile bandwidthd 2.0.1 on OpenBSD 4.3
I ran into numerous problems when trying to compile bandwidthd 2.0.1 on OpenBSD 4.3. The first problem was that, even though I had installed all the dependencies via ports, ./configure was still erroring out with: checking for png_read_info in -lpng… … Continue reading
Volume discounts with PayPal Merchant Services
You’re probably not going to like this solution very much. To set the scene, PayPal’s “Merchant Services” contains a fairly straightforward webapp to generate “Buy Now” and other such buttons. When we needed to sell a product at work, I … Continue reading
sh: read: -p: no coprocess
Just thought I’d throw this out there since I don’t see many google hits on it. The problem (on OpenBSD 4.4): $ read -p “Enter input: ” MYVAR sh: read: -p: no coprocess Oh, of course, “no coprocess”! Surely, if … Continue reading
jQuery: disable the submit button, but still send the button’s value
Solving the old user-hits-the-submit-button-twice problem is fairly easy using JavaScript and even easier using jQuery. Setting up a sequence like the following is no problem: User clicks the submit button Button becomes disabled The values of the form’s inputs are … Continue reading