SSH User Annoyance & Solution

I’m in an environment where whenever I ssh to a machine I have a different username than that of my main machine. For example, the username on my desktop of “Some.Desktop.User,” whereas all the Linux environments I ssh to use the username “Some.Linux.User.” I’ve typed “ssh <host>” countless times, only to be annoyed when I…

Where’s the Alternative OS?

As much as I love Linux (Fedora is my distro of choice), I remain frustrated that no company–at least none that I know of–is doing much to really compete with Windows or Apple. Linux, in my humble opinion, as a desktop OS, remains something usable by the few who enjoy getting their hands dirty with…

iOS 7

Yesterday I saw iOS 7 for the first time–on a coworkers phone (beta version). Looks very different. Looks like iOS is taking some queues from Android, which is a major shift in the way things have been in the past. Not sure what I think of it. TechRadar: iOS 7 news

Mac OS: Keyboard Shortcut to Change Wallpaper

I have my wallpaper set up on my Macbook to change images every 5 minutes. It shows images within a particular event that I have set up in iPhoto. This is all fine and nice, but what if I get bored with the image that is randomly chosen? I found this Applescript by Googling the…

Sonicwall Netextender VPN Strangeness – MacOS

If you get the following strange message when attempting to connect to the VPN using Sonicwall Netextender on MacOS: FATAL: An immediately fatal error of some kind occurred, such as an essential system call failing, or running out of virtual memory. (1) …Take a look at the permissions in /etc/ppp. Something mysteriously changed mine, removing…

Love My Macbook

I’ve been developing solely on a Macbook Pro for about 6 months now. I can honestly say that it has increased my productivity considerably… I can’t imagine going back.

Running Redmine with an Oracle Backend

Well, it took some figuring out, but I have succeeded in getting Redmine to run with an Oracle database. I did have a little help from this post, but there have been a few changes since then to deal with. Once I got all figured out, it really isn’t all that difficult to repeat (it…

Subversion Authentication Using Unix Accounts

Standard Subversion authentication using plain text user settings and passwords in the passwd and authz files in the Subversion conf directory. This is all fine for a very small installation on a localhost, but it doesn’t work very well in a work environment. Alternatively, SVN can be set up to use LDAP authentication. That’s okay…

Subversion Authentication Using Unix Creds

Here‘s a simple way to configure Subversion to authenticate  a user using Unix credentials (through http) with Apache, pwauth and mod_authnz_external. Its not really rocket science, and its not anything that others aren’t already doing (the post is over 3 years old), but it certainly is useful. I like authenticating Subversion users in this way…