For those of you who are fans of the text-based BitTorrent client rtorrent, it is worth noting that you can run its tracker communication traffic (though not its block exchange traffic) over an HTTP proxy of some kind by setting an environment variable http_proxy=http://some host:port/ before you start rtorrent. This appears to work because rtorrent is linked against libcurl to implement HTTP. However, please note that some BitTorrent trackers specifically disallow the use of proxies, and might penalize or ban you outright for doing so. If you want to do this, just set the above environment variable …
Never bolt the sides back onto a computer you're building until you're absolutely, positively, cutting-charge-wrapped-around-a-major-artery serious that it's working exactly the way it's supposed to. Installing a server in the rack before the systemware's installed and patched and the servers are up and running is a sure-fire way to provoke a hardware failure or hard drive crash.
When installing the heatsink/fan assembly of an Intel CPU designed for the LGA 775 socket, do not twist the fastening pins of the cooling unit to seat them. Just use a flat-headed screwdriver to push them straight down. Twisting them is only done to remove the cooling unit!
The only thing that Java coders spend more time on than the user interface is the code in the installer that detects which variant of the JRE you're running and errors out because there are three extra characters in the canonical name of the JRE binary? Wasn't the whole point of Java to have a language that could be implemented everywhere and execute in any runtime environment that adhered to the spec?
If you just look at the outside of a piece of hardware you can't tell if it's working or not, but if you open the housing to peek inside you will unquestionably break it.
Something that VMware quietly changed with the release of VMware Server v2.0 was that they deprecated the use of their stand-alone management console application - if you try to use it to connect to a v2.0 server it just won't work. What you need to do is plug the URL http://vmware-server-host:8222 or https://vmware-server-host:8333 into your web browser and log in with a user account that has admin privileges (which basically means that the account is part of the vmware group). If you're using Mozilla Firefox v3.5.x, the web interface will ask you to …
I've got a laundry list of stuff that I want to say, but every time I sit down to do so, they vanish utterly from my brain and it's really starting to piss me off. I don't know what's wrong with me lately.
Okay. Let's start with something that I picked up a while ago and never got around to writing up - it has to do with some software that Daniel J. Bernstein wrote a couple of years ago, namely, daemontools. Daemontools is a suite of utilities that was designed to keep tabs on network services running on …
