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The new rm -rf /
There are many urban legends out there talking about n00bs asking a *nix related question and getting the answer just do rm -rf / from the terminal (by the way, you don’t want to do that – it tries to recursively erase all the files from your hard-drives – in general when you get advice…
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Kernel 2.6.24 + PostgreSQL != love?
It seems so. The sad thing is that at the moment Ubuntu Server 8.04 (LTS) comes with 2.6.24… Ouch. Hopefully the patches will trickle down quickly. Also, note to myself: newer is not always better. Update: back to the future – 2.6.24. Thank you Marcin for pointing it out. Also corrected the tags.
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Installing Perl 5.10 on Ubuntu
So I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 and I’m not very impressed unfortunately. I got Compiz working, thanks to Compiz-Check (it works only at lower resolutions, so I switched it off, however it’s nice to have the option) and also Monodevelop 1.0, however the installed Firefox is slightly outdated (Beta 5 rather than RC1) and sound…
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Test for available modules in Perl
As I mentioned earlier the difference between use and require is that the second is evaluated only at execution time, making it possible to test if a given module was imported successfully. One possible use for this is to make your script deployable on multiple machines where you might or might not have the option…
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Mixed links and commentary
MS Office took a page out of IdeaJ’s book and uses every available method to annoy users (check for valid licenses) – on the bright side hopefully I will time to update my machine to Ubuntu 8.04 today 🙂 The Backup Song. Very, very funny! Writing a small web crawler in Python. Why it demonstrates…
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Perl split gotcha
One of those things which are spelled out in the documentation, but most people (including myself) don’t really read the fine manual, until really, really forced to, and from the way it’s described, it’s not immediately clear how it can byte you. From perldoc: Empty trailing fields, on the other hand, are produced when there…
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The difference between use and require in Perl
Contrary to PHP (if you ever used it), require is the more dynamic one of the two. Both statements are used to import modules, however use is executed compile time (ie when the parser runs through the script), and require is executed when the actual line is evaluated. Generally speaking you should use use (:-)),…
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The problem with amateur crimefighters
I wish to preface this with the fact that I am a deep believer in cooperation and data sharing. Also, I really appreciate the work that volunteers put into maintaining different resources (like the excellent CastleCops forums). But you have to remember that these people are not professionals and sometimes don’t have a complete understanding…
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An alternative for Perl heredoc’s
Perl has (true to its motto – there more than one way to do it) many methods for declaring string. Here are a few: The single quote (‘) – does not interpolate variables, does not understand escape sequences (like n for newline) The double quote (“) – interpolates variables (replaces $foo with the value of…
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Web Applicaiton Firewalls – are they usefull?
I was looking through a presentation by .mario about PHPIDS (embedded below for your convenience), which got me thinking about Web Application Firewalls (or WAFs for short). Currently I don’t see very much value in WAFs. My way of thinking goes something like this – there are two types of web applications you might run…