Archive for August, 2008
‘pkill’ – the lazy mans ‘kill’
Posted by Ken in Uncategorized on August 15, 2008
sfullenwider on his blog talks about the kill command, often used to terminate rogue processes. It requires a PID however to be useful, and finding PIDs are too much of a pain for lazy people such as myself. I use a much easier and powerful alternative named pkill. pkill allows you to pass the equivalent kill command without knowing the processes PID. Most notably I used pkill to kill processes by their process name such as:
pkill -9 fire This of course matches any processes with ‘fire’ in them, specifically I am trying to kill firefox after it’s been possessed by a flash applet gone evil. pkill is a lot more powerful than this simple example, although I’ve never bothered to try anything more than simple regex name matching.
OpenDNS with NetworkManager
If you are like me, you roam around with Wi-Fi or your ISP’s DNS servers just really suck. NetworkManager has the habit of ignoring /etc/conf.d/net here and uses the crappy DNS servers. No more! To use OpenDNS simply add this to your /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf
supersede domain-name “opendns.com”; prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220; Now OpenDNS should be working for any access point you connect to. Enjoy the freedom.
In search of a laptop bag for a student…
So I’m in the need of a laptop bag for when I leave for college. At the moment I can’t decide on any bookbag/backpack designed for a laptop to buy. Needs to hold a decent amount of garbage plus keep my 15.4″ lappy safe. If anyone has any recommendations please let me know!
KeePassX woes
The following error occurred while opening the database: Unknown error while loading database. This is what I was just greeted to after trying to open my KeePassX database. The problem? I just recently emerged KeePassX 0.3.2 from portage. I’m glad whoever maintains this checked if you can even open an existing database…sigh. My Solution? Well I rescued the old ebuild from cvs and emerged it. Behold! The database opened right up after entering my password. So I’ll export this database as a KeePassX XML file. This should work hopefully… Nope. After saving the new database it still ain’t working. Hrmm.. Let’s run a revdep-rebuild just in case something got broken along the way. It comes up clean, so this isn’t the option. OK, maybe TwoFish is simply broken with the new version. Let’s try with AES encryption… Success. It seems for now TwoFish is broken on my Gentoo system with the new KeePassX. I wonder if this is an issue that is affecting others? It seems there is a bug open at sourceforge about it.
Finished AlcoholEdu
Well I took and completed my required AlcoholEdu course yesterday online after messing around with getting flash working. It was pretty meh. Filled with surveys that mostly assumed you drink so you can’t really answer them if you are like me and don’t drink at all. Suddenly halfway throughout the course I randomly needed Java for an error page it seems which totally ticked me off, but I digress. Apparently if you enable closed captioning (which I did as it’s easier to read and listen than simply listening to something) the course is broken around module 2, after you learn about BAC levels. Switching captions off let me proceed throughout the course. All in all the course was easy albeit massively boring. Towards the latter part I just started blasting techno music to keep me occupied while I finished up the exam.