Many scientific papers use Latex for formatting. There exists an Latex class called IEEEtran which "produce high quality typeset papers" (example here). Besides from being nice, it is also a requirement for many conferences/journals to submit papers using this class. But how do we install it on Ubuntu/Debian?

I really would like to have an encrypted swap and home partition on my laptop. In case it gets stolen or if I should forget it somewhere, I can be sure that no-one would be able to read my private files. In this mini-howto I set my home partition using LVM, but using a regular partition should work just fine. This howto should also work, with minor modification, if you use another distribution than Ubuntu.

I received a Mac Mini today. We plan to use it as part of our lab setup here at work. The box is pretty small and compact. It's quite cheap too.

It will primarily be running some flavor of Linux, but I plan to install Windows Vista ("Business" version) and OSX Leopard on it as well. This way I can quickly test all three OSes if needed. So how do we set up triple boot on this box? It turns out to be quite easy.

At my last place, I had a dedicated room full of servers. It was lovely mix of cra^Wold hardware running various flavors of Linux, BSD and Solaris. At my new place, we didn't have that much space so I was forced to do a cleanup. I bought a powerful server with sufficient RAM, CPU and disk. Now I have one server and a whole bunch of virtual machines running on it. (Throw in a couple of Linksys devices running openwrt and dd-wrt and I was happy.) There was one "problem" - the server had to be placed out on the balcony. It has been running out there for over a year now - how did that go?

Unix sysadmin and never heard of Munin? Good news for you: You have a great tool waiting. Munin monitors your servers, stores the results and generates pretty graphs for you to interpret. Munin itself is written in Perl, but uses plugins, written in language of choice, to fetch relevant data. The default install comes with a number plugins that works out-of-the-box - most of them written in Perl or shell. But some plugins, or services, require manual intervention to work. Bind is such a service, so let's see how we can monitor Bind with Munin.

I've been on the lookout for a decent webcam. After some searching, the choice fell on Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, which should be supported according to the Linux UVC driver page. It's not one of the cheaper models, but not the most expensive either. It also has "HD-quality" (which in this case translates to resolution up to 1600x1200). So how does this camera works under Linux?

Soon Christmas and still no snow? Since there hasn't been a decent cold and white winter here for years, it's a little hard to get that Christmas mood. Luckily, we have computer tools that can help us out.

SELinux introduces a new access control mechanism in the Linux kernel called "mandatory access control". It has been in the mainline Linux kernel since 2003, and included in RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 (2005). RedHat have been testing SELinux for quite some time through the Fedora releases, where it has been available since Fedora 2 (2004). RedHat is aggressively pushing the development of SELinux and relevant tools forward. From RHEL version 4 to 5 the targeted policy includes more services, added support for a modular policy, (graphical) administrations tools and support for MLS. But what are the performance penalties when running with and without SELinux enabled?

Update 3. Nov 2007: Dug up some more interesting stuff.

The "holiday cracking" story got far more attention than I ever would have imagined. If I had known it would get so massive attention, I sure would have done a more throughly job. Interestingly, after the posting I have received some pretty interesting feedback - even an email from the cracker himself! It sure helps getting on Slashdot and posted on Bruce Schneier's blog!

Let's improve the Bash prompt even further from my last post. I want to see the exit status of the last command in the bash prompt.

I've been working with a lot of different RHEL-boxes lately, and I've (yet again) been frustrated with the default RedHat Bash-prompt. It is an easy fix, but its tiresome to change every time.

The Nintendo DS (NDS) is more than powerful enough to play several old PC games. Some porting is required, and luckily a lot of people have already done that. Usually, you just need the game files (which means you must either own the originally game, use the shareware version or, check if it's abandonware). It's time for a trip down memory lane trying out some old classics.

After getting my own DSX memory card for running homebrews (read earlier blog entry here), it's time to fire up Linux. Getting Linux to run on the NDS was no problem at all, but it's still quite limited. At least when using the memory card DSX.

As of June 2007, 47 million Nintendo DS units has been sold. That's quite an impressive number, and has been the fastest selling platform in Europe. As soon as I got my hands on one of these units, I started looking for ways to use "homebrews" (= software written for the NDS usually published for free).

The BASH shell has several environment variables that can be manipulated. The PATH variable is well known. Another useful variable is CDPATH. As PATH is a list of search paths for commands, so is CDPATH a list of directories used as search path for the "cd" command.