I needed a shell script that runs every 5 minutes but I only wanted it to do something when a status changes. In this case, I wanted it to log some information to the system log but I didn’t want it to fill up the log with redundant entries. Here’s the pattern I came up [...]

I recently had a hard drive go bad on me which actually turned out to be a motherboard going bad. The hard drive may be fine but I don’t want to take any chances, and anyway, you can buy 1 terabyte now for about $70 US. There was definitely something goofy going on with access [...]

Information on changing the default Gnome terminal size is out there but it is scattered and scarce. I have two 20 inch monitors. The default size (80×24) is too small. Here’s how you can change the default. This applies to all launchers, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts: Run gconf-editor Open desktop → gnome → applications [...]

I use an automated deployment script for BigHugeLabs.com. I’ll regularly do around 10 deployments every day so it’s important that the system has as much automation as possible. The deploy script builds CSS and JS files, updates shared libraries, deploys files to several locations, and does some testing. One test I recently added was an [...]