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Linux and Unix administration and troubleshooting articles, help and inspiration for freelancers and the self employed, advice on blogging, SEO and earning money on-line.

Not a significant source of information concerning Microsoft products. Primary author is an opinionated Mac OS X and Linux Evangelist.

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May contain liberal opinion, small dashes of politics and some crankiness as well as the occasional grin. Contains Skill Tests, Unix and Linux Consultant Listings and more.

This site is not recommended for total n00bies or real gurus. N00bies may be overwhelmed and true gurus will be bored.

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Most recent posts:

Facebook Poker

For the past week I've been playing Hold-em on Facebook. Let's make one thing perfectly clear immediately: this is nothing at all like playing poker with real money. ..

Web/HTML 2/6/2010 Tony Lawrence

Why the iPad IS important

The iPad is still not much more than pages on Apple's web site, but already some folks are telling us that it's unimportant, a bust, a no-show, insufficient, ill-conceived and all that. That some of those nay-sayers cast similar barbs at the iPhone could be amusing, but I wouldn't argue against most of the complaints: they are absolutely correct that Apple's new device has warts. ..

MacOSX 1/29/2010 Tony Lawrence

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Lan sniffing with a DualComm port mirroring switch and Windump

I was recently contracted to help another consultant sniff a customers network for suspicious activity. The situation was that the customer had been put on blacklists because some internal machine had apparently been compromised and was sending out spam. ..

Security 1/19/2010 Tony Lawrence

Google Custom Search Promotions

Google's Custom Search engine is generally accurate at finding the results I'd like it to find when searching this site. However, sometimes it doesn't find what really is the best result. Until now, there hasn't been much you could do about that. ..

Blogging 1/14/2010 Tony Lawrence

Mac OS X Scrabble Word Trainer with Growl

i have also been playing with strangers. When I first started that, I was a little shocked by some of the word usage. In our family games, we had never allowed slang, abbreviations, or foreign words. If you had a Q and no U, you were stuck - there was no QI or QAT or QANAT in our games. Isn't that why a Q is worth 10 points? If al it takes is an I to play it, it shouldn't be worth much more than H, should it? ..

MacOSX 1/11/2010 Tony Lawrence

Basic TrueCrypt Usage

I and other people here have mentioned TrueCrypt before. I thought (and perhaps you did too) that it was very simple and obvious to use but I've had several people write to me complaining that they downloaded and installed it, but have no idea what to do next. ..

Basics 1/7/2010 Tony Lawrence

Internet Scrabble

Our family has recently discovered online Scrabble through Facebook.. We've been a Scrabble playing family for many decades; we all love the game, but we are seldom all together to play and even when we are, we usually have other things to do. ..

Web/HTML 1/2/2010 Tony Lawrence

Detecting Comment Spam Part 3

In the previous posts in this series, I've said that spammers habits allow us to detect their attempts to leave inappropriate comments. I use these techniques here and am able to send most spam comments directly to the bit-bucket without ever having to examine them myself. When I suspect spam but am not sure, I just send the comment to moderation. In practice, very few spam attempts get by the automatic filters. ..

Web/HTML 1/23/2010 Tony Lawrence

Detecting Comment Spam Part 2

In part 1, I talked about code to read a list of spammish words from a file and look for those words in comment posts. Commenters pointed out that spammers will obfuscate words with dashes, spaces, bizarre spellings and so on, making it very difficult to catch these programmatically. That's true, but there's more to the story. ..

Web/HTML 1/23/2010 Tony Lawrence

Detecting Comment Spam Part 1

Suppose you were writing a commenting system for a website and you wanted to check user input against a list of words that might indicate spam. You'd want the list of suspicious words in a file and you'd run through that list. An easy way to do that in Perl is to use Perl's "grep" command. ..

Web/HTML 12/21/2009 Tony Lawrence

Unix and Linux startup scripts, Part 3

We looked at both System V and BSD methods; until fairly recently that would have been the end of the discussion: if you were running Unix/Linux, your system used one or the other of these. Not everyone was satisfied, though ..

Linux 12/14/2009 Tony Lawrence

Moved Host

We've moved APLawrence.com to a new web host. If you are reading this, you are on the new host. ..

Web/HTML 12/10/2009 Tony Lawrence

Unix and Linux startup scripts, Part 2

The rc.d system is used on NetBSD, FreeBSD and DragonFly (and possibly a few other systems) to launch daemon processes when the system goes multiuser and terminate them properly at system shut down. In the interests of brevity this article will not examine the system comprehensively: rather, this guide is focussed solely on adding new scripts to control additional daemons or perform other tasks at start up and shut down. Even with this narrow focus I will not attempt a comprehensive treatment, but this guide should suffice for most common tasks and still remain brief enough to read when you actually need to write such a script. ..

Linux 12/9/2009 Andrew Smallshaw

Unix and Linux startup scripts, Part 1

I wrote Automating Program Startup almost 10 years ago. A lot has changed since then and I realized that this has actually become a fairly complicated subject when I tried to answer a forum post that simply asked about starting an arbitrary service. Because that poster used "httpd" as an example and was using a Fedora system, several answers mentioned "chkconfig". That's the right answer if we are specifically asking about httpd on a Fedora system, but it's not the right answer for any arbitrary service on any arbitrary Unix or Linux system. ..

Linux 12/9/2009 Tony Lawrence

Budgeting with Mint.com

Mint works by you allowing it to access your bank and credit card accounts. That right there is enough to turn off most people, but as they explain at their privacy faq, money can't be transferred with Mint and all they need is your email - no names or other personally identifiable information. They argue that they actually increase your security by being able to notify you of any unusual activity in your various accounts. ..

Employment 12/9/2009 Tony Lawrence

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