Category: Uncategorized

In my short running series extremely obscure pieces of code that hopefully someone else in the universe will find useful I bring you a pre-commit hook for subversion that checks to make sure your sudoers file has correct syntax. This is useful for us because we have a very large sudoers file and once commited…

Every now and then you come across a genuine new command that you haven’t heard of before that does something useful. lshw lists basically everything hardware related you would want to know about a new box you have just jumped on to. It is extremely detailed and easy to read and should be available with…

Flickr-CAPTCHA is a captcha program that uses flickr images and tags to decide whether someone is human. A random thing is selected (from a list of things) and a random number of flickr images are chosen a long with a set of decoys. Each decoy contains at least one other thing in order to prevent…

While working on my python test-sudoers script I realised I would need to query NSS netgroups. I went looking for a python module that would do that, and I found the nis module but this wasn’t really what I was after. The NIS module allows you to query NIS netgroups if you have a NIS…

I wrote a quick script called test-sudoers.py which reads a sudoers file and can answer questions like “what commands can a particular user run on a particular host?” and “can a particular user run a command?”. The latter is particularly useful because using return codes that can be scripted and allow certain actions based on…

I’m selling my Sony Vaio SZ15GP on EBay, if you know anyone in the market for one send them the listing.

Guide for SUSE linux.

Youtube video of man trying to jump a river.

Windows has two modes of talking to IDE devices, PIO mode and DMA mode. DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode is far faster and more CPU efficient, however it automatically gets disabled after a certain number of errors as a fallback position to take on a drive that can’t do DMA or a bad cable. The…

Then at some point they decided to build the world’s tallest tower, and a tower that has turbines inbetween each level and can rotate.