Random musings in IT

This is the second article in my 21 day blogging marathon. It is not quite as polished, as it could be. Join the marathon by adding meaningful comments all the way! I use a quite old, and battered Acer laptop with an I5 2nd generation processor and a "feeble" 8GB memory, for my personal…

This post is for summarizing the information about the time-lapse movie I mentioned in my earlier posts titled Using a standard web camera to capture a time-lapse on Linux and Compiling UVC driver for Linux with still image support. As it turns out this topic is one that was actually read by…

To support my web camera project and enable it to use higher resolutions I need to patch the UVC driver in the kernel with still image support found on https://github.com/yangh/uvcvideo. First the chages made in that project to the standard UVC driver were merged with the driver in 3.0.4 kernel I'm…

As I see there is a solid movement to reform the user interfaces that are in use in our computers. After all the menu bars with a start menu are on the mainstream desktops since the win95/OS2 era. And the programs can be started using icons on the desktop and the start menu. For the ones who know…

I started playing MafiaWars on my last job, where I had time to spare. As it has happened in the past with me playing on a mud, when the game got repetitive I start writing tools to speed things up.When I was on the mud I used macro-enabled clients, like tintin++ to perform simple tasks for me.…

After setting up VirtalBox based virtualization on our server, I needed a way to have it automatically started and stopped whenever the host is restarted. Also it would be for the better if the system was not simply started and stopped, but rather saved and restored when possible. I love scripting,…

After migrating our hosted application to a virtual server I realized, that as usual the system is a "maintenance free" Linux, meaning we set it up as it were and left it running for ages without touching it. On the occasion of power failure the applications were started manually. As I don't want…

We host the server for a legacy application in our office. Since it's more like a favor than a real assignment we don't care much about the server. However we had a few network issues lately, so we decided to migrate it to a virtual server running on our hosted server. Also the machine produces…

What could make one's Saturday morning better, than a slight hangover? Well idling through a few mail folders, reading a few log messages and discovering that your server has been hacked for over three days is not the thing, for sure. Being a  bit on the paranoid side, I have a few tools up and…

My dad found this puppy on the street. Someone decided to get rid of it, and put it out for grabs. Since it's a nice compact looking machine we decided to give it a spin. Originally the computer ran DOS, and judging from the software I found on it, it was used by someone visually challenged, for…