Creating User Account With Empty Password on Linux

, 2 min read

Assume you want to set-up a user-account which can only log-in to your machine if he sits in front of it and has to give no password. Let's name this user kiosk. Unfortunately there is apparently no single command-line switch to accomplish this with useradd. The task at hand is not be confused with…

Splitting Large Files on Microsoft Windows

, 2 min read

After finishing my ABAP programming course I wanted to upload the Netweaver-trial software to Telekom media-center. Telekom media-center allows you to store up to 25 GB of data in the cloud. That's more storage than offered by many USB sticks. Netweaver-trial software is about 3.5 GB, and…

Microsoft Brought Down No-IP.org With Federal Court Order

, 2 min read

Microsoft brought down no-ip.org and many other domains with a court order. Here is the text from No-IP’s Formal Statement on Microsoft Takedown: We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning,…

7-Day Week, 6-Day Week, 5-Day Week, Soviet Calendar

, 2 min read

In the year 2010 I read Martin Varsavsky's blog entry on The 6 Day Week by Carlos Varsavsky. In this post Martin Varsavsky states his father, born in 1933, proposed the 6-day week, i.e., work 4 days and rest 2 days. To cope for the reduced productivity, it is proposed to interleave the 6-day week…

Facebook Was Down on 19-Jun-2014

, 1 min read

Something you don't see that often: Facebook was down today, see start page below. Now Facebook is up again. It reminds me of the monkey web-page from Google/YouTube.

Setting-Up LUKS/dm-crypt for External USB-Drive

, 1 min read

The following commands are used to encrypt the whole USB hard-drive. This hard-drive is assumed to be on /dev/sdc. Create one partition. One can use gparted for this. Then cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdc1 luksFormat is only used once. To make this encrypted drive available as device on /dev/mapper…

Installing Missing Debian Packages for Google Chrome

, 1 min read

This is how I install Google Chrome, as I do not like Google to add automatic cron-jobs. I unpack the Debian package. mkdir T cd T dpkg -x ../google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb.140525 . Switch to root. mv ~User/Download/T/opt/google /opt chown -R bin:bin /opt/google mkdir…

Patching Faulty EDID Information

, 2 min read

Some computer monitors either do not provide correct EDID, or no EDID at all. An example monitor is LG E2340T. In this case you can provide a hand-crafted EDID file in xorg.conf. For setting the correct screen resolution in the EDID file you can either use a hex-editor, or use below short C…

Simple Exercises for a C Programming Language Course

, 3 min read

I sometimes teach a C programming language course. I use the following simple exercises for the students to solve on their own. Most solutions are no longer than 10-20 lines of C code. Exercising simple loop and printf(): Print a table of square root values for arguments 1 to 30. Exercising…

Statistics of this Blog: Crossed 5.000 Views

, 1 min read

In three earlier posts I showed the development of this blog. Statistics of this Blog: 2.600 Views, 78 Countries, 20 Comments, February 2014 Statistics of this Blog: 1.000 Views, 60 Countries, 10 Likes, October 2013 My Blog Statistics by Country, September 2013 Today I can announce that I crossed…

Announcement: Workshop Programming of Heterogeneous Systems in Physics, July 2014

, 1 min read

This workshop is planned for 14-15 July 2014 in Jena, Germany. The workshop is organized by Bernd Brügmann (University Jena), Xing Cai (Simula and University Oslo), Gundolf Haase (University Graz), and Gerhard Zumbusch (Chair, University Jena). The last workshop from 2011 had two high-profile…

Defeating Annoying Timeout in OpenShift SSH Access

, 2 min read

One simple way to get rid of the very short timeout in shell access to OpenShift is to unset the TMOUT environment variable: unset TMOUT Before I knew that I used an Expect script. Below Expect script defeats the annoying timeout by sending some text every 60 seconds. #!/usr/bin/expect # Defeat…

Installing Ubuntu 14.04 Server Edition

, 4 min read

I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) on my new 2TB hard drive. I do not use the desktop variant of Ubuntu because I think it is too bloated. Rather I specifically install packages as needed. Below is a list of packages I install after the server edition. jpilot, of course, see my posts…

Syncing with J-Pilot via Bluetooth

, 4 min read

Probably I am a little bit old-fashioned, but I still use J-Pilot on my PC and my Tungsten T5 and sync them. It mostly serves as a kind of backup so I have my valuable address and datebook data on separate media. So in case my PC gets inaccessible then I have my data on this device at least. These…

Youtube video to mp3

, 1 min read

Assume you want to download just the music of below video on Youtube, so you can listen to the music on your phone, while you are on the road. Here are the necessary steps on the command line: youtube-dl www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHjpOzsQ9YI mv Crystallize\ -\ Lindsey\ Stirling\ \(Dubstep\ Violin\…

Enabling Power-Aware Applications on Linux Using Cyrogenic Module

, 1 min read

A post in Phoronix: "Cryogenic" Linux Kernel Drops Power Use shed light on a Linux kernel module improving power consumption. This module was written as part of a master thesis in computer science at TUM (Technical University of Munich) by Alejandra Morales Ruiz. The thesis is well…

Calculating number of seats in parliament using d'Hondt's method

, 3 min read

Wikipedia contains an article on d'Hondt's method for calculating the number of seats given the number of votes for each party. I wrote a short Perl program for its calculation including the case when d'Hondt's method by its design leads to drawing the lots. Its input contains a list of party names…

[STORY] Lufthansa Airbus A380 Landing in San Francisco

, 1 min read

Very nice article on http://pilotseye.tv/ Added on 20-Mar-2014: Original blog post, which was reblogged here, apparently has been deleted. So I put a video from PilotsEYE here: -- -- -- Quote -- -- -- I have always been interested in flying and aviation. I recently found an…

Statistics of this Blog: 2.600 Views, 78 Countries, 20 Comments

, 2 min read

In two previous posts My Blog Statistics by Country and Statistics of this Blog: 1.000 Views, 60 Countries, 10 Likes I showed the statistics of this blog in September and October last year. The last few weeks I was quite heavily loaded with work, so I couldn't announce that I broke the 2.000…

Scheduling Cron Jobs on Business Days

, 2 min read

I found a marvelous way to run jobs on certain business days via cron. The solution was depicted in Scheduling Cron Jobs on Business Days and it was written by a user named rdcwayx. The idea is to use the output of cal and some Awk or Perl string-trickery. The output of cal looks like this …



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