I have two Ubuntu 10.04 virtual appliances. One, Machine A, sits on my own computer; the other, B, is on the computer I got from work. I want to keep them perfectly identical, so I can move between computers as easily as if I were always on the same machine. I think I found a [...]

The problem: I now use two laptop computers -- my own and the one I got from work. I have been wondering for a while if there was an easy way to deploy the same home environment across different physical machines given that you would need it for some reasons, but not for others. For [...]

My main trouble with UNIX is that I'll go looking for a quick answer, find it, and then somehow still keep digging until I'm utterly stumped, long after I solved the initial problem. Here's one example: On the recommendation of my friend Bálint Érdi, I signed on with Dropbox, and I figured one good use [...]

If you run a virtual Linux machine as a VMware appliance, and you have VMWare Tools installed, you can let it write to folders accessible from the Windows host. This takes two steps. First, in VMware Player (as of 3.0) you edit the virtual machine settings -- enable Shared Folders in the Options tab, and [...]

This is a revision of my earlier assessment that tsclient is so slow it's useless. The thing came back to life somehow and it looks like it's thanks to either Dell or Microsoft. I upgraded to Karmic over Christmas with some hope that it might fix tsclient, but nothing changed. Then the server in Atlanta [...]

My migration to Ubuntu has just hit a major snag. I spend most of my work day connected to a Windows Server 2003 machine sitting in a colocation facility in Atlanta. I write and run Stata code on it, use the MS Office products, a bit of Gmail -- the usual stuff. As it turns [...]

The books I'm reading these days come with examples of code, saved on associated web sites. Sometimes that code is neatly packaged into a zip archive or tarball, with every piece of code sitting in a directory named after the chapter it was referenced in. But other times these web sites have the code sitting [...]

Today I had to install TOra with Oracle support. That was interesting. TOra is on the Synaptic list, but if you install it from there you only get PostgreSQL support. For anything else you need to build TOra from source. Instructions are here, courtesy of Brad Hudson. Follow them. In particular, do not skip installing [...]

Windows 7 has been officially launched after favorable pre-release reviews, but my own hankering has been to eventually replace my Windows XP Pro with some kind of UNIX. After a brief look at PC-BSD, I kind of fell into using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for most of the year on my testing machine. Over the weekend [...]

I have 10 days or so before the fall semester at NC State starts, and with it an online course on assembly language. So in the meantime I thought I'd visit here and learn me some Python. I like that the lessons come with problem sets. OK, so that's the setup for this post, which [...]