Occasionally I want to transfer a file from my Linux desktop machine to one of my Android-based devices via my home network. Shouldn't be a problem, there are lots of networking protocols for this, right? In practice, many solutions you think of aren't convenient enough for daily use.

Services like …

From time to time, the virtual server I rented acted up. When logging into the system, I would get error messages indicating the server wasn't able to create any more processes: "cannot fork". This was weird because ps(1) showed only 20 processes, while the hard limit of the virtual …

I'm currently setting up my new Laptop with Ubuntu Natty. Apart from all the things I hate in Unity (the list is long), there's one recurring annoyance: the blinking cursor in Gnome Terminal. There's no menu setting to disable it, but fortunately, there's still a way to fix it.

You …

OpenID is a great concept but what I don't like is that I tie myself to a specific identity provider. Suppose the provider goes out of business or doesn't support OpenID anymore. Of course, I could set up my own private identity provider but I'm lazy and I don't want …

Despite all the problems I had with Ubuntu updates over the last couple of years, I decided to update my work machine to Ubuntu 11.04 ("Natty Narwhal"). I expected problems and I wasn't disappointed, after the upgrade I was left standing in the dark, without X.

Fortunately, the rest …

A colleague asked me to recommend some books on software design. That's a good opportunity to have a look at this particular part of my bookshelf and select a few highlights. As usual, you can't go wrong by reading Fowler, but let's see what we've got.

Ranging on the border …

Finding duplicate files is easy, anyone can do it. Finding files that are almost identical is more difficult, but it's useful for use cases like detecting plagiarism. In this article, I'll present a simple python program that calculates the textual similarity of two documents.

The basic idea is to reduce …

2011 may not be the year when IPv4 addresses finally run out, but the reserves are running low enough to warrant large IPv6 transition projects. Access providers and domain hosters will see the effects first because the growth of their businesses depends directly on the supply of new IP addresses …

When I'm at my desk I use an external LCD monitor with my netbook. I'm glad that switching displays finally works on Linux, but even on Ubuntu it takes a lot of clicks in the Monitors menu. Fortunately, I found a way to map this to keyboard shortcuts.

The following …

Computer science and software development are two entirely different things. The former is a science, the latter is mostly craftsmanship, still struggling to become an engineering discipline in its own right. Being a good computer scientist doesn't make you a good software developer and vice versa, but as a software …