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 …

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 …

With traditional Unix sort(1), the size of the files you can sort is limited by the amount of available main memory. As soon as the file gets larger and your system has to swap, performance degrades significantly. Even GNU sort which uses temporary files to get around this limitation …

Last week I ran into a nasty little problem while implementing an application with soft real-time requirements. I was aiming at 1 ms or less for a TCP-based request-response roundtrip on a local network. Should be trivial, but why did my tests indicate that I wasn't even getting close?

The …

Half a year ago, I bought an Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook. The first thing I did was wiping Windows XP off the disk and installing Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix. When I bought the netbook, I knew support for the wireless chip (AR928X, according to lspci) was limited, but things …

For a long time, Gnuplot has been my tool of choice for plotting diagrams. The diagrams it produces out of the box look very scientific, but it takes a lot of tweaking to produce something that's visually pleasing. I got used to Gnuplot's weird ways but I was never entirely …

A few weeks ago I wanted to enable digest authentication on an Apache 2.2 web server. I got basic authentication working within minutes, but I didn't want to send plain text passwords over the web, so how difficult could it be?

I followed some tutorial on the net but …

One of the most often read postings on this blog is the one about my getopts-enabled shell script template. So I figured, a similar template in Python would also be useful. Like the shell script, it's quite trivial, but it might still save some time.

The template is an example …

Usually, I download all my email via fetchmail, sort it into folders using procmail and read the mails with mutt. This works reasonably well and I've been using this mail setup without major changes for about 10 years. Since I recently bought a netbook, I also wanted to read mails …

Once in a while, I install Python packages from source using distutils. The distutils-powered setup.py script found in many packages installs software in /usr/local/ - quite useful because it doesn't interfere with packages managed by your distribution. Since Ubuntu Jaunty and Python 2.6, this doesn't work anymore.

Previously …