Recently I have been asked to write a Syslog event generator, but not just a normal syslog generator, it had to be able to generate events coming from different hosts. The normal ‘logger’ command sends Syslog messages using the machine’s IP address, so logger wasn’t very useful. The only thing useful seem to be, to…
Author: insaniac
Connect your home and company networks with OpenVPN
Introduction OpenVPN is an opensource Virtual Private Networking (VPN) solution which can be downloaded freely on the Internet. It also included in almost every Linux distro to-date, so it can be easily installed using your distro’s favourite package manager tools. It uses the SSL/TLS VPN stacks, which makes it different from almost every other VPN…
Geotag your photos with Perl and GPX files
Geotagging photos used to be a very expensive operation, since you needed special equipment, heavy antennas and especially: a lot muscles to carry all your extra gear. Nowadays, a lot of people have iPhone or like me, an Android phone. A descent Android phone contains a GPS device. A GPS device connected to a computer…
Generate thumbnails with Perl and Image Magick
Putting photos on a website has always been a pain. There were always a few steps you had to do, before they could be seen on your webpage. Of course, nowadays there are services like Flickr, Picassa, Panoramio, Facebook … but you still have to go through quite some steps before you pictures are online….
Recovering Subject column in Apple’s Mail.app
This weekend I had to install an Apple update, which seems to have updated the Mail.app. This new update caused the WideMail plugin not to work anymore (and so it got disabled). Normally this shouldn’t cause any problems, unless the software the poorly written. So the next time I’ve started the Mail.app, the Subject column…
Perl/Ajax with JSON
I just discovered this very interesting article about Perl, CGI, Template and Ajax using JSON. I’m going to use to beef up my image browser which I quickly wrote to simply the contents of directory full with images. (can be found overhere http://yamamoto.moretrix.com/~insaniac/grtp/ Here’s the link to the article.
Updating custom CPAN modules on Debian
On Debian based distributions, a handy tool called dh-make-perl can be installed to ease the installation of CPAN Perl modules on the system. This tool will create a Debian package of the CPAN module, and can also install this package automatically. The advantage of this procedure is that when the CPAN module is picked by…
Bash and the Screen
Beauty and the Beast When working in a UNIX/Linux/MacOSX environment, the command is often used to execute some tasks. The default shell in the Terminal.app (MacOSX) and in most other terminals, is the Bourne Again Shell aka bash. Bash is intended to be a conformant implementation of the Shell and Utilities portion of the IEEE…
Writing and reading to pipes (Perl)
When writing Perl scripts to automate shell tasks, file handlers will be used for reading files, writing to files, executing commands, redirecting output, … But these handlers can only be opened in one direction if they are created with the standard Perl subroutine open. In some cases it is actually required to create a two…
Perl, Facebook and GMail Contacts
There are probably already 13 in a dozen applications or websites that can do this, but I wanted to write one on my own, in the programming language I like: Perl. Nowadays writing programs for tasks concerning Web 2.0 alike websites, is rather simple and easy. The only thing you will have to do, is…