Some themes add a copyright notice using a technique also seen in hack scripts. They take the PHP code, and the base64 encode it, and gzip it.

I got a message to run modprobe vboxdrv, but didn't seem to have the vboxdrv driver.

The following command will run the script, and then keep running the script after you log out.

nohup ./somescript.sh &

For some legal reasons, Ubuntu does not ship with some important features in ffmpeg enabled. It appears that support for faac AAC encoding is stripped.

Setting up ProFTPd with MySQL isn't "hard" per-se, but the most popular tutorial at Khoosys is kind of complex.

http://www.khoosys.net/single.htm?ipg=848

It has users, groups, quotas, and a lot of accounting.  So the tables are numerous and there are a lot of queries involved.

There are different theories on why Open Source succeeds or fails (and opinions on whether it's succeeding or failing). The most common is not a theory at all, but the idea of "giving back to the community": that companies will give away assets because they're receiving assets for free from the community. It sounds nice, but, it's a really weak idea.

If you don't have Windows around anymore, and you need to flash your BIOS, you need to figure out a way to make a bootable floppy.

If you don't have a floppy, you can make a bootable CD.

Exim4's docs need some work, especially the split config.

First, you need to make a new config file /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/000_localmacros

Then, in the file:

I had to send out some mass emails, and because the site had been taken off the collective server, the only installed, configured copy of PHPList I had was on an internal server.

I was testing a new product called Mailarchiva, and I misunderstood the instructions. The upshot was that a mailbox full of messages was moved into Mailarchiva, and I wanted to restore them to the mailbox.

After doing some research on the subject, I was totally confused about Cisco terminal cables. These are just regular serial cables, with with all kinds of weird "cisco-y" features. The big tutorials on the web really confuse the issue by trying to cover every possible type of cable.

It's pretty simple to set up Skype (dynamic) on Ubuntu 9.10 (beta). I think all the 32bit libraries are installed by default. If they aren't, check out Daryl Dawkins' page about running it on Fedora.

The one oddity I experienced is that you need to run the skype program from within the skype directory. The following script does that - my Skype is installed in ~/bin, my personal bin folder.

A couple odd things happened recently. I was trying to set up Mailscanner on an Ubuntu box, and when I got to the project's site, it said to uninstall the Ubuntu package, and install their package. Lacking time, I didn't do that, but it made me think, "what's the point then?" I wanted the distro version because it updates itself automatically.

The same thing happened with NetBeans. The user-contributed Ubuntu package integration crashed a lot. The Sun version didn't.

GiSTEQ sells a GPS data recorder called the TripBook that is powered by a car's cig lighter. The magic is in the software that figures out the distances. Just to see, I tried to get Linux to talk to it. It did, and it worked as a GPS, spitting out NMEA sentences.

This is one of those problems that has been solved, but, it's been solved in incomplete ways so many times that these not-too-useful answers outnumber the useful answers, totally messing up web searches. This consequently seeds the idea that this is an intractable problem! Even at stackoverflow, they say it's really tough.

This is the opposite of so-called "collective intelligence". It's collective stupidity.