Category Archives: General

This is what I see if I look towards Chicago from the top of my apartment.. (some obvious and not well done manipulation done in the GIMP)

Several copies of W32.Sobig.E@mm have made their way to the mail server at work. Luckily, there’s a simple Procmail recipe to stop it. The above recipes use the Procmail E-mail Sanitizer by John Hardin to catch malicios content such as this virus.

This article about the lengths to which People in the UK go to to hide their televisions from the inspector introduced #LUNI to our (and our neighbour’s) TV licence system.

<seva> UncleDub: wtf are they talking about

“Let the buyer beware.”
I came across this and thought, ‘wow!’ Then I googled, and found this thread.

DON’T DEAL WITH THEM!!! They are All Liar’s, Cheaters, Shady dealers, and Rude to you!!

Hopefully I can make it to the Chicago SocialLUG tomorrow. It’s on in the Goose Island pub in Clyburn at 6pm.

Last night after work I walked down to Washington/Wells to catch the L home. At the station passengers were turned back by officials and told to go up to Merchandise Mart. No explanation was given as to why. Not being completely familiar with Chicago yet I walked north, following the train line and took a wrong turning. As I approached State/Clarke I saw a policeman directing traffic across the river, and noticed ambulances and that the road was blocked up ahead. I had the radio on (NPR – loud music after work irritates me!) and as I turned around I heard there had been a “pedestrian accident” on the L. I walked too far unfortunately, reaching the Green Line station at Clinton before consulting my map and turning back and north to Merchandise Mart. There we were told that no trains were heading south (back into town) but trains were running north. A train pulled in 5 minutes later, and everyone on the outbound side of the train station was told that the train was going north again. We all rushed over to the other side and headed home. I saw at least 3 south bound trains stopped on the brown line.
I heard on the train that a woman had been dragged under the L at a station, but I missed the news last night. Here’s the story from the Sun Times. Poor woman, really bad accident. 🙁

Woo! I was listening to Today FM (Irish radio station, available on todayfm.com) and the dj read out an email from an Irish person in Chicago! I immediately popped an email out to him and got a mention 10 minutes later! /me’s happy now!

If you ssh to hosts beyond a firewall or from within a NATted network then you’ll have noticed that SSH sessions timeout and get disconnected. I found that setting the TMOUT variable to 0 helped when not going through a firewall, and it must have been the firewall disconnecting an idle session otherwise.
Add this line to the sshd_config of the server and restart sshd. This will send a keep alive signal to the client every 360 seconds.

ClientAliveInterval 360

man 5 sshd_config will give you more information about that. This works in OpenSSH. I’m not sure if it’ll work elsewhere.

Having just turned 5 “Astronomy Picture of the Day” presents another great photo for you to feast your eyes on. At first I thought the moon had flipped on it’s side but it’s a very unusual solar eclipse!

Does Gnome comes with a standard sticky notes app? KDE does, but when I restart it in a Gnome environment it blanks out the screen and one of the notes gets corrupted and called “data”. I found this Sticky Notes app through Google for Gnome. It looks nice. I’ll road test it for a few days.