the reality tunnel

As part of my work at the Center for Research Libraries, I am investigating different Constituent Resource Management (CRM) systems.  One of the options is CiviCRM, a popular FLOSS CRM.  As CRL is, in large part, a membership organization, I wanted to see if it was possible to represent the basic information that we keep [...]

There are some interesting backup tools for system backups (Time Machine) but I want to just be able to copy and verify a directory (and its children).  I’ve heard that the commercial product Retrospect provides copy and verify functionality, but I’m cheap.
This is the method that I used.  I’d be interested on hearing feedback about [...]

I got a new MacBook from work and need to migrate files from my old Dell notebook running Xubuntu Linux.  Luckily, I had recovered a drive from a bricked machine that was donated to pages that I could use to transfer the files.
I don’t like the Fat32 file system, so I formatted the external drive [...]

I kept getting logjammed checking my personal e-mail at work, so I made separate profiles in Thunderbird for each.  However, every once in a while, I want to open both at once to monitor incoming e-mail from both my personal and work accounts.  In order to do this, you need to provide the -no-remote switch [...]

ghing@silvertongue:~/.mozilla/firefox/imtysl65.default/Cache$ ls -lh `find . -size +1M | file -f – | grep Flash | awk -F ‘:’ ‘{ printf “%s “, $1; }’`

Update: Photos of my planner! Mine is on the left, next to a moleskin to give you an idea of the relative size.  Below is what each day looks like.

I use Sandy for most of my calendaring, but don’t have a PDA or mobile phone with a convenient calendar app (and can’t afford one).  So, [...]

I’m running debian lenny/sid with  kernel 2.6.26-1 on my workstation and for a while, my audio hasn’t been working in most applications (I was most annoyed by the lack of sound in flash), though it has been working in amarok.  I was getting error messages like this when trying to do audio playback.  These particular [...]

Extracting from a vimball
From http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=1502

Users of a vimball archive simply need to
:vim something.vba
:so %
and the contents of the vimball will be extracted and placed into the proper directories, no matter where the user opened up the vimball. Furthermore, the helptags command will be automatically and transparently used to make any doc/*.txt files’ contents available [...]

I finally got off my butt and fixed a few things that had been driving me nuts with the settings on my workstation.
Weird KDE copy/select behavior
First, I use KDE, and the copy and paste behavior was driving me nuts.  If I copied text in an application with ctrl-c and then selected text with the mouse, [...]

Having a job at the university means that I have access to hardware that I can’t afford to buy for myself.  My coworker was getting a new video card for his workstation and they just ordered me one too.  The card is an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS PCI Express card manufactured by Chaintech.
Downloading the Driver
I [...]