Blog :: Random Tech Tidbits

The following is just a list of tech stuff I've discovered in the last month and haven't have time to mention. Non linux users may feel free to skip this.

I hung out on the #pear channel on efnet irc for while. Watching the chatter I noticed lots of people using pastebin.com to collaboratively edit code snippets. Very nice! Syntax highlighting, diffs between versions, the ability to highlight lines... Pasting code into a gaim window can be annoying, using pastebin makes discussing snippets a bit easier.

Meld is an awesome diff gui. I think it has replaced kdiff3 as my favorite tool to look at the differences between two entire code trees (for a single file, JEdit's visual diff plugin works fine).

SMART_HOST is a very useful config option for sendmail. PHP on Linux can only send mail with a mail binary (usually sendmail). If you're running your own box that isn't supposed to do any mail delivery and want to use the SMTP server set up on a different box... You can basically just says route all mail traffic to the SMART_HOST.

Ever needed to access your email from a different than normal email client? Thunderbird has a weird structure for its mail files, but it It does keep email folders in mbox formatted files. This means you can access them remotely from the console (I needed to today, don't ask me why). Just ssh into your box, switch to your profile directory and "mutt -R -f ./Inbox". The -R option opens mbox files read-only to make sure you don't do anything thunderbird doesn't approve of...

Update: Oh yeah, and I meant to mention faubackup. I clobbered some files the other day and wasted time recovering them (unmount the partition and "cat /dev/hd2 > bigfile" then split and grep... Ugh.) Anyways I decided I should research automatic backup solutions (my manual backup only happens once a week or so.) I installed faubackup and uncommented a line in the cron file it put in my /etc/cron.daily directory and now I have nightly incremental backups, symlinking to the old files to save space and keeping a monthly, yearly, and the last 7 daily copies on a seperate physical disk. Very nice and absolutely no hassle.

Posted on April 3rd 2006, 04:56 PM