In honour of the “Mugs for Manifests” contest, I thought I would spin out another custom service description I wrote some months ago. My setup for working from home—key during the last six months of Solaris 10—is to tunnel into Sun’s network via one implementation or another of a virtual private network (VPN). In all [...]

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For various reasons—some reasonable, some suspect—Solaris doesn’t ship with a compiled set of windex databases for its manual pages. The unfortunate result is that helpful commands like apropos(1) or man -k are unhelpful: $ apropos sort /usr/man/windex: No such file or directory < p> smf(5) provides one way to address this shortcoming, via a transient [...]

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I’ve been working on the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) website for the U.S. Geological Survey in anticipation of the release of the new Supervolcano movie and I needed to change the coordinates for the logos in our header. As a Mac BBEdit user, I wanted a simple program that gave me the functionality of a [...]

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We’re regular, but not heavy Netflix users. For the most part, Dina and I have our own entente cordiale regarding our movie selections, meaning that we can each watch the other’s “dumb movies”. What is still difficult is the handling of whose movies will come by post next. (Netflix is a DVD rental subscription service [...]

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blueslugs.com turned five this week. A reasonable time to take stock. The domain’s first days were hosted over the DSL line in our apartment in Menlo Park on&mdash;wait for it&mdash;a PowerMac 7100 running MkLinux. Since then, it’s been hosted on an Ultra 10, a Netra T1, and finally on a Shuttle, running various versions of [...]

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I had built an early version of libxosd for my Solaris SPARC systems a year or two ago, since it provides a very tidy way to have a ubiquitous onscreen clock with a wide variety of window managers. libxosd went, when I was distracted, through a substantial rewrite, culminating in a 2.2.x series release. And [...]

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I’m often manipulating over 100 files when I’m making modifications to various software components. Generally, the buffers menu in Vim (X11/Motif) handles this okay, unless all of the files are named with the same letters. In a recent batch of changes, 90 of my files were named “Makefile”, “prototype_com”, or “pkginfo.tmpl”; this results in the [...]

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I figured I should mention that I’m going to make most of my Solaris-specific comments on my blog at blogs.sun.com. We’ll see if I can keep the topics meaningful and interesting on both, without halving my posting rate on each.

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I use ion as my window manager, but have recently switched my home desktop from a G4 Cube to a PC running Solaris. I’m a regular full-screen VNC user, and getting vncviewer and ion to cooperate is pretty key. Fullscreen mode can be achieved using vncviewer and ion (from blastwave, or build them yourself) with [...]

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Here’s an interesting survey: Sun wants to know how secure the default install for Solaris 10 should be. If you listened to the NetTalk on Wednesday, then you might be able to guess that your input here probably means more work for my team and me. (I suppose I should really split work blogging from [...]

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