Check this article out: http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/06/recipe_chocolate_banana_pops.html.  An easy and great idea for those who like to impress with their “cooking” and “baking” skills!

Syntax highlighting can be a very useful thing when writting and editing code.  You can enable this feature with Vim by doing the following:

If you have an open file (e.g. program.pl) then while in vim press escape and then type :syntax on.

To turn syntax highlighting off then while in vim press escape and then type :syntax off.

An even easier way of making this a permanent change is to edit your vim config/preference file (found under  ~/.vimrc ).  Then append to the end the following: syntax on

That’s about it, probably not the most technical post ever ( ) but useful when you forget about it

A useful and probably known tip to many:  To check if a package is installed in perl try:
perl -e ‘use PACKAGE::NAME::HERE;’

For example:

perl -e ‘use DBI;’

The setup: 1 old sparc machine (makes enough noise to be confused for an airplane engine) running solaris, 1 Debian net install cd (to install debian as the new operating system), 1 serial cable

The idea is this: connect one end of the serial cable on the sparc machine and the other on an ubuntu machine, start the sparc machine, insert the cd rom, install debian.

As the sparc machine has no vga card and since it defaults to the serial terminal connection when no keyboard is installed this is the only way of installing debian. (any suggestions please do tell )

Firstly: go to http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/sparc/install.txt.en and keep it open.

Reality:

Once you have plugged in the serial cable on the ubuntu machine you will need to make sure that it is picking it up.  To make login as root using sudo -i .

Then read this page: http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-set-up-a-serial-console-on-ubuntu .  Have in mind that you will need to restart your system  as in my case checking for the serial connection (ttyS0) turned up nothing.  After a restart everything ran smoothly.  So from the page above the useful thing to pick up is $ dmesg | grep ttyS0 to make sure that the serial connection is alive.

Now, we will need a program such as minicom.  Google minicom up and remember to set the speed to 9600 (Control + A takes us to the option menu).  When we start up the sparc machine we will need to send a break command.  To do this, once we boot it up we will need to do a Control A and then press F.  An ok prompt will pop up.  This means that we are in the boot loader program of sparc, OpenBoot.  Open Boot has several options, have a read here http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/open_boot.htm.

One problem that i have read about when install Debian on a Sparc machine with solaris installed already is that you will get a memory alligment error.  The solution is to set the boot sequence of the sparc machine to boot from the cd first.  This is how to do it: setenv boot-device cdrom disk net .  Then reboot by typing boot and pressing Enter.  More on this can be found on this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=588088 .  When you reboot you will see the proper debian install menu over the console.

This is all for now, any corrections or suggestions please let me know