Today I had to copy several LVM partitions to another machine. The first tools I thought of were dd and netcat (nc), the swiss army knife for every sysadmin. But the following two lines didn’t make me happy: source$ ssh root@192.168.66.2 — nc -l 3333 \| dd of=/dev/VolGroupData/data1 & source$ dd if=/dev/VolGroupData/data1 | nc 192.168.66.2 [...]

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I recently got a Philips Speechmike device. It seems Philips has a Linux SDK for it, but I was unable to obtain it. I thought it wouldn’t be impossible to write a Linux driver for those couple buttons, so I gave it a try. First the good things: The speaker and microphone work perfectly out-of-the-box [...]

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I have been using Gallery2 for my private picture collection for quite some time. It’s a great piece of software that shows how to write PHP code. Unfortunately, all the abstraction layers make it quite slow without additional help. I did three things to speed things up a bit: Use lighttpd (doesn’t give that much [...]

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If you’re working in a company or go to university or college, that’s probably close to the most important question of the day. Wouldn’t it be great to have that information right on your desktop? While I was playing around with KDE4, I thought it would be great to have a Plasmoid (like a Dashboard [...]

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Some time ago I had the need to post a customer’s XSL-FO file to a mailing list. The problem was: how to strip all the content out of the file without destroying the overall design (that’s what the question was about)? So I wrote a small PHP script which replaces all characters outside of XML [...]

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Welcome at my new blog! I finally got around to re-organize all my web content and install this nice blog. Let’s see how many entries it will get over time. I’m planning to write about various software technologies I’m working with and interesting stuff I noticed. So, let’s get started! The first entry will be [...]

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