Here’s a quick photo gallery of our new custom digital signage kiosk, located at the entrance to the IT suite. We use BrightSign digital signage boxes. This particular model (HD110) does not have network capability, but there is a network jack in the kiosk for when we upgrade later. The current model uses an...
It’s that time of year when I start poking around our network trying to update the various records that we keep of the various devices on our network. Unfortunately, we do not use any fancy network tools that automatically map our local network service to determine what machines are on the network. However, it’s...
One of my co-workers brought me an interesting problem. He had downloaded a page of data from Martindale-Hubbell about a local law firm and was looking for a fairly efficient way to convert that data into something that could be loaded into a database. Fortunately, he found a pay solution involving a commercially-prepared DVD...
I recently did a presentation at the CALI2010 conference held at Rutgers-Camden. Here’s a link to the wiki pages that were the basis for my talk: http://blogs.law.emory.edu/itwiki/CALI2010bjc Here’s the summary of the talk from the CALI web-site: Open Source Potpourri That’s right – it’s “a mixture of dried, naturally fragrant plant material, used to...
Image via Wikipedia Recently, I needed to analyze a log file that had lines of data, where each line had a date stamp and some other information. Each line of the log file represented a single email message. The goal was to determine how many messages were sent out each month and each year....
Crontab is the venerable task scheduler for Unix-derived systems. To schedule tasks, you configure a table of entries that occur in some sort of chronological fashion, hence “crontab”. Image via Wikipedia To set up a crontab entry, enter crontab -e at the shell prompt. This will bring up an entirely blank screen in vim,...
Take a look at http://writeboard.com/ . It’s run by 37signals, the Basecamp, etc. people. If you’re a geek, it’s a single-page wiki with password protection. If you’re a normal person, it’s a very easy one page collaboration tool without the overhead of signing up for GoogleDocs, etc.
I’m experimenting with Alfresco, running inside an OpenVZ container on which I’ve installed CentOS 5.2. One of the prerequisites for this project is to have a properly functioning Java VM running on the virtualized CentOS host. This post sets out the steps that I went through and includes a patched spec file to deal...
This is an excellent (and up-to-date) set of instructions on how to install Mailman on an ubuntu server: Mailman – Community Ubuntu Documentation This guide explains how to setup Mailman mailing list software with the Apache web server and either the Exim4 or Postfix mail servers on Ubuntu. The intended audience is experienced linux...
Here is an excellent introduction to why you need an RSS (“Really Simple Syndication“) reader to help you keep up with the blogs and other news that you read every day. It’s only three minutes long and it’s terrific. Here’s the link: RSS is a very straightforward method for you to have news and...