Those who use a SELinux enabled distribution – more specifically those who have set the SELinux security layer to enforcing mode – will most probably know about the auditd daemon (part of the audit package in Fedora Core). By default, all SELinux messages are recorded to the syslog, but when auditd is running, then all [...]

I wish GNUitar, a guitar effects software processor existed 7-8 years ago, when one of my main interests was my good old electric guitar. If I recall correctly, I had tried some computer programs under Windows back then, which tried to simulate a hardware sound processor. Acoustically, the result was fine, but from a technical [...]

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol or just DHCP provides networked devices with all the necessary parameters, IP addresses, network masks, the gateway or DNS servers IP addresses, so that they can actively participate in the network and start exchanging data with other devices or workstations. This automated operation, which greatly relieves the system administrator from [...]

Inspired by Aggelos greek to greeklish text converter implementation, I decided to write such a text converter in Python. It accepts text either from the stdin or by reading a file specified in the command line. It also auto-detects UTF-8 and ISO8859-7 encodings. Two sample text files are provided in the distribution for testing. Download: [...]

This is an excellent article that describes in detail how P2P applications can bypass the firewall and accept incoming data without opening any ports in the firewall configuration. This trick is used by the majority of VoIP software. In this article, the author not only describes how the popular internet telephony software Skype manages to [...]

Someone had once said: “every hero needs a villain“. Taking this quote into account I had always been thinking that, in the proprietary vs open-source software debate, Microsoft (MS), with its “Get The Facts” campaign, represented the villain and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was one of the heros promoting the benefits of open-source software.

I have already mentioned two excellent data recovery utilities in an older post. Today I came across some others; some lists of other tools actually. I didn’t have the time to try any of them, but here is some info and some useful links to get started with.

LinuxQuestions.org has set up a wiki page which contains information about utilities that can convert CD images from one format to the other. This compilation will probably be useful to Windows users who occasionally use Linux or have recently migrated to Linux. It is widely known that there are numerous windows utilities that save the [...]

Usually, when writing or modifying a CSS file, the author adds comments and excessive indentation to the code in order to preserve its readability and to simplify maintenance. Although this might be a good habit, all those extra bits stored into the CSS file increase its filesize, often resulting in unnecessary waste of bandwidth, especially if such a file is used in a production web site. Today, I decided to search for tools that can perform compression and optimization of a CSS file.

pdf2email is a CUPS backend that uses GhostScript to print a document to PDF and sends the final file to the user that requested the print via email. This software is written in Python. I had written this backend a few months ago, it has worked fine for me, so I decided to release it. Your feedback is welcome.