I’ve been using the Linux Libertine fonts with XeTeX for several months now, and while they look beautiful, they for some reason tend to trigger odd quirks about just about every aspect of the typesetting system. One that I’ve been dealing with: the font comes in regular, semibold, and bold weights, but by …

The court document filing system ECF requires Java 1.6 to be installed. This is not the latest version of Java, because apparently there is a bug that prevents the latest Java from working with the system. To install Java on a Mac running any new version of OS X, you will need to do the following: Install the latest …

Say you are me and you are updating your MySQL configuration. Say that, for purposes of backup and version control, you replace /etc/mysql/my.cnf with a symlink. Say you stop MySQL and start it up again, and you receive a failure message.

You might venture to look at the service startup log file, perhaps …

My SSL certificate signer is StartSSL. Their free certificates are valid for one year. This is how I renew my certificates. Log in using my personal certificate. A copy is in my scans folder. Use the Validations Wizard to validate the domain name (it just sends an email with a code). Generate a certificate signing …

The network firewall system used in Linux is called iptables. This is a brief overview of the system to the extent that I need to understand it if I want to fix my current firewall setup.

I set up an LDAP server to manage my email login password. I then promptly forgot how I set it up. This is the story of how I recovered it, mostly for my personal future use.

This is how I set up nginx. The post is mostly here so I remember what to do the next time around.

Here is a Ruby script to find libraries (like the ones used with require). It is like the Unix which tool.

I recently installed FastRI to speed up retrieving Ruby documentation. Following the directions on the website, I installed it from the source tarball rather than as a rubygem. Then, when I tried it, I received this error:

sbf5:~/fastri-0.3.1> qri
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/ri/ri_paths.rb:61: uninitialized constant …

I was generating GnuPG keys, and got the following message:

Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 274 more bytes)

We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform some other action (type on the keyboard, move the …