I never knew that the +X mode for chmod meant set the execute bit only if a directory or if the execute bit is already set on a file.
Up until now I had been using a wierd combo of chmod -R [whatever] followed by find . -type d | xargs chmod +x to reset permissions [...]
This is a collection of stuff that I liked from 2004, prefixed with “best (some vaguely related category)”. But really, is a justification needed? I say not. Here we go.
Best Blog: Fafblog? Yes, Fafblog. Consistently funny and on the mark. “One thing about Donald Rumsfeld that you have to give him credit for is he [...]
Although I’ve almost entirely switched across to the PowerBook for most Serious Computing Tasks, I still keep a WinBox about the place for two very important pasttimes: gaming, and tinkering with hardware. These activities are not unrelated…
I’ve been building my own PCs for ages now. One thing you soon discover is that the various components [...]
This is Steam. It’s the game distribution system that Valve are using for Half-Life 2 and others.
You purchase the game online, and it downloads the content to you. It’s similar to the iTunes Music Store, except that you don’t have to “bless” the system it’s installed on. Log on to Steam on a new box [...]
Time Magazine are hereby nominated for the catachresis of the year 2004:
For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively) [...] , George W. Bush is TIME’s 2004 Person of the Year
Literally sticking to his guns, eh. I wonder where he stuck them? Maybe between the shoulder blades, as seen during the second presidential debate (pictured)?
Or [...]
I feel obliged to blog this. I’ve been meaning to explain to my non-Australian readers (assuming there are any, other than spambots) as to why I picked girtby.net as a domain name. Recent events have finally prompted me to do it.
Basically it’s a nerdy allusion to a line from the Australian national anthem: “Our home [...]
I really like UNIX sometimes. My home FreeBSD box has a dying hard drive. It started reporting ominous READ_DMA log entries in the daily emails it sends me (what, your operating system doesn’t send you email?). I stupidly ignored these, and a few days later found that it wasn’t booting. Attach a monitor to it, [...]
Way back when I started this humble web-log I had intended to write down exactly why I bothered to set it up. The reasons for documenting the answer to the “why bother?” question are pretty similar to the reasons for setting up the blog in the first place, namely: for my own amusement.
More precisely, blogging [...]
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