Using an alternative mirror for FreeBSD port retrieval

This is something I always search for which doesn’t seem to be very clear from the initial results. The mirrors included below are South Africa specific, so if you are not in South Africa then replace the hostname with something more appropriate for your location.

Keyboard shortcuts in Google Wave

I was messing around a little with figuring out some of the keyboard shortcuts in Wave. Here is what I have so far:

Simple HTTP POST in Java

Today I was helping a friend debug a web service they had implemented. Their side was working correctly but the developer who was trying to interface with it seemed to be running into many problems. Since they were integrating an application written in Java, I whipped up a simple test for them. All we really needed to do was to send a few variables using HTTP POST to this resource and make sure it returned exactly what we were expecting.

This uses standard libraries only, and doesn’t require anything third party. It does nothing fancy at all, just simply posts data to a URL. Hopefully you find this useful at some point.

Using a ZFS filesystem with Time Machine

This simple how-to explains how to get your Time Machine backups working with a ZFS filesystem. This allows you to use the features of ZFS filesystems for your Time Machine backups.

Please note this is for Mac OS X - Snow Leopard.

New addition to the family

So after much anticipation, many tireless weeks of spec checking and a whole bunch of money I was really glad to be on the receiving end of a brand spanking new 17” MacBook Pro!

Although it has been less than 72 hours this is (so far) truly the most amazing piece of computer equipment I have ever owned, honestly worth every single cent! The initial setup was completely flawless and only took a few minutes. The graphics, resolution and performance are exceptional, in fact I haven’t even had to switch over from the standard “on-board” video card to the higher end controller yet, despite putting the GPU through a thorough beating, testing out the Quake 4 demo :P

Quick Solaris zone stats

Add this: alias zonestat="prstat -vZ 1 1 | grep -A50 '^ZONEID'" to your ~/.profile and you should see something like this when running it: root@tank:~# zonestat ZONEID NPROC SWAP RSS MEMORY TIME CPU ZONE 0 58 1198M 1206M 30% 16:15:40 1.7% global 6 25 172M 175M 4.4% 0:03:14 0.0% cl-build 2 27 48M 31M 0.8% 0:00:47 0.0% mirror Total: 110 processes, 534 lwps, load averages: 0.09, 0.08, 0.

The basics of ZFS ACLs

This post was mostly inspired by reading this post in trying to get my head around the ZFS ACL and permission system.

Run something as another user

Here is a simple way to run something on UNIX / Linux as another user, without having to resort to weird sudo incantations. The Makefile is left as an exercise for the reader.

This has only been tested on FreeBSD, Debian Linux and OpenSolaris so far.

Hello World

So I finally decided to join the world of blogging. Let’s hope I have something interesting to say…