A window manager (WM) is the component of a system's graphical user interface (GUI). The window manager controls the appearance of an application and how it is managed: the border, titlebar, size, and ability to resize a window are handled by window managers. Many window managers provide additional functionality, such…
After installing Arch Liunux, I decided that I needed to spruce up my bash environment. The Arch Linux wiki page on colorizing bash prompt offers us some basic configuration options for colorizing the prompt itself for individual users. One just needs to edit ~/.bashrc by commenting out the defaults and…
This entry walks the reader through the process of installing Arch Linux. It basically re-presents the steps defined in the Beginner's Guide to Installing Arch Linux—with me contributing only minor edits and comments to improve clarity and to help me more quickly re-deploy a system if I bungle…
Context: My Lenovo w510 crashed some time ago. Probably due to all the hype (and also probably a bit influenced by my girlfriend's style preferences), I decided to buy a mac-mini server as a temporary replacement (the original platform hosting this article). The short version of that rather epic struggle…
I've been having difficulties to figure out how to set nuanced parameters for managing large sets of files. For example, let’s say that I have a project with 600 files in an active working directory, and I wish to copy these files to a backup storage device. I don’…
Introduction: As with any host on the Internet, EC2 instances are vulnerable to attack. EC2 firewalls offer a very powerful means of securing an instance from unwanted network traffic, but some applications require you to relax your firewall settings--potentially exposing your instance to attacks, e.g.: Intrusion attempts: exploiting bad…