I have been using LaTeX for several years now, but only a couple months ago did I start experimenting with pdflatex. Actually, most current LaTeX distributions use pdflatex as the default LaTeX engine, but if you use the latex command, then it will produce a .dvi file, which most people then convert to .ps and probably to .pdf. Using the pdflatex command produces pdf directly, thus skipping two steps. This is always a plus. However, there are many other benefits […] (Read more)

Over the weekend, the network my server lives on went down. Apparently it was a planned outage that no one told me about. So I got a call Saturday night from my friend Daniel Reeves, who uses my server. I happened to be at a friend’s house, and couldn’t do anything about it at the very moment. When I got home, I started trying to reach the server. I used nmap to see what ports were open. Nothing. Then I […] (Read more)

Recall from a previous post that I was playing around with Filevault on Mac OSX not too long ago, which encrypts your home folder on the fly. I ultimately decided that it was not worth it, since it messed up a few programs, and most of my data is not very sensitive. However, I do have some sensitive data, like bank statements and such, that I keep on my computer. And now that I am mostly using linux, but still […] (Read more)

I recently started the FedDibblety house blog, documenting our home improvements to our new home in Indiana (which Clare’s parents built). I set up accounts for my wife Clare, her parents, Dave and Ellen, and my parents, Harold and Fran. Ellen, being a technology nut like myself, immediately jumped in writing posts about the house, and also had some feature requests. One of those features was to have the blog read in chronological order. Most blogs read in reverse chronological […] (Read more)

Which operating system? This was kind of a no-brainer. I was definitely not going to buy Windows, so it was going to be Linux. (I did think about something in the bsd family, and might still consider it at some point. I read a nice article comparing linux and bsd recently, which was informative and fairly unbiased. My take is that one of the biggest differences is that most people compile their own stuff for bsd, while most people get […] (Read more)