Cris' hacks - Page 2 of 3 - Tips & tricks, fun and much more...

Virtual disk data recovery

Oct

24

2015

The last weekend was terrible. On Friday evening I was writing some VHDL code for a small project and testing step-by-step all the stuff through a VHDL simulator running on Windows. Obviously, to do this I used a VirtualBox virtual machine, since my host OS is a Linux distro. Once I finished to work I simply ...

Written by Cristiano

packETH 1.8.1 SlackBuild and packages

Aug

16

2015

Hi folks, I’ve found this interesting software which can be very useful for testing purposes. Its name is packETH. packETH is a GUI and CLI packet generator tool for ethernet. It allows you to create and send any possible packet or sequence of packets on the ethernet link. It is very simple to use, powerful ...

Written by Cristiano

libcpuid 0.2.1 SlackBuild and packages

Aug

11

2015

In the last week I’ve tried to make my first SlackBuild script. I’ve decided to start with libcpuid. libcpuid is a small C library for x86 CPU detection and feature extraction. Using it, you can: get the processor vendor, model, brand string, code name get information about CPU features such as: number of cores or ...

Written by Cristiano

Happy SysAdmin Day!

Jul

31

2015

System Administrator Appreciation Day: http://sysadminday.com/

Written by Cristiano

Ant buildfiles usage: a brief example 2

Apr

3

2015

Hi folks! After a few months of inactivity I come back with a new post concerning the anatomy of an Ant buildfile. Ant buildfiles are written in XML and are mainly used to build Java applications. In this post I’ll explain step-by-step how to write a buildfile for a simple Java application (a simple Web server ...

Written by Cristiano

A way to extract the playback time from mpg123

Dec

26

2014

In the last period I was working on a project concerning UPnP. In particular I was developing a “smart speaker”, a wireless speaker which plays mp3 files by streaming them from a NAS (UPnP media server). The code is written in Java and leans to mpg123, a real time CLI MPEG audio player/decoder. The hardware ...

Written by Cristiano

Upgrade to PHP 5.6.2

Nov

9

2014

In the last days I was trying to create some packages for Slackware 14.1. I’ve created two virtual machines with VirtualBox, one for the 32 bit version and the other for the 64 bit version. These VMs have a clean Slackware installation and are intended to be used only for building packages. I’ve configured slackpkg ...

Written by Cristiano

Sort tricks

Aug

17

2014

This nice UNIX command allows you to sort the rows of a text file according to predetermined criteria. Let’s do a few simple examples. Imagine you have a text file called Data.txt structured as below: If you want to sort the rows according to the age (the second column), you can do it with sort ...

Written by Cristiano

Toshiba DVB-T TV tuner on Linux 4

Jul

30

2014

My attention is focused on this specific USB device: Toshiba DVB-T TV tuner P/N PX1211E-1TVD. I got it together with my old laptop in the summer of 2006. Albeit this DVB-T TV tuner comes with a standalone mini antenna, I usually prefer to connect it directly to the TV antenna cable using the adapter. This ...

Written by Cristiano

The laptop reboots instead of shutting down: what to do?

Jul

26

2014

A few days ago I finally fixed a problem that has plagued my laptop for a few months. I bought the PC last year at the end of December. The first thing I did once I got my hands on it, was to format Windows in order to install Slackware on the whole disk. After ...

Written by Cristiano