using xscreensaver. sounds simple enough. UPDATE: easier: "apt-get install xtrlock", a transparent lock screen

enabling TCP Slow Start on the HTTP server-side decreased internet round-trip page load time by 21% in this case; comments suggest an "ip route" command can also work

'vmtouch is a tool for learning about and controlling the file system cache of unix and unix-like systems. It is BSD licensed.'

as seen in their "Instagram Engineering" post

'Tcprstat is a free, open-source TCP analysis tool that watches network traffic and computes the delay between requests and responses. From this it derives response-time statistics and prints them out.' Computes percentiles, too

Amazing response to a security bug report. 'what's happening in this bug report right now is a perfect example of how *not* to do security response. When faced with two people who clearly know a few things about secure coding, rather than taking their advice and actually fixing the root cause of the problem (or abandon it as a hopeless situation, which is probably the more appropriate response), you've chosen to waste our time by demanding that we write weaponized exploits to exploit what most people already know to be exploitable. To top it off, when shown repeatedly how your half-baked "fixes" don't actually fix anything, rather than taking our advice you just add another small hurdle that can be trivially bypassed. It would be sad if it weren't so funny. I've decided that it's time to stop beating a dead horse. Usually I get paid good money to own software this hard, and I don't think you're worth making an exception. Best of luck, I'm sure you'll figure it out eventually.'

'When amount of sockets is enough large, netstat or even plain cat /proc/net/tcp/ cause nothing but pains and curses. In linux-2.4 the desease [sic] became worse: even if amount of sockets is small reading /proc/net/tcp/ is slow enough. This utility presents a new approach, which is supposed to scale well.' via scanlan

'a tool for tunneling SSH through HTTP proxies'. handy

truly incredible -- quite fast (about 386 speeds) under Chrome, even! from the HN comments: 'I just forkbombed my browser. Nothing is sacred anymore.' more comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349

these are great - some new ones on me!

great tips for system-level and app-level profiling on Linux from Padraig

handy -- a patch to rsync(1) which will not disturb the buffer cache, so that large file transfers and backups will not interfere with what's been cached previously

'an alternative Linux-based firmware for powering Broadcom-based ethernet routers. It is a modification of the famous Tomato firmware, with additional built-in support for USB port, wireless-N mode support, support for several newer router models, and various enhancements. Tomato USB supports many Broadcom-based routers from Asus, Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear and other manufacturers.' Looks good -- I've been a Tomato fan for many years -- and jzawodny-approved

a nifty gdb hack; essentially dup()s a couple of files in /tmp in place of fd 1 and 2, then uses the bashism "detach" to nohup the running process

'Any TCP session you initiate to one of the proxied IP addresses [specified on the command line] will be captured by sshuttle and sent over an ssh session to the remote copy of sshuttle, which will then regenerate the connection on that end, and funnel the data back and forth through ssh. Fun, right? A poor man's instant VPN, and you don't even have to have admin access on the server.'

hmm, I never knew about oom_adj, useful (via Peter Blair)

some interesting /proc tricks.  I like the 'phantom progress bar'

truly horrifically awesome hackery from ASR

open-source speech recognition for Linux and Windows. must give this a go! (Via Alexander Seewald)

another concurrency shell command; interesting approach to dashboarding the results, with the "mdm.screen" utility provided

by Ole Tange. pretty extensive, if inscrutable (via Tony Finch)

wraps strace(1) to summarise and aggregate I/O ops performed by a Linux process. looks pretty nifty (via Jeremy Zawodny)

very interesting; modern multicore x86 architectures use a NUMA memory architecture, which can cause a dip into swap, even when there appears to be plenty of free RAM available

Linux distros ship ancient Python interpreters, hence it's impossible to rely on recent language features because they won't be there, making it useless to write code in Python. We have similar problems in perl-land, but it's easy enough to get by without the latest-and-greatest; maybe Python is different in that regard? ... or is it Zed?

"benchmarks disprove common wisdom" shocker

classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs

'a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.'

'a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.' these are really, really nifty (via popey)

I should do this on my hosts

torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission

The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too

Back looking at these again, as Padraig noted the SundTek drivers are closed source; at least pvrusb2 is OSS

'Analog TV is working again with MythTV which comes with the final Ubuntu 10.04 release' -- MythTV support is officially tested by SundTek support staff! I think we have a clear winner

'I can recommend that USB device, I never had a device which has such an easy installation under linux.'

official, and pretty voluminous. looks good

seems to be a safe option for MythTV analog TV and DVB-T support on this side of the pond

Jesus Christ Hauppauge. get a clue already, why are you making it so hard for Linux users to buy your bloody hardware?!

from Padraig Brady. lots of nice one-liners I wasn't familiar with

'we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (E. coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. ... both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. ... These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.' (via adulau)

yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less

worth it for #10: 'Capture video of a linux desktop': '$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg'

interesting Django/Pythonic approach, based on concepts from AppEngine

filed under "about time I did another DVD backup"

'Lsyncd uses rsync to synchronize local directories with a remote machine running rsyncd. Lsyncd watches multiple directories trees through inotify. The first step after adding the watches is to rsync all directories with the remote host, and then sync single file by collecting the inotify events. So lsyncd is a light-weight live mirror solution that should be easy to install and use while blending well with your system.' (via adulau)

I didn't realise Firefox's geolocation used wifi triangulation, too

A good guide to installation on Jaunty. I'm trying out sup. It does a really good job of bringing the GMail experience to the commandline, so far so good; now to see if I can switch my work email over!

sweet. HDMI out, MythTV streaming, and silent for $300

lots of new features, and a switch of default IM client

Google resync to the latest kernel every 17 months or so -- not bad, actually

hmm, a nifty app that takes pics of the desktop, activates the webcam etc. and uploads to a central server if you activate a 'my laptop has been stolen' bit

wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status

good and cheap; good reviews; supported by Linux HID force-feedback joystick library; EUR58 at Play.com

an alternative way to get pedal controls working; use a racing-game steering-wheel controller, instead, since they're cheaper

'View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way', supporting postfix/spamd/clamd logs among loads of others. very cool if a little silly