bounsy.com

In case any of you missed it last summer (2010), Disney gave away 50 free MP3s.  I downloaded nearly all of them, but missed a few.  I was just checking online to see if they were still available somewhere (so that I could complete my set) and found them here: http://www.laifamily.com/Disney/disney.html.

One of my all-time favorite inspirational poems.  My own recent experience with it is discussed after the poem.

The Race
By: D. H. Groberg

“Quit! Give Up! You’re beaten!”
They shout at me and plead.
“There’s just too much against you now.
This time you can’t succeed.”

And as I start to hang my head
In front of failure’s face,
My downward fall is broken by
The memory of a race.

I do a lot of work with regular expressions (regexes), especially in Perl (my favorite programming language).  There are a lot of resources out there to aid with regular expressions.  The following lists will be updated as I come across new resources that I think are worth mentioning.  If there are more resources that should be on here but aren't (or if there are other changes or updates that should be on here), feel free to add a comment.

Yesterday, I was applying some security settings to a Solaris 10 server.  The security settings range from disabling unneeded services to configuring text files to implementing security policies for passwords, etc.  After the scripts were done with all that they were supposed to do, I rebooted the box, logged on as a non-root user (since root was now restricted from being able to log on directly via telnet) and tried to su to root.

The result?  A single message:
su: Sorry

No password prompt.  No additional errors in any log files (which I was able to verify once I got root access on the console).  Nothing.

So what went wrong?

Talk delivered in Sacrament Meeting of Vint Hill Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Gainesville, VA, May 16, 2010

When the children of Israel were enslaved by Pharaoh, God prepared Moses and called him as a prophet and granted him great power through the Melchizedek Priesthood.  With that power, Moses became a great instrument in the hands of God.  Through him, God brought plagues to the Egyptians until Pharaoh let His people go.  Through him, God parted the Red Sea, brought forth water from the rocks, and performed countless other miracles.

But this is not all.  Moses had a much more important work to perform.

Ever wanted to perform interactive telnet-like functionality using Perl? No? Didn't think so.

Why do with Perl what can already be done with existing programs, such as the real, full-featured telnet program? Unless telnet is missing from a system where Perl is installed, I can't see a good reason to do this. Never mind all of the security problems inherent in telnet (which is why telnet should be disabled on secure servers).

Neverthelesss, this actually came up today at work, so here is a solution.

I recently needed a simple way to display a process tree from the UNIX command line (including instances where the command line is limited to about 250 characters). Here's what I came up with.