Linux Machine

Coming soon - guest posts welcome.

Coming soon - guest posts welcome.

Check it out - pretty.py is a miniature library that provides a Python print and stdout wrapper that makes colored terminal text easier to use (eg. without having to mess around with ANSI escape sequences). This code is public domain - there is no license except that you must leave the header intact.

Just import the module and make use of the printc(), writec(), or switchColor() functions in your own programs. A test sequence is included and can be invoked if you execute the script directly. You can download it from here.

I’m back! I’d like to resume things here on Linux Machine by giving you a solution to a problem others seem to have had (after searching online). It seems that Jython, a popular implementation of Python in Java, does not have Python 2.5’s hashlib module. This posed a problem to me when I was coding a small Jython application that needed one-way hashing.

Python has now-deprecated md5 and sha modules, so I was able to write a small wrapper for the hexdigest() functionality of the md5 and sha1 objects in hashlib. You are welcome to use the code all you’d like, and feel free to expand on it and send back the changes. Source is after the jump…

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Bit-for-Bit Mountable Backups

Coming soon - guest posts welcome.

Dear fellow readers,

I’ve taken a hiatus from updating LM right now. I’m sorry that this isn’t some kind of sick April Fools joke. I’ve got a lot of things going on, including preparing for final exams. Over the summer I will get back to writing articles and regular posting. In the meantime, I would like to announce that I will now be accepting “guest posts”. If you have something that you’d like to see on the front page of LM, send me an email with attachment and I’ll post it online.

Best regards,
Brian

We interrupt your normally scheduled blog posts to bring you… Josh’s old-but-new-to-him Super Nintendo, as well as a rather interesting Retro Duo that was acquired from an online auction!

Here is the second part to SOS — Securing our Server. Part one, in case you missed it, dealt with setting up an effective firewall. You can find it back in the January archives. This article, in case you haven’t guess it already, is going to talk about properly setting up your SSH (secure shell) server. SSH is an encrypted protocol that gives you remote access to your Linux machine’s command line interface, but it is also so much more than that as you will see in a few minutes…

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When the program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes.

— The Master Programmer

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Many thanks to the people at wiki.eeeuser.com for insightful information on modifying the IceWM installation, to Debian for providing up-to-date packages, and to the IceWM developers for making such an awesome window manager.