Happy birthday to me! :P
February 19th, 2009
Today I have become 26 years old. Wow time flies 
Archive
Archive for the ‘general’ Category
Disable root login for ssh server in Kubuntu
February 13th, 2009
If you are a hacker, what is the thing you want to be on a Linux System? Root. You can try to access a ssh server with the root user. There is an option in the ssh server configuration which prevents a remote root login. This does not mean you can not become root, it means no one can directly login as the root user. So if you are logged in as Alice you can simple enter the “su” command to become root.
How we can prevent the remote root login is described below.
Fixing possible Samsung NC brightness issues
February 12th, 2009
If you run Windows on your Samsung NC10 you might have ran into this issue: when you lower your brightness you can not lower it enough. This problem has to do with the “auto-brightness” setting.
bios screen
Google Sitemap generator plugin for WordPress
February 10th, 2009
Google webmaster tools is a nice place for uploading your sitemap. There are several sites around which can create a sitemap automatically. One problem: your weblog has dynamic content. This means you have to update your sitemap every time you add a new post to your blog…
part of the Osiblog sitemap
Windows 7 and visual web developer express works
February 2nd, 2009
In one of my previous post I wrote a bit about the upcoming Windows 7. One of the biggest problems was having a Windows 7 installation up and running, but without visual web developer express (VWD) working it was quite a useless operating system.
The main problem showed up when I opened a ASP.NET web application. Editing the C# source files was no problem at all, but as soon as I opened an .aspx file the whole program freezed.
As a web developer, having a working version of VWD is too important so I switched back to Windows Vista. Sometimes solving problems can be simple; today I decided to reinstall VWD and guess what? Works like a charm! 
Page Links To plugin for WordPress
January 31st, 2009
As you can see this blog has several subpages like photography and about. My problem was to have a page linked to an external website. Therefore I used:
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
window.location = “http://flickr.com/basvandijk”
// –></script>
window.location = “http://flickr.com/basvandijk”
// –></script>
Now it turned out, there is a WordPress plugin available called “Page Links To” When enabled it provides you the option to have a page linked to an external website of your choice. Works a lot better than using Javascript redirects 
Page Links To field
Samsung NC10′s webcam works on Kubuntu!
January 25th, 2009
Lately I was wondering if my Samsung NC10′s webcam worked under Kubuntu 8.10. I found this website which shows a tool called luvcview in order to show your webcam video. In order to install luvcview execute the following command:
# apt-get install luvcview
When the installation is done simply execute:
$ luvcview
Smile!
Webcam works!
GNU Nano parameters
January 19th, 2009
I use GNU nano a lot for text file editing in Linux. One of the things annoying was the lack of a cursor position. Many tools prompt with something like: error on line 42. Nano can show the actual cursor position by pressing Ctrl+O, but I want to see it permanently
Another annoying issue was word wrapping. When I pasted a line inside the terminal and this line was longer than the standard 80 characters the line was broken apart. Imagine a 800 chars line, you have to correct 10 lines of text
The solution to these problems were simple, just launch nano with:
$ nano -cw
You can also create an alias in your bashrc.conf with:
alias nano=’nano -cw’
This will makes sure Nano uses the specified parameters every time it is launched.
GNU Nano
Retro gaming: DOS
January 17th, 2009
Remember the good old days? Sitting behind your 286 machine playing games on a monochrome screen? I do! Actually it was my very first “own” computer running DOS 6.0. I had only one problem: a lot of cool games failed to run. Later it turned out to be a problem that I had a monochrome screen, at least something with my old videocard.
The funny thing was the solution to this problem. I discovered once that I could play the games which first gave an error, if I had run the game “Wings of Fury” in advance…
Wings of Fury screenshot
New header image: Zugspitze
January 11th, 2009