I received a funny request from a colleague today.

He wanted to know if I can force a kernel panic on a Linux box.

First question: Why?

It turns out they are testing some component of VMWare that will be able to detect when a machine has panicked or stopped responding or something.

Now, kernel panics are not an easy thing to initiate. The Linux kernel is reasonably strong and it should be able to handle most errors without any effort.

The request was made though and I started trying to find an answer.

Surprisingly enough, the answer was reasonably difficult to find.  read more »

Interesting read over at Ars Technica today.

Recently, Microsoft contributed code for it's Hyper-V drivers to the Linux kernel.

Yes, you read right, MS contributed code to the kernel.  read more »

I just finished reading a blog entry about 'why Linux is not for the masses'.

It makes a quite a few good points.

Telling a user that he must 'sudo' to the root user to be able to apt-get a specific package is a technical thing.

Where I work, I sometimes have trouble explaining to people how to open their command prompt.

I would like to attempt to make a counter-argument in this post. For the fun of it.  read more »

I picked up on this story of a computer user who was caught uploading the latest Star Wars movie. He pleaded guilty to the charge of "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" and was given a small amount of jail time and mostly home confinement which includes installing tracking software on his computer to track his movements.  read more »

So I've been struggling with this little gem for 3 days. I get a log of files that get downloaded from a bunch of different locations.

In the filename, there's a number in a fixed position (like 218) that corresponds to the day of the year. 29 for example would be the 29^th of January.

I need to convert this number to an ISO date format (like 2007-09-30). I have been racking my brains, scouring the internet, trying all sorts of different Perl modules with no luck.

Then it suddenly hit me, right between the eyes.  read more »