What to do when people forget to log out?

If you’re at a university/school/workplace where you run linux you must know that it’s almost mandatory to mess with someones account when they forget to log out. If not, you should make it!

I think it’s needless to say that you should never delete peoples files or hurt them in any way :) and always take their knowledge about linux into account – this is suppose to be fun.

If you want to be obvious (reveal that someone has been messing around) change the wallpaper and home page in his/her browser. It may not be hilarious, but if the person doesn’t know linux very well I think that’s all you should do.
If you all are on the same network edit you victims .plan file. This is a really good place to state you triumph since the only person who don’t read the file is your victim, and he will properly not notice it for a long time.
Mess with his GNU Utils. Now, this will take some time unless you make a script to do the dirty work for you. Create a folder ~/.bin, and add it to the beginning of his $PATH environment variable. Now, fill the folder with small scripts called ls, rm, emacs or maybe even cd, which does nothing more than just outputs: ls: command not found, ls: Permission denied or something similar. (remember you can always write /bin/rm to access the real rm and remove the scripts)
One of the really good things about linux (in this case) is that on startup. You can delay your surprise by putting it all in some startup files …

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Opera

We all know that opera is a fantastic web browser. You may have heard some fanboys claim that it doesn’t need extensions as firefox because it just comes with everything out of the box. While that is partly true, it doesn’t mean that opera is a perfect (perfect as in perfect). There are still some small user JavaScripts you can add to make your browser experience even better.

Before I begin perhaps I should point out that this is written for opera 9.5 beta, and I have no idea if I will keep this up to date in the future (But I’ll try). But lets get to the point, here’s my setup:

There’s not a lot of things firefox does better than opera, but this is one of them. When you view a large image in firefox it automatically resizes it so it fits the screen. Opera does not. However, with this simple little script you can add this feature: http://userjs.org/scripts/browser/enhancements/autosizer
When I started using opera I always turned off the “Start bar” (or whatever the bar which pop up beneath the address bar is called) because I never used it. Well, now I do! I found these really cool buttons which gives you really quick, and easy, access to useful everyday services as BugMeNot, TineyURL, Del.icio.us and a local google …

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Install GIMP 2.4 on Ubuntu 7.10

Note: GIMP 2.4.1 has been released. The instructions has been updated

This is a short tutorial on how to get and install GIMP 2.4 on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) instead of the Release Candidate Ubuntu is shipped with.

First download the source code from gimp’s homepage
Unpack the files: tar -xvjf gimp-2.4.1.tar.bz2
Make sure you have all dependencies. I have no idea what the exactly are, but I found this list of packages which was required for a developing version: sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libart-2.0-dev libtiff4-dev libaa1-dev libmng-dev libpoppler-glib-dev librsvg2-dev libwmf-dev libxpm-dev libgnomeui-dev libgnome-keyring-dev liblcms1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev gtk-doc-tools libgtkhtml2-dev intltool automake1.9 flex bison libgnomevfs2-dev libxmu-dev libexif-gtk-dev python-gtk2-dev libexif-dev
Now, run: ./configure --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.4
Then compile the gimp (this may take an hour or two): make
And at last, install it: sudo make install
Now you can just remove all the files and folders which was created during the installation.
At last, make a symlink to /opt/gimp-2.4/bin/gimp-2.4 in you /usr/local/bin. sudo ln -s /opt/gimp-2.4/bin/gimp-2.4 /usr/local/bin/gimp-2.4

If everything went well it the gimp should now have been installed into /opt/gimp-2.4

just run gimp-2.4 to start it.

You can remove i…

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Getting started with Ruby on Rails

I thought I would write a few words on how to get started with Ruby on Rails. This is not a tutorial about how to install nor use Rails, but more guide of what to read, which applications to use and where to get help.

First: Get excited

Since you’re reading this chances are that you already is hooked on rails, or just want to learn more about it. what’s it good for? what can it do for me?

Well – there are a lot of good reasons to use Rails to develop webapps, but right now I’m only going to list the main one: productivity. With Rails you will be able to develop first class webapplications in no time—seriously! if you haven’t already seen it David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) has made a 16 minute screencast introducing Rails. There’s also a version of it on youtube, but unfortunately you can hardly read any of the text.

oh yeah, and by the way. Rails Envy has also made some pretty funny mac-style Rails Commericals

Second: “The Rails way”

If you come from a PHP world (which I think a lot for new Rails users do), you are used to solve problems your own way. This may sound odd, but think of it this way: If you and a friend where shown a weblog and asked to write a clone of it in PHP, how much similar do …

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