Matt's Blog

vim typically supports the :syntax on command, but I just found out about the :colorscheme option. But what I can’t find documented anywhere is what color schemes are options. On CentOS 5.3, they’re in /usr/share/vim/vim70/colors/ and include blue, darkblue, default, delek, desert, elflord, evening, koehler, morning, murphy, pablo, peachpuff, ron, shine, slate, torte, and zellner. [...]

iptables, the Linux firewall engine, is capable of a lot more than I’d previously given it credit for. It seems like it has native support for things like OS fingerprinting and port-scan detection, plus analysis of low-level TCP headers that mere mortals like me probably shouldn’t touch. Tarpitting and ECN support, too. It also turns [...]

I wrote off Tor a while ago. It seemed to me that 95% of people who wanted to be anonymous were up to something bad. Spammers, hackers, and child predators all seem to love Tor. But all of the talk about Iran and their attempts to silent dissent by blocking popular Internet sites got me [...]

The highway was horribly backed up on my way home today, so I stopped at a Burger King halfway home today. The place was mobbed, and as I stood watching everything while I waited for my food, I reflected on the days when I worked–and ran shifts–at the bowling center, and on my time in [...]

North Carolina’s Rusty DePass, described as a GOP Activist, came under fire after remarking that an escaped gorilla was probably an ancestor of Michelle Obama. When the remark (posted on Facebook) hit the news, he explained that Michelle Obama, not him, had made the comparison. When news outlets failed to find any supporting evidence of [...]

As a grammar “nut,” haphazardly-placed quotation marks tend to “annoy” me greatly. They just “jump” out at me and really mess up the “flow” of whatever I’m reading. Sometimes people use them for “emphasis,” which never made any sense, but other times it seems that people use them truly at “random” to make their text [...]

The New MacBook Pro looks amazing. It’s smaller, faster, better, and cheaper. I practically had my mind made up to buy one, although I was dogged by an awful lot of hesitation. But one thing irks me. Apple’s been criticized for a long time about built-in batteries. Batteries fail on the iPod and you have [...]

For a long time, I tended to think that a lot of brand-name servers were overpriced, given that I could build one with similar specs for less. After working with some Dells at work, I came to see that there’s good reason they charge more. There are a lot of nifty onboard diagnostic tools that [...]

I’ve been itching to toy with spamd for ages, so I’d really hoped to get it running on my new machine. spamd relies on OpenBSD’s pf firewall, so it really won’t run on anything that’s not BSD, which means that I either need a dedicated BSD machine (not practical), or I need to get a [...]

There are tons of guides out there on how to “tune” most anything. With alarming frequency, I find things in them that are flat-out wrong, or, at the least, accomplish nothing productive. A classic example is the advice on emptying your Prefetch folder on Windows to make it go further. If you read up on [...]