Aug 182012
 

In the past I’ve published articles on how to do a benchmark with namebench to see what’s the fastest DNS server for you and how to crypt your DNS traffic if you use Opendns but I’ve never done a comprehensive guide of the command dig, probably the best command you can have on the command line to query a DNS server, so today I want to show you the basic usage of this command and some trick, using examples that you can re-use for your goals.

But as first thing, probably every reader know what’s a DNS server, but anyway it’s better to take the good definition from Wikipedia:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. A Domain Name Service resolves queries for these names into IP addresses for the purpose of locating computer services and devices worldwide.

So let’s see how we can query a DNS server o get all the info we need.

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Aug 122012
 

Ubuntu software repository is one of the bigger, and this means that you can easily install a lot of software with the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with a simple sudo apt-get install softwarename, but sometimes you want a software that is not present or perhaps a newer release of the one available in the main repository, in this cases you can use a PPA.

A Personal Package Archive (PPA) is a special software repository for uploading source packages to be built and published as an APT repository by Launchpad or a similar application, once is published anyone can use it and install software from there, just keep in mind that once that you add a PPA you “trust” the software published from that source, so add PPA only when really needed and only from known and safe sources.

Y PPA Manager is a software that can help you in manage,add,remove and search easily PPA in your Ubuntu.
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Aug 082012
 

Today I want to share with you some of my favorite features of bash, I called them hidden because I’ve discovered that a lot of people don’t know or don’t use them, but to be honest they are not so hidden after all, they are in the man page of bash, but how many of us have read it all ?

1) xkcdcom-149-2

Thanks to xkcd.com for this explanation.
In short this is useful when you need root access for a command and you forget to use sudo.
The parameter “!!” is substituted with the last run command.

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Aug 042012
 

On my desktop I use Xubuntu 12.04, and today i noticed that this distribution shipped by default the Zeitgeist daemon, a thing that I’m not using at all, for what i know.

From Wikipedia:

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’s activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations. It makes this information readily available for other applications to use in form of timelines and statistics. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns by applying data association algorithms such as “Winepi” and “A Priori”

Zeitgeist is the main engine and logic behind GNOME Activity Journal which is currently seen to become one of the main means of viewing and managing activities in GNOME version 3.0

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Aug 032012
 

In the past I’ve made a roundup of microblogging client for Linux, but this one is so new that i did not talked about it.

Turses is a fork of a similar project Tyrs, the goal of both projects is to provide a twitter client on the terminal with the help of ncurses library, so why fork ? The fork has been initiated by Alejandro Gómez a few months ago after writing some patches for Tyrs, to be correct he did a lot of changes in Tyrs, my opinion is that Alejandro did so many changes that he wants to start his own project.
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