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Archive for February, 2008

Build a Custom PC: Design and Build a Custom PC

Posted in How To on February 26, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Building a custom PC is fun. In fact, you usually save money and end up with a better computer by building one yourself. Although building a custom PC easier than you might think, it does take a little more time than picking up a PC from one of the big vendors. I will discuss some serious time-savers that make the process a lot smoother than it would be without them. And once you gain some experience, it won’t take you much time at all to put together a new machine.

Expect to spend a few hours designing your computer as well as an hour or two assembling it. You will also need about an hour for installing your operating system (e.g., Windows or Linux).

Ready? Let’s get started…

(more…)

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Install QEMU on Gentoo

Posted in How To, tagged , , on February 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

A few months ago I decided I needed to install QEMU on my laptop. I assumed it would be a cinch. Wrong was I. You see, my laptop is running Gentoo. I’m a longtime (4 years is longtime, no?) aficionado.

(As an aside, I recently did a quick install of Ubuntu on my workstation at work, and I’m surprised to find how much I like it. This is a topic for another post…)

It turns out that QEMU is finicky about who compiles it. Not just any old version of GCC will do. On my system, I got it to compile and install with gcc-3.3.6-r1. Without further ado, here are the steps I took.

  1. echo "=sys-devel/gcc-3.3.6-r1" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

  2. emerge -a =sys-devel/gcc-3.3.6-r1

  3. gcc-config -l

  4. gcc-config 1 (or whichever one corresponds to 3.3.6)

  5. source /etc/profile

  6. emerge -a qemu

  7. sudo make me a sandwich

  8. gcc-config 2 (or whichever one corresponds to 4.x)

  9. source /etc/profile

There you have it. I tried to make it as straightforward as possible. This worked for me. I also passed it along to The Code Lisperer and it worked for him. As always, YMMV.

-Mr. ANSI Pants

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Spam Assassin on Exchange 2003

Posted in How To, tagged , , , on February 20, 2008 | 17 Comments »

At work we use Exchange 2003 as our email server, mostly because it was just so darn convenient to set up. Outlook and Exchange are pretty decent at filtering spam once you’ve installed the latest service packs. However, the amount of completely useless emails making it to my inbox recently spiked (Valentine’s Day may have had something to do with it). Time to bring out the big guns. (more…)

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Programming Challenge: Time Parser

Posted in Hacker Challenge, tagged , , , , on February 14, 2008 | 2 Comments »

OK, this challenge is shamelessly borrowed from a challenge issued by Sasha on the Provo Linux Users Group mailing list, but I remember enjoying it so I figured I’d share. Make a solution in any language. The more, the merrier! Post solutions in the comments.

Input: A string containing an arithmetic expression consisting of times. The times could be in seconds, but they could also be in colon form: 3:12 is 192 seconds, 1:45:03 is 1 hour, 45 minutes, 3 seconds. There also may be fractions of seconds: 2:28.42 is 2 minutes, 28.42 seconds.

Output: Leave the arithmetic expression intact, but convert all times into seconds. So:
1:45.2 + 83 – 2:34 becomes 105.2 + 83 – 154

Enjoy, and good luck!

Guest Submission from The Code Lisperer

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