Cool Wallpapers for free

Ok, today is advertising-day
If you wanted to have a nice decent, say, landscape as your desktop background  (like the one on the left) – in high quality without any tricks, just give
http://interfacelift.com/ a shot.

Those pictures are really awesome and they have various resolutions available. But you knew that one already anyway right?

Cool Icons for free

Lately I was encouraged to give a presentation in public and it was a long time ago I had to do such a thing. So I was looking around for cool eye-candy to keep my audience happy and guess what – I really found some at:

http://www.iconspedia.com/

I think those guys do a really brilliant job!
Hilarious Icons – clean and professional looking.
And the best: for FREE . No Pop-Ups ‘n crap, just the usual google adds.
Unfortunately I’ve seen the site quite unresponsive from time to time, but be patient – it’s really worth it.

Broken attachments in Apple Mail

Once in a while I seem to have broken attachments in my e-mails in Mail.app.
But when I check those e-mails with another client or webmail everything is all right.

I found out, that one can work around this issue by rebuilding the Mailbox’s Index:

Mailbox-Menu -> Rebuild (last entry)

After a couple of minutes (depending on the size of the corresponding mailbox) my attachments look alright again.

A really cool screensaver – electric sheep.

Haven’t  you heard of “electric sheep“, yet?  The fancy screen saver that turns your screen into a psychedelic
playground. The idea behind is so charming:

The very beautiful sequences of animated fractals are generated by thousands of computers in their “sleep”. Those CPU “dreams” are called (sheep) in reminiscence of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?”, which got filmed as “Blade Runner”. That rings a bell, doesn’t it?

And the best: it runs on Linux as well as on Windows and Mac!

How to check 64bit or 32bit CPU ?

Lately I stumbled upon this post on the web:

Hi All,

Any one knows the utility, which will provide info about the
CPU used in the machine is 32 bit or 64 bit ?

Thanks

I was wondering about this myself from time to time…
The good news is – in Linux you can figure that out in no
time by typing:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

If you can find the “lm” flag (lm for long mode) in the flag section, it’s a
64-bit machine. If not it’s most likely a 32-bit box you are dealing with.

How to import a signed wildcard Certificate into Lotus Domino?

Lately I wanted to install a wildcard certifcate that I had ordered at
Thawte, which works perfectly fine for e.g. Apache, Postfix and cyrrus IMAP
into Lotus Domino 8.5. Turns out, this is not just a piece of cake.
Although there is an import function within the
“Server Certificate Admin”, it was giving me a hell to get it running,
so I considered to write this little Howto.

Even IBM Support suggested to create a new Certificate Request -
but Thawte would have charged us for that one and I did not like
the idea to pay twice for the same service…

Ok, let’s get going…

At first you need to create your keyring file by opening the
“Server Certificate Admin” Database (certsrv.nfs) within
the Lotus Notes Client (not the Administrator Client).
It creates (per default) a file called keyfile.kyr and -very important-
keyfile.sth (this is needed later on, when the SSL-services starts,
it reads out the scrambled passphrase for the keyring file from here).

You need to enter some basic information about your site, like the
location of the keyring file (on your clients file system), key size,
common name organisation etc… When you are finished hit the
“Create Key Ring” Button.

Now you need to install the Root Certificate from you CA (in my case Thawte)
as “Trusted Root Certificate” into the keyring (unless it’s already there),
because otherwise it would not let you import the actual Certificate.
As you can see, I used the Base64 encoded Cert and pasted it via the Clipboard.

Note: the Root Certificates for Thawte can be found here:
http://www.thawte.com/roots/

If you now look at “View & Edit Keyrings” you can see your freshly imported
Root Cert:

The keyring file is prepared now and ready to get the actual cert imported.

Now look for some computer with openssl installed (Linux just ships with it),
you need it to convert you cert into the .p12 format like:

openssl pkcs12 -export -out <new_key_pair_filename>.p12 -inkey
<private_key_filename>.key -in <certificate_filename>.crt

Of course we need the new_key_file.p12 (dont’ forget the export password,
you will need that later).

Next, you want to install IBM’s IKEYMAN tool on some machine.
It has certain OS requirements – I got it running  within a WinXP VM.
Copy your keyfile.kyr and new_key_file.p12 onto that machine.

Start IKEYMAN and open the keyfile.kyr. With “Personal Certificates”
selected, click on “Import” and choose your freshly created
new_key_file.p12 and save:

Copy your freshly updated keyring.kyr and keyring.sth (from the very
beginning) into the data directory of your Lotus Domino server.
Open the Server Configuration Document within the Lotus Administrator.
Go to “Ports”->”Internet Ports”-”SSL key file name”.
Enter the name of your freshly updated copied keyfile.kyr and you’re all set.

Good Luck.

The Cyborg Name Decoder

Check out this cool site.
Hack in your name and start marvelling…

Sophisticated Clothes Dryer

Alas, today I messed up my trousers with finest french salad dressing at lunch.
Lucky me – we have a washing machine at my work place.
But would I make it home with dry pants?

YES.
Thanks to ~100 cluster nodes blow-drying them in no time!

“What was he wearing while his trousers were blowing in the (cluster) wind?”
I hear you ask…

r2d2 ringtones on your cellphone (really free)

Have you ever wanted to have the cuddly r2d2  making his lovely noise for you, when you get a call or SMS?

This is the place you want to go, provieded – your phone supports mp3 ringtones…

http://www.r2d2translator.com/

Love it.

Rescan the SCSI bus under Linux

Sometimes you want to rescan the SCSI bus, when e.g. adding a new virtual disc in a virtual machine…

Here you can find a very nice shell script, which accomplishes the job:

http://blog.sun.com/roller/resources/le/rescan-scsi-bus.sh

On debian based distributions you can find it in the scsitools package.