A couple of years ago I was sitting in one of those mind numbing meetings about stupid users or some such thing when I began to doodle and hit upon an idea. Wouldn't it be cool if all of our users sat in specially designed (or retrofitted) chairs that were capable of producing a shot to the sitter's posterior. The idea called for a chair, a boot, a lever, an actuator, a small computer with a network connection (wired or wireless), and some custom software. The computer would provide a network interface that would allow an administrator or help desk person to send a request to the chair and the person sitting in it would get a single kick in the pants. The idea for the interface later morphed into a web page and/or XML-RPC interface that listened to requests from authorized administrators which would trigger the butt kicking as well as various presets (single kick, small whooping, smack down, death by boot, etc).

When running Filemaker Server 5.5/6.0 on Linux one looses the nice automated backup features which exist in the Windows and Mac versions of the software. It turns out backups can be automated pretty simply by using the PAUSE and RESUME options for fmserverd. I don't claim to be a super bash scripter but here's an example script to get you going (keep in mind that this script lacks error handling, use it at your own risk). NOTE: If anyone would like to add error handling and other nifty features please login and post a comment with your suggestions.

NOTE: If you're using Apache 2.x go here.

I manage a fair number of Apache 1.3x web servers. Most of which are used for virtual hosting. After reading an article by Jeff Fulmer in SysAdmin Magazine entitled "Save Bandwidth and Increase Performance with Cache-control Response Headers" I decided to configure my Apache servers to use mod_header to send the Cache-control header for graphics files.