I am trying to form a Linux User Group at the University of Texas at Arlington. So far the LUG at UTA has gained serveral initial members, elected officers, ratified a constitution and now we are awaiting approval from the Student Governance Office to be an official student organization.

I made another presentation to the Fort Worth Linux User group this month. This time I gave an introduction to drupal. Read more to watch it.

It annoying when you have to enter your username and password into a captive portal day after day. With a super simple perl script using WWW::Mechanize and a wireless connection manager like wicd you can make it all happen automagically.

Here is the script I use to auto login to the wireless connection at starbucks.

So I got a nice little acer aspire one, and I've been using the wifi around town. It is really annoying when you get behind a firewall that only lets certain ports out.

I wrote a perl cgi script that will set up iptables port forwarding rules to put a service (like ssh or a vpn) on a non-restricted port (like 443). The rule only affects the IP address from which the cgi was accessed.

of course it has to run as root to set up the iptables rules.

I just got a palm centro and have been trying to get it to play nice with my linux desktop. This post documents the things I discover and problems I encounter.