Author: Rob

Consultant, Coach, Mentor, believer in agility and adaptability. Founder @ Chalk and Cheese. Formerly Co-founder @skeltonthatcher consulting

Cloud services for small business

The maturity and availability of cloud services at both infrastructure and application layers reinforces my view that now can be a time of technology led transition. Many business and individuals are looking at cloud offerings with the mandate to examine them for applicability to their own requirements. There are a few common points which might server as a … Continue reading Cloud services for small business →

Looking at Chromebooks

Today Google unveils a new Chromebook in the form of 14" HP Pavilion Chromebook. It seems they may be gaining traction. For the curious, I have put together a small summary from my notes after attending a Google presentation on the subject.  The Chromebook as an IT concept is an interesting thing as it steps … Continue reading Looking at Chromebooks →

Conditionally setting DISPLAY variables in bash

A tiny snippet of useful bash shell code today, to help with setting your DISPLAY variable if integrating Cygwin/X into your Windows environment, add it to a .bashrc for effect. Launching X apps from the ‘Cygwin Terminal’ is smoothed as a result. #RT Check for XWin and set DISPLAY if present. ps -a | grep … Continue reading Conditionally setting DISPLAY variables in bash →

Using the Unix Epoch timestamp for file naming

Another aide-mémoire today, illustrated via a small script. I was musing on file version numbering (yes I know about SVN et al, but sometimes they are overkill) and considered using the time represented as the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix Epoch, seems like a simple approach wrapped into the file and filename, what … Continue reading Using the Unix Epoch timestamp for file naming →

Using .forward files and retaining a local copy

If your read your email on a platform able to utilise dot forward files (.forward), it's useful to know that aside from adding a forward address to bounce mail onwards seamlessly, you can retain a copy at the original receiving host by constructing your .forward as below, where I show an excerpt from my system. #cat .forward … Continue reading Using .forward files and retaining a local copy →