I have a dual-boot computer that boots Ubuntu and Windows 7. Whenever I boot into Ubuntu, the BIOS clock is automatically set to UTC time, even though my current timezone is UTC+8.

Google has launched a new Group Chat feature in Google Talk. Even though Google Talk uses the open XML based XMPP protocol for it’s IM service, Pidgin, the open source multi-platform instant messaging client, has yet to support this useful feature.

A couple of readers, upon reading this article to calculate yesterday’s date in a shell script, have requested for a similar script that can be used to calculate tomorrow’s date.

Are you going on a holiday and need to find out exchange rate of your holiday destination? You will no longer need to search for a site that does currency conversions. Google is able to perform the currency conversion using a simple search query.

If you need to administer your home network remotely from office, you will either need to know the public IP address assigned by your ISP or use a service called dynamic DNS, that will map a DNS hostname to your IP address. Dynamic DNS is required as the public IP address assigned by your Internet Service Provider is never fixed for consumer broadband connections.

In modern UNIX and Linux systems, user passwords are encrypted and stored in the /etc/shadow file. On BSD systems, the passwords are kept in the /etc/master.passwd file. The encrypted password field in the file contains more than just the encrypted password, it contains additional information.

Linux is a very customisable UNIX like operating system. To date, there are more than a couple of dozen Linux distributions available, based on this Wikipedia list.

There are times when you will need to calculate yesterday’s date in a UNIX shell script to run some date sensitive cron jobs. There are currently no standard command line tools in UNIX to perform such date arithmetic.

If your organisation has password aging policy set for your UNIX servers, there is a possibility that the root account may also get locked out due to the existence of an expiry date set in the /etc/shadow file. Once the root account is locked, all jobs (cron, etc) that require root privileges may start to fail. To unlock the root account on a SUN SPARC machine, you will need to:

The Registry Editor, or regedit.exe, allows the import and export of Windows registry entry files from the command line. It’s usage though, could prove to be a bit restrictive from the command line. From Windows XP edition onwards, Microsoft has included another command line tool called REG, or reg.exe. This tool is able perform almost all the tasks as it’s GUI counterpart – regedit.exe.