Greetings. Welcome to my work-centric home page. It does not tell much about me personally, but neither does this. I work at Wesleyan University as one of two Unix "Programmers". If you need to contact me, call (860) 685 3142 or mailing me at abelew@wesleyan.edu. If you wish, you may learn a little bit of what I can do through my resume.

| Random information| Academic Unix @wes|Documentation| Getting access to Unix @wes|Security| Amusing remarks|Code| Config Files|Links |

How many people still remember "Tinkertoys?" If you will recall, they were a series of plastic tubes and widgets that ranged in height between 2 feet and the height of a small child (me at the time). When properly assembled, these could make amazing structures which could easily support the weight of pretty much anything the young child can think of, including to a limited extent, one's self :) But, I think that playing with computers has a very similiar feeling, if done correctly. So, here is my box of tinkertoys. I hope you like them.

My editorial about computer use

Please keep in mind that these are my views, and though they may be somewhat caustic, they in no way reflect those of my employers, nor have they any effect upon how I might help/treat anyone with respect to computer use.
The use of a computer is a priviledge. As such, the user absolutely must take responsibility for their actions and for the knowledge needed to operate a given machine. By analogy: If you had never before driven a car; would you drive a standard, no power steering dump truck down the autobahn? (presumably not) If you did so, would you blame the truck for the impending accident? (hopefully not) Would you be help responsible for the damage you cause? (Perhaps not in the US, but this is the Autobahn).
With that warning in mind, playing with computers can be a _lot_ of fun, and I invite you to partake in these little bits of information.

Some random stuff!

  1. Information to move mail accounts.
  2. Random compiling note of the day (errr... year): Most c++ software (eg kde) has broken Makefiles, so remeber the -isystem flag; but also remember it only works with certain -r flags and I can't ever remember which ones -- so here is a guaranteed working line for picky code: 
    g++ -c -I/usr/local/qt/include -isystem\
 -I/usr/openwin/include -O2 -fno-strength-reduce\
 -O2 -fno-strength-reduce -fPIC\
  -I/usr/local/kde/include  *.cpp
  3. My Suggestion Box, written in under 8 minutes :) http://condor.wesleyan.edu/cgi/abelew/suggestion_box.pl

Some Information about the Academic Unix machines, Condor and Woodstock

  1. If you are attempting to use Mathematica, on condor, you should make sure that you are also using the fonts that it requires. Thus, set your font server to be either tcp/condor.wesleyan.edu:7100 or tcp/condor.wesleyan.edu:7000 or both.
  2. The default window manager on condor.wesleyan.edu is fvwm2. If you create a .fvwmrc file in your home directory you may _completely_ change the look of fvwm. Here are some examples.
  3. It is very easy to change the window manager you use: Here is a file I use when I wish the gnome with sawmill (very cool) to be my window manager on woodstock.
  4. Other window managers on condor include: fvwm, afterstep, WindowMaker, sawmill, kwm. If anyone wants another wm, tell me.

Documentation for Documentation's sake

  1. A little info to make GNOME work in solaris.
  2. My emacs tutorial
  3. Condor's info
  4. Condor man pages
  5. Wesleyan Unix
  6. Linux documentation project -- All this information works in Solaris as well with a little thought.
  7. A shameless plug for my Unix tutorial.
  8. A dirty explanation of the modem log
  9. A small introduction into Wesleyan's Unixhelp service
  10. How /dev/hme0 autodetects (or does not)
  11. A nice explanation of inodes and ls
  12. Howto setup a loghost in Solaris
  13. Howto Turn off sendmail (pdf)
  14. Howto setup nis+
  15. Some awk information
  16. Some printserver information -- taken from SunWorld thanks to Ravi.
  17. A disk inventory of the datacenter.
  18. The new hacker's dictionary The place to go for Computer jargon.
  19. Information to move mail accounts.
  20. Some CVS information.
  21. A directory of fun documentation: Here

Getting better Access to our Unix machines

  1. Some rough information about how ssh works and can be used at Wesleyan.
  2. Some desktop Unix help

Security / "Anti-Big-Brother" / "Howto-Be-Big-Brother" Information

  1. Bsm auditing
  2. tcp wrappers information
  3. The admin's guide to cracking
  4. My info about security
  5. My PGP public key.
  6. Some PGP information

Some Funny / Inflammatory remarks

  1. Computer politics
  2. Problems with Suns and Solaris
  3. For those of you hungering for a new UN*X OS.
  4. Content Hell, ripped from HWA taken from elsewhere, but I share the sentiments.
  5. Email
  6. DecWars
  7. The Tao of Programming
  8. Real Programmers Write in Fortran. Thanks to Clemens for this one.

Some code I tinker with

  1. My brute force 8 Queens solver written in Scheme. I hope to have a semi intelligent one written soon.
  2. My elisp checkers game!

Some configuration Files

  1. My current elisp directory
  2. My current bashrc file
  3. My current Xsession file

Some Links

  1. Personal Stuff
  2. My bookmarks.
  3. The Student Net (Wadi)

Ashton Trey Belew
Last modified: Tue Nov 28 12:03:57 EST 2000