Today’s interesting discoveries

1) You can’t even count on your own project’s QA team members not to lie and say “I didn’t change anything” when they really mean “I manually edited this vital configuration file and totally botched the syntax of the start time parameter”.

2) If you need to get a screen dump of the login screen on a machine that isn’t network attached, and so therefore you can’t just use VNC to do it, you can do


chvt 7 ; sleep 5 ; XAUTHORITY=/var/gdm/:0.Xauth DISPLAY=:0.0 xwd -root > login.xwd

You youngsters might want to use the import program instead of xwd if it’s available. But then you’ll never know the joys of stringing together a half dozen pnm commands and getting it right the first time. Damn kids. Get off my lawn.