The power of silence Six ways to make a point by saying nothing reflection behaviour

The power of silence Six ways to make a point by saying nothing reflection behaviour

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In todays Magazine

• 7 questions on quizzes
• How can the Titanic be celebrated?
• Is taking rubbish stealing?
• The ear of the leader

Stop.

Close your eyes.

Take a deep breath.

Shut out the world around you.

Those moments when you are immersed in quietness are all too rare in todays world.

Noise pollution is a companion to modern life, with traffic, ringtones and other peoples conversations providing the soundtrack to our daily routines.

A record by the Royal British Legion featuring only silence is hoping to beat Take That to the number one spot this week. 

It reflects the immense power that - for many people - silence can wield, if only we stopped to listen.

Go to BBC to read the original article.

Posted via email from colby pre-posterous

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The love affair with freenx is over time to make the marriage work

The love affair with freenx is over time to make the marriage work

It seems that not much survives contact with students!

Basically if the freenx session isnt correctly terminated or established then desktop processes and a nx process are left running to the server which will prevent them logging in again.

However I am not the first person to notice this:

PSI Labs who use the technology have developed a RPM of scripts to manage this properly called nxcleanup. A user session has the standard number of processes for the desktop however there is an associated nx process that the student doesnt own. So the script nxclean would need to be run as root.

How do I enable a student to run a script as root that wipes out processes of an arbitary user?

Simple: Use a setuid "shim"! Write a trivial C program that takes no inputs (or has very, very thorough sanity checking!) which identifies the current user using posix calls and then execs the script after passing it the current username. Nifty eh? This is a standard way of making scripts run safely as root. Ill post it as soon as I am done.

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