FreeBSD by default runs three sets of periodic scripts that outputs a volume of information about your system's current state. The output of these scripts are sent to the root account's mailbox. If you are like me and have a number of FreeBSD servers, its a pain to go check this mailbox on each machine. Well here is an easy fix to send the output of the scripts to any email address.

Edit /etc/periodic.conf and add:

daily_output="ben@domain.com"
daily_status_security_output="ben@domain.com"
weekly_output="ben@domain.com"
monthly_output="ben@domain.com"

To test that this is working run: periodic daily as root. The security run output should arrive in your mailbox.

Quick tip, especially if you use GitHub with Gravatar so a little profile picture will show up on GitHub you likely need to set your Author and Email for Git. So instead of falling back to your system username and machine name for an email address (at least on the Mac), and your account's long name for author name, Git will use the correct information and your gravatar will show up in GitHub (minimally just match your email with your Gravatar account).

Run the following commands:

git config --global user.name 'Your Name'
git config --global user.email ben@domain.com

This will add entries to your ~/.gitconfig file under the [User] section.

Thats it. See me on GitHub here: http://github.com/unilogic

Thanks Tim for the correct way of doing this.
Resource: http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/git

Just to show what value add really means, we have a company that is dedicated to making good products. They pay attention to detail and it shows by error screens that look like this. Job well done Phusion.

Introduction

Here is the, the long awaited second part of my extensive guide on setting up a rails server running on Ubuntu 8.04. Everything should be going smoothly so far and you should be at the point where we need to setup Apache and link everything together. This guide will be quite verbose and much longer than the first one. This is due mostly to all the configuration that will be required. That being said I will contemplate making a third part of this guide that will cover the version control and capistrano recipes. Your thoughts are greatly apreciated, esecially if you want me to cover any other features or topics after you finish reading this guide.

As pointed out by a reader, some people may not have read part 1 yet. Click here to read Part 1 of this guide.

To expand on my last post about fixing the home and end keys in Terminal here is how to fix the Page Up and Page Down keys.

Follow the directions in my last post, but instead of choosing the end or home keys select the page up and page down keys.

Set action to send string to shell and in the text box copy and paste: \033[6~ for page down, and \033[5~ for page up in the text box under the action pull-down.

If you can't copy and paste, the key sequence goes as the following: ESC [ 6 ~ and ESC [ 5 ~ respectively. Those two key sequences should expand to the above text.