Month: March 2012

Emacs – Working with Regions

Posted on by jra

In this weeks segment on Emacs wizardry let’s learn some of the basic commands for working with regions of text so you can move around your Emacs region faster than Blackberry’s are forgotten about.

Keystrokes Command Name Action
C-@ or C-SPACE set-mark-command Mark the beginning (or end) of a region.
C-x C-x exchange-point-and-mark Exchange location of cursor and mark.
C-w or SHIFT-DELETE kill-region Delete the region
C-y or SHIFT-INSERT yank Paste most recently killed or copied text.
ESC-w or C-INSERT kill-ring-save Copy the region.
Esc-h mark-paragraph Mark paragraph.
C-x C-p mark-page Mark page.
C-x h mark-whole-buffer Mark buffer.
ESC-y yank-pop After C-y, pastes earlier deletion.

Linux PAM Resources

Posted on by jra

Pluggable authentication modules (PAM) are a mechanism to integrate multiple low-level authentication schemes into a high-level application programming interface (API). It allows programs that rely on authentication to be written independent of the underlying authentication scheme. PAM was first proposed by Sun Microsystems in an Open Software Foundation Request for Comments (RFC) 86.0 dated October 1995. It was adopted as the authentication framework of the Common Desktop Environment. As a stand-alone infrastructure, PAM first appeared from an open-source, Linux-PAM, development in Red Hat Linux 3.0.4 in August 1996. PAM is currently supported in the AIX operating system, DragonFly BSD,[1] FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD and Solaris.

Below is a list of good resources related to PAM that you can use to improve your Linux security model.

Linux PAM Admin Guide

NetBSD PAM Guide

Nice PAM Tutorial

Redhat Reference for PAM Modules

PAM Manual

The Necessity of Catechism

Posted on by jra


From Richard Baxter’s “A Christian Directory – Volume I:


A sound and well composed catechism studied well and dept in memory, would be a good measure of knowledge, to ordinary Christians, and make them solid and orderly in their understanding,
and in their proceeding to the smaller points, and would prevent a great deal of error and miscarriage, that many by ill teaching are cast upon, to their own and the churches grief!

We can see plainly that the a few of the sound benefits of committing a catechism that exhorts sound doctrine offers:

1. Ground Christians in the fundamentals of Christian doctrine.

2. Refutation of error introduced into the Church.

3. A continual means of growing in grace.

So what are some biblically faithful catechisms that you can use to commit to memory? Here are a few:

Westminster Shorter Catechism

The Heidelberg Catechism

Fisher’s Catechism

The Catechism of the Church of Geneva