Time zones are a major source of annoyance for me, when writing code or working with databases that store time-keyed data. It’s especially irritating when you have to deal with the abomination that is daylight savings time.
So, I’ve finally decided to go ahead and set my server clocks to UTC (or GMT). It wasn’t hard [...]

The version of metacity that ships with Debian Sarge has all of the focus theft prevention code disabled entirely, meaning that every new window ever created steals (or is given, however you want to put it) focus. I’ve spent quite a while this morning trying to figure out how to disable this behavior, finding nothing, [...]

Moving from FreeBSD to Linux, another issue that came up is that apparently Linux’s default terminal information allows the use of the “alternate screen buffer” from vt102 or some such thing. This is what causes less and vi to clear the screen when you exit, screen to not allow you to use xterm’s scrollback buffer, [...]

and I have trouble getting the X server to see the right amount of video memory. It turns out it’s because the default Dell Dimension 3000 BIOS options only allocate 1MB to the video card, rather than the extremely beefy 8MB(!!). Anyways..
At 1MB of video RAM you are pretty much stuck with a max of [...]