The Pocket Site

www.dumpert.nl – KT Tunstall BigBlackHorse.

Humid blech, supposed to play soccer tonight, but son is fluish

Lately I’ve been reading a few on-line books, and I have to say I’ve been impressed with the talent I’ve seen around the web. Sometimes I have to wonder how some of the material I come across doesn’t get published it’s so good! And sometimes its fun to get in on the story as its created, be part (actively 0r otherwise) of the community that supports these authors.

So this is to be the first in a series of posts derived from my (secret) ‘Good Reads’ compilation, with a few gems I feel should for better or worse be singled out.

• Sennadar.com: online fantasy books by James (Fel) Galloway

The above is the one that got me started searching for these gems. I ‘discovered’ it about halfway through the creation of the Firestaff series. And I have to say that although it took a long time for the works to be completed I enjoyed coming back every few months to catch up on the well developed characters progress. I wont spoil it for you, but if you think you might like a little magic, fantasy, and stories about were-cats, then I recommend you go check it out. Enjoy!

Today felt rushed, definitely unplugging tonight, more Star Trek!

rested happy morning, worked like a dog, late wine yummy

Sleepy brunch; fast grocery; building bookcase; marinated chicken win

From mozillalinks.org

A few months ago, I posted how to improve Firefox performance by defragmenting its database files executing SQLite VACUUM command. The only con was that it required a Firefox restart to execute the command.
Thanks to Mozilla’s Jeremy Orem, we have now learned it can be done from within Firefox in two short steps:
* Open the Error Console: Tools menu/Error Console
* In the Code text box paste this (it’s a single line):
Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL(“VACUUM”);
* Press Evaluate. All the UI will freeze for a few seconds while databases are VACUUMed
Note however that the procedure optimizes the Places database only, but this is precisely where you will get the most significant performance improvements.

Stefano Barone does things I never new possible with a guitar. You can buy his CD at CANdYRAT Music. More modern guitar music for your browsing pleasure with CANdYRAT on Myspace. Wow, just wow…

Bash has a built in history function that records recent shell commands. But by default it only retains a raw list of those without attaching additional information. You can add a timestamps to each command by adding something like…

echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%F-%R%t"' >> ~/.bashrc

… and then after reloading your shell session you will see something like …

:~$ history | tail -n 2
 502  2009-10-15-11:26 vim .bashrc
 503  2009-10-15-11:26 history | tail -n 2

You can see much more about what you can do with bash and the history command, including redirecting history commands in the bash and date man pages for your favourite linux distro.

Update: Another option on a debian system (possibly others) would be to use the snoopy package, as described at http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/88

Ubuntu 9.04 bug with networking directory creation « RimuHosting Blog.

I ran ifup and got the following errors
root@charon ~ # ifup eth0
ifup: failed to open statefile /var/run/network/ifstate: No such file or directory
… so i checked and /var/run/network did not exist… This link had a bit more technical information. They said look for  the following files and remove them.
/etc/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules
/lib/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules

A good solution to a tricky issue after an major upgrade.

While I am a big fan of Ubuntu and I use it regularly on my desktop, its fair to say that I prefer not to use it for server installations. The same things goes for Fedora. Actually just don’t use Fedora . Silly bugs like those above are one of the reasons.

If I had to make a recommendation, it would be for Debian stable or CentOS/RHEL. Both are reasonably easy to use, with great community support. And I find they have a much more more consistent toolchain so that things are less likely to break and are better testing before getting into production systems. Keeping in mind this is for a server.

Mind you, no distro is 100% perfect, and some needs will differ. All YMMV and IMHO