The Pocket Site

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

IMHO, there are four parts to managing services in most linux distributions.

First you need to decide what services you really need. The less software you have running on your desktop or server, the easier it is to maintain long term. This is important both for security and in terms of allocating valuable resources.

Use the netstat command to check which services are listening to external ports, and the ps command to see the global process list for your server

Secondly find out how to control the service

• under CentOS, use the  service command
• under Debian, use update-rc.d

Third, you may need to enable some services in the distribution configuration. For example under Ubuntu, to enable the Apache server edit /etc/default/apache2 to allow that to be run by default

Fourth tweak automated running services.

• under CentOS, use the chkconfig command
• under Debian, install the sysv-rc-conf console based gui

That should help you get started on working out what is important to have running on your Linux server or desktop.

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar… and the coffee…

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things-your God, your family, your children, your health, your friends, and your favourite passions-things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, and your car.The sand is everything else-the small stuff.

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18 holes. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal.” Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.”