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In: Computers|Linux Tips
30 May 2008I’m going to use the default Apache and PHP that come from the CentOS repositories (until I get irritated enough with how old they are…). So I just did an install of php-pecl-memcache and let yum fetch the “dependencies,” which, in this case, included Apache and PHP. O:-) In other news, I’m slightly confused about [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Insanity|Linux Tips|OCD|Rants & Raves
9 Mar 2008So I’ve mentioned before that I run an NTP server. Stratum 2, which means it gets its time from a “Stratum 1,” which is set directly to something reliable. The main goal of NTP is to keep clocks in sync, and it’s pretty accurate, down to a fraction of a second, which is more accuracy [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Hero of the Day|Ideas|Interesting|Linux Tips|Living|Photography|Programming|Rants & Raves|Security
25 Feb 2008I just discovered PhotoRec, a tool for recovering digital camera images. For the non-geeks, a quick basic background…. When you save a file, it writes it to various blocks on the disk. Then it makes an entry in the File Allocation Table, pointing to where on the disk the file is. When you delete a [...]
As much as I love open source software, I tend to shy away from the die-hard “OpenSource or bust” people. I use closed-source (“restricted”) drivers when need be, and they usually work better, since the vendors can optimize them. I’m quite frustrated, though, with ATI… The closed-source fglrx drivers give good performance, but have some [...]
I’ve been running an NTP server on this host for quite some time now. But as of yesterday, I’m a member of the pool.ntp.org group. pool.ntp.org is a round-robin-ish DNS service where requests for pool.ntp.org are given IPs from a huge block of listed nameservers, balancing the load across a pool of about 1,500 NTP [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Linux Tips|Living|OCD|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves
27 Jan 2008I’ve redone ttwagner.com. It’s no longer a random integer between 0 and 255, but instead, a decent-looking site. I’ve integrated some of the cool things I’m hosting there as well. I came across a few interesting things I wanted to point out. The world DNS page is incredibly intensive, and, since it’s not dynamic, there’s [...]
Gnome (the desktop environment, not the creepy garden fixtures) has a “Trash Folder,” which is the functional equivalent of the Windows Recycle Bin. This is slightly problematic for those of us who are used to file “deletion” on Linux instantly unlinking the file, who don’t expect that the files are being moved somewhere. Especially as [...]
In the hopes of helping someone else… Ubuntu has two options for a plugin for Firefox to play Flash. There’s the open-source Gnash and “the real thing” from Adobe. Of course what Adobe provides is closed-source, so there seems to be a tendency to push Gnash. But having used Gnash, it’s awful. I give them [...]
It’s good to keep backups, especially of servers in remote data centers using old hard drives. rsync -vaEz –progress user@remote:/path /local/path In my case, I’m doing it as root and just copying /, although, in hindsight, I think I should have used the –exclude=… option… It doesn’t make any sense to me to “back up” [...]
In: Computers|Ideas|Linux Tips|OCD|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves|School
19 Jan 2008I’ve been working on my resume as I seek to apply for a job that’s a neat blend of multiple interests–managing web projects (even in my preferred LAMP environment), politics, and even a management potential. And as I do it, I’m remembering all the stuff I did at FIRST, and reflecting on how much better [...]