opensourcetutor.com

Here’s a simple method of automatically muting your volume overnight and resetting it in the morning. This is especially good for those who use softphones, skype or an IM client that have sound alerts output to speakers.
We are going to use three command line tools for this: aumix, which and cron. We are also only going to set things up so the commands are run under the user account, rather than as root as cron used incorrectly can open up some security issues.
so, to get started try and run:
:~$ aumix
and …

Yesterday, I was searching around for a Critique of Neale Donald Walsch after watching the DVD “Conversations with God” – I have already read all three books of his Conversations with God series and whilst it didn’t present to me any new and revealing ideas about life, god and living in general, it did act as a reminder of the ones I already have. I have known about Book 1 for almost as long as it’s been out but never picked it up as I considered it would be too …

I have read quite a bit about Lisp before and most of it, frankly went over my head as a non-programmer except bar a few articles of Paul Graham’s on Lisp. Paul is one of the brainchild(ren??) behind ViaWeb which is now Yahoo Shopping and the author of a number of books: ANSI Common Lisp, Hackers & Painters and On Lisp, which you can download here
Today, I happened to come across this link and the guy in the picture just happens to be John McCarthy, the man who designed …

Some really bizarre results here that just blew my mind. Check out the “rate” column for both random writes and random reads and compare the Ext3 Ubuntu with Nexenta VM for both UFS and ZFS – UFS is a bit quicker the ZFS. I am not sure whether the virtualisation actually improves the random reads and writes but it’s a pretty massive difference. After my small play with Nexenta, it’s looking quite promising to become my primary desktop OS.
Here’s a tiobench of Ubuntu 7.04 running on a Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB …

In my last post, I wrote about flpsed a PDF and Postscript editor. I was really surprised about how much traffic the post brought in from google, so I thought I would do a bit more digging around to see what I could find because flpsed doesn’t have the same amount of features as something like Foxit’s PDF Editor.
So I went on a bit of an install frenzy searching for Windows PDFEditor’s with free trials and installing them and running them with Wine. I didn’t have much success there and …

Ok, I have used most of the Gnome music players and they are mostly very good and quite stable but here, I find myself back on Amarok, given up on it’s Gnome counterparts?
Well, mostly it’s the tagging capabilities that Amarok offers. Yes, Listen and a few other have musicbrainz support but most of my music is so left of field that it’s not on Musicbrainz and this is where Amarok let’s you use “guess tag from filename” and you can also do this quickly and easily for groups of files. …

# Update – I discovered a better PDF Editor than flpsed and have written about it here
I spend so much time typing and so little time writing these days, that when I have to use a pen, any length of writing ends up becoming a bit painful, especially so because I am left-handed and we are reknown for holding our pens incorrectly (among other things)
So, I haven’t used Adobe Acrobat for viewing PDF’s for a long time.. since Version 6.0 when it took forever to load and asked you to …

I recently stumbled upon this very interesting interview with (ex) Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas. The article is definitely worth a read as Con expresses much of his frustrations with the performance of the Linux kernel for desktop users (much of it relating to scheduling) as well as some of his frustrations with the kernel development process.
I know myself that FROM A USER’S PERSPECTIVE, very high disk i/o can kill a HP DL-585 with 5 x 15K SAS drives, meanwhile the same task running on a lower end HP9000 …

Last time I did this, I found the instructions pretty easily on how to migrate SSL’s from IIS to Apache. This time I found it hard to locate the documentation, so for my own lack of memory and when google fails you, here it is:
First we need to export the certificate from IIS into a pfx file. To do that:Click Start->Run->type: mmc [enter]Click ->’Console’ -> ‘Add/Remove Snap-in’.Click -> ‘Add’ -> ‘certificates’ snap-in and click on ‘Add’.Select -> ‘Computer Account’ -> click ‘Next’.Select ‘Local Computer’ and then click ‘OK’.Click ‘Close’ and …

Ok – some real-life critical experience today.. one of our web servers notifies us (thanks to csf / lfd firewall ) that the server has had a high load for greater than 5 minutes. I get logged in and see the 5,10 & 15 minute load average exceeding 30 and this server normally runs at a load of <1
Here’s the MRTG Graph of the load:

A quick look at top showed me approx 15 httpd (apache) processes maxxing out the CPU. Now, it’s a shared server with hundreds of Virtual …