Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Happy Ubuntu 11.04 release day
Ubuntu 11.04 was released today and, as OMG! Ubuntu put it, “every man, wife, dog, child, elf, dwarf, sister, neighbour and cousin are downloading it right now”. OMG! Ubuntu has set up a cutomized landing page for people looking for Natty info. Head on over to http://omgubuntu.co.uk/hub/natty to see it
Robbinsweb lives…again
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, My Life, Technology on April 25th, 2011
Yeah, ok, so I know I already wrote about this, but the ole’ boy died again. This time I lost a drive. For once in my life i was glad I had mirrored drives on a home server. The down time was rather epic considering my complete lack of motivation to rebuild it, and its difficult to find an 80 GB drive any more. For the interested here are the steps I followed to restore the array:
1) Install the drive in place of the dead drive (like I needed to tell you that)
2) Boot the degraded array and go start up fdisk indicating the new drive (something to the effect of ‘fdisk /dev/sdb’) The reason I used fdisk rather than the far sexier cfdisk, is that cfdisk was having fits about the drive having an incorrect block count or something that made no sense on a new drive. Fdisk handled it perfectly.
3) Partition the drive EXACTLY like the current drive (size, order on disk, etc.)
4) Add the partitions back into the array one by one. So if you have three partitions in the array, say root, swap and home as sdb1, sdb2, and sdb3 respectively, add them into the array like this:
mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1
mdadm –add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb2
mdadm –add /dev/md2 /dev/sdb3
That is assuming your array partitions line up to your disk partitions that way.. Then you can watch the rsync updating the partitions by doing a ‘cat /proc/mdstat’
To alias or not to alias, that is the question
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web, Work on April 12th, 2011
I have a good number of servers I have to keep track of at work, and they all have rather long domain names, and I really haven’t gotten used to the subnetting at my job yet. So what is one to do? Well, I did what any concerned Linux user would do, I aliased all of then in my hosts file. Sort of like this:
192.168.125.133 dev1 192.168.125.137 dev2 10.6.8.201 uat1 10.6.8.202 uat2
I can hear you say already, “Jeff, just memorize them, there are only 4!”, yeah, ok, this is only about 1/16 of the aliases I have, so that becomes a bit more difficult. So here is my conundrum, do I continue with the aliases, or do I go cold-turkey and try to memorize them. The upside of aliasing is that I can fly when I am at my machine, its a no brainer to scp or ssh to a machine, but then I look like a total retard when I am at someone else’s computer, “What do you mean you don’t know the IP or domain name of your dev server!?”.
So therein lies the subject of my pondering..
Ubuntu 11.04 is almost here
In light of the fact that Natty is almost ready for release, I have added the countdown timer to the side panel. I will, as tradition demands, forget about it until many months after the release has happened and the image become some odd amalgamation of Ubuntu advertising and proselytization, either that or a broken image. Either way, I usually remember to take the image down before the next scheduled Ubuntu release. Usually..
With 11.04 moving to use both Wayland AND Unity this is setting up to be one of the biggest releases Ubuntu has ever seen. The move away from X.org is a monumental thing in itself, but then also replacing one of the mainstay Linux (Gnome,KDE,etc.) desktop environments with Unity is nothing less than playing software chicken. Either Ubuntu is going stay the course and the community will flinch and Unity/Weyland will become a standard, or Ubuntu will flinch and will have to backtrack with X.org and Gnome, or a worst-case scenario, neither flinch and we end up with a smoldering pile of rubbish on both ends.
(note: yes, I know Unity is built on Gnome, and works similar to Gnome3, but it isn’t Gnome3, so my statement stands)
Google CSE article
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Technology, Web on April 9th, 2011
I just finished the Google CSE article I started a couple of weeks back. It was an interesting project, mostly due to the fact that I have never worked with the Google search API before and it was enjoyable to learn something new.
Hopefully you find it useful. When I was putting the code together, I found there to be a distinct lack of articles or documentation on the Custom Search Engines. Hopefully this helps someone. Then again, Google will probably EOL the JS CSE API in the next few months and I will have written the article for my own benefit. Ah well..
Wow, Gmail motion wrocks!
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web on April 1st, 2011
I logged into Gmail this morning and I was looking over my inbox when I just happened to scratch my nose. Oddly, a new message was created addressed to my top most mailed addresses. What an glitch I thought. Then I ran my fingers through my hair and Gmail created a new label “80′s Hair Bands” and applied it to the message I was reading. Wow! Gmail is behaving very strange this morning! Then I tried experimenting with other motions, and sure enough they produced other effects in Gmail. I found ways of forwarding all my junk mail to family members with only a flick of my wrist, and marking all my inbox messages as spam with a nod of my head. I found out that I was using Gmail Motion! This has got to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, no strike that, the greatest thing since AdBlock Freedom!
A solution of sorts
A reoccurring issue with web development has always been cross-browser checking. Does the site work and layout correctly in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera, blah blah. A huge problem with doing all my development on Linux is that I can’t easily check Internet Explorer on Windows. Most of the rest of my team also decline to use Windows and most of them use Apple (a whole other debate, but I will skip that for now). Our clients are totally Window’s shops so this presents a problem. We have tried running VM’s locally, but this has its own issues such as resource usage on your local machine. You start up a VM and watch all your RAM go bye bye.
The solution I have for this now, which seems to work alright, is to run another box with a decent amount of RAM and let everyone RDP into it for testing. This coupled with the virtual machines that Microsoft provides for testing has been working very well.
Do you ever get the feeling?
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Rants, Work on March 8th, 2011
I have been working to implement a Google custom search engine into a clients website. I have had to pour through the documentation to fully understand how it works and I am both impressed and revolted simultaneously. I keep getting the feeling that this stuff was originally developed by people that are obscenely smarter than I am. Its obviously brilliant, but like any brilliance, its usually offset by some other glaring omission.
First off, the search API from Google. Why is the primary search API deprecated and the recommended replacement not even out of labs yet? So let me get this straight, I can either use the API that will EOL’d at some unknown time by Google without warning, or I can use the unstable labs API that could and most likely will change in the future. Sounds like a call from the client complaining that their site is broken just waiting to happen.
Second, the API is written in a way that leaves massive holes of undocumented functionality. Usually when you document an API you include ALL the functionality so people can fully utilize all the features. So I am continually finding blogs and other bastions of literary excellence revealing ‘hidden’ features of the Google search API. I have implemented a fair amount of the code I have found on these sites and I am still flabbergasted as to why Google would just leave this stuff out of their documentation.
I am going to be writing up an article on implementing a Google custom search engine over the next few days, one, so I can remember if I have to do it again in the future, good documentation is sparse on this subject, and two so others can refer to it and hopefully avoid some of the frustration I have gone through to get this to work.
Cairo dock
I just found this little nugget of desktop customization goodness. Its called Cairo-dock, or GLX-Dock, not sure where the name discrepancy came from. Its basically Apple’s dock on all sorts of funky pepsi. You can customize the heck out of it and it just does its thing. I used to use Docky and AWN but after messing with Cairo-dock for a while, I was hooked. It might not be for everyone since it has quite a breadth of features, if thats not your cup of tea, you might try AWN or even Docky for the ultimate in dock usage-ease.
Not only can it serve as a app launcher, it can completely replace the default OS menu bars. Check out the video on the main page of their site for a good example of what it can do. I will post some screen shots of my desktop once I have mine more customized.
LibreOffice hot off the presses for Ubuntu and now in PPA!
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Software, Technology on March 1st, 2011
In case you haven’t heard, LibreOffice is available as a PPA. That means no more downloading individual .debs and auto updating! Found through OMG!Ubuntu here.
