I’m in the process of working on one of my projects, and the requirement came up to download a fairly large file (4GB). Since I only receive ~20GB/month at my house, I decided to just use my server in the U.S. The next requirement came about needing to compile Mapnik, which I had intended to do on the server at some point anyways, yet I ran into memory constraints. Good old distcc comes to the rescue. I don’t need to use distcc that often, yet when I do, it is very handy. However, I always forget to set g++ to use distcc as well. So, for when I forget next time…

I have to admit, I’m pretty lazy. I don’t (ironically) like to type, and I really don’t like typing the same command over and over. I found myself switching between my external monitor and laptop quite frequently, and decided to somewhat automate the task. Although I know there are other programs out there that allow this, they either had too many features, or crashed. Xrandr works just fine, but like I said, I’m lazy…

Today on Linux.com, Liferea was mentioned I find this particularly because I’ve been using Liferea for quite a few months, and haven’t been able to find anything that better suits my needs. It sits quietly in the corner until a new RSS is available, and slightly changes color. Plus, it integrates wonderfully into GNOME. Well, the Linux.com article does a great job summarizing the reader, so if you are in the market, I’d take a look. For posterities sake, I took a screenshot of the Linux.com feed of Liferea, in Liferea.

Having been in I.T. for quite a few years, upgrading can sometimes be quite a hassle. Having switched to Linux for many years, the crazy upgrade madness of windows is gone. So, how easy is upgrading in Linux? Yea, pretty darn easy, I must admit. And my system certainly isn’t normal! It has been an upgrade from Debian Sarge(ish) -> Ubuntu LTS(ish) -> 6.10 -> 7.04… The only hiccup was at some point when the fonts were reinstalling (I totally ignored the “close all programs” warning:

I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. I love it because if there is a problem, I can actually tinker and find the problem and fix it. But I hate it because I like to tinker. Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of Django programming – enjoying every minute of it. After completing several of my projects I decided to do some benchmarks, and the results are in! Generally I can server cached/semi-cached pages at about 200req/sec. 200req! Considering this is 5,000,000 or so requests a day, and a number I am never going to reach, I still began to wonder: why isn’t it higher? I mean, serving a static html page is at like 1000+ req/sec, so why would a cached page be significantly different? I …

It should come as a surprise that I enjoy using Linux. For the record, the first time I booted into Linux on my own was 1997, this was just before entering high school. So, while some of my tech friends played with NT, I was rumbling with the Penguin. Starting in 2000 I was using Linux as my main operating system, sometimes supplemented by OS X, and only using Windows when the gaming urge surfaced. In 2004 I mostly dropped playing any games, which resulted in dropping Windows – and besides for work, I haven’t used it since.

Ian keeps bugging me at how great Quicksilver is. Knowning that there must be an alternative built for linux, I accidently stumbled across Katapult. While it still has a little room to grow, Katapult makes a great tool in any KDE toolchest. Press ALT+SPACE, and your widget fires up, ready to take your orders. Since words don’t really do this justice, I created a screencast. Katapult Screencast from Kelvin Nicholson on Vimeo.

In the next year I plan to make a little video, nothing fancy likely, but something that will require an editor. However, I don’t own a mac (which rules our Final Cut Pro + After Effect and iMovie, which Ian and I both have had too much fun with. Inside joke.) I’m also a die-hard Linux fan, trying to hold out buying a mac for as long as possible. SF to the rescure. There are four editors listed, and in the next year I’ll try them all. Overalll, they look quite promising.

I’ll admit, I think one of the thickest barriers to entry regarding Linux is variety. I love variety, but general end users don’t adjust well to change (IMHO). Thus enter the stage: Portland. So, what does this mean to the end user? This means that, eventually, the UI throughout linux will all look similar – regardless if it is designed to utilize GTK, QT or anything else (that is, if it is built off the Portland standard).

Logs spiraling crazy, we run out of disk space all the time. A nifty trick to find where the disk went is to issue: du -cks * |sort -rn |head -11 This returns where the disk usage is, and makes finding the bloated log a lot easier.