Wow!

I’ve only tested this is Hardy Heron at the moment, but it appears that, given the proper repositories, it is now possible to install applications from the browser! It’s not only an idea, it’s in practice! This’ll let tutorials consist at least partially of application installation links! ^^

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Categorized as Software

Super Cache!

If the site seems maybe a bit faster, I bet it’s because of Super Cache! This plugin will store pages as HTML and serve them up instead of more intensive PHP pages with oodles of MySQL quries. It was a bit of a pain to get working. First I had to enable mod_rewrite, and then the readme told me I had to delete the configuration files of another, less extreme caching plugin that it uses to supplement itself. It then complained it couldn’t find the file. Oh well. Given write permissions to various folders and files, it was largely able to fix its own problems. You can tell if a page has been served to you by super cache by checking the source code of the page at the bottom for a comment saying as much. This means my server will probably be even LESS occupied. I’d like to run Seti@Home on the server, too, but I’ve tried it before and it loses some responsiveness and becomes horribly unstable. I suspect it’s probably overheating, which will hopefully be solved once and for all when we get our house wired with some Cat 6 and stick all but the alarm computer and the desktops in the basement. I imagine computers are quite fond of a nice 57 degrees. (Fahrenheit, I don’t want to melt them. :p)

Brasero

You know Brasero, the new (and very shiny) CD burning suite in Hardy Heron? I have had two problems with it thus far in the course of burning the RC ISO from my beta installation. My root partition for the beta only had around 550 MB left – not enough to mirror the ISO in a temporary directory. It failed with a vague error message:

Error while burning:

the selected location does not have enough free space to store the disk image (692 MiB needed).

Yes, the error message really was that poorly written. I tried another CD, thinking (incorrectly) that there might be something wrong with the CD itself, but I noticed that Brasero itself reported the CD with 702 MiB or so of space, and recordable. I poked around, and under the properties button next to the drive selection, I found a temporary directory with, you guessed it, around 550 MB free space. I told it to use my other ext3 partition, and it burned the disk happily. It then ejected the disk, then requested I put it back in for a read verify check. I did so, but Nautilus popped up first, showing me the contents of the disk, and there was also a package manager asking since there were packages on the disk if I wanted it to open. I said no. Brasero complained that the drive was in use. So much for read verify. I’ll see if I can post my errors somewhere where they can be addressed. Maybe they’re already fixed in the RC…

EDIT: Yup, it seems to be fixed now. I got a read verify to run.

EDIT2: It helps to disable the automatic display of the contents of new media in Nautilus’ preferences. To disable everything Nautilus does to the disk, you’d probably have to disable it popping anything up when a disk has software on it, too.

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Categorized as Software

More Cats!

Some engineers got together and made an entertaining video on cats. It’s very well-done, and you can find it here.

There were also some very poorly – to the point of hilarity – fan fictions written about Half Life 2. Squirrelking wrote them. There are two parts.

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Categorized as Funny

Malasysia

How many of you knew where Malaysia is? I didn’t either. It’s here. It’s a rather small country in southeast Asia. They’re getting a huge rollout of 224 megabits per second (direction not specified) broadband over power (Internet over power lines – plug an adapter into a wall socket and off you go) for $1.58 per month. FiOS is about the fastest thing available at an average consumer level, (and it’s nowhere near national rollout at this point) and it costs $43-$50 per month, offering up to 50 megabits per second downstream and up to 20 megabits per second upstream. If they can do it, why can’t we?

I’ve read about this huge island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, but I’ve never seen it. I looked on Google Earth – it isn’t there.  It makes sense to me why Google wouldn’t take extensive pictures of the ocean – in the most part it’d be a waste of satellite power. I recently found a series in which some people get a boat and go out to this patch of plastic. It’s thought-provoking. You can watch it here.

On the subject of satellites: space is full of them. Not just operational satellites, but shards of them. Here’s a picture.

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Categorized as Hardware

Uninterruptable Power Supply, AKA Overpriced Surge Protector

At around 2 AM Wednesday morning, the power went out, and my server UPS informed me with earsplitting screeches. The logical thing to do would have been to log on the server and shut it down gracefully, but I wasn’t thinking straight, seeing as I had been awoken just then by an alarm. I unplugged the UPS, but of course it went on making its horrible, piercing tone as there was no power. I then had to hold down and release the UPS’s button, and it stopped. I then spent a few minutes bringing the machines back up to speed. I ran down to see if my rig’s UPS had held out for a few minutes, but it hadn’t. Oh well. I’m beginning to wonder if UPSes are worth it.