Al4

Intel wifi led blinking AGAIN on Ubuntu 12.04

Alex — Thu, 10 May 2012 22:32:20 +0000

I previously posted about this on previous versions of Ubuntu, but despite updating the instructions for 11.10 the instructions are once again obsolete. It seems Intel changes the name of its wifi kernel module every release… On my Dell E4300 …

I Sincerely Hope I Never Write a Script like this Again

Alex — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:20:21 +0000

This sort of stuff destroys your soul: #!/bin/bash logfile=~/slave-watcher.log while true; do status=$(mysql --execute="show slave status\G"|grep "Seconds_Behind_Master:"|awk '{print $2}') if [ $status == "NULL" ]; then mysql --execute="show slave status\G" | grep "Last_SQL_Error:" | tee -a $logfile mysql --execute="set global …

Buying a PC Power Supply in the UK, January 2012

Alex — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:30:36 +0000

In the process of building my first desktop PC in about 4 years, I’ve come to realise that I no longer know anything about PC hardware. At one stage I considered myself, perhaps incorrectly, to be fairly knowledgeable about the …

Adding a swap file on Linux

Alex — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:15:20 +0000

At work some of our Red Hat (RHEL5) servers with 32GB of ram were configured with only 2 Gb swap files. For some workloads this might be fine, but a 2-in-1 Apache and MySQL server is not one of them. …

LinkedIn Android “bug fix” update includes invasive permissions change

Alex — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:28:38 +0000

LinkedIn was an app I hesitated to install initially because of the long list of permissions it requires. The December 19th update also added one more: The full description of this permission reads: READ SENSITIVE LOG DATA Allows an application …

Viber battery life – an update

Alex — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:06:18 +0000

My impromptu post about Viber gained a little more attention than I thought it would, prompting a discussion about battery usage and even attracting a response from the Viber development team. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, …

It had to be done…

Alex — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:33:00 +0000

Q: How does well does adsense perform on a site like this?

Alex — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:36:55 +0000

A: Haha: Not quitting my day job. Despite increasing revenue by 50% over the previous month I still need to increase revenue a further 500% to cover the costs of running this site. And at the moment it’s a tiny …

Slow desktop performance on Ubuntu 11.10 with nvidia graphics cards

Alex — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:29:35 +0000

11.10 has been a bit of a mixed bag. On the plus side it has Gnome 3, giving me a practical (and in my opinion superior) alternative to Unity. On the minus side I had upgrade glitches on both my …

Viber – a nice VoIP app that I don’t really like

Alex — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:54:57 +0000

Viber (the kiwi/brit in me really wants to spell it “Vibre”), is a VoIP app for cell phones that uses a data connection to make free calls, much like Skype and other VoIP systems. The idea is great in principle, …