Author Archives: Alex Forbes

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

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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 256MB instance on Rackspace Cloud which, traffic depending, costs me a bit under £10 a month. To run WordPress properly however you really need 512MB minimum, even with the meagre traffic this site receives… so the cost should be closer to £20.

What I’d like to do is be able to justify running a cloud load balancer with two front-end web nodes and a separate DB node at the backend. Assuming all 256mb instances the cost of that setup would be about £1 per day, which should be too hard to deliver on an affiliate site, even if it isn’t this one. Hmm. Project time. :D

While this site does reasonably well on a few Ubuntu-related terms, it’s not hard to see why this site has such a poor click-through rate. For one thing the articles are mostly tech-focused, and I know myself when I’m Googling for a solution I literally skim the article for the code blocks, maybe think “that looks right”, and I’m gone in 10 seconds.

If it was a particularly tricky problem or the solution was a good one I might hang around long enough to leave a comment but most of the time I don’t, even though I like receiving comments myself.

The other reason it does badly is that I don’t really want the ad banner to get in the way, you’ll notice there’s only one banner, and its to the right and not even at the top.

Plus I’m using a stock theme and update once in a blue moon.

This site needs some love.

Or for more people to click the following link and spend lots of money with Rackspace. ;)

Powered by Rackspace Cloud Computing

Slow desktop performance on Ubuntu 11.10 with nvidia graphics cards

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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 work and personal machines, and they were unrelated issues! Might be wise to wipe and reinstall for this one (you did separate your home partition when you installed didn’t you :)).

Anyway after getting it working on my work PC (which has an 8400GS), the desktop was quite laggy in both Unity and Gnome3. It was still usable but I didn’t realise how bad it was until I went home and noticed how much smoother my laptop was, with its lowly 2009-era Intel integrated graphics…

The solution was to install the latest 285.05 Nvidia driver, but trust me when I tell you that you do not want the hassle of using the Nvidia installer from the Nvidia website.

It is much simpler to use the X Updates ppa.

So assuming you already have the default binary Nvidia driver installed and activated (nvidia-current), the quick command line solution to your performance woes should hopefully be:

sudo -i
add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
reboot

You should notice an update for the nvidia-current package being installed.

That wasn’t too bad was it? :)

How not to troubleshoot an unexplained server reboot

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We asked our provider to investigate why one of our servers rebooted last night. In the process they accidentally rebooted it again… this is root’s bash_history just before it happened, note line 971:

  954  2011-08-17_15:10:39 sar -q
  955  2011-08-17_15:10:59 sar -q|less
  956  2011-08-17_15:11:09 sar -r|less
  957  2011-08-17_15:11:24 last -x|less
  958  2011-08-17_15:11:49 history |grep -i shutd
  959  2011-08-17_15:11:21 history
  960  2011-08-17_15:11:32 date
  961  2011-08-17_15:13:52 cd /var/log/
  962  2011-08-17_15:13:53 ls
  963  2011-08-17_15:13:54 ls -lah
  964  2011-08-17_15:13:58 less audit/
  965  2011-08-17_15:14:04 less audit/audit.log
  966  2011-08-17_15:14:25 less secure
  967  2011-08-17_15:15:15 grep -v nagios secure | less
  968  2011-08-17_15:16:11 dmesg
  969  2011-08-17_15:17:57 sar -r
  970  2011-08-17_15:18:19 dmesg
  971  2011-08-17_15:18:30 dmesg | reboot
  972  2011-08-17_16:20:20 [LOGOUT]: xxxx     pts/2        2011-08-17 15:27 (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)

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Stopping the Intel WiFi LED from blinking in Ubuntu

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My Dell E4300 has an Intel 5100 wifi card and the led blinks constantly. I still don’t understand how Intel can consider blinking the wifi LED during data transfer to be a sensible default. For most people it blinks non-stop which is both uninformative and irritating.

Fortunately blogger Alex Cabal found a solution for Karmic, and his updated solution also works for Natty/11.04. It describes opening a text editor and pasting a couple of lines, however I’m much lazier so here’s the one-line version:

echo 'options iwlcore led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf

Of course, the command above must be run as root (sudo -i), for some reason sudo gave me access denied. You also need to reboot… or you could just unload and reload the module:

modprobe -r iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn

The double ampersand just executes the next command if the previous one succeeded (exit status 0).

Update

As of Ubuntu 11.10 (kernel 3.0.0) the option has to be applied to the iwlagn module, options for iwlcore are ignored. Thus the full solution now becomes:

sudo -i
echo 'options iwlagn led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf
modprobe -r iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn

Upgrading my E4300

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Two years is quite a long time for me to keep a computer, but this Dell has lasted surprisingly well. It lags a bit in the 3D graphics department, but CPU wise it’s still perfectly acceptable and 4gb of ram is still a decent amount. And the 13″ form factor is perfect for my needs.

One of the major advantages of business models is the long product life cycle, which means an ample supply of spare parts and accessories. In the case of the Dell E series the docking stations and some of the other accessories are compatible with all other E series laptops. The greater amount of resources that go into the design and the higher build quality are also apparent – once you’ve had a good business laptop it’s hard to go back to disposable consumer machines!

Recently I’ve had a few gripes with it however:

  • The lack of bluetooth has become an inconvenience as the E4300 is chronically short of USB ports. Two really isn’t enough, and I want to get a bluetooth mouse to free up one of them.
  • I moved to the UK last year and the USA keyboard layout lacks the keys for € and £ symbols.
  • The fan started to buzz loudly now and again about six months ago. It was relatively infrequent and only annoyed me perhaps once a week, but it was a sure sign that the bearings were on the way out.

When the fan finally outright stalled I was able to get it to move again after a rest, but I decided it was time to kill 3 pigs with 1 bird and give the old girl a new lease of life.

I picked up the following parts on ebay: Continue reading →

Keyboard layout switching to USA in Ubuntu 11.04

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I recently upgraded the keyboard in my Dell E4300 from a standard USA model to a backlit UK model. All went great however I noticed that the keyboard layout kept switching back to the USA layout. It seemed to happen after every reboot, and also randomly in the middle of the session.

There’s even a bug in launchpad about it which I commented on: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/762111

There were two factors causing the layout to switch and the USA layout to be reinstated.

Firstly when logging in the session was set to the USA layout. To fix this logout, select your user name and then look for the keyboard symbol down the bottom of the screen.

The second feature causing seemingly random switches during sessions was the “Separate layout for each window” option in Keyboard Preferences (Keyboard Preferences is in system settings and the option is on the layout tab).

If you deactivate this, remove the USA layout, apply system wide and make sure the GDM session is set to the correct layout on login you shouldn’t have any more problems with randomly switching keyboard layouts!

Getting the most out of Terminator

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Terminator in action

Terminator is a must-have tool for Linux administrators. It’s a terminal emulator that supports multiple terminals via tabs, but also by dividing up its window with horizontal and vertical splits.

The user documentation is a bit sparse, in fact what you see in the man page is what you get. In this post I’ll take you through the features that I think make Terminator the best terminal emulator around.
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