If you run a Linux desktop you need to be using conky. It compiles all those shiny gadget you see on other desktops eating system RAM, down to what you need; information on what your system is doing. So try it out, install conky, and then drop this into your home directory as .conkyrc - then run conky. The file is pretty self explanatory, enjoy!
I’ve gotten my pictures online from my San Francisco trip. The city was everything I always hoped it would be, and I really loved it there. I had the opportunity to meet with diverse people that all intersect with various aspects of my job (now being refered to as my career). From The Moore Foundation (the most amazing workspace I’ve ever seen) that provide us grant money to do our research to other non-profits partners like Internet Archive, The Smithsonian, Califonia Academy of Science, Public Library of Science to some of the folks that run the servers and dream up new ideas at Flickr (they use MySQL shards, Squid and memcached all over the architecture to navigate all that data - so I’m on the right path!) The best part was meeting more people like me who are learning how to deal with and distribute all of this life data that just increases daily, the fact that I’m using my skills that I learnt by doing things like…running this blog, to do things on such a global level is an honor. And fun, lots of fun!
If you’re like me, you’ve messed up your xorg.conf before and wanted to start over with the default that you know dpkg-reconfigure can set it to. Because of this I’m posting here because I’ve needed it multiple times in the past and have tired of looking it up! To automatically reconfigure Xorg in Debian or Ubuntu issue the following:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
Then logout/login or restart X via contrl-alt-backspace. As one who tweaks things a bit more than he should, this has saved me a few times now. Props go to a poster on this page.
This is a big deal for me, I played with Skype back in the day, but never really used it much since it required a second client, and I have always used Gaim (which is now Pidgin) to consolidate all of my accounts into one client and didn’t want to break out of that mold, but now I don’t have to. Using the Skype API, Eion Robb has created a Pidgin plugin called Skype API plugin for Pidgin/libpurple/Adium. Now I just add my user to the Pidgin accounts tab and I can now chat via Skype in Pidgin just like I chat with all my other contacts. Note that you can’t do the video of Skype on Pidgin. Mac users note that you can use this on Adium (my fav OS X chat client), which uses libpurple, which is the backend for Pidgin, on Mac. So now I’m using Skype again, which is a propreitary app, thanks to them providing an API for the Open Source community to latch on to. Ah, the circle of life…
UPDATE: I’m reworking my config blending in the security ideas found on camomel.org they’re really thought things through on this, this should make for a very secure environment.
I’m always trying new software, and with the webserver I’ve moved from Apache 1.3 to 2.0 to 2.2, and then later I moved everything over to Lighttpd, which I’ve liked, save for some memory issues that popped up. Now, enter a web server named nginx (engine x), written by a Russian hacker. It’s already proved it’s meddle by running some of the largest Russian sites for years now. It has the speed of Lighttpd, but with none of that memory weirdness, plus it uses a fraction of the CPU, so scaling should be smooth for highly visited sites. It also does cool things like load balancing, reverse proxy, IMAP and POP proxy, etc, so I can see it being used in a variety of ways on a network. It took me some time to understand how to configure it, which was a case of me just making it harder than it really is, so I wanted to post it here. Look for updates as we go along, but this is currently backing a Production site I manage.
user www-data www-data; worker_processes 5; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr $host $remote_user [$time_local] “$request” ‘ ‘$status $body_bytes_sent “$http_referer” “$http_user_agent” ‘ ‘”$request_time” “$gzip_ratio”‘; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay off; keepalive_timeout 65; gzip on; gzip_http_version 1.1; gzip_vary on; gzip_comp_level 6; gzip_buffers 16 8k; #gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth; gzip_proxied any; gzip_min_length 1000; gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript; server { listen 80; client_max_body_size 50M; server_name server.domain.com; root /var/www; index index.html index.php; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html; location = /500.html { root /var/www; } location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif)$ { root /var/www; expires 30d; } location ~ \.php$ { include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; } } }
With the barriers lowering, and other market factors creeping in, Macs are slowly making a move into the enterprise. While this may/may not solely be Apple driven, the fact is that people like choices, and the Macs are now far more compatible with other systems than they once were, so finally folks have options. In my recent travels to Woods Hole we had ~14-15 developers from around the world, and there were 4 Macs there. Of course we had the normal thing where someone couldn’t get something working in Windows, Mac folks would chime in with, “just works on a mac” and later when Mac folks couldn’t plug a projector into the certain Macs, the windows folks throw the, “just works in windows”, so it was all in good fun. So while I don’t consider these folks “enterprise” as in working for a corporation, it clearly shows that more people can use what they want, and have IT adapt for their needs. I talked to a friend up there about his MacBook Pro - it’s a beauty of a machine, and he loves it b/c he can do everything he needs, plus run windows for dev work that you can only do in Windows. Of course if I had such a beast it’d be running Linux, and that’s my argument for my buying my Dell laptop; while the Apple is nicer, it was also ~2500$ more than the Dell. Yes, maybe when my work buys me a ‘top I’ll rethink it - but now I’m thinking smaller again - and I really like the Xseries Thinkpads (used be by IBM, but now it’s Lenovo - but the same otherwise) and they’ve always had excellent Linux ability. two devs in WH had those, and I had to borrow them - not to work on them, just to pick them up - nice and light, thin, but with high screen resolution. of course for a full fledged system like thatI could also look at the MacBook which shares most of the Thinkpads features - but for a Mac I’d prefer the black MacBook after my long, drawn out suffering with my old iBook…but I digress. Now, what was the question? Oh yeah, more Macs in the workplace, yeah, it’s how I’ve always said it should be, and it’s more that way now. I run Debian Linux at work now, on my work provided HP desktop machine, on my personal Dell laptop when I bring it, on my Development server, and (soon) on my production server. What kind of support do I need from IT? Gimme an IP and a gateway IP and I’m all set. So, in conclusion, I believe four reasons for Apple’s success with people using more Macs at work is due to the following reasons:
Look, business is like everything else, to survive it must evolve. Plus, choice is freedom, which makes it an inherint human desire. Wouldn’t you rather work somewhere that allowed, and TRUSTED, you to work with whichever OS you perferred?
Last week I traveled to Woods Hole, MA to attend Nomina 2. Woods Hole is the home of the Marine Biology Lab, and it’s where Encylopedia of Life is based. EoL played the host, and did a wonderful job at making us confortable in a very quaint, peaceful town. The meeting was organized by TDWG - an international group that proposes biodiversity information standards and protocols for sharing biodiversity data. Basically they’re a taxonomic group that have and collect data on zoology, biology, botany, viruses, insects, (don’t know what *logy those last two fall in) etc, in order to be able to provide that data to the world in a way that can be shared between different groups. So standards that disparate groups can abide by for now into the future to permanently organize their collections. This was the second meeting of Nomina, (Nomina means “Sacred names” in Latin) with the goal of coming up with a way that 1) unique names can be assigned to specims in biodiversity so that they can be used to share data across disciplines, and 2) a global index of all of this data can be generated so individual nodes can search across all of it and know where to find the details. So the cool thing is I get to work with all of these people from around the world (during this conference we had people from the US, England, Ireland, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Russia, India, New Zealand), so that it’s not only a true Open Source, community effort, but it’s focused to provide a certain goal, that a ton of people are either behind, or will be once this large of a group builds/adopts it. You can see my photos from the trip on Flickr, and some in session meeting shots on the Encylopedia of Life’s blog. TDWG’s next meeting is in October in Perth, Australia, and they’ve told me they want me there for that. This is getting fun.
Image via Wikipedia
Heading out today for Woods Hole, MA - it’s supposed to be beautiful (expect pictures on my grossly underused flickr account). I’m representing the Biodiversity Heritage Library in a meeting with the Encyclopedia of Life folks as we discuss standardizing data streams for upcoming sharing of data. It may not sound like it, but this is fun. While I’m on more of the technical end of the spectrum, the way these things will be shared/directed/pushed along the wire is where I’ll come in and I’m very interested in their efforts and methods, so I expect to learn a ton. For more info on EOL and what they’re working towards, check the links to some articles below. (that Zemanta feature is pretty slick)
Our DSL went out last Friday, and didn’t come back up until yesterday…frak. I’ve hosted all of my websites on homebuilt servers for over 7 years now, and I love doing it, but when the temps change or some phone repair guy plugs something in wrong, we’re down. It’s never the internal wiring, it’s never our ISP (the still wonderful Speakeasy), it’s always something funky with the line. This time they had to send out a new modem before they could dispatch the phone company, and being that it was the weekend I couldn’t get it until Tuesday, so that was that. Oh well, at least no one got hurt - and I could still get my email (and that’s one of the main reasons I stopped hosting email at home). And with what we pay for DSL to have the static IP so we can run servers, the 250$/bonded T1 that they offer starts to look pretty attractive. Get that, pop one of the old routers in an outdoor box attached to some small solar panels and start building an open network to blanket the neighborhood.
This has to be my favorite ‘lost in translation’ picture ever. If that’s not a band name or a website I don’t know what is. [Source link]
I've been blogging online since November 2001, with topics ranging from politics, geek, music, and the overall meaning of life. If there ever was an entry for me I would want it to say, "Mostly harmless". Thanks for stopping by, feel free to ask a question, start a conversation or subscribe to the RSS feed if interested. Thanks.
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