Over the years I have used almost every significant Linux distribution available: either in work or at home. Check out DistroWatch for information on many of these and lots more distributions. More th…
This is a cunning one I discovered today thanks to someone called vino. If you are a bash geek, you will already know this and, no doubt, use it every day; sadly I don’t hack on bash that often. Strip…
On Friday, we were asked to review a technical problem a neighbour was experiencing. It turned out that a MySQL server had somehow corrupted its data-file during a power-cycle. Although the user thoug…
How useful would it be to include a document version that can increment itself every-time the document file is updated into a subversion repository. Being able to show a revision number on selected pa…
or a while I have been thinking of having my Django sites include CSS styling from a database; for instance having different themes that can be switched on and off at will. It took me a while - with s…
Actually, what prompted me to upgrade my system recently was Sweet Home 3D. This is a Java application suggested on ILUG (pointing to Linux.com) as a tool to help design floor layouts; other CAD-like …
We are fortunate to have several of our servers hosted by [Hetzner] in their data centres in southern Germany. Since 2009, all Hetzner systems could have IPv6 connectivity, all you had to do was ask f…
When working with an SQL database, especially in a development environment, it is easy to lose track of which databases are in which instance. MySQL has a really convenient way of listing its database…
If you have configured X.org so that your display spans multiple monitors, usually when you login to an XFCE session, it will appear as if your monitors are simple clones of one another. You can use a…
Today it became necessary to deploy Oracle XE on a new SuSE system. This did not seem a big deal; we had already deployed a version of Oracle 10g XE on SuSE 10.2 quite a while back and as far as I rem…
I have just started working with Django, building an example application to find my way through the framework. Django seems to be more dynamic than I expected and the web is full of answers to questio…
When inserting records into an SQL database using a existing table as a source usually means we need to know and specify the column structure of the target table. If we are trying to do this using a s…
You have created a server somewhere and you would like it to send you emails so you can monitor various services; or perhaps your new server has a web site you would like to be able to email users but…
I keep forgetting how to do this and searching for the answer on the web just leads you down a horrible twisty maze of passages all looking the same. Your Google-Chrome session has become discombobula…
Hmm, I suppose this sounds like a really daft thing to do - why would you want to run a graphics application on a system without a GUI? Here are a few use cases: In my particular case I needed to run …
In the past, a couple of Plone sites we have built had large numbers of users for whom it was easier to store their details in an SQL Backend rather than Plone itself. When it came to bringing one of …
When working with a version control repository, it is often useful to know what version of script we are working on or - in a production environment - which version we are actively using. Subversion p…
On Thursday, I decided to upgrade from OpenSuse 11.2 to 11.3. I was highly suspicious that this would work so bundled up all my important documents, systems, settings & whatever and stored them sa…
It can be really difficult trying to quantify what a “slow website” really means. Its easy to spot a slow site but arriving at some metric that helps you monitor attempts at improving performance or b…
I discovered the solution to this problem a couple of months ago. Goodness knows how I happened upon it but today the same thing occurred. Of course, I had forgotten about the solution, fretting for s…
