Category Archives: Linux

Trials of moving /var in Ubuntu

Note: most of this is rambling, go to the bottom for the useful technical bit. I’m doing some work with large amounts of data (about 100 million rows), and today I tried loading it all into MySQL on my home machine, so that I could run some collaborative filtering tools over it easily. However, when… Read More »

eMusic/J 0.20 – fix for a weird Sun decision

I’ve just put out an 0.20 release of eMusic/J. This fixes an issue that appears only on some JVMs (in this case, it seems to be Blackdown) where System.getenv(String) isn’t supported. However, it doesn’t fail gracefully, no…it throws an Error (not just an Exception even). See these Sun bug reports for details. I think that… Read More »

Shiny new hardware!

I’m writing this post from my new computer, finally an upgrade from my venerable old Duron 700. The specs on the new one are: Athlon64 X2 4600+ AM2 2.4Ghz 512Kb cache Asus M2N4-SLi AM2 2x 1Gb DDR2-800 2x Western Digital Caviar 250Gb SATA II 7,200RPM 16Mb cache Gigabyte 7600GT PCIE Graphics card 256Mb DDR3 and… Read More »

Installing Ubuntu on a Travelmate 230: X Issues

I was asked to install Ubuntu Linux on someone’s Acer Travelmate 230 laptop, and I ran into a problem that was very easily fixed, once I knew what it was. However it wasn’t documented anywhere under the laptop model, which made finding the solution hard. The problem was that X would start with only a… Read More »

Linux.conf.au (part 1)

Last week I spent Monday through to Saturday at linux.conf.au, which was a very good conference on Linux stuff. I hoped to write about things as they happened, but lacking a laptop, I was only able to spend an hour or so per day using a computer and so it didn’t happen. So now I’ll… Read More »

Making webalizer do DNS lookups

The default install of Webalizer on Debian doesn’t perform DNS lookups on the log files, although it is capable of it. There are three ways of getting Webalizer to do this, in rough order of recommendedness: 1) make your webserver do the lookups when it writes the logfiles (this makes your webserver slower, and has… Read More »