Picking up the meme from jono and matthew, here’s my meme:

“a state of emergency became the rule” – The Dachau Concentration Camp, 1933 to 1945

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

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Wanna test your box performance, both its hard disk and memory? Try setting up a +370 table database, and then build a huge MySQL update file. Run it and get something like this:

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ps -C "firefox" -o pid=,vsz=,rss= | awk '{ printf "PID: %d, Virtual: %-.2f MB, Resources: %-.2f MB\n", $1, $2 / 1024, $3 / 1024 }'

And I got:

PID: 6223, Virtual: 778.06 MB, Resources: 403.70 MB

And I had just a couple of tabs open. So I said, ok, let’s start fresh. Here’s the same command with a firefox with just an about:blank, having just started up:

PID: 9139, Virtual: 462.02 MB, Resources: 56.34 MB

Nice to see resources drop, but Virtual is still at over 450 MB. Why oh why are you so hungry, dear firefox?

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history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

Brings the following list of top 10 commands:

66 ls
40 sudo
37 cd
36 httperf
36 exit
31 svn
18 mysql
17 ssh
17 chmod
15 ./amreg-vpn.sh

Only custom script there is amreg-vpn.sh, which looks like the following:

if [ "$1" == "" ]
then
	echo "Usage: $0 <start | stop>"
else
	case $1 in
	start)
		echo "Starting VPN..."
		sudo vpnc /etc/vpnc/amreg.conf --natt-mode natt --dpd-idle 0
	;;
	stop)
		echo "Stopping VPN..."
		sudo vpnc-disconnect
	;;
	*)
		echo "Usage: $0 <start | stop>"
	;;
	esac
fi

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1. Simple backup script for Ubuntu

Ubuntu is probably the best Linux distribution out there, but sometimes you need to use software that’s only available on Windows. What do you do? Give Wine a chance. As its website states, Wine is a free implementation of Windows on Unix. Installation on Ubuntu is pretty straight forward, so you should not have problems installing it.

The above screenshot shows Wincachegrind working through Wine. Eventhough there’s a KDE version (haven’t looked for GNOME, which I run), I really needed the Windows version as it offers far more information than its Linux counterparts. With Wine, I installed the package with no problems, and I’m now using it as if it was a native Linux application. Awesome!

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If you have Ubuntu with the Compiz effects enabled, it’s pretty easy to control which application windows you want with some transparency. On this post I’ll show you how to set your Pidgin windows with a 90% opacity. Go to the Compiz settings manager by clicking System -> Preferences -> Advanced Desktop Effects Settings. On the window that shows up, click on the General category at the left category list, and then click on the General Options button at the right. Select the Opacity Settings tab. A screen similar to the following will appear:

We will create an Opacity setting for windows that match a certain condition. Click on the button New shown right below the Window Opacities list, and enter the following details for each shown field, and then click the Close button:

• Opacity windows: class=Pidgin & !title=Buddy List

• Opacity window values: 90

We’ve just specified that we want 90% opacity for all windows that have “Pidgin” at its class, but do not have “Buddy List” as a title. As you see, this procedure is not limited to Pidgin windows, so you can learn from the windows matching rules to apply different settings to different windows.

Thanks to Ryan for this post.

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So you want the world to know what cool tunes you are currently listening to on your Ubuntu? Well, perhaps not the whole world, but at least your IM contacts. First thing you need is to be using Pidgin, and your favorite music player (I use Rhythmbox), since we will install a plugin to link our music player to our messenger. Open the Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager), click the button Search, and enter “pidgin-musictracker”. Right click on the available package (it should be just one), and select “Mark for Installation”. Click Apply.

If you are already running Pidgin, restart it. Once it has started, click on the Tools menu, option Plugins. Look for “MusicTracker”. Enable it by clicking on the checkbox. You can optionally select it and click on Configure Plugin to have more fun. That’s it!

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1. Transparent Pidgin chat windows

Since I normally need to test different applications (almost all of them built with CakePHP) to make sure they work on different browsers (including IE7), I’ve recently installed VMWare over my Ubuntu Hardy to use Windows XP. This is how my desktop looks like when running it (click on the image to get the larger version):

You can see the excellent htop command showing that for some reason at that precise moment my Processor #1 was at 100% while Processor #2 was resting at a 15%

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#!/bin/bash

function showHelp() {
	if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
		echo "ERROR: $1"
		echo ""
	fi

	echo "Usage: $0 <folder> <file.tar.gz>"
	echo "where:"
	echo "	<folder>	folder to backup"
	echo "	<file.tar.gz>	where to save the backup (.tar.gz file)"
}

if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
	showHelp
elif [ ! -d "$1" ]; then
	showHelp "Directory $1 does not exist"
	exit 1
else
	echo -n "Creating $2 from $1: "

	if [ -f "$2" ]; then
		mv "$2" "$2.previous"
	fi

	tar -cpzf "$2" --exclude="$2" --ignore-failed-read --transform="s/"`echo "$1" | sed -e 's/^\\///g' | sed -e 's/\\/$//g' | sed s/\\\//'\\\\'\\\//g`"//" "$1" &>/dev/null

	if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "ERROR"
		exit 1
	else
		echo "DONE"

		if [ -f "$2.previous" ]; then
			rm -f "$2.previous"
		fi
	fi
fi

The line that probably looks scary is:

tar -cpzf "$2" --exclude="$2" --ignore-failed-read --transform="s/"`echo "$1" | sed -e 's/^\\///g' | sed -e 's/\\/$//g' | sed s/\\\//'\\\\'\\\//g`"//" "$1" &>/dev/null

The complicated part comes from the transform expression, which is used to get rid of the absolute path to the directory we are backing up. The tar –directory option here is not useful since it adds the “.” special path to the packaged file, so let’s break it down:

• echo "$1": the folder to backup
• sed -e 's/^\\///g': remove starting slash, if any
• sed -e 's/\\/$//g': remove trailing slash, if any
• sed s/\\\//'\\\\'\\\//g`: convert forward slash to escaped slashes (so every / is replaced by \/)

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$ rm -fR /var/backups/home/mariano; rm -fR /home/mariano.old; rm -fR /home/mariano

“You did what??” You ask.. Yup, that’s right, I wiped not only my Home directory, but every single backup copy I had of it. Granted, I didn’t have *much* on my home folder (except my evolution mail folders and some other documents), but I still wanted to shoot my hands for insisting in adding -fR to my rm commands (-fR means: delete recursively, and no, do not ask me for confirmation.)

So after trying without any luck to recover the deleted inodes, I’ve successfully re-setup my home folder starting fresh, which wasn’t so bad. In order not to mess up again, I’ve decided to add this little alias to my ~/.bashrc file:

# alias to make del send files to trash

alias del='mv -t ~/.local/share/Trash/files --backup=t'

So from now on, I just need to remember to use “del” instead of “rm”, like so:

$ del example.txt

The above command would send example.txt to the trash, instead of wiping it out from the file system. You can later on decide to Empty the trash in your Desktop, or undelete your files. The del alias also works for folders.

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