Aug
16
Over the last few months, I’ve been monitoring Apache’s usage of memory and CPU for 10 virtual hosts on one of my VPS. I found that Apache regularly ate up 480MB of RAM after a couple days running, as this is getting dangerously close to my VPS limit, I had a play and optimised it [ Read More ]
Apr
19
pstree – lists processes in a tree format, I find this very useful for when working with heavy duty applications, and applications that spawn other processes: [ ~ ] [ alex@server ] pstree init-+-crond |-dhclient |-httpd—14*[httpd] |-mingetty |-mysqld_safe—mysqld—9*[{mysqld}] |-ntpd |-perl |-rsyslogd—2*[{rsyslogd}] |-screen—bash—irssi—figlet |-3*[screen---bash---irssi] |-screen-+-bash—irssi | `-bash |-2*[screen---bash] |-sshd-+-3*[sshd---sshd---bash---screen] | `-sshd—sshd—bash—pstree |-svnserve |-udevd `-znc pgrep - [ Read More ]
Apr
18
I find tab-completion an extremley useful feature of my IRC client, irssi, and most Linux/UNIX terminal emulators. I often wish that tab completion of filenames, commands etc was implemented in other software as well. Eclipse does have this feature, but it is often overlooked – simple open a file in Eclipse, in the Perspective that [ Read More ]
Apr
18
I get a lot of annoying spam email, I know that a lot of people do too, but I recently discovered something that enables me to track who has given who my email address. In order to sign up to, well, any website these days, you have to give them your email address, in order [ Read More ]
Apr
14
Recently, I had to do a scheduled deploy of some code – specifically, the client wanted a new rebranded logo to go up at 6am. Whilst I do try and give as much as I can to work, I really like sleeping, so I wasn’t going to get up and start messing around in their [ Read More ]
Apr
14
For some reason, the gods at Google decided that the file containg the datastore for the Python Google AppEngine SDK should be in a temporary folder, meaning that sometimes if you stop an app from running, or turn your machine off, you lose the datastore contents. This is really annoying. You can, however, tell the [ Read More ]
Apr
14
I’ve often wondered whether my terminal is hanging or if file transfer/import is just taking a long amount of time. pv solves this by outputting a simple progress bar, as well as time elapsed, percentage completed, current throughput rate, total data transferred, and ETA. The usage is really simple, and I find it really useful, [ Read More ]
Apr
14
I was really rather surprised at how simple this actually was. From the Cyanogen(mod) website: The ZTE Blade (aka Venus or Orange San Francisco) is a touchscreen Android smartphone manufactured by ZTE for the European market. The device has various versions, differing in aspects such as screen type (AMOLED/TFT), camera (3.2MP or 5.0MP), and RAM [ Read More ]