springpad extension on netbook

I'm a Springpad user and although the recent upgrade took away one of my favorite features: offline mode I continue to persevere. A little while ago I noticed that the springpad extension on my netbook would put the extension popup window to the top and off the screen, like this:

Screenshot

performance of different scripting languages: shell v. perl v. python v. ruby V2

A little while ago I did some testing on the performance of different scripting language and summarized my findings as performance of different scripting languages: shell v. perl v. python v. ruby.

Well, I got some questions about versions and some suggested that the Ruby version I was using was known to be a poor performer. So after I upgraded the box I used for testing to Ubuntu 12.04 I decided to install Ruby 1.9 and re-run the tests.

performance of different scripting languages: shell v. perl v. python v. ruby

I have my preferences on scripting languages. Many I work with do as well. I tend to fall back to good old shell for down and dirty stuff. I've written a lot of perl and ruby sure seems neat. I've struggle with python's whitespace. Setting all of these this aside I decided to do a comparison of different languages with various tasks.

I decided I was going to use the following tasks:

easy emusic downloads in ubuntu

I'm an emusic subscriber and I found it remarkably challanging to get the emusic downloader (emusicdlm) to open the emusic download files. Well after some digging and find various hints on the topic I found a comfy way to do it.

Essentially you just need to create a config file that associates the

So open up a text editor or use cat to populate a file named ~/.local/share/applications/emusicdlm.desktop with the following

redundant DNS on ubuntu using IP takeover via heartbeat and pacemaker

When DNS is unavailable the internet always seems down. And sometimes it's just really really slow waiting for timeouts. The other day the primary DNS server in my house failed and I once again thought that there had to be a better way. Since I already have a DNS slave I started hitting google land for ideas like anycast and load balancing. Lot's of research later I found that I essentially had 3 choices:

annoying xorg crash due to librecord.so

Running with Unity on Ubuntu 11.10, I've had a few sporadic X crashes. This seems to be due to the librecord.so module and you end up with something like the following in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log:

rsync or ssh failing from cron or background script

Came across this again and thought I'd write it up. Basically we had an rsync/ssh job that was being called by tool. The command ran just fine with all manual tests and experiments, but when called unattended by another tool, the following error resulted:

instapaper epub issues

I'm a big fan of Instapaper. Sometimes I don't want to read long articles and posts online and so I squirrel them away via Instapaper and then I download them as an epub to my Kobo eReader. As of late my epubs have failed to be legible and I finally tracked it down to some issues with the HTML that is produced by Instapaper.

swappiness on Ubuntu Desktop 11.10

Some things are surprising. My system has been feeling sluggish and I've been cleaning out stuff, fixing things, etc to make things more peppy on my 2 year old netbook which has been upgraded to each new version of Ubuntu Desktop. I was looking at the output of the free command a couple of days ago and found something odd. It showed swap being used. Not much, but I still had currently free memory. I know that can happen, but I was curious anyway.

google chrome performance getting worse ... maybe not

I've been noticing that my google chrome, the lord of speed, has been just not running as fast as it used to. I also read a recent blog post about some very significant improvements in the speed of firefox. That had me wondering, but not enough to really dig in until today. I think I found an issue on Ubuntu ...

Today I was looking at $HOME/.xsession-errors and noticed the following line:

[9:9:671762708:ERROR:nss_util.cc(397)] Error initializing NSS without a persistent database: libsoftokn3.so: cannot open shared object file: Permission denied

springpad extension on netbook matthias
performance of different scripting languages: shell v. perl v. python v. ruby V2 matthias
performance of different scripting languages: shell v. perl v. python v. ruby matthias
parallelism or multiple threads in BASH matthias
easy emusic downloads in ubuntu matthias
instapaper epub issues matthias
redundant DNS on ubuntu using IP takeover via heartbeat and pacemaker matthias
annoying xorg crash due to librecord.so matthias
rsync or ssh failing from cron or background script matthias
Naged matthias

OpenNomad