Tired of remembering complicated passwords?

My colleague Mat showed me a nice little trick today. Say you are bored or tired of using different password in all your websites you use, or maybe you don’t want to use the same password on these sites. Simple and easy if you use a Linux computer. You only have to use, and more importantly remember, simple words or combination and a little command in the shell to generate a really difficult to guess password.

Tricks to diagnose processes blocked on strong I/O in linux

There’s one aspect of the Linux kernel and the GNU operating system and related tools in which it might be lacking behind, specially with kernel 2.4 series. I’m talking about I/O accounting or how to know what’s going on with the hard disk or other devices which are used to write and read data. The thing is that Linux provides you with a few tools with which you can tell what’s going on with the box and its set of disks.

Speeding up trac's response time

I’ve been trying to speed up an installation of trac over the last few days. The web interface took ages to display each of the directories or files within the subversion repository. But this one wasn’t too big. The only change to the subversion repository is that we started using a vendor branch imported into our main repository using svm So, after a few hours trying different solutions, and reading trac’s source code, I think I got where the bottleneck was.Well, it was http://www.sqlite.org/download.html which was causing the bottleneck.

Setting up a subversion mirror repository using svnsync

With the new version of subversion 1.4 you have a new tool called svnsync with which you can maintain mirror repositories quite easily. I’ve been working on one at work and would like to share with you my findings in case it interests anyone :-) Understanding the problem In order to have a mirror repository, it is important that commits only happen on the master and then they are synchronized to the mirror using the svnsync program.