Things n' Stuff | Thoughts about the universe in general

I’ve been moaning on and off about how much e-mail clients, or more specifically – “personal information managers” – simply suck. All of them – there isn’t one client software that is useful in all aspects.

I mean – if you are a simple e-mail user: have one account with which you send a few emails, receive a few e-mails and sometimes forward something to your list of friends – then you have several good options including a few web-mail systems.

If, on the other hand, you are more serious in your communication requirements and you need to:

• Work with multiple e-mail accounts and manage them separately but with the option of moving stuff between accounts.
• Connect with MS-Exchange (still most companies in Israel use MS-Exchange for their groupware backend)
• Work with multiple mailing lists with different policies and different internal filing requirements
• Keep all your past communications for reference
• Inter-operate with multiple shared calendaring systems, and specifically with other people’s calendars in a heterogeneous environment (some people do not believe there are e-mail clients other then MS-Outlook)
• Do all this on multiple computers so that e-mail, address books, calendars and what-not are transparently available on all computers
• Use Linux as your computing platform of choice.

Then you are basically out of luck. The Linux requirement is not that of a problem really (contrary to what many people keep saying when they nag me about moving to MS-Outlook) as the situation isn’t really better in Windows or Mac except that you can’t get Evolution to work there and theoretically Evolution could provide what I need.

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As system administrators we often want to list the last few lines from a log file in order to track problems and see system reports. The UNIX command tail is very useful for that purpose and lets you display an arbitrary number of lines from the bottom of any file.

But often this is not really what you want – an administrator might want to see what happens in the last X minutes and the common practice to do this is to run tail with a guessed number of lines, see if you get what you want and if its not enough increase the number and try again.

Here’s another approach that works well if the log file you want to trace has time stamps for its lines (more…)

Mozilla’s decision to offer users of Firefox 3.5 to automatically upgrade to 3.6 seems to be paying off quite well:

From looking at some web statistics that I generated from leading web sites, this is how the browser market place looks for the top 95% of web users:

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A chroot environment is simply a directory – inside which you can find a file system hierarchy exactly like your original operating system. You can then use the UNIX chroot command to open a shell in that directory so that command running under that shell see only the chroot environment and can’t mess up your system. This is very useful for many different reasons – for example if you want to build some software packages and you don’t want their build dependencies to pollute your real system.

Building a chroot environment is not difficult at all using the right tools, and YUM – the CentOS installation tool – has what you need.

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As we’ve know for quite a long time now, Ubuntu is aiming to look and behave as much like Mac as possible⁽1) – we’ve already seen the Growl-like on screen notifications (which are rather cool) and here is the next major user interface change:

In Ubuntu 10.04 – due to be released on late April of this year – the window buttons (close, maximize,minimize) will be on the left side of the window! See here for the branding screenshots.

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1. within 2 years Mark Shuttleworth said in 2008, so he’s clearly running out of time [↩]

Its time to update an old post about updates: Fedora 7 is again rather old, with the current Fedora being at 12, and 13 is right around the corner, but We’re still with CentOS 5 (I hear that RedHat is deep into beta with their next version – 6 but when it comes out is anyone’s guess).

In the mean time, if you want to run something a bit more modern maybe you’d want to upgrade your CentOS installation to Fedora 12 which can be considered pretty stable after a few months on the market. The reasons for the change may be numerous – maybe you need to run the latest subversion (with better merge tracking) or a new version of Ruby. Either way, if upgrading from CentOS 5 to Fedora 7 was a pain, guess how it is more the two years later?

Before we get to the action itself, I would be remiss if I would not recommend you to reconsider what you are about to do – this is a challenging exercise for many system admins and can sometimes end badly. I do not guarantee anything and if it breaks you get to keep both parts. Often its much faster and easier to just go to the server, stick a Fedora 12 DVD in the slot, reboot and let the DVD upgrade your system⁽¹⁾. That being said, this is fun if you’re into that sort of thing, so if you’re still with me, lets dive in!

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1. another safer options would be to upgrade to Fedora 7 using the instruction in the previous article linked above, and then use Fedora’s preupgrade tool to upgrade to Fedora 8, then to fedora 10, and from there to Fedora 12, though this procedure will also require physical access to the machine and multiple reboots and multiple long downloads [↩]

One of the most annoying issues with Linux’s graphical system (and any UN*X), is that if you have some keys setup for switching the keyboard layout – when using two or more keyboard layouts, such as for writing English and Hebrew – then that key combination cannot be used in any other keyboard shortcut.

Its most annoyingly present when setting the keyboard layout switching command to ALT+SHIFT (like in MS-Windows), then you can’t do any keyboard shortcut that has ALT+SHIFT in it – such as ALT+SHIFT+TAB to move to the previous window.

Well, finally there is a solution! As detailed in FreeDesktop.org’s Bugzilla and Ubuntu’s Launchpad , and thanks to Ilya Murav’jov we now have a patch to solve this ancient X11 problem.

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Ripping off Linux Outlaws title for episode 122, here is my review of GNOME’s upcoming desktop shell. Promised to be the pinnacle of the much talked about GNOME 3.0 release (which was happening and then not happening and then happening again) that is currently scheduled for September of 2010 (though no GTK+ 3.0, as far as I understand).

The new GNOME shell is, off the bat, pretty awesome – it is a completely new and refreshing approach to the desktop (checkout the screenshots in the link).
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Google have declared a new programming language – Go. Contrary to how the title might read, this post is not a tirade about the abundance of programming language – I just like this sort of expressions (and Google could have easily named Go as YAPL instead ). On the contrary – I’m all for a large selection of good programming language to choose from, and a programming language coming from there, like any other Google product released, definitely warrants a more serious test then what I can offer in this rather quick post.

But I actually found out about Go from a friend that asked about it, didn’t mention Google, and gave me a link to the home page at GoLang.org where Google is not mentioned. So my review below was not influenced by any Google hype, and on the face of it, after reading through about half of the tutorial and a couple of other documents, I don’t like it.

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This question is probably one of the most debatable in programming, ever, and I wasn’t much surprised to find it also on Stack Overflow⁽¹⁾.

Actually, I wasn’t surprised to find about a dozen different questions in the same gist, but here is the one that I really liked, especially some of the more interesting answers: How many lines should a method typically have?.

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1. The best programming questions and answers site – if you’re a programmer by trade or hobby and you’re not familiar with Stack Overflow, then go register. [↩]