Category: Computers

Everything that has to do with, guess what, computers. :-)

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Computers

iTunes rantings…

What makes Apple computers so popular is their supposedly intuitively-to-use software. I have to admit that I can’t comment on “native” (read: MacOS) Apple software, but I can comment on Apple’s Windows software and my comments aren’t exactly favorable…

A few days ago, I installed Apple’s latest iTunes software for Windows. I had already played around with a previous version of iTunes (4.x I think) which I didn’t like very much then, because it was “sluggish” even on fast computers (because it obviously didn’t make use of multithreading so it blocked every now and then,) not very well integrated into the Windows desktop, etc.

Unfortunately Apple didn’t make their homework. iTunes still is very sluggish to use (at least on my 1.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine,) and it’s also not very intuitive to use. Let me give you an example: I configured iTunes not to use the “1-click buy” feature, but to use a shopping cart. I bought a song and wanted to download it. I searched around, but couldn’t find the shopping cart, no matter where I looked. I finally found it in a different iTunes window, that was laying around under the current window. Hey, is this intuitive???

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Computers Development

Preventing flooding in Perl

I’m using a small Perl script to send SMS for Nagios notifications. Up to now I didn’t have any flood control (i. e. logic that limits the rate of messages to be sent) built into the script, which made me feel bad (especially since I had already been SMS-bombed a while ago when the link to the servers to be monitored broke down).

My search for some Perl sample code that implements flood control led me to an article on Perl.com and the CPAN Perl package Algorithm::FloodControl, which does exactly what I need and which is easy to use at the same time. I very much recommend this package.

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Computers WTF

Custom paper sizes in Windows…

My girlfriend and I are currently designing a greeting card. The cover of the greeting card will be made using “embossing technique,” and the inlay will be made from a sheet of parchment that we will print using my good, old, trusted HP LaserJet 5MP.

What sounds like an easy job (printing the sheet of parchment) turned out to be not-so-easy. The problem is that the sheet of parchment we bought in a crafting shop is not a standard DIN format, and that the printer driver for my LJ 5MP didn’t seem to allow me to create custom paper formats. No matter how hard I searched for a menu that would allow me to do that, I didn’t find any.

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Computers

Grub and root on partitionable RAID1 array

To make a long story short — don’t do it, it won’t work. 🙂

And now the long version of the whole story. The following applies to Debian 4.0 aka “Etch,” but it’s not specific to Debian, since the principles of the whole procedure is the same on all Linux distributions.

For the first time I wanted to use a partitionable RAID1 array, because I wanted to spare myself the trouble of creating multiple partitions on both drives which would then be combined to individual RAID1 arrays. Instead I would have to create a single partitionable RAID1 array and partition it afterwards.

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Computers Development

Monitor number of active connections to MySQL using Nagios

I need to monitor whether the number of active connections against a MySQL server is within a “reasonable” range.

For all my monitoring needs, I use Nagios. Of course, Nagios offers a MySQL monitoring plugin, however, it does not suit my needs. It only allows you to perform queries on tables, which doesn’t allow me to retrieve the number of current connections to the database server (or does it?!).

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Computers

A somewhat nightmarish Debian upgrade…

You might remember that I while ago I wrote a post about upgrading my office test-server from Debian Sarge to the almost-ready Etch, and that everything went as smoothly as I’m used to Debian distro-upgrades.

Well, on 2007-04-10 I upgraded my personal production server (that also hosts this blog) to the finally-released Debian 4.0, code-named “Etch.” I sticked pretty closely to the release notes, which always is a good idea even if you’re an experienced user.

At first, all seemed to go well. I performed the pre-upgrade step to pull in the new libc6, and afterwards performed the dist-upgrade that pulled in the remaining packages to be upgraded or to be newly installed in order to satisfy dependencies.

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Computers deutsch Politics

Gott sei Dank gibt es noch vernünftige Leute…

Schön, dass sich eine technikorientierte Website auch mit politischen Themen beschäftigt — soeben sehe ich nämlich wieder einen interessanten Artikel auf heise online zum Thema Onlinedurchsuchung:

heise online – SPD uneins über Schäuble-Pläne

Jörg Tauss und Christoph Matschie beziehen eine Position, die mit meiner weitestgehend übereinstimmen. Auch Wiefelspütz hat zumindest teilweise den Rückwärtsgang eingelegt — nunmehr sagt er deutlich, dass es sich bei der von ihm geäußerten Ansicht “um seine persönliche Meinung” handelt. Wahrscheinlich ist er von den Genossen in Berlin “zurückgepfiffen” worden — gut so!

Kontra kommt wie erwartet vom CDU-Rechtsaußen Wolfgang Schäuble. Diesem ist scheinbar gar nichts heilig — er will die Verfassung ändern, um ihm das “Schnüffeln” zu erlauben. Dazu benötigt er bekanntlich eine Zweidrittelmehrheit; ich bezweifele, dass er diese erhalten wird. In der SPD gibt es zum Glück genug kritische Abgeordnete, die dieses Spiel nicht mitmachen werden.

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Computers Work

Debian distro upgrade to Etch

A few days ago I upgraded my personal Debian server in the office from Sarge to Etch, considering that it’s only approximately two weeks until Etch will be officially released, and I wanted to be prepared for what’s to come when I upgrade other (important!) boxes to Etch.

As always I was amazed about how smoothly the upgrade went. I used

apt-get dist-upgrade

to upgrade the box. APT downloaded about 300 packages, if I remember correctly. In the configuration phase that occurred afterwards, it asked me the usual couple of questions about some of the packages in case the existing configuration files didn’t contain all the necessary settings, or in case I had changed config files for which a new version is available in Etch.

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Computers WTF

Cisco VPN client that magically “dissolves” itself

I had some very strange problems with Cisco’s VPN client today that almost made me go berzerk… 🙁

It all began when I tried to use the VPN client over an establish WLAN connection. For no apparent reason, the client was unable to connect to the VPN gateway. It gave me a strange error message that didn’t help me (I forgot the exact wording). The strange thing was that I could establish a VPN connection when I was dialled in with my Vodafone Mobile Connect Card. But it wasn’t the Internet connection itself which was hampering the establishment of a VPN connection, since the VPN gateway was accessible in both cases.

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Computers Development WTF

Nightmare on Elm^H^H^HWordPress upgrade…

I just had a nightmarish experience when I upgraded Debian’s unstable WordPress package to version 2.1. When I invoked my site for the first time, WordPress prompted me to upgrade its database — which I did, of course, or rather “I tried to do.”

After I started the upgrade, I saw a dozen or so error messages rushing over my screen. When I analyzed them, I quickly recognized that the database user didn’t have sufficient permissions to perform certain table alterations. I thought, “Hey, no prob, correct the permission problems, and re-run everything.”

But “Not so!” WordPress was able to write the new WP database version no. into the database in the last step of the upgrade procedure, so the upgrade refused to run again because it thought the database was already current.

So what could I do?

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