…I remember how hard is was to get the drivers working for an Nvidia card!

Ubuntu 14.04 full screen on VirtualBox
I recently needed an Ubuntu box for project I am working on, but since I don’t have a dedicated computer for such experiments anymore, I had to virtualise it. VirtualBox is my weapon of choice for these cases and in this occasion I picked the 14.04 Long Term Support version of Ubuntu, nicknamed Trusty Tahr. […]
Changing the time zone in Ubuntu
This one is from the “d’oh” category. As recently I’ve moved to Barcelona and since Bucharest and Barcelona are in different time zones, I wanted to set my system’s time an hour back, in order to display the correct time. I went the easy way: right clicked on the clock in the upper right, selected […]
Web svn administration on Debian
When I work alone on some projects, I usually use git for versioning. I have a github account and I throw there my code, for safe keeping, since GitHub’s datacenter is much more reliable than anything I could ever improvise at home. And it’s quite cheap also. But at work I’ve always used SVN and […]

WhiteHouse goes Drupal – governments and open source
Whitehouse.gov goes Drupal – this was a headline on all technology blogs. This alone is a huge step for Drupal. It has proved itself and the debates like Drupal vs. Joomla or Drupal vs. WordPress are now over. Buytaert’s followers will just go “yes we can”. But it’s also a big day for Open Source […]

MySQL backup script
What is a bad day? How do you define it? Its very definition varies from person to person and from job to job. For some, a bad day is when they lose the bus or the subway and are late for work. For others, a bad day is when their hair looks weird or they […]
Monitor free space on your Linux server
Warning: After consulting with some of my friends, I’ve concluded that Nagios is a much better solution, so this article is now obsolete. Read it only if you don’t want to install Nagios on your server. Now that I have some server that I need to administer and look after, I’m starting to notice potential […]
ALERT – configured POST variable limit exceeded
ALERT – configured POST variable limit exceeded…this error kept poping in my server’s logs all morning, and – what a strange coincidence – an application stopped working in that exact time frame 🙂 Well, upon investigation, this exception is thrown by suhosin when a client application sends too many variables to the server. In my […]
Advertising blog entries on Pidgin’s status
I wanted to write this post ever since I’ve read Radu’s Fortune and Pidgin’s status on Ubuntu post. Radu’s approach is quite lame and hard to use, because it relies on the user exporting a SQL dump file every time he posts something on the blog. And really, do you need *all* the posts in […]
Limit a script’s execution time
Sometimes you might want to limit a script’s maximum execution time, so that if it’s not done in X seconds, you’ll discard any results you’ve got so far and move on. And if you’re lazy and don’t want to implement threading and semaphores and so on, or you just need a quick way to achieve […]
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