This is an updated version of my previous backups script – Backup Directories to Amazon S3 Script. The new script works much better and safer. Unlike the old script, the new one creates the tarballs in a temporary file under /tmp, and allows more control over the backup process.
Continue reading s3backup – Easy backups of Folders to Amazon S3
acpid IssueI’ve installed acpid on my system some time ago (Gentoo package: sys-power/acpid. However each time I tried to start it it complained:
acpid: can't open /proc/acpi/event: No such file or directory
Apparently acpid requires you to enable ACPI_PROC_EVENT, which in it’s labels states “Deprecated /proc/acpi/event support”. I really wonder why such tool only support the deprecated way to receive the ACPI events.
I was testing today the SVN version of LyX 1.6.0 and 1.5.7. Due to a change in the way the double quotation mark (“) is handled, adding it to Hebrew text resulted in the following LaTeX error:
LaTeX Error: Command \textquotedbl unavailable in encoding HE8Continue reading LaTeX Error: Command \textquotedbl unavailable in encoding HE8
This is an updated version of my WordPress Backup Script. The new version basically does the same thing: backup up a wordpress blog (actually any site that consists of files and a MySQL database). The new thing about the script is that instead of only saving the backup locally, it also uploads it to Amazon S3.
I’ve tried to use ImageMagick to create .ico files for Open Yahtzee, out of PNGs of various sizes. The command as it should have been:
convert openyahtzee16.png openyahtzee32.png openyahtzee64.png openyahtzee.icoresulted in the alpha channel being reversed. I’ve used ImageMagick 6.4.0, and I didn’t remember this misbehavior happening in the previous versions.
While this annoyed, and was due to no apparent reason, it could be easily solved using the ImageMagick switches to reverse the alpha channel:
-channel Alpha -negateSo the command that produces a correct .ico file was:
convert openyahtzee16.png openyahtzee32.png openyahtzee64.png -channel Alpha -negate openyahtzee.icoSome time ago, as some of you noticed, the web server that hosts my blog went down. Unfortunately, some of the sites had no proper backup, so some thing had to be done in case the hard disk couldn’t be recovered. My efforts turned to Google’s cache. Google keeps a copy of the text of the web page in it’s cache, something that is usually useful when the website is temporarily unavailable. The basic idea is to retrieve a copy of all the pages of a certain site that Google has a cache of.
Continue reading Retrieving Google’s Cache for a Whole Website
I had to parse an access_log of a website, in order to generate a sitemap. More precisely, a list of all URLs in the site. After playing around I’ve found a solution using sed, grep, sort and uniq. The good thing that each of this tools is available by default on most Linux distributions.
Continue reading Generating URL List from Access Log (access_log)
For the past several weeks I had a strange problem. Sometimes when I booted my computer, it would refuse to start the X server and would give the following error in dmesg:
NVRM: not using NVAGP, kernel was compiled with GART_IOMMU support!!
NVRM: failed to allocate stack!
The weird thing about it is that normally if I rebooted the computer it would magically work again. So this error only showed up once-in a while and seemed to disappear at will. Today, it happened again, so I decided to fix it.
Continue reading NVRM: not using NVAGP, kernel was compiled with GART_IOMMU support
The term “load average” is used in many Linux/UNIX utilities. Everybody knows that the numbers the term “load average” refers to, usually three numbers, somehow represent the load on the system’s CPU. In this post I’ll try making this three numbers clearer and understandable.
Continue reading Understanding load average – A Practitioner Guide
I decided to benchmark rzip against bzip for my backup needs. The benchmark was performed on a 89M tar archive of a directory which I regularly backup using my Amazon S3 backup script. The directory contains mostly LaTeX, PDF and Open Office files, so this benchmark may reflect very different results than what you will get if you will test it on other kinds of files.
Continue reading rzip vs. bzip2 – A short comparison