Software

I had been contemplating and researching the purchase of a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) for a long time. Initially, I considered a few different options; an entry level unit like a Synology DiskStation, a small server like the HP Gen 8 Microserver or Dell T20 and installing the disks or even buying the individual components and building the unit myself. However, I’m pretty useless with hardware and as a NAS should be high quality, reliable and solid, I decided to purchase a ready made unit....

I recently had to re-install my work laptop with Oracle Linux 7. With backups, it didn’t take too long to reinstall. The most time consuming task was compiling Emacs 24.5 from source. Emacs 24.5 is required for the excellent Prelude starter kit I have recently adopted. There are a lot of pre-requisite packages for Emacs that are available (but not included) in Oracle Linux 7. As part of the ‘Emacs for Everything’ experiment, I have also started to use an Emacs package called ‘elfeed’ to read RSS feeds and while it worked in my new, shiny environment, I noticed it ran much slower then previously....

Getting email No mail. In three whole days. Weird. I wonder if it’s Thanksgiving over in the States. Not even any football related banter. Is this thing even on ? Then I realised precisely why I was sitting alone in an island of blissful isolation, devoid of all email communications and staring at an Inbox in a perpetual state of ‘Zero’. I had forgotten to configure inbound email. When I was testing, I used mbsync to synchronise emails from my ISP which worked well (fast, reliable, well documented) with bi-directional sync between IMAP and my local Maildir....

I have used CVS and then SVN for version control. As I now use GIT for a couple of projects, I found this set of GIT tutorials very useful as they are well-written, use plenty of examples and outline where and how GIT differs from Subversion.

Frustrated at the inability of Google to provide a simple sync process that works for disparate versions of Chrome and Chromium browsers, I decided to adopt a pragmatic approach, return to Victorian values and go back to using a Web based bookmarks service. Way back, in 2005, I evaluated three different bookmarking services and dismissed Delicious, mainly on the grounds of the user interface design of the home page which, according to me, ’looks like an undergraduate knocked it up during a lunch hour’....

Steve Rubel has resolved to return to feed reading in 2011. However, I have been using Google Reader since 2007 and use it daily to catch up with the tech and sports news in addition to my favourite blogs. I honestly can’t imagine life without it. I was also interested by a recent article (prompted by the demise of delicio.us) that described the use of Google Reader as a bookmarking service....

Jake Kuramoto from Oracle Apps Lab has a great post about common search terms for the three main search engines and notes that ‘facebook.com’ (and variants thereof) appear in the lists of most frequently used keywords. Recently, I have been observing my wife who is a non-technical (Firefox) user although I must admit to a vested interest here. I am keen to understand any areas where Linux Mint is ‘worse then Windows’....

‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs So very true. Via a comment on an interesting blog post comparing Tumblr to Posterous. Ironically, this short post would have been better suited to a one liner, throwaway post correctly labelled and nicely formatted as a quotation on a service like, well Posterous or err, Tumblr but I am trying to consolidate all my efforts into this blog....

Cary Millsap posts a brilliant article about his approach to performance troubleshooting that resonated loudly with me. When I first started working at Siebel, a standard review was a production health check that consisted of meetings with key project staff (Siebel Administrator, DBA, systems and network admins, project manager, developers) coupled with some standard checks on key Web, Siebel and Oracle configuration parameters. At the tail end of one engagement where I had precious little to note or report on, I asked to meet with an end user for a brief chat....

I have been running Linux Mint for 8 weeks now and I’ve been delighted with it. My desktop PC is fast and responsive and I am hugely impressed by the sheer amount and quality of software available for Linux. Printing, scanning, wireless networking, audio, DVD writing and all my USB devices just work. I don’t have a virus scanner consuming memory and chewing clock cycles. I am no longer considering a memory upgrade as Linux works fine with my paltry 512MB....