When you run servers, there are certain things you need to know. When you're the only one running the servers, there are a few more things you need to know. One is the loneliest number Since I'm basically the only person running the servers keeping Yardstick Measure alive, I need to know as much as I can about them. More than that, I need to know things you might not really care about if you have a team of dedicated people managing the servers. …

Well I figured since everybody else is doing it, why not hop on the bandwagon. These are my tools of the trade: Hardware 2009 Apple MacBook Pro 13" running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I got this not too long ago, and it completed my operating system trilogy. Dell Inspiron 6400 running Ubuntu 9.04. My lifeblood in university and still a solid laptop. Custom Intel Core 2 Quad desktop w/ 8 GB DDR2 RAM and EVGA nVIDIA 295 GTX video card running Windows …

Picture this: You are reading some tutorial or whatever, and you need to install some things. So you run 'aptitude install prog1 prog2'. Then you realize you need prog3 and 4 too, so you CTRL+C that, and run 'aptitude install prog1 prog2 prog3 prog4'. Then you see you need something else. Rinse and repeat. This is really annoying. The worst part is you can't run multiple aptitude instances, because they'll whine about file locks or something. I …

So what I have here is nothing fancy. It's basically cut and paste from the Chromium site, but if you don't want to think, just download and run, and have Chromium on your Ubuntu setup. So, on with the script: The comments speak for themselves. Basically, get prerequisites, get tools, get source, build away. This process will take awhile, so once it starts go flirt with your significant other for a bit :) The first thing you see when you start u…

I was setting up ufw on my server and noticed my xen instances couldn't do anything. Simple fix, and if you Google that, you'll find this link at the top. Solves the problem straight up. Xen and UFW on Ubuntu

I needed to compile LLVM from scratch since the llvmruby gem needs it compiled with position independent code and the repo version doesn't seem to be, the gem whines compiling, etc, etc. The docs for LLVM don't seem to be that great when it comes to compiling this stuff from scratch, so here's what I did, as one big script chunk. You can probably copy and paste this, but I make no promises that it will work, only that it Works on My Machine. And…

I don't know if this is a problem on Jaunty anymore, but whatever. I had to do this on 8.10 to get Eclipse to actually run and function properly. In a word: printing. In more words: disable it. Who prints from Eclipse anyway? Add this as a vmarg in your eclipse.ini -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.disablePrinting The long story: When I was at school, my Eclipse instance just would not start. Well, scratch that. A blank workspace would start fine, …

I've had this problem before, but never wrote down how I fixed it. emacs would whine about not being able to open a termcap database file, and wouldn't start on the console. The X version worked fine, but using the -nw option resulted it in dying. The fix! infocmp -C rxvt-unicode | sudo tee /etc/termcap If you strace emacs when you start it, you'll see it tries to open that file, which doesn't exist on Ubuntu by default. I tried everything else,…

So today I started my new job. There was much rejoicing. Mainly by my father, whose bank account I slowly siphoned away whilst at university. Being a software engineer (member-in-training), I work on a computer. This computer happened to be a Dell E521. Not a top end machine, but for what I was going to be doing it was plenty of machine. I could do with it what I wanted I was told; awesome. I'm now the first person at CodeBaby to be running Ubun…