23
09
2008
I did my 2nd blood donation in Canada today. I’d like to encourage any Canadian’s that read my blog to go out and schedule a donation to the , it’s a worthwhile experience that can save someone’s life. It’s free, it’ll take an hour of your time, and you get juice and cookies.
To snitch their catchphrase:
it’s in you to give
4
09
2008
While it’s easily cleared by a malicious person, this can easily extend the usefulness of your history file with the information of when you ran that command.
This works in bash v3 and up.
If you’d like to add the timestamping to all users on the machine, the file you’d want to edit is probably /etc/profile. If not, add it to your .bash_profile in your home directory (~).
Add this to the end:
HISTTIMEFORMAT=”%D %T ”
To get your current session to use the new settings:
source /etc/profile
Check it out your last 20 commands, datestamped:
history | tail -n20
I love bash, the more if the inbuilt features I learn, the more I realize how great it is.
25
08
2008
Martin (or dzo) has released another update for the Vogue, updating his release to the newest SDK available from Google, which was made available from last monday.
This release has broken a few custom applications made by some, as the phone keyboard now needs to be written, and the previous method used an on screen keyboard hacked into the kernel.
However, the data access and voice data works fine in this release, although the SMS app (due to the broken keyboard functionality) isn’t working yet.
I’ll update when I see more!
18
08
2008
Apparently this was released without much fanfare, but Google Maps Mobile v2.2.0.16 for your Windows Mobile smartphone / pocketpc has been released, which means it now provides transit directions on the go.
This makes me extremely happy, but annoyed as well, as it was released quietly — I’m even subscribed to the Google Latlong blog.
Give it a try, and enjoy it if you live in a supported city.
7
08
2008
I wanted to mention that I’ve been looking for something like for this a bit — a USB key that comes with a way to install multiple Linux distributions. While at work, we primarily use Gentoo, we still have a Ubuntu server or CentOS install to do occasionally, and it would be nice to have a non-CD way of doing it.
Billix to the rescue!
This little 110MB download includes netinstalls for all of these distros: three Ubuntu installs (Feisty, Edgy, Dapper; both desktop and server editions), Debian Sarge and Edgy, Centos 5.1 and 4.6, Fedora Core 8. It also includes memtest86+, ntpwd, and DSL (Damn Small Linux.)
Give it a try if you have a use for it!
7
08
2008
I wrote a BASH script that will run “optimize table” on any table fragmented. it’s pretty tidy, and you can supply usernames and passwords, and even run it against remote MySQL databases.
Here’s an example of it’s output:
root@lit [~]# mysqlFragFinder
MySQL fragmentation finder (and fixer) v0.7.2, written by Phil Dufault ( http://www.dufault.info/ )
Found 59 databases
Checking someforum_forum … found 1 fragmented table.
Optimizing log_online … done
Checking dufault_blog … found 2 fragmented tables.
Optimizing wp_comments … done
Optimizing wp_options … done
3 tables were fragmented, and were optimized.
I find this a great script — maybe a feature to add later is a way to prevent it from optimizing really large tables.
Here’s a link to the source:
mysqlFragFinder
Any other features you’d like to see in it? Comment!
7
08
2008
I’ve been using this for the past two weeks:
MySQL Tuner
I’ve used on servers running on MySQL 4.0, or 5.1 lately to tweak their preformances. Itt’s an awesome script, and I recommend using it on any MySQL server you can find. 
5
08
2008
I recently learned of a newish OpenSSH feature, a feature that let’s you reuse existing SSH connections.
If you want to enable this functionality on a per-host basis, then you can setup your ~/.ssh/config file like this:
Host *
ControlMaster no
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%l-%h-%p-%r.sock
Host someserver
Compression yes
ControlMaster yes
To enable it:
ssh -f -N someserver
After that, just ssh in like you would normally:
ssh someserver
Combining this with SSH keys and keychain — that’s some fast SSHing. Enjoy!
Source for this article: http://www.revsys.com/writings/quicktips/ssh-faster-connections.html