Windows blows killing several…

Windows blows killing several win32 only programs in its path…

Din motive mai mult sau mai putin obiective, in ultima vreme, a se citi ultima jumatate de an, am folosit ca si sistem primar de operare pe laptop Windows XP Pro. Motivele obiective, tin de faptul ca am inceput sa il folosesc la birou cand lucram niste ore imposibile, in timpul serviciului nu puteam reinstala linuxul care era cam obosit, si windowsul mi-a oferit destula stabilitate o vreme, cu 2 GB de RAM si customizat la maxim. Cu timpul, m-am trezit ca incet incet windowsul magar mare cum e el de obicei, a inceput sa se miste tot mai fecal, si mai penibil, dar problema era alta… miliarde de setari, parole salvate prin diferite keychainuri, VPN´uri, chestii care s-au adunat si faceau tot mai greoaie trecerea de la wingoz inapoi la linux.

Pana azi…

…cand m-am trezit ca orice browser as folosi, paginile o iau razna, si dureaza o vesnicie pana reusesc sa fac ceva. Nu se poate asa, am nevoie de viteza, am nevoie sa lucrez cu browserul, nu imi ajunge consola si IM´ul. Nu mi se pare normal sa incarc pagina de la Google, da da, aia cu o singura imagine si ceva text in 4 – 5 minute de parca sunt iar pe vremea US Roboticsurilor puse pe linii inchiriate de la romtelecom acum 10 ani.

Am schimbat antivirusul de la avast la kaspersky, implicit scanat crap, si totul era OK, am upgradat toate pogramelele care le tineam rezidente in memorie la ultima versiune, verificat servicii, si apoi am chemat un specialist… Bogdan, care pana la urma, e Windows Admin din ala cu mcse´uri si chestii. Nimic. Problema continua.

Drept urmare, Carmen 2 se muta pe Ubuntu 8.04, pana apuc sa fac un backup la datele din windows si sa reinstalez. Dar, daca versiunea 8.04 nu o sa imi faca probleme cu revenirea din stand-by ca si cea precedenta, o sa revin si eu la Linux ca si sistem de operare primar. O sa reinstalez windowsul pentru chestiute mai delicate cum ar fi un CS (Counter Strike) din cand in cand, dar cam atat.

Go Ubuntu! Tweaking time!

Ah, daca apucati careva sa cititi asta in timp util, si v-ati batut de problema asta, va rog dati un semn… Sunt curios ce mama dracu ar putea sa aiba…

Summer day, happy happy happy!

Sunday morning, I wake up at 8 AM after a busy Saturday, and the first thing I see, is a happy birthday message on IM. WTF? It’s not my birthday until December… Then I connect the dots, and I realize it’s the 1’st of June, Child’s day. In Romania, happy birthday stands for happy anniversary also, so “Happy Birthday” to all of you out there, make sure you don’t lose the kid in you. The piece of you that enjoys the sun, that enjoys a good time just sitting around with friends, the innocence of childhood. We all grow up, and become… “grown ups”, but marching through life with just that it just ain’t worthed.

Life provides tests almost at every corner, small tests, big tests, hidden tests and upfront tests. Take them as they come, one at a time, enjoy the test, as much as the result, otherwise, is like taking a gondola in Venice for he first time just to get to the other  side of the canal. Try to see the big picture, try to prioritize. Do you really need that? no, that’s not a good question, the question would be: out of 3 things, A, B and C, which one is the most important? You are doing all of them at the moment, but are you sure you are giving everything for each one of them? is it worth spending all your time on more tasks than you can fulfill, or on tasks that you can barely fulfill?

I have a programming background behind me, and I could have become a programmer. I also have a server administration background, and I became a server administrator. What made me choose that? It was a coffee break at a Microsoft conference a few years ago, when talking to one of the key speakers I asked him condescendingly: “Just now, at this conference, you’re a Microsoft evangelist, you work with Microsoft servers, but what operating system do you have on your gateway/firewall server?” It was a stupid question, and I was 80% sure of the answer, and I was right: he whispered : “Linux of course…” But I’m not trying to make a point here about the pro’s and con’s of operating systems, the ongoing flame war between Microsoft & Linux, I’m just saying that, that little stupid question, helped starting a conversation between the speaker and I, private conversation, in the lobby. He was a good speaker, a good salesman, and a brilliant tech so I enjoyed every moment, but before going back inside, he gave me something to think about. He asked me: “Do you want to be a mediocre programmer in an age filled with programmers? Or do you want to be a brilliant server administrator? Think about it, and try to choose what’s best for you…” At the moment, I’m not a brilliant server administrator, but I’m a good one, and I’m improving daily. Still, from time to time, I start working on different projects, which take me off my “path”. Let’s consider A: Server Administration, B: Social life (family, friends) and C: one of those other projects. In order to do A+B+C one needs to make sacrifices on each one, in order to fulfill them, which means, being average, being mediocre. Try to focus on what’s most important of the three, try to see the big picture. Combining two of them is the ideal situation, but we never live in an ideal situation.

In real life, we always have A, B, C, D, E, F, […], Z. Try to prioritize in order to grow efficiency in order to become a brilliant nurse, a briliant restaurant chef, a brilliant photographer or landscape architect. Make sure you don’t sacrifice too much of what you really want to do, want to become, want to have, in order to achieve something which will only matter for a few seconds after completion.

Today is a happy day, even if for me it marks 8 years since I’ve last seen and hugged my sister…

Ubuntu 8.04 Release Party

[via Adi Roiban]

Grupul pentru Software Liber va organiza o petrecere de lansare a noii versiuni Ubuntu și KiwiLinux.

Locul ales este barul 420 (strada Avram Iancu nr 1 , intersecția cu strada Republicii), începând cu orele 19.00. Vă rugăm să fiți punctuali.

Evenimentul va cuprinde o scurtă prezentare a noilor caracteristici Ubuntu și Kiwi Linux 8.04 şi va continua cu discuţii amicale în jurul unui suc sau a unei beri. Pentru cei prezenți la petrecere am pregătit postere și autocoloante cu Ubuntu și KiwiLinux.

Later Edit: Mi s-a atras atentia ca nu este data in postul asta. Evenimentul va avea loc in data de 7 Mai

Even Later Edit: daca vreti sa va anuntati participarea, va rog sa o facti pe site-ul www.softwareliber.ro

Geek Meet * Teen

Filip Chereches Tosa scria ieri despre Geek Meet * Teen, si anume organizarea de cursuri de programare și design web pentru adolescenți, la care o sa aiba prioritate cei care provin din familii sărace.

Totul suna perfect, si ca si un fost voluntar ce sunt (cursurile vor fi gratuite, si se vrea infiintarea unui ONG), ma anima si pe mine ideea. In momentul de fata, au schitat un plan de bataie, au facut un necesar de chestii de care au nevoie, si deja vad ca sunt oameni care se ofera sa ajute.

Pe moment incerc si eu sa ajt cu un pic de promovare a ideii, web-developer nu sunt, dar daca la un moment dat ideea se va prelua si la Cluj, si se extinde un pic aria de acoperire (in cazul meu Administrare Linux) sunt dispus sa contribui.

Pana una alta, aplauzele de rigoare, si le tin pumnii sa reuseasca.

Blogul proiectului: AICI

Tocmai mi-a trecut prin cap, un motiv foarte bun pentru care companiile IT ar TREBUI sa  ajute acest proiect:

  1. partea sociala, ajuti oameni sa se dezvolte
  2. in momentul in care ai la indemana minti tinere, neformate, ai posibilitatea sa le modelezi, si apoi sa le oferi sansa celor mai buni sa lucreze pentru tine.

It’s a win-win situation I tell you!

Linux Beginners

For those of you who have basic Linux knowledge, and when I say basic, I mean login, create a directory, list the files etc, that kind of basic, I stumbled upon today a nice tutorial which could take you a few steps further if you are willing to read through it (and you should).

It is actually a shell scripting tutorial, with some power tools like awk or sed and taking a quick glance at it, it looked like it would be worth reading.

Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial v1.05r3 – A Beginner’s handbook

mysql crashes…

So, what do you do when you get this from your logs?

I/O error reading the header from the binary log

Obviously the binary logs are broken, or at least the last one is. They are usually located in /var/logs/mysql/ and you should not start copying over some old logs with the new name because that would just not make it right, so the solution is,

  1. read your logs and see which *.bin file is corrupted
  2. delete it
  3. open /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.index and delete the line with the bin file on it.
  4. Restart mysql

et voila 🙂

Gentoo in distress

Catalin pointed me towards this article on Slashdot.

Apparently, The Gentoo Foundation Charter has been revoked a few weeks ago with no explanation, and Daniel Robbins, the creator of Gentoo is trying to help fix things. Right now it’s all in the hands of the current trustees of the Gentoo Foundation.

Read more on Daniel’s blog: Post1, Post2.

Gentoo is a Linux flavor, and I can safely say it’s my favorite distro. I really hope this will be fixed up somehow, and we will have Gentoo on the list of linux distros for a long time.

I even painted Larry the cow on my little Tux…

TuxTux

Holiday Season, Special Season

I got this text last year around this time of year, from Pedro I think, and it brought a large smile on my face. I just received it by Y!M, so here it is:

One beautiful December evening Huan Cho and his girlfriend Jung Lee was sitting by the side of the ocean.
It was a romantic full moon, when Huan Cho said:
“Hey baby, how about playing Weeweechu?”
“Oh no, not now, lets look at the moon” said Jung Lee.
“Oh, c’mon baby, let’s you and I play Weeweechu. I love you and it’s the perfect time,” Huan Cho begged.
“But I rather just hold your hand and watch the moon.”
“Please Jung Lee, just once play Weeweechu with me.”
Jung Lee looked at Huan Chi and said, “OK, we’ll play Weeweechu.”….
Huan Cho grabbed his guitar and both sang….
“Weeweechu a melly Chlistmas,
Weeweechu a melly Chlistmas,
Weeweechu a melly Chlistmas,
and a happy New Year.”
(And all those with dirty minds – shame on you)

Indeed it is a special day today, it’s Mirela’s birth day, and Johnny’s Birthday. Mirela is my girlfriend if you didn’t figure that out yet, and Johnny is a good friend whom I am going to call in a few minutes. So Happy Birthday to both of you my friends.

Santa came early for me, and last night I got some nice gifts from people I love, and who won’t be in town for Christmas or my birthday, so thank you Catalin & Codruta. 🙂

Lorand Minyo, tagged me, and I have to write the best 5 moments this year brought… Here it goes:

  • Let me start with this article I wrote for WIF which got us on the front page of Digg and almost blew out some fuses of our hosting server: http://wirelessisfun.com/2007/02/20/dell-powered-by-linux/
  • Becoming a BEST Alumnus member was a moment filled up with emotion and pride.
  • I visited the Netherlands, and that was a highlight of the year, meeting new people, seeing a new culture. (pics)
  • During my visit in The Netherlands, I got some great news from home, Ovidiu and Simona will get married next summer 🙂
  • And last but not least, taking part at a job fair here in Cluj, provided me with extra reasons to be happy this Christmas. 😉

That being said, I’ll tag next the Trolls, Dobrestii and Groparu, and of course whoever else wants to take it.

PS: Talking about Groparu, I have some nice pictures with him, and some flowers he received on a date… *evil*

Windows based hosting vs Linux based hosting

Lately, Microsoft entered the hosting business with full throttle. The number of Windows servers available on the web for hosting purposes, VPS’s on Microsoft Windows 2003 or DDS’s on MSVS grows quite exponentially.

At this point the end user, the customer does not care much what platform he is hosted on (i.e. Linux or Windows) if he has a simple website, maybe a forum, a blog or something like that because technologies are intertwined: you can get an apache webserver both on windows and linux, and you can get ASP support on Linux. Maybe if he needs some VB applications to run he will definitely need windows based hosting, but that’s about it. He gets FTP to upload files, a control panel (i.e. SWSoft’s Plesk) to manage domains, mail addresses, databases, name servers etc. The main problem here is scalability. Thinking in the future, you need to decide if you are going to expand, and in which direction because you can easily switch from Linux to Windows, but the reverse is not that simple. I would suggest Linux of course, being much more secure, robust and efficient.

Today I had to delete 1 folder on a windows VPS. How much do you think that took? whatever you said, the answer is no! Let’s see:

  • remote desktop to the VPS – 15 seconds
  • locating the folder in question – another 10 – 15 seconds.
  • trying the delete button, checking permissions 1 minute
  • googling for something as trivial as “how to delete a directory with a space in its name” and finding the right solution: 15 minutes. (this is an extreme drawback… Windows problems, are often not well documented)

Add to that stopping the VPS from virtuozzo (vzctl stop VEID), mounting it on the VPS Node (vzctl mount VEID) and going to the mount point ( c:\vz\private\VEID\root\Inetpub\FtpUpload ) and then unmounting (vzctl umount VEID) and restarting the VPS (vzctl start VEID) nand you’ve got yourself a good 25 minutes spent on removing 1 folder:

C:\Inetpub\FtpUpload\ \ÿta18594-ÿ\ÿ-;; &20 @tagged .by; quit %f;;…-ÿ\ÿÿ-ÿÿ\ÿÿ–ÿ\ÿ-;% scanned by %d.-ÿ\ÿÿ-ÿ

My advice? stick to Linux. Why? because Linux is well documented, it has a great community behind, mature, and many many more qualities can go here.