Rudd-O.com

I just installed and used the Firestarter firewall management tool. I can categorically say that Firestarter is fantastic.

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Hello again! If I may, let me tell you a short story.

I’m a young entrepreneur — I was never the type of person to endure a regular job for more than 6 months. I’ve always prided myself of being independent. And Free Software has made that happen for me. No, this is not a millionaire success story, it’s just the story of yet another Average Joe who’s made a decent life.

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USB UPSes fail to stop after emergency low-battery shutdown? Here’s the solution.

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Today, I’m sharing with the world a new tool I developed to make my software development life and work easier. It’s called mirrorlinks.

From the home page:

mirrorlinks is a small bash and python combo script that automatically mirrors the contents of a directory into another directory using symbolic links, so you don’t waste unnecessary disk space in copies. It’s also clever enough not to mirror Subversion’s `.svn` directories, so you can use a single Subversion working copy for several deployments of your projects.

I sincerely hope you find it very useful.

Indeed, this post is to inform that Main categories for WordPress has been released. Instead of talking about how nice separating categories into main and secondary is, or how easily this makes dividing your blog into sections and topics (with navigation bars and sidebar widgets included), I’ll just lead you to the Main categories Web page.

While doing routine tuning and checking of my weblog, I discovered a rather nasty slowdown with WordPress page generation. Taking the “scientific” route, I deactivated nearly all non-essential plugins in my Supercharged weblog (more than 40) and proceeded to activate them one by one, interspersing activations with ApacheBench tests.

A short plug: This post is brought to you by Supercharged. If you want to get these plugins in one package, consider getting Supercharged for your blog.

Really quick conclusions:

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Yesterday, I started to use smart on andrea, my home computer, immediately after I got my cable modem (64kbits, which make the quotes in “broad” band sensible). By the way, I’m paying $50/mo. for this setup.

Sigh. Smart told me it has to download over 900MB of RPM packages to update my system. I’m on day 2, and it still hasn’t finished.

But there is a bright side to this story:

1. Smart is smart (pun intended). So far, smart has been the only automatic package manager (among those I tested in the last 2 years) that didn’t choke on my installed package base. In comparison, at least yum choked.
2. Smart is fast. It’s nearly as fast as apt. Forgetting for a moment that it balloons to more than 100MB of memory while resolving dependencies, it’s way faster than yum, which insists on connecting to the Internet and downloading a myriad small files.

Recientemente me suscribí al servico de cable módem por SatNet, más específicamente el de 64kbps/64kbps. Hasta el momento estoy bastante contento con el servicio. Pero, como es usual con los módems cable, cuando uno se descarga uno o más archivos, navegar o usar aplicaciones de chat se vuelve imposible.

Hay una razón para esto. Para mantener al máximo las velocidades de descarga (”mira, mamá, nuestro servicio es más rápido”) los módems cable tienen colas internas de paquetes. Estas colas son largas, por lo que cuando las colas están saturadas, las solicitudes que nuestros computadores hacen se demoran en salir del módem, y también se demoran en entrar las respuestas.

Afortunadamente, yo me comí el problema con el famosísimo Wonder Shaper. A través de él, yo limito mi consumo de ancho de banda en mi pasarela Linux (que, en este caso, es mi computadora de escritorio también) con lo cual mantengo las colas en el módem cable vacías.

En pocas palabras, sacrificando un 8% o 10% del ancho de banda máximo, mantengo la calidad del servicio (la Web y el chat van rápido) y no se me pone lenta la conexión de Internet cuando estoy compartiendo archivos vía BitTorrent u otros programas P2P. En lugar de tener tiempos de ping por encima de los 5 segundos, mantengo uno de 15ms.

Nice, ¿eh?

Well, well, well, it seems I solved my Pocket Tunes hard buttons problem.

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