Turns out I’m not the only one who struggled with the copy/paste functionality in Linux. Someone posted an Ask Slashdot question about that same topic, and the answers are telling. There’s not a fix, per se, but a ton of viewpoints on how people need to try to adapt to the operating system [...]
My Linux on the Desktop article for HAL-PC hit this month, and already it’s generated more feedback than any of my prior articles. Everybody emails me the same basic questions, so here goes:
What video card did you use? You should have used ___. Read back through my Linux blog category to read my [...]
Wow, about time. The site’s finally moved over to Linux. Ended up using PHP just to get it to go live quicker & smoother – I can always play around with Java on other sites. Besides, I don’t edit the code on this one much now that I use MovableType.
Lots of things [...]
OK, I give up.
This morning I figured I’d take another shot at setting up a VPN client, this time using SSH like a guy at my company uses. I got started, got about an hour into it, and it doesn’t work on Xandros because the kernel doesn’t have the PPP module built in. [...]
I’ve been running Linux on the desktop for a little over a month. I’m using it as my mail server and DNS server, and now it’s time to start migrating my web sites over from ASP to JSP. Most of the translation should be pretty straightforward – there’s hardly any dynamic code in [...]
Three solid days of work have given me the ability to both send and receive email using Courier under Linux. Something that takes literally ten minutes under Windows (well, and a pirated copy of various software programs) finally works under Linux.
I succeeded in getting SpamAssassin working to filter my email, too, thanks to these [...]
After what can only be described as a struggle, I now have smtp mail working – meaning, I can receive mail. I can’t send it yet, though, because it keeps saying my passwords aren’t right, even though I know they’re right and I can log in correctly. At least the mail is coming [...]
I’m in the second round of Java training this week. When I walked in on Monday, I headed straight for the Solaris workstation: I figured now that I’m migrating to Linux, I could take this knowledge and sit down to any Unix box and start work. Sure enough, I’ve been able to do [...]
I’ve got a Tivo with the Home Media Option, which lets your Tivo play music from your computer’s MP3 collection. JavaHMO is a third-party server program that is a vast improvement over Tivo’s software, which lets your Tivo do things like show the local weather forecast, the movie schedules at your local cineplex, show [...]
A couple of days ago, I thought I’d managed to get the pptp vpn client working under Linux. No luck. The next morning, I found out that it would let ping packets pass through, but wouldn’t the Watchguard firewall at our office wouldn’t send back any other packets. Great. Lovely.
Pop quiz: should you be worried if your SQL Server’s page life expectancy is averaging 214? There’s only one correct answer: it depends.
Performance tuning is all about finding the RIGHT bottleneck, focusing on it, and fixing it to the application owner’s satisfaction. Learn what happens if you don’t do it right.
Read More »Erika’s friends call her “Fancy Feast” because she only likes the best things in life. She’s got champagne tastes, but we can’t afford to buy the best of everything. I recently picked up a coffee table from Ikea, and it got me thinking about SQL Azure.
In a perfect world, I’d have on-premise SQL Server for every database. I’d use cutting-edge storage and cluster everything. But this isn’t a perfect world…
Read More »I get a lot of questions from people who want to get a better job. They want to know if certification, training, or branching out will help them get the job of their dreams. These things just aren’t the real answer.
The answer is simple: the Buddy System. Learn why.
Read More »In high school, I threw a huge party in Grandma’s house. It had long-lasting implications – among other things, I got disinherited.
Learn why SQL Server data compression has a lot in common with me after that Jungle Juice bash.
Read More »When my Grandpa Ozar wanted to find out if his 10 megabyte 5.25″ hard drive was responding fast enough to handle his database loads, he monitored the Perfmon counter Physical Disk: Disk Queue Length.
Things have changed since Grandpa’s time, though, and now it’s time to learn a new performance tuning trick – SQL Server waits.
Read More »