Dr. Andrew J. Page - Linux

Domain leeching

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:45:44 +0000

I googled for something from Politics.ie today and came across a Chinese domain leecher. They had setup http://poitics-ie.hostsoft.us (now blocked) and were redirecting their DNS to the Politics.ie server. Thus they were leeching off our pagerank (and content) and succeeded in getting 1200 URLs into the Google index (with our content). They then either sell the domain (with a temporarily high pagerank) or replace the pages with ads and steal some of our referrals. Anyone using that domain now gets a 403 error.

Search engines and sitemaps

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 20:34:24 +0000

If your website isn't getting much traffic from search engines, it could be because your pages aren't being crawled. So why not let Google and Yahoo know you exist by creating a sitemap listing all of the pages on your website.

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Dealing with loads of images

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 19:44:11 +0000

So you have 1,000,000 images on your website. Problem is that doing anything with that many images is a pain. Most commandline tools cant handle more than a few thousand arguments. Performance is also effected when you want to retrieve an image.

What I did was to split up the images into a few thousand sub directorys. That means less images per directory, and better performance overall. It also makes management much easier. In my case each image is represented by an ID number such as 123456789.jpg.

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Translating Ubuntu into Irish

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:33:49 +0000

If your good at Irish, then you should help get Ubuntu translated. The website is very simple to use, just go to this site https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/edgy/+lang/ga and register, after that you just translate away. Already 2 of my friends (1 of whom is non-technical) have started to put their Irish skills to good use to help improve Irish language support. Unfortuntaly I think interest in this translation project is quite low because most technical people (males) I know dont have the best Irish skills, its generally non-technical females who are good at Irish. I know its some major stereotyping going on there, but from what I've observed its true for the most part, with only a few exceptions.

Firefox doesn't know how to communicate with the server in Fedora

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:16:58 +0000

I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox in Fedora using yum and it stopped working with the error Firefox doesn't know how to communicate with the server.
I started firefox with firefox -profilemanager and created a new profile.
I then copied cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/profilename/compreg.dat ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.rtt/ where profilename is the name of the new profile. Thats it.

Fedora update killed Xorg server

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 10:18:14 +0000

I updated my Fedora Core 4 system, and it killed X. For some reason the xorg.conf file was changed by the update to include a resolution of 1600x1200 (as default), which isnt supported by my system, and it tried to clock it at a higher frequency than the system could handle (mode clock 162MHz exceeds DDC maximum 140MHz). Luckily copying and pasting Dez's config worked a charm. So if you've got an FC4 system you probably shouldn't update Xorg for a while.

IE6 in Linux

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 15:27:22 +0000

I just installed Wine and winetools on Linux. Wine allows you to emulate windows programs on Linux. Both packages installed straight off, and within about 5 minutes I had Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 up and running, along with Outlook Express, a DOS command line and, Windows media player. Its difficult to create websites on Firefox through Linux, because you just dont know how they will turn out on 90% of the PCs in the world which run IE on Windows, so this will be a big help. Next step is to get Office up and running. I'm quite impressed at how easy they made it to install windows software, usually in Linux they make you jump through a dozen hoops so that you can prove yourself worthy to run the software.

Synergy - Killer app

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 13:15:05 +0000

On the advice of Dez I setup synergy to use one mouse and keyboard with 2 computers. Its brilliant!!! It took less than 5 minutes to install and setup (including the time to yum install it). The best feature has to be the joint clipboard. Its extremely useful.

One thing I've found though is that when 1 computer forces me to take a typing break, the keyboard locks on both machines. very intelligent.

Linux device drivers

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 12:59:06 +0000

I installed a wireless card the other day (RT2500 chip). After an apt-get it suddenly stopped working. It was because I change the kernel from a 386 version to a 686 version, but it was the same overall version. I then had to download all the headers and rebuild my driver again.

Its a shame that linux forces you to do this, it would confuse new users, who are used to their windows 95 stuff working on XP without a hitch. Backwards compatibility should be built into the kernel to minimise these problems.
Joel Spolsky has a great chapter(blog entry) in his software book for managers about backwards compatiblity, and its well worth taking a look at (in the minds library). If linux removed this barrier to people changing over perhaps more users wont be as scared about linux and more people who try it will stick with it.

Installed Ubuntu

nospam@example.com (Andrew Page) — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:52:52 +0000

I wiped windows from the PC in my room and installed ubuntu. Its a nice distro, got my wireless card working in about half an hour (RT2500 chip), versus Fedora which required you to follow 20 poorly documented steps to get the same card working.

Although Ubuntu is branded as "Linux for human beings" the install is not for a newbee. Its a text based install, and assumes you have a fairly decent knowledge, thus it has poor on screen instructions and help. It also doesnt allow you to choose what gets installed, it just does it all for you. Fedoras anaconda installer wins hands down.
I was quite impressed the way Ubuntu has minimised the amount of bloat that gets started automatically. The install actually went smoother than Windows (with SP1). The 250GB harddisk can only use 127GB when you first install windows, its only when you install SP2 that it allows you to use the full harddisk, but that means you have to split your disk in two, or buy partition magic and expand your partition.

On the same PC I have previously installed OpenBSD, which has a supprisingly powerful installer, but is not in anyway suitable for anyone who has not extensivly used a *nix based system. Paritioning you harddisk with OpenBSD requires the installation manual beside you or you'll get nowhere. I got Gnome up and running tho, so I was fairly pleased. It really isnt ment for a desktop system, no matter how secure it is.

The best website I have come across so far for Ubuntu is Ubuntu guide. I was able to setup all the mulitmedia codecs in a few minutes. Its very well laid out and worth looking at.