Linux

Ubuntu Firefox's Tattletale Search Query

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Search SimplificationHave you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for 'banana' and you get something like this:

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

Well what you're effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana

and if they really want to know more about me, then they're welcome to go digging through their logs.

OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there's no reason why we can't take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.

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Counting files in subdirectories.

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ze countOK, it sounds simple, and it probably is if you're sitting at your desktop with Gnome or KDE fired up. However if you're looking on a server half way across the world, using the command line its not so easy.

There are a number of tools which are useful in finding out things about your filesystem. ls, du, df are three of them, but sometimes they just don't give you the information you need. In my case I'm backing up a server to a remote location. The script was timing out becase I was trying to back up too many files at once, so I needed to find the number of files in each subdirectory.

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Z-star Video Camera working in Ubuntu Intrepid

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At last. Its a lazy Saturday after New Year, and I just got around to fixing another one of the things which broke when I upgraded to Intrepid – the video camera. Actually I don't really use it much, hence it got dropped to the back of the queue, but its nice to get things working again.

Here's the relevant info:

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Linux Memory Usage Summary Script

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I was having trouble with a webserver this week, which I'd just set up for a client. When it went live, it seemed OK initially, but when we left it overnight it curled up its toes and died. It was so dead that I couldn't even ssh in to reboot it, so we had to do a remote reboot. Crunch.

Anyway, on getting it back up, I poked around in the logs and found that it was running out of memory, which it really shouldn't do given that it was a fairly low load on the webserver, and only apache, mysql and php were running on it. I looked around the Interwebs and found an excellent resource called Troubleshooting Memory Usage, which gave me some pointers about how to rein in apache and stop it from eating up memory so quickly. Thanks!

Anyway on the page was a script for summarising memory usage, which I thought was a good idea, so i grabbed that one and adapted it to my own purposes. I thought I'd make the results available here, so feel free to grab it and adapt it to your own needs.

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Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 upgrade.

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A lot of commentators in the blogosphere have shown disappointment at the fact that little seems to have changed with Ubuntu 8.10. My answer to them is that in fact a lot has changed, but not much of it is visible. To my mind a lot of these under-the-hood changes have addressed fundamental issues which needed to be fixed as a priority, so that normal users could just get on with the business of using Linux, rather than scrabbling around in config files.

Also, Ubuntu has an aggressive schedule, which means release are made every 6 months. I believe the purpose of the April (.04) releases is to introduce new features, and the October (.10) release is to refine them and fix any breaks. Compare this approach to Windows or Macintosh, where releases are made around every three years, and you can appreciate that releasing little and often means that changes are more diffuse and less apparent.

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