Everything is Broken – Page 16 – Efficiency vs. Inefficiency, in a no-holds barred fight.

PLDT SMTP server.

December 27, 2019June 2, 2009 by admin

Man this is the best kept secret in the entire telecoms industry … I've been trying to send email through PLDT's SMTP servers as I'm a broadband customer of theirs, and my normal SMTP server wasn't working. I needed to get an email out, and I was getting a little desperate. So apparently the published … Read more

Printing Web pages the way you want 'em

October 3, 2009May 4, 2009 by admin

Just came across this awesome tool which will let you format webpages in real time, and then output them to a printer. Here's the URL http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/ And here's a link to this very page opened up in the site, so you can try it out. Brilliant. Why didn't I think of that …. Oh, and … Read more

Ubuntu Firefox's Tattletale Search Query

April 23, 2009 by admin

Have 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.

Counting files in subdirectories.

February 23, 2009 by admin

OK, 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.

Z-star Video Camera working in Ubuntu Intrepid

January 3, 2009 by admin

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: