delayed-shutdown is an initscript that delays the shutdown (runlevel 0) or reboot (runlevel 6) procedure as long as a pre-defined lock file exists. The goal is to create a mechanism, which can be used by programs that perform critical operations that must not be interrupted, in order to delay system shutdown until these programs have…
Yesterday night, at the moment rTorrent finished downloading the Fedora 10 ISO image, I rushed to burn it to a DVD and perform a clean installation of the operating system. No, I was not that excited about the new features of F10. I just wanted to replace what had been the buggiest desktop I had…
Today I noticed that AWStats, the web traffic analysis tool, had stopped generating valid reports since November 23. After spending about 3 whole hours trying to figure out what on earth had happened and having checked all the things that could have gone wrong, I went through all the automatic emails my server had sent…
If you happened to visit CodeTRAX, my (at the moment) personal software publishing spot, during the last two months, you would have noticed that I’ve started using Drupal on that website. My alternative options had been WordPress and a custom CMS based on Django, but I finally rejected both and I am glad I did…
What I tried to accomplish today was to prevent a system shutdown or reboot or suspend, if a specific process was still running in the background. This might sound pretty useless, but having shut my PC down once again this afternoon while the backup process was still active in the background, I decided to resolve…
Having set up automatic incremental backups for my home directory, I need to follow some simple rules in order not to poison the backups with temporary files (sometimes huge ones) I usually place on my desktop for later viewing. One of those rules is to stop downloading stuff directly to the desktop, but use a…
Normally, such pieces of information as the maximum length of a URL are completely useless. The developers of HTTP server and client software take good care of such details, so that they do not interfere with the user’s browsing experience. Yesterday, while trying to create a CGI version of a script, I realized that the…
In the previous post, I had written a few things about my intention to make the full content and not just the summaries of the posts available through the feeds (RSS or Atom). This was a hard decision as I’ve always considered feeds as a medium for notifying readers that the content of the website…
It’s been a few months since I last updated the web site, so apologies for the long period of silence. During the last months, although I was around, I tried to spend as less time in front of a computer as possible, so updating the website was not a priority at all. Not using a…
From a user’s perspective, having to use an old beta version of Firefox in my primary desktop, while, at the same time, a final stable release of the browser has been released, is a bit annoying. But, the fact that this happens due to technical issues makes it partially acceptable. The following article aims to…