Okay. It’s been five years since I started this website and I feel I want to share with you one or two things about it. In this post I’ll try to go back in time and write about why I started it and what this web journal has accomplished so far. I also post some thoughts about the future plans.
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The rules make the game. You take out the rules, the game goes up in smoke. I think it’s still fine if someone takes advantage of any inconsistencies between the rules to win the game, but cheating is completely unacceptable.
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I’ve been using Redmine for several months now. During this period of time I had the chance to evaluate most of its features. Although I still consider it one of the most feature-rich project management web applications currently available, using it on a production website revealed some weaknesses in the anti-spam area. Truth is the application lacks anti-spam features, but, on the other hand, such features most probably belong to the plugin area instead of the application core, so noone can put the blame on the core developers for not making the app spam-proof. Apart from this, I also realized that some of its templates need some improvement in some cases. Time permitting, I’ll be working on these things in the upcoming weeks and release the customizations in the form of patches that can be applied directly on the latest official release of Redmine.
The PHP interpreter supports running it in interactive mode by using the --interactive (short equivalent: -a) command-line switch. Running an interactive PHP shell can be useful when you need to quickly try code snippets. But, for this mode to be fully functional, PHP has to be compiled with readline support. Unfortunately, on CentOS PHP has not been compiled this way.
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About a month ago, I had finally decided to start writing a simple web-based VCS manager. This is a project I had been thinking about for the last 2 years as a solution for source-code management at CodeTRAX.org, but I never really started development. The initial plan included support (repository creation only) for the most popular open-source version control systems, like subversion, mercurial, git, and bazaar. The VCS manager, actually a Django application, should be able to create source code repositories and manage user permissions on a per repository basis. It would also include an authentication/authorization backend for httpd, compatible with mod_wsgi‘s access control mechanisms, in order to provide controlled access to the repositories over HTTP or HTTPS. During the last days, after exploring several of the Mercurial features, I am quite certain that Mercurial includes all the necessary features to meet any requirement of CodeTRAX. So, I seriously consider dropping support for any other VCS except hg and try to make the VCS manager more hg specific. Now I realize that this should be the approach from the beginning. The needs are quite specific, so supporting several version control systems was completely unnecessary.
rdiff-backup is my favorite tool for keeping backups on Linux systems. Today, I started using it on a Windows 7 desktop as well. At first, I used rdiff-backup from the cygwin project, but I soon noticed that, if I did anything else that required moderate hard disk access on the computer on which the cygwin rdiff-backup version was already running, my system suffered from random lockups. For example, if I tried to open Thunderbird, my computer froze for several minutes. I finally decided to try the native Windows release of rdiff-backup and all this strange behavior is now gone. My computer experiences no lock-ups and is usable while rdiff-backup is backing up some subdirectories of my homedir. I am not really sure what is the problem with the cygwin version. However, I intend to investigate this when I have the time, because I use cygwin for several tasks and I’d like to know about any possible incompatibility issues with current Windows versions.
I’ve been using the Subversion version control system during the last 2-3 years. Although a VCS has never been a top priority for me, it seems there is always room for version control. I ended up using it for almost everything, from simple to more complex scripts and even system configuration files in some cases. A few weeks ago I decided to switch to Mercurial. I had read about Mercurial for the first time in some mailing list messages written by Giorgos Keramidas and also in several posts about Mercurial on his blog, but it was only a few months ago when I started experimenting with it for real. Although I use many of its features, my general use of version control systems is rather basic, so do not expect any sophisticated reasons why I have decided to switch:
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This is a quick note that mod_wsgi daemon processes are now incompatible with mod_python. Upgraded mod_wsgi earlier today in CentOS and saw the following note. I guess this limitation has been around for a while before affecting CentOS/RHEL:
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Permanently removing deleted posts and topics in bbPress can be cumbersome. bbPress does not provide a decent way to completely remove deleted content from the database. I am not sure why… In my case, these posts mostly contain spam and there is absolutely no reason to keep them in the database any more. As it usually happens when I try to administer bbPress, I ended up executing SQL queries at the MySQL prompt. I hereby publish these SQL statements.
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I just read this very interesting article about the new 4096-byte sector hard disks, like the new Western Digital Caviar Green drives, and the impact a partition misalignment might have on the drive’s write performance.
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