I thought it would be nice to share with you that I received a comment from Pádraig Brady, member of the GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) maintainers team, on yesterday’s post about effective data wiping saying that he has decreased shred‘s default number of passes from 25 to 3, as shown in this git commit. The…
I’ve been using the mod_dav_svn module for Apache, part of the subversion distribution package, in order to make several SVN repositories available over the HTTP protocol for quite some time now. More specifically, I use a multi-repository setup under the same virtualhost by using the SVNParentPath directive of mod_dav_svn. Also, the authorization policy is enforced…
About two years ago, I had published some notes about how to use the good old Creative PC-CAM 750 digital camera/webcam combo under Linux using the spca5xx kernel module. Many things have changed since then. The ‘spca5xx‘ driver has been re-released under the name GSPCA, which has lately made its way into the kernel. This…
It was about time I started using a cache in WordPress. After doing some research, I found out that WP-Super-Cache is sophisticated enough and works quite well, judging by the posts of many satisfied users. In this post I will outline the installation procedure step-by-step, because the installation instructions of the README file were a…
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…
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…
Yesterday, I upgraded WordPress to the latest version 2.5, which I liked much! For the upgrade I used a WordPress updater script I had written some months ago, which, by the way, still remains unreleased due to lack of time to prepare a stable release… Anyway, the script has worked quite well and the transition…
WordPress version 2.2 or newer allows the user to define the MySQL database character set and the collation (get familiar with these terms) inside wp-config.php. Today, after upgrading to the newest version of WordPress, I decided to also update this file and append the statement that sets the database encoding to ‘utf8‘. But, as soon…
I finally made the decision to upgrade WordPress to the latest 2.3.1 version. I skipped the initial v2.3 release as I had read that there was a lengthy list of bugs about that release, which eventually have been fixed in 2.3.1. Everything seems to run smoothly. I intend to spend some time browsing around my…
This article describes how to use the command line download managers wget and curl in order to download files from your Rapidshare Premium account.