open source

Slow Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Inspiron 6400

After upgrading a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 the machine was so slow it was barely usable. top was showing a load average of 7 after opening Firefox or OpenOffice.

I'm going to FOSDEM 2010

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Drush and rsync

Both drush and rsync are handy tools to automate the deployment of Drupal sites. You just have to be careful how you combine them.

Problems with Eclipse buttons in Ubuntu 9.10

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) some buttons no longer work in Eclipse 3.5. Clicking has no effect but keyboard shortcuts still work.

pidgin-facebookchat ate my bandwidth

If you are running pidgin-facebookchat make sure you keep an eye on your bandwidth usage.

Using content-check.pl to monitor a Drupal site

One of the scripts in my bag of tools to check whether a site is still up and running is content-check.pl. This little script compares the hash of a web page against a previously created reference hash. If the content of the web page has modified, this script will detect it and send an email.

HTC Hero does USB tethering on Ubuntu

The user guide of the HTC Hero explains that Windows users can do tethering through the (Windows-only) HTC Sync software. I assumed that tethering on Ubuntu would be impossible without rooting the phone - just like any other Android device - but I was wrong.

Minor annoyances of the HTC Hero

I have been using my new HTC Hero (running Android) for two weeks now. Overall I am very happy with the device (both hardware and software) but of course there a couple of (minor) annoyances.

HTC Hero

Last week I bought an HTC Hero (running Android) from the Redcoon online store.

Vacuum Firefox

A recent blog post on Planet Ubuntu reminded me of a trick to speed up Firefox (a little bit).