Compact Ubuntu

I've always hated the fact that on Ubuntu with the default themes, there's far too much space wasted. The buttons are too tall, the treeview wastes too much space so that if you're on eclipse or some other ide, you see a precious few items on the screen.

I've been trying to tweak it to no end - even looking to see if there are any ~/.gtkrc-2.0 tweaks. Found a few links such as this Making Eclipse look good on Linux - Max's blog - however, didn't really satisfy my need.

And so it stayed until today when I came across Clearlooks Compact Gnome Theme.

I love it - one more for my list of must-haves!

Enjoy symlinks and hardlinks on NTFS

Can't believe I didnt come across this before - if you've gotten used taming your hdd by creating links to folders and have been annoyed with the lack of symlinks and hardlinks on NTFS, then despair no more. I've been using Mark Russinovich's (of sysinternals fame) tool - junction.exe all this while and though it works great, have always wanted something that would integrate with Explorer too. For an in-depth discussion - read http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284 Anyways, I'm extremely happy with NTFS Link - this will surely go into my list of "Must have tools - install immediately on a new machine" list :-)

Upgrade blues - upgrading to Firefox 3 final from Firefox RC 3

As evident from other posts here - have been keenly waiting for the FF 3 final. Imagine my surprise when the "Check updates" didnt find an upgrade! (I'm on FF3 rc3).

Anyway, so off I went to Mozilla.org and downloaded a copy of the final - and did my bit towards FF download day. Happily installed it - all defaults as usual. Install told me that it was installing into the same location as my current installation (c:\program files\mozilla firefox 3 beta 1 - that's where my FF3 install have been going  - all the way from b1 to b5 and then from rc1 to rc3 - so no surprise).

Well, installation completed successfully, and I started FF 3 - but my title bar still says Build 2008052906 - even the file version has the same build ID.

Something's up - don't know what yet - but has anyone else had a similar experience?

Desultory Monday...

This entry was posted using Its all text on Firefox 3.0 RC2 on Ubuntu Hardy heron, with emacs 23 snapshot as the editor. I love it :-)

Well, Its all Text is great if you hate typing into webforms with textboxes that make editing such a big pain in the butt.

Its great to see that Its All text has been updated to work with FF 3.0 now. The fun would be to see if this works on Windows with cygwin emacs as the editor. Had problems the last time I tried that - but that's been sometime ago now.

Today's been a desultory Monday. Spent sometime getting emacs snapshot with pretty fonts on my hardy. Its beautiful.

The next thing has been mostly scratching my head on hadoop. What I'd like to do is parse an access log and generate multiple outputs - ie single input of gobs of web access logs and multiple outputs - with say requests by country, popular pages, % of client browser and so on.

1. parse web log


2. pull out remote ips and use geo ips to find the originating country


3. pull out user agent field and figure out browser distribution.


4. Filter the requested resource and pull out only pages - find pages by popularity

Now there seem to be quite a number of ways of doing this -

• Code the whole thing in Java - and this is where I'm getting into analysis paralysis.
  Look at ways to generate multiple outputs from MapRed and then use Job and JobControl to setup the pipeline.


• Use Pig - Pig examples on the Pig overview page seem to suggest that this should be trivial with Pig.


• Use Cascading - seems to be doing the same thing - will need to do this in JRuby or Groovy though.

Will post an update once I get through the java route

VPN into Windows VPN Server from Ubuntu *Hardy* Intrepid

** Update 2008/11/17 **: Networkmanager is broken in intrepid. To get it  working had to install network manager from ppa as given here - http://www.ubuntu-forums.com/showpost.php?s=e0d93c09b8c340976477456593ac4cf7&p=6094870&postcount=5

Ok - this was easy - and while there's some resources on google, I had to figure out a few itty bitty things for my work VPN setup.

install

• network-manager-pptp


• pptp-linux

Restart network manager with

killall nm-applet
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart
nm-applet --sm-disable &

Configure VPN settings

Click on the network manager applet and click on VPN connections

1. Create a new VPN connection


2. Ensure that you select Refuse CHAP  in the authentication tab.


3. In the routing tab, you can give netmasks that need to go through VPN - for my work network, I have: 10.10.5.0/24 172.16.106.0/24

That's it. Now click on the Network applet, and connect to your VPN. In the authentication dialog, use <domain>\username and your windows domain password.

Scalability principles: Lessons from eBay

InfoQ: Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay

Great article on Ebay scalability principles.